Mixtape

bun

Created at 2009-07-02 20:46:53 UTC Permalink
No Gods, No Gangsters

Taking a break writing here in favor of a short adventure in apartment hunting.

Created at 2009-06-29 20:53:22 UTC Permalink
The Outer Limits

In an homage to the Television Apocalypse, Youtube is showing classic television shows like The Outer Limits. It's excellent psychodrama. Here's a transcript from episode 1008 titled The Human Factor.

Man: if this machine works it will be possible for two minds to communicate directly. To share the same thoughts and emotions simultaneously.

Woman: emotions?

Man: psychiatrists think the intellect is a useful but devious trait. this machine will let me know what the subject is really feeling, way down underneath the intellect.

Woman: I'm not sure I want to go through with it.

Man: be a good girl. (pats her on the shoulder patronizingly)

Man: take a look at the oscilliscope.

Woman: Huh. Well you can't tell too much from that, can you?

Man: Not too much. But in a moment I may know what you really think. because I intend to amplify those waves and feed them back to a machine into a terminal instrument which is capable of translating them back into the thoughts and emotions that produced them. and that terminal instrument is my own brain. Now relax, I'm bringing up the power.

Created at 2009-06-12 19:27:56 UTC Permalink
The abundance of personal backup

It's 2009. The Bandwidth of a consumer Internet connection is going up. Laptop computers are ubiquitous, small storage devices are everywhere and can meet or exceed internal storage, everyone's making movies, sounds, pictures on their computers. I'm doing this. But where the fuck am I going to put this stuff when I don't want it available on the laptop but I don't want to delete it? There are a lot of solutions to this problem. Most notable is Apple's TimeMachine product, which makes the decision for you by dedicating an entire external USB disk to the role of incremental backup. But what if I want to control what gets backed up and what doesn't? Some things should not be backed up. Cache files, auto generated image thumbnails, temporary files, garbage directories generated by OS X, private documents with very particular accounting of where each copy resides. Apple has taken the road of abundance and thrown assumptions of privacy and efficiency out with the bathwater. Fortunately, OS X and GNU/Linux have neato user obsequious tools like rsync and rdiff-backup. For my Mac, I wrote a simple script that backs up my entire home directory in one command with an optional file to exclude directories to backup.

#!/bin/sh
EXCLUDE_FILE="$HOME/bin/full_backup.exclude"
rsync -rv --progress --stats --exclude-from=$EXCLUDE_FILE $HOME/ $1

Search for EXCLUDE PATTERNS in the rsync manpage for the exclude patterns file format. Basically, one on each line with shell wildcards accepted. This will copy everything in my home directory except for the files (or patterns) in the .exclude file to a directory passed in as an argument at runtime. It will also give you an realtime progress meter for each file! Neato.

Created at 2009-05-24 21:00:05 UTC Permalink
Jazz. It's abstract. It's good.

Kevin Farrell and Devin Maxwell are

Four Trio

This recording is produced with love by arsenic-free music: "we have arsenic-free music, they don't"

Their take on Giant Steps

Created at 2009-05-22 21:34:12 UTC Permalink
My new favorite band

Doom Metal. An excellently named genre. I can't stop listening to Nadja's cover of Needle In The Hay, my favorite Elliot Smith song of all time. Oh yeah, and Lala is my new favorite music site.

doom

Created at 2009-05-19 20:33:13 UTC Permalink
More previs for movie!

I learned how to make materials, atmosphere and a sun! Here's my first test render with the finalized model.

First Lighting Test

I have decided to give the movie a working title of "radio astronomy". Not too catchy but it makes me feel funny when I say it.

Also, the Wacom tablet is not worth it. While the x.org drivers and the kernel drivers in CentOS 5.3 work well, somehow the application specific configuration is different and crashes, making the pressure and tilt useless. Would be nice to debug sometime but right now I'm not doing much painting or drawing.

Created at 2009-05-05 00:27:08 UTC Permalink
Linux 3D workstation Photographic Proof

A picture tells a thousand words. Here's my story from this weekend

New 3D workstation

On deck: Wacom tablet installation and configuration for the OS, Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. Oh my!

