Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 33
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
transferred 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'.
Tue april 11 23:25, 2006
These pages have spurred into a trace of existence more
resembling "work journal illustrated" or "the nature and time of Theo
Verelst" than the theover diary ramblings, which all things considered
started as a protest and a life line for interested people.
A fortune cookie from all knowing linux to keep the spirits up:
Jargon Coiner (#8)
An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.
* STAR SPINOFFS: Applying themes and ideas from "Star Wars" and "Star
Trek" to contemporary events.
Examples: "Let the Source be with you!", "Microsoft is the Evil Empire",
"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated by Microsoft".
* TRADEMARKIZATION(tm): Giving a phrase special meaning by appending a
trademark symbol to it.
Examples: "Think Free Speech, Not Free Beer(tm)", "Real Soon Now(tm)",
"Blue Screen of Death(tm)"
~ [997] $
A lot of material is presented on this page, some of which could be put
on a page of its own, or possibly a whole book, but anyhow, now it is
mentioned here for information and entertainment and conisderation. I
guess most of this all concerns american dreams.
Maybe I should write a page once "Why Theo Verelst shouldn't apply for
a lottery Green Card" ...
Then again, being worth an exceptionally qualified one probably, but
only getting a lottery chance to live in the desired destination would
suit just fine.
The Lord Jesus
Through the Ages
For people calling themselves christians or having
ties or origins in the religion by roughly that name it would be hard
to beat the power and authority and meaning of the name of Jesus with
exceptions for the jews concerning the unspeakable name of Jahwe and
Jehova, and possibly for anybody at least or more pentecostal
than the pentecostals concerning the Holy Spirit.
Possibly the little green man from mars are also an exception, who will
tell?
But in general in the christian world one is aware of a rule that
places Joshua above the world and its inhabitants, pretty much without
questioning the principle.
God of course is also considered a high authority but usually remote,
maybe uninterested, and at least not nearly as human as Christ,
regardless of the truth in those thoughts. I'm sure that christian
doctrine rightfully indicates that Jesus of Nazareth was the pivot of
human history but also that the distribution of the grace of God is not
done justice by making him into somebody like a madonna, or that He is
the only leader of the the world and the universe and can be used to
pityfullize everything one meets as if He would be a fascist leader, or
as if the maffia leaders, the UN, Rome and all kinds of leaders and
influential ones must strive with Jesus for being the nicest and that
strong characters or well defined personalities must always make way
for sweet Jesus.
I don't think that is so.
Rather than "Have a little talk with Jesus" one could suggest "Jesus is
just all rigth with me" as song titles.
This isn't about defending Jesus, though I'm sure it isn't against Him.
Would all this, a very big constellation in far away space, be for
Jesus? Or should one follow the inclination in thoughts that the Holy
Spirit in the name of God has been creating?
The images of drawings are from mr. Larking, a well known
writer/illustrator from the US from the previous century.
3D design
I tried NVidia EffectComposer a bit and combined some effects, and
postprocessed the 3 dimensional rendering with Gimp (Image processing)
to create the gradual crossover between black and white on the border.
That didn't work all great, though the effect is correct. Visually it
is probably a large contrast range for a small blend range.
I pictured the high quality AD/DA coverter with its new case which I
use often to get very good computer sound, the picture could be used in
a brochure, but I don't plan on one:
or a book with colour pictures. I some time ago mailed Elsevier about a
book on sound synthesis which I could write, but they didn't have the
decency to write back. Hm. Well, I guess more than a few people think
it is better I'm out of the way, but they won't get that, and shame on
them.
I'm also working on another project:
Mind that this little box has a high tech Texas Instruments AD/DA
converter with patented USB phase locked loop clock circuit, and has
very high quality parts in it, including metal film resistors and those
colored capacitors which are not cheap but good and compact. Also the
opamp for analog filter is pretty good, though I think it could be
improved on, but this is a 5V one.
