Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 29
The same holds as for my tripod and
other diary pages: nothing on this page may be copied or changed and
distributed except that the page as a whole may be printed or otherwise
transfered in unchanged form, mentioning the original URL
and global page reference, and that holds for everyone on the globe
and beyond, including so called 'christians' and self-appointed 'Secret
Services'.
Sat Dec 24 18:01 2005
After the last page, which was finished a lot later (way in december)
then when it was started, I had a server machine problem: I think a
pentium 1.8 blew up!
Everything runs fine though, see below.
The below picture was printed at Dixons.nl at 30x50 cm, which looks cool
This is a 2 (5 megapixel) photo panorama, with some automated program
(this not ful res, of course):
The Hague, of course I used GIMP for some processing. With the 10
megapixel resolution, it would seem great to have HD video of that
quality! That'd be marvelous.
I did some low res photocam mpeg video of art at scheveningen (the
Hague, my city of birth, where the sign of the beast is not
worshipped...) from a chinese artist:
Practical Radiosity
I've played with recent computer processor power for the purpose I have
professional experience with: computer graphics (see previous diary page for grades, too...)
Preview of the sponza
scene from the rendering competition web site, where I got the 3D
scene files, which are previewed here:
These views can be transformed in real time, even on a notebook which
is fun.
Now I wanted to do some heavy computations to compute more accurate and
natural lighting in this scene, and remembered long ago already
that Povray does serious
ray tracing, so I made these renderings, some post-processed by GIMP:
This is a demo file from povray rendered:
From the scientific light distribution corner, I've been looking at
Radiance which I knew about long ago (Like 90) and whose maker I've met
when he visited Delft University (at the time the graphics section at
informatics dept.), this is a famous scene from that time which is
given with the distribution which I rendered:
Remember that these images are all NOT PICTURES! They are scenes which
consist of computer file three dimensional description of the objects
in text form, with coordinates and material properties (colour,
shinyness), which are read by a computer program which simulates
the way light illuminates the objects and what rays of light
enter the virtual camera. I'll do some more work on this I guess.
Art, too is very possible with compute graphics of course, I've in the
past with a teacher at art academy Rotterdam, and a fellow course
follower there (who was architect) made some complicated radiosity
based computer art myself at Delft University, in fact at the HP 720
workstation I used in weektime for my work there. At the time ('92 or
so) those machines were an order of magnitude faster then the PC's
which were very non-compatitive still, in that time, a PA risc, 128
MegaByte (!) of memory, I think IIRC 64 bit bus, too, and of course
unix, and I had a big true colour screen and card at it. Currently
consumer PC's are quite capable and fast too, but at the time it was
fun to work on such a capable machine, but as I've written I was kicked
aside in the end, and I don't have access currently to the files I
think, unless maybe I'd talk to some probably pretty bad persons, which
I don't want, and which is why I didn't persue a PhD in the end...
Family
Gilles Tran, oyonale.com
The sound of laughter or silence and dark sarcasm?
I think it's time to think about all the same subjects I've written
about some more, but of course I'm not free (with a few tons of euros
at the bahama and a gun to defend my backyard or so) to do just what I
please.
I've the impression I was lucky to be confronted with (often american)
art, for me music and tv mainly in the relatively wonderfull 70s before
the cynical 10CC negros would actually find it normal to live the ways
dreadlock holyday and most everybody appearently think its great.
I think it won't work to just bash everything that exists though in
certain areas like 'certain' 'music' that is very tempting, and
probably possible and justified...
The things I grew up with like Star Track (orginal with captain Kirk),
the Six Million Dollar man, Appolo 11, Easy Rider, Donna Summer, even
the Rolling Stones and a *lot* of excellent enough music should not be
replaced by the teletubbies, sessame street without a blink, and loads
of braindead crap that can so easily be seen.
Movies clearly are in minor and minimalism already for at least a
decade, which is representative of important issues, but that won't
make the better people feel ok in the longer run. Or the important
lines in life bearable or lifted up.
There is no risk
The new server machine
The 'old' server machine I handle mostly (though I won't call it mine)
I 'gave' a new motherboard (the central printed circuit electronic
board inside a computer), worth only about 100 euro, but up to date,
and Asus. And a new 400 Watt big fan supply replacement, fairly quiet,
a Nvidia 6200 graphics card (only 50 euro) , the old disc (which was
the 3rd replacement) and rom drives, floppy, enclosure etc.
One 512MB cheap memory bank, and a not overly expensive AMD 64 bit
Athlon processor with integrated head sink and cooler fan. It stays
very cool, also when going from 1 to to GigaHerz clock frequency (which
makes the internal clock frequency up to 3.3GHz, fairly fast): about 30
degrees Celcius. Unfortunately the main board has a little fan at high
speed, too, which stays less cool, but still: no more then 40 degrees.
The updated system:
There are also video, wireless and firewire cards from the old setup in
the 'new' machine. The harddisk isn't a serial ata one, though the
board coudl handle, and came with 4 connecors and cables! Some RAID
that could be.
Ethernet comes at 1 GB/s, but I don't have access to another machine
with such speed, USB 2 works fine, audio too (up to 6 channels) though
fairly low AC97 quality, quiet though.
I put Redhat fedora on the system, while maintaining the old file
systems (after some reordering/resizing of the disc partitions) as I
said core 4 64 bit version, which is like fast... I can access the old
NTFS partition from windows XP which was on the machine, but only as
read-only, and I have no new windows, the old machine-bound XP doesn't
start up at all, and can't be re-installed in the new machine, which is
a waste, but then again, a server is much better of with linux!