Created at 2009-04-27 15:56:23 UTC Permalink
Building a 3D workstation with CentOS 5.3

Dove in head on. Here's my list:

The Good:

The Bad:

The Ugly:

Created at 2009-04-26 20:51:11 UTC Permalink
Building a CentOS graphics workstation for previsulation

Got a nice 2 way AMD64 workstation with an ATI R350 video card. Old hardware but better than anything else I have for the previs work. CentOS is...well it's interesting. The video card worked by default for GLX mode and the monitor resolution was auto detected to 1280x1024.

There are a lot of missing pieces, most of which are related to software. CentOS has a much more conservative selection of packages then I'm used to. Notable differences from Debian:

There are wacom tablet drivers and userland utilities to configure the tablet, though Gnome provides no configuration panel, therefore manual editing of xorg.conf and command line tablet calibration will be required.

Created at 2009-04-24 16:05:47 UTC Permalink
So, You Wanna Make Debian Packages?

About 11 days ago I set out on a journey to create a custom Debian package repository to serve my own custom built packages based on very specific versions of source code. Through the oral history of my predecessors and some experimentation, I have accomplished my goals. It was not easy. I'll outline my process step by step here, so other can continue the tradition. Yea knowledge!

Before you start out with any labor, you must first answer some preliminary questions and sketch out your architecture. The first question you have to answer is "who else will be using these packages". If the answer is "no one" this article is not for you. apt-get install checkinstall for that. If the answer is "many other servers and workstations controlled by others aside from myself all running various versions of Debian or Ubuntu", then read on.

My needs

  1. Build packages from scratch for 32 and 64 bit systems
  2. Serve both binary and source packages from a centralized repository
  3. Maintain all crucial dependency information for custom shared libraries
  4. Serve multiple architectures and distributions from a centralized repository
  5. Ignore restrictions in policy that only apply to uploads to be merged into stable by a Debian Developer

The first step is building the packages from scratch. I'm building source packages on a 32 bit system and building the binaries on specialized build servers in Amazon EC2 for 32 or 64 bit CPUs. Download the source tarball and extract it. Then configure and compile the code to test that the source will run. If true, delete the extracted directory and reextract it to a fresh directory. Then check if someone has already built a package of a different version of the same source code. If so download that source package. You can probably use most of the work and skip over a lot of the mysterious oral history contained in the Debian New Maintainers Guide. In my case I could download previous versions. copy the debian/ directory form the source package into your freshly extracted source tree. Now the fun starts.

Make a copy of the original tarball of the source but rename it to end in .orig.tar.gz. Then enter the debian/ directory of the already extracted source and open the changelog and stare at the contents for a while. Then duplicate the topmost changelog block and update it for your information. Don't forget to make your package a version bump or at least have a different version. Save and close. Next install all the following packages. There are many helpers for building packages, there are merely the ones I selected. aptitude install pbuilder reprepro nginx dpkg-dev debhelper devscripts fakeroot dh-make autotools-dev cdbs dpatch

Next open the control file. Verify all dependencies for the versions on your build system. All we need to do here is make sure the package knows about it's supporting libraries. Adjust the version numbers as needed. Now you have to open the rules file. If you added any custom configuration options when you first compiled the code, you need to find the section that calls ./configure and add those options. You also need to read through the build target and see if the original author of it is doing some weird things with the build process. If it matches up pretty well with your own successful compiliation then you can move on.

In some cases you might need to patch the source code or perhaps the original author's patches won't apply cleanly to your new source code. This is what dpatch is for. Compare the old patches with an interactive dpatch shell by entering dpatch-edit-patch [patchname] where patchname is what you want to call the patch. Tuxmaniac has a Short tutorial.