To use with the converter, a recent playlist:
sounds very good at the big studio monitors I made.
Which can double without trouble or damage as PA speakers, like I did
for Queens day, at april 29:
That was done with a 1000W car booster (half used) and a pretty good
Philips portable CD player, and a car battery with a hinge, and was
really pretty loud. A bit less quality than with the better DA
converter on a computer, and using the studio amplifier, and also the
sub-woofer (an additional 15") was missing, but still, 2x150 Watt or so
lasts at least a few hours on the battery, and sounds extremely good
for a disco or small PA system, and very loud, audible throughout a
whole street, and even made the (nearby) pavement rock...
Nothing like this of course (see my photonet contributions),
friday night North Sea Jazz Festival, the Hague, 2003:
but my sound was probably better, and playing Scofield/Lovano and some
"hard core soul disco" and even Oasis (very heavy sounding, almost made
it up to the concert effect) certainly was a good listen, even at ample
distance.
I recall a concert I went to see of Jean Michel Jarre, the
french
synthesizer front man, in Rotterdam harbour, around 1989 I think and I
remember the sound wasn't up to full rock concert level, not horrible
but not so great. I saw this photo of the laserharp being played in
Poland of all places, which has a strong light resemblance with the
above picture:
I made a computer graphics, that is synthetic, so generated from
computer models, not pictures, rendering of two teapots from the Gelato
package, I made it a bit bigger, and added a almost whit background,
and probably increased the indirect lighting accuracy quite a bit,
looks good:
Quality Audio sources
As I wrote on a previous diary page, I had one of the early (but not
earliest) cassette recorders when I was a boy. At the time, I had
recordings of good sounding records of (mainly spoken) performances,
like:
Paul van Vliet, Dat Zijn Leuke Dingen Voor De Mensen: mp3
examples high low only 100 seconds, dutch.
Produced at wisseloord studio, where also famous acts were recorded
such as the Rolling Stones.
When I was about 10 or 11 I knew this performance by heart and foundit
funny without realizing that making that much fun about the new world
order so many seem to want might have downsides...
Another example is
Trosspelletje -
Gerard Cox en Frans Halsema, see
Andermans veren
from zo 19 feb 2006 in de player op 8:10 vanaf begin.
For fun, these are the two main jingles for the most famous radio show
holland has known I think, the Dik Voor Mekaar Show, jingle 4 and jingle 7 . The show was a few years back
made again and available on the internet, but that site I think is not
longer maintained. It would be great to have ALL the "dyke for
eachother"-shows online, preferably in quality that does justice to the
original.
I was in germany last
year to visit the largest european musical instrument event the
Frankfùrter Musik Messe, this picture is from the Kurzweil stand
where I played the pianos in front and was amazed at the great and
musical and rolling and rich sound that came from them, even using the
build in speakers.
What would be the champ pianoplaying, apart from me? Without question
for the serious and knowledgeable musician that would be Champion Jack
Dupree, see this wonderfull free mpeg from him:
Champion
Jack Dupree "Rum Cola Blues"
The Blues in Electronics
What is my links with electronics, and what does that mean? Well, I was
interested in elecetronics since I was little, and quite good at all
kinds of electronics since lets say the end of the 70s, untill I
started to study Electrical Engineering in 1984. I was
electronics assistant since I was 2d year student, on invitation, and
did more than a few electronics/chip design graduate courses
Recently I've made audio equipment, a digital simulation of an analog
musical synthesizer, various analog prototypes (mixers, amplifiers,
filters, AD/DA converters) and digital electronics (like FPGA
cirxuits). During the latter part of my studies I only was assistant
and didn't do any hobbying anymore except repairs and music making
related work, but overall I'd say I've been quite almost 30 years into
electronics, with quite some time spent and some quite hard projects.