And, it's behind a ethernet modem which perfectly puts through only
ping, web and secure web data, so the total security is almost
complete: nothing will ever happen much, I guess, not even when loggin
on as root user.
The usb disc also fits on nicely, runs fast (20 Megabytes/ sec
throughput) and fedora has no problem recogizing it and a camera: no
problem.
The setup includes a webcam (logitec: yeah, compilation and mod-ing
driver is necessary...), a pinnacle PCTV deluxe box with usb2
connection connected with a cable antenna and a sat receiver connected
with astra in space, the ethernet connection routes also to one or two
other machines, which makes tv viewing at quite high quality possible
over the local net for instance on a notebook, I use dune for that
purpose, which required a some work to get running, but with a tcl
networking script and an added usb-2 hub (though there are already 6
usb connections, camera, webcam, possibly handycam, usb-midi, usd ad/da
converter) to correct a initialisation problem with the pinnable box
and duneinit.
As it is the setup runs well.
Additionally, there's a parallel port jteg fpga programmer cable and a
serial port connection to one or two fpga/cpld boards, which I can
access over a tcl serial port script and program using x2csprog, which
is a great program to get Xilinx .bit files effortless, smooth and fast
to the fpga or the platform flash memory over the serial cable.
The fun part is, that I can use that setup (using remote X windows or
ssh login) from an other (also physically remote) machine to program
the xilinx (with a file made on an XP machine with Webpack ISE),
communicate with it over a serial link, and view the displays and leds
live with the webcam! It's almost like a fashion now which I did years
ago with web controlled parallel port electonics and display: there are
now web-measument setups and demonstrations at techonline
"university"
from Analog, philips, Xilinx, and such which allow measurement and
device programming to be done from a web browser, also with webcam
direct visual feedback.
Of course the 10 or 20 gig of Fedora Linux disc space, plus a lot more
from old FAT partitions for video and such have been used for a lot of
software, fedora has a lot already there.
The processor is fast, even though probably memory bandwidth and such
aren't the highest available: 4 mplayers with 6 megabit/sec video
(quite good quality, really) can run simultaneously on one (big)
screen, and then there's still processor time left, and absolutely
uninterupting and unwaivering video. Quite a lot more then the previous
pentium4 1.8 . I think FFmpeg, which of course I had to compile on it,
does almost (?) real time high Q mp4 encoding of full size video.
As said, I can on a networked machine transfer the pinnacle (realtime
tv-dvd quality mpeg-2 encoder) video stream from the server to a remote
video player, have the webserver running easily, some other software,
use a samba share on the server to watch remote video at full quality,
play a dvd on the server and have some web video on, and some more
normal programs, then the system is still completely unimpressed and
has lots of power left to do other things in the meanwhile as well,
like compiling or graphics programs, on top of remote x windows and X
management locally and remote (like gnome or kde or windowmaker, which
I must still get in touch with either smoothly...).
Cool. (only 30 degrees C, mostly).
I only got it chockin' by running out of a gig of virtual memory while
doing heavy duty radiosity with POVray, but I didn't say it crashed or
failed...
The AMD Athlon 64 at 3.3 GHz
A fast and well running, cool, processor.
Runs fine and reliable (servers and video server/recorder, graphics
applications and normal editing and remote x window use run for weeks without
reboot). Compatibility issues I've not found.
Apache web server statistics
I've installed the apache web server from Red Hat Fedora Core 4 64 bit
version Linux, which I have pointed at my exisiting (!) document /
picture file tree for the web server (I used tclhttpd before), so that
it now serves my web pages from http://www.theover.org
.
Monthly Statistics for November 2005 (from 20th - 30th)
Total Hits 4870
Total Files 3389
Total Pages 343
Total Visits 114
Total KBytes 324448 (324 MegaBytes)
Total Unique Sites 437
Total Unique URLs 393
Total Unique Referrers 51
Total Unique User Agents 168
Avg Max
Hits per Hour 18 781
Hits per Day 442 1010
Files per Day 308 644
Pages per Day 31 87
Visits per Day 10 21
KBytes per Day 29495
146203 (145 MegaBytes)
Monthly Statistics for December 2005
Total Hits 7720
Total Files 6359
Total Pages 1052
Total Visits
302
(?)
Total KBytes 1577684 (1.6
GigaByte)
Total Unique Sites 1063
Total Unique URLs 437
Total Unique Referrers 84
Total Unique User Agents 243
Avg Max
Hits per Hour 13
250
Hits per Day 321
888
Files per Day 264 663
Pages per Day 43 91
Visits per Day 12
22
KBytes per Day 65737
773507 (0.7 GigaByte)
Visitors from at least 60 countries, at least a few hundred competely
different ones per month, and quite some US commercial ones, GREAT!
Though some probably are from the yahoo web crawlers.
Oven combustion
I mistakingly set an oven to microwave when heating up little
wurstbreads, a heavy 1000Watt one, for 8 minutes, after it had already
preheated as oven... Oops, little explosion, and flames in the
machine.... It stank for half a day.
Audio Engineers meeting at Amsterdam Movie Academy
A lecture about the chinese state television new buildings' sound
studios design, which is like mega big.
In the Academy's movie theater:
Are those car speakers? : )
I saw this model, about the size which just fits on a normal table in
lobby:
With the right lighting, it might look like the big real thing, which
is funny.
I've entered a paper