Run a test build/clean directly with fakeroot debian/rules [build|clean] Where build or clean is the target you wish to test. If the build process is functional, it's time to build the source and binary packages! Yea! But not yet...Aw :c

Build dependencies. During your testing you might have noticed that the test build fails due to missing build deps. You can install these deps by hand each time but that's a pain. Fortunately pbuilder provides a nice shell script that will figure these out and install them. Just run this in your debianized source directory: /usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satisfydepends

Magical! You have all build dependencies installed. Now you can try and build the package. I'm using debuild like so: debuild -us -uc

If debuild succeeds, you should have a bunch of files one directory up. An explaination of their roles:

Whew, that was epic. Fortunately, now that you build once, you can build anywhere! To build binaries for another architecture, you merely have to upload the .dsc, .orig and .diff tarballs and rebuild on another system that meets your requirements. You can extract source packages with dpkg-source -x *.dsc

Next up, serving them from a repository!

Created at 2009-04-23 21:14:22 UTC Permalink
Snarky laughs for a monday morning

Found this poster in the hallway of my office this morning. It is advertising the Wall About film festival. Sounds cool: I haven't heard of it, the poster is designed well and it has the word "film" in it. Relevant to my interests. Then I had the misfortune of reading the text on their web page. I'll copy verbatim to save the agony of looking at the whole thing.

Wallabout is: a collaborative project putting cultural assembly into explicit practice; a collective celebrating artists’ efforts and the co-production of art; a festival promoting the continuous flow of creative episteme and the techne. It is a question leading to a question leading to a question. Wallabout is committed to challenging our minds while exulting the works of to-day. Wallabout is about it all.
Sad thing is I'm still interested. Can't judge poorly the whole event for one bad writer. Fucking art.

Created at 2009-04-20 15:52:35 UTC Permalink
Tarkovsky, The Mirror

I rented this DVD as a reference for my film not knowing what to expect. Well, here's the 8 minutes of chapter 2, see for yourself:

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

That shot when the male character leaves but is stopped by a wind explosion across the whole meadow. Yeah, that's only 11 minutes into a 2 and one half hour film. So that's how you want to play, I see.

The movie is un-fucking believable. It's long, meticulously composed and shows seamless technical mastery of camera, light and color. And some of it happens to be in black and white. The story is deep and reflective (The Mirror, ha!) and I couldn't stop thinking about it after it was over.

Created at 2009-04-20 00:00:59 UTC Permalink
Film pre-production workflow

"Workflow" is a word I hear a lot but no one has a definition for it aside for what "works for them". So perhaps a good workflow is what works for me? Let's see. Since I'm a real software developer and a fake filmmaker, I will take my software workflow, which is quite productive and adapt it to directing/producing a film. Here's my software toolset as it stands:

  1. Git, the awesomest revision control system for files on a disk
  2. Vim, a text editor. Yes, a fucking text editor. It's totally crucial. Stop using notepad, really
  3. Blender, a 3D modeling and animation program that can import and export many other program's formats
  4. Autodesk Maya, the mothership of proprietary 3D applications. Not free, in fact you better have a hook up cause this shit is as precious as a fistful o' Benjamins
  5. Inkscape, a 2D vector drawing program. Its paths can be imported into Blender
  6. The Gimp, a 2D bitmap painting program. Good for doing "photoshop stuff"
  7. Flickr, a photo sharing community online. Has extensive metadata for photographic reference and camera details for most photos
  8. Google Earth, a crucial architectural reference for cowboy previsualization, h'ya!
  9. Drop.io Manager, a private collaboration webapp. Transfer, preview and share any file without worrying about your secrets leaking out on the intarwebz before production's complete (fee required)
  10. OpenOffice Calc, a fucking spreadsheet application. It does that stuff and yes, everyone needs a spreadsheet sometimes
And this is just pre-production. I'm satisfied that I have got this far with the use of only two fee-based applictions. Of course Maya is useless when opperated by me since it's a highly specialized skill to opperate in a meaningful way. I have inside connections to a special individual who knows these secrets (much love T).

Out of all these programs, probably the git + vim combo is the most unusual. I'm going down the editor/DRCS route since I'm working on a myriad of computers (read: I don't have a "graphics workstation"). My primary offline storage device for all assets is a USB keychain I carry with me at all times, so it's nice to have a system to sync that with other storage media and not worry about blowing over crucial changes.