I've followed various electronics parts makers mainly over the internet
and through some fairs and some contacts, and I'd say that apart from
various miseries in my life the electronics world is not very happy,
though works hard.
The first reason for the blues I think is lack of respect, varying per
country, and many motherf*ng deals all over the world (a good song from
the Electric Light Orchestra). The new New Age masters and doctrines
did a bad job creating very unhealthy world views and makes even
gadgets hard to make fun anymore, and a lot of products not as free
feeling as in the 70s or so. Great feats have been achieved, from HD TV
to fast computers, 24 bit 192kS/s audio (though that makes me smile
with disbelief...) good satellite reception portable music, but the
athmosphere is sad.
And the blues? Well, the above picture shows a main blues and rock and
roll guitarist mr. Chuck Berry, and a as yet to be formed 70s artist
Steve Miller, who was told at the time to call himself the Steve Miller
Blues band. Well, with Berry they sure played the blues and he was
certainly controlling that.
The blues is nothing but a good man feeling bad don't tell it all, but
its something.
I sent an email to Nital
company who promote 8xPCI-Express cards on their site, which appear to
not be available, whatever that means. A heavy FPGA on such a card for
a good price is powerfullm but at the moment pro devkits probably are
expensive. Sigh.
I've worked with a power meter the other day, a real cheap one from
Conrad, which is supposed to show the amount of Watts a machine uses
from the mains, but a strong 450W computer switched suppy gets it
fooled al the time, and will not give a solid reading at all.
I've put the meter on webcam, which can be operated from a webpage, and
I have a ligth aimed at it to light it up automatically when the
webpage is requested.
Why doesn't the measurement work good? Well the meter could be broken,
but is works accurately for lamps and other machines, so probably the
reason is a complicated one: the power drawn by a switched supply isn't
even, and the meter just doesn't doe the measument and power
computation right for those loads.
The Next Rip-off in Signal Processing
I"d put some ramblings down about the section in university where I
graduated and worked, which is supposed to be about the idea of them
entering in signal processing as some sort of experts. Thats not true
enough about the actual ongoings in that field by and large, and they
seek some way to make themselves proven anyhow, which on the basis of
theory and general american ideas is not easy. And since I suspect more
than a few of them are considerably more evil than average mankind
should ever be, which is about a decade ago, and since I'm gone there
and don't want to need their respect and references (though they owe me
that big time) I don't share their opinion that they should progress
their ambitions anymore, so I wrote this:
So they organised a load of horsesh*t conservative sh*t butllsh*t
sh*t to make it seem and appear they are important? Well, not only, I'm
sure its reasonable to publish some things in the field, but the idea
of 'certain people' is not the progress of the particular field, and
also not honest science, and certainly not a form of democracy!
You may say: you cannot know that! Yes, I can, I was there, I know
them, I've been in their circles watching a lot of their moves close up
for years, I know, I got the right to condemn that, reasonably speaking.
Talent is yerked, delayed, exploited and dishonoured, stolen from, and
worked out of the way, and the only true considerations to get
somewhere is how "the hierarchy" sees certain people, like the pope and
the cardinals.
Not maturity, honesty, reasonable dividing of the subjects and places,
democratic considerations, recognition and nurturing and respect for
talent and skill, not even appreciation of decent work.
That sounds like any conservative organisation for illicit purposes so
why make a fuzz about it? Well, the area used to be a hot area in
contemporary microelectronics and its use, has received wrong attention
and the process of conservative claiming is taking a for electronicists
alarming fashion.
When I was a student active as electronics student assistant and a
newcomer at network theory section, doing chip design, computer
graphics, simulation software and more I was, maybe at a christmas
dinner I co-organised, I forgot, informed of the concept of the 'claim
culture' and that that was appropriate term to describe the ongoings in
the section and the country I was in. Well, that's a rightwing attitude
that may well work, but as a summary of the ongoings of the top section
in micro electronics in a countries' top university that is not right,
and also not in line with the traditions which had led to the standing
of the section and the name of a respectable institution which also has
a serious electronics section.
At the latest Tcl at Fosdem meetings, where I wasn't invited, there was
a guy showing a tcl interface for an asic design package. Absolutely
not university level, and I could ban the thought that was in line with
a suggestion I'd done on the wiki to bring a fpga example. Sigh. asic
is higher than fpga for some moranic jesuit, I guess, and of course
things should be kept simple. I don't really understand that logic.
Well I remember things used to be like a graphics symposium I helped
organize long ago in the time of transputers and atari STs, that was
about content, HP would show off a huge machine which did real time
rendering of shaded bezier surfaces, a lot of people would show
interesting high tech things, and a guy who probably wants to be called
professor stole my rational bezier transformation mathematics and
programming work for his own presentation on the conference. Tsk, tsk.
So I couldn't win the rat race ? Well there might be rats but when I
got unduly put aside and eventually went away I did so because I
started to suspect very very great evils going on behind the scenes,
like I wrote on some of my early pages, and a major reasons why during
my work I created a lot of resistance is that things were the opposite
of the olympics in science or a race in research and development. On
the contrairy, that's what I had against my "project leader". Who
incidently claimed a subject I chose as a student, and probably the
dutch tamtam had whispered my home activities as a highschool person to
them to make some remarkable parallels happen in their
'interests' area.
It wasn't a finished piece, I gues it is a good though to write freely
so I let is stand as is.
Flash ?!?!
It's becoming a bit of
a habit to put videos on a web site in a flash presentation. That not
being bad it itself has disadvantages, like you need the flash player,
and a recent one, bla bla.... Also one cannot choose their own player,
like mplayer, or WM with PureVideo or what you like, maybe Quicktime or
even winamp, DivX, Realplayer etc. It is sort of closed up instead of
the 'Open Source' html-page idea. And it isn't particularly good or
extremely usefull, it does certain jobs, but isn't called flashy for
nothing.
I saw on netscapes' starting page that a new Miss America was chosen,
and remembered how I disliked many of those type of events, not even
for the in leftish circles normal measure of disdain for the concept of
such a flesh display, but simply because I didn't like it very much.
The site showed pictures and movies (in flash) of the ongoings of these
young american women and I though it would be fun to try making a
'ripped' movie from the flash movie, and see if mpeg-4 could do some
good to the quality of the material, well, it could make movies just
like other sources I tried look a lot better motion- and
non-jerkeyness-wise. The rounding of the camera motion to pixels and
playing of the camera motion with the effects of the motion (block-)
coder conrol properties is made a whole lot better by a heavy mp4
transcoding, at least when your media player knows how to deal with
inter-pixel motion and is up to the job of rendering those files in
real time.
Really ? Yep, really, in fact I made a bit of a habit the last week of
it to transcode from mp2 or other formats to mp4 and back to very high
bandwith mp2, which can then be shown in a (NVidia) PureVideo
accelerated mediaplayer, and often with ok material come close to
cinema quality movie rendering! That is not possible with any of the
materials I've tried on any player on several of machines and OS-es,
including some fairly heavy ones, for consumer norms that is.
High Low
High Low
This screen shows 3 simulaneous high quality video players at work, the
upper left has been transcoded which when played gives a very nice
impression, the still shows ok looking motion blur:
The upper right and the lower Woody Allen are direct and recorded BBC
medium HD TV resolutions, the upper left is recorded from discovery
channel.
Below a high res and shrunk version of direct cable TV on the dual
channel receiver card shown on a fast pc, with probably enough memory
bandwidth to display theo 1600x1200 rendering without glitches and full
30fps without tricks, though I didn't compute that.
The shrunk and slightly processed image looks sharper than a normal tv
picture can, which is probably due to progressive coding which gets
recognized and processed right. Progressive scan only works well on
non- or slow moving film.
Doing high bandwidth