So yeah, that's my "workflow" right now. Seat of my pants style. This list will only get more complicated when the Red camera comes into play. Stay tuned...

Created at 2009-04-19 00:13:23 UTC Permalink
Untitled Production Notes

I'm working on a short film. It is currently untitled. Here are my production notes up until now.

Doing previsualization from nothing to something. Can't get a permit more than once so that rules out coverage on location. Started with a top down photograph of the architectural footprint from Google Earth, used the software measuring tools to determine some rough distances between points. Took the photo and brought it into Inkscape. Began tracing paths and curves around significants parts of the landscape. Got the proportions right. Imported curves into Blender, two week crash course in 3D modeling.

Got the right paths converted into polygons and through a lot of guess work, some arithmetic and a lot of measuring defined one unit in a realistic scale. Read online that the building is 6 stories, guessed that one story will equal 10 feet and fudged the height of the building to 60 feet. Couldn't find any specs on the water tower so calculating height is impossible. But lo and behold, there is a treasure trove of photographic coverage on Flickr, and thanks to Flickr's camera metadata reader, I got lucky and found a dude who did helicopter shots with a Nikon D50. Both building and water tower in frame. Got the lens mesaurement and the aspect ratio of the shot. Exported data from Blender to Autodesk FBX format, solicited T for some help with that precious software. Imported FBX and T did her magic by creating the same camera and locking it to the photograph. The original geometry was composited with the photograph and the camera was moved and scaled to make the 3D building fit with the size and angle of the photograph. That gave us the water tower height reference in a perspecitive view. She created a cylinder of the proper height and exported both building and water tower as a Wavefront OBJ format file. I imported that file back into Blender and now I must match it up to the scene I have.

This process was facinating. The photographic reference was what I was missing all along. It's amazing that I can use the Internet as a reference for not only visual information but also camera and lens details which can apply to a 3D world. It made me think of my first calculus class, since the number of known values was so little but it wasn't merely a 2D plane so things like angles, tangents and lens curvature influenced the results. We have come so far from those days of proving our physical world on paper to taking what was written on that paper and transforming it into a computer program so we are no longer required to do the math necessary to make the simulation correct.

Created at 2009-04-18 22:57:12 UTC Permalink
Chef Conventions

Two small notes about chef conventions (assumptions), after I got my test installation running.

  1. It assumes the target system has sudo installed
  2. It uses the name of the directory in cookbooks as the recipie key
These were two unexpected annoyances but were easily worked around. The Resource class that handles APT is quite nice, despite my initial concern that it was only installing one package at a time.

Created at 2009-04-02 16:00:40 UTC Permalink
Chef: Build Automation in Ruby

I'm experimenting with Chef after attending Ezra Zygmuntowicz's talk about it at Philly E-Tech conference last week. The back story is that I began writing my own framework in Perl two weeks ago to automate building up EC2 instances. I made some progress but it was far from extensible. So I'm trying chef. If all goes well I'll have a framework in place to create new nodes so I'll never have to log into them, they will "just work". The goal being a base Debian EC2 image creation and a tiny bootstrap script passed as per-instance metadata to get chef installed.

First Impressions? Not too good. Here's my test, ported from a subroutine I wrote in perl with some file I/O and a big ol' system() call.

  1. Generate list of debian packages to install
  2. Install them

Sounds straight forward, right? Chef failed for two reasons:

  1. There is no configuration option to pass to apt to allow untrusted packages. I'm pulling from a repo that needs to first install a GPG key to authenticate, but that package is untrusted. Chicken and egg problem. Chef halts.
  2. The list of packages is treated as an array of strings and each string is iterated over. This is sub optimal since it means apt will be run array.size times. I would much rather run apt 1 times by passing it a big ass string delimited by spaces.

But these are trivial issues. I'm happy that this kind of framework is being developed and I hope to contribute to the Debian centric classes. Pretty soon it might actually feel like writing a recipie and cooking for reals.

Created at 2009-03-31 22:25:50 UTC Permalink
Philly -> NY, day four

Three days of rest for the vacation and I'm ready to go back. The way back was not as eventful as the way out. I woke up late. Real late. Didn't leave Philly until 1PM and I had to catch the ferry at 7PM. That's 6 hours to cycle 85 miles. And the weather forecast was for rain at 5PM. Sounds AWESOME. I also had a 10 pound load (including laptop computer) and no matter which way I turned there was a headwind from the north.

It was everything I expected. Not since PBP 2007 did I suffer so much on a bike ride. Fuck that.

With more time and better weather the route is very pleasant. Few turns, good roads and a nice pace between towns. Here's my map and near finalized cue sheet. WARNING! Page 3 is the route back. Page 1 and 2 is the route out.

Created at 2009-03-29 21:12:41 UTC Permalink
NY -> Philladelphia, day 1

The above article was my inspiration for traveling to Philly by bicycle. To test out how this random article holds up to the same ride on these "mostly good roads" 114 years later. What folows are my discoveries using this article, google maps and a hand held GPS device when I got lost.

It is impossible to get from Staten Island to New Jersey by bicycle now. The Goethals bridge forbids non-motored traffic, the ferry to Hoboken requires navigating through the marshes of Jersey city and Newark. I chose to take the Seastreak, which departs from Wall street Pier 11 and ends up at the Atlantic Highlands in Monmouth county, NJ.

Exiting the ferry at the Atlantic Highlands on a calm morning I set out for the hills. Nice riding up onto windy country roads. Revolutionary words on every road, monuments, parks, red hills, deep cuts. I turn up Red Hill road and at the top of it I find a monument of the American revolutionary army's victory over the british, causing the enemy's army to retreat. Red hill indeed. Following the red hill is the deep cut garden. Perhaps the British army felt that too. A deep cut. Violent words to remember a land by. A land where people continue to call home and travel back to after a hard day's work.

The next discovery would define the whole trip. Only a handful of miles from the Highlands, it was monumental and something that should have been taken as an omen that my old-timey wheelman styles had very little remaining references. The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex was a scientific research facility with a 44 year history. Notable inventions sponsored by the facility include the digital transistor (without that you would not be reading these words on a personal computer), the big bang theory, fiber-optic networking, and the frickn' laser. The facility is pure modernist science fiction. Imagine Phillip K. Dick and the design of Logan's Run. The era when The Future was the future. This archetecture left no doubt that humans rule the world. In this case it's science that brought humans to that power. A monument to our invention.

Now it's abandoned. The 2,000,000 square foot complex has no occupants, no employees, no researchers and weeds are growing through cracks in the parking lot. The giant water tower in the shape of a transistor watches over flocks of geese. Brush gathers in the stairwells on the building's 4 sides. Baseball diamonds rust in an overgrown field. A sign reads "Ocean Simulation Facility ->" but points to a colapsing building. This place could have been victim to the Andromeda Strain. A perfect example of human aesthetics surviving the humans themselves.

But it turns out that is not the case. The complex is now a historical landmark because the company Lucent sold it to understood its cultural importance. They didn't cancel their plans to redevelop the land, they plan to keep the footprint intact and to construct four independent buildings in the place of one giant.

And then I got back on the bike and pedaled to Trenton. Nice day and quick going. Over the Deleware river and into PA. Now it's just a straight line down Bristol Pike to Philly, just like in the article, right? Wrong. This is where my plan falls apart the the modern world looks far more disgusting than the overwhelming aesthetic of progress within the Holmdel complex.

The Bristol Pike has been destroyed. It has shards of it's former self but between the pieces are huge gaps that won't heal. A paper mill, a steel mill, polluted waters, chruning engines carrying tonnage, sand, silt, dirt. This place died with the cold war. In it's place is US highway 13. A massive truck route to carry the product from the mill to other, more efficient roadways like the Jersey or Penn turnpike. This place is not for humans unless they are wearing a steel exoskelton, which didn't exist for the wheelmen of the 1890s. They could not have imagined it.

So it was a long hard adventure from Trenton to Philly, dodging cars, GPS routing, backtracking and riding on the most obvious but least pleasant route for 25 miles into a headwind. In three days I'll hang up my old-timey pretentions and do it for reals on the way back, with a real route through rustic territory.

Created at 2009-03-29 19:49:21 UTC Permalink
I ski in Colorado! RADICAL!!!


Larkspur Bowl Downhill from Lee Azzarello on Vimeo.

Created at 2009-03-21 01:26:21 UTC Permalink
A new radio recorder

I made a program! It records the radio. It's your last chance to participate in this crucial part of the modern world. Download, install, be confused!

Created at 2009-03-21 01:22:18 UTC Permalink
DJ/Designer

Inspiration. It's like opera.

Created at 2009-03-20 19:51:55 UTC Permalink
Software Art Thread

Three great links to two artists (Aaron Koblin and Daniel Alfonso Massey) and one project of thousands.

Created at 2009-03-17 15:19:22 UTC Permalink
Flickr as a photography portfolio

I Hardly Know Her (witty!) is a Flickr viewer. It approaches the problem I'm asked about often: How do I make a photography album online if I'm a professional photographer? Well, I got mines, now it's time to make yours. I'm working on the details.

Created at 2009-03-01 23:23:38 UTC Permalink
Flickr Ruby API client

Interesting. Yahoo's page on API clients results in a set of three that are written in the Ruby language. Like most web "API" libraries, I click on all of them and figure out the pieces later.

Results!

  1. FAIL!
  2. ALPHA!
  3. BETA!

Well then. Let's try the beta...

Created at 2009-02-27 02:09:37 UTC Permalink
Sounds and Emotions Radio

Sounds and Emotions is a pretty good radio show put on weekly by Nico Bogaerts in Brussels. Their tag line is "Experimental music for experimental people". Unfortunately, their distribution format is 180 degrees from "experimental". It's quite conservative and restrictive, limiting their distribution using format obsfucation. Since I like their show so much, I have composed a script to use mplayer to save a copy of the streaming mp3 to disk. I'll be uploading them weekly to a drop, as I listen to them. The script is also present in the drop, if you are so inclined to rock the steez yourself.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Created at 2009-02-24 17:47:40 UTC Permalink
Shitfone Logo

Created at 2009-02-23 03:47:55 UTC Permalink
Misspelling Generator another good idea, another failure

Misspelling Generator is amazing...in concept. In the long line of cool conceptual concepts that have unintended consequences, Erik Borra and Linda Hilflings's Firefox plugin claims to intercept searches to Google and generate a set of misspelled terms based on your proper terms. Cool concept, but a bit of an implementation fail from all ends. In the 10 times I used it, every time I used more than one term it would crash firefox because the script took too long. After these 10 uses, the public wifi network I was on mysteriously began reporting that all my search terms were blocked because it was suspected that I was a robot trying to abuse Google.

In summary, this software is a failure because it literally fails to evaluate (or halt, I'm not sure which), then it submits a false positive to it's far-end. Like ABSML, its a good idea with a bad execution.

Created at 2009-02-23 01:57:03 UTC Permalink
Shitfone meme continues

Miss Heather has been very nice with our little dialog. But wait! There's more shitfones being documented. This one is pretty amazing, though the Queens shitfone wins, literally.

Created at 2009-02-11 02:37:14 UTC Permalink
Sh*tfone. "make the call"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sh*tfone. "make the call"

Much like a mountain, shitfone has features. Also like a mountain, you are not in control of these features. You can only set out on an adventurous expedition of shitfone's features. Call. Experience. Grow.

shitfone is inspired. Using cutting edge new media web sites, shitfone gets it inspiration from it's users, like you. shitfone's features were created in it's user's likeness.

Shitfone is inspired by Miss Heather's New York Shitty Monologue Machine series.

Shitfone will have desktop software available in the spring of 2009.

Created at 2009-02-08 00:59:26 UTC Permalink

I have an honorary degree in software engineering from the university of the Internet. I propose to a different friend on facebook every monday. I'm single on weekends, which is when I hack on things like web programming, sound synthesis and databases. I hack on drop.io when I'm married.

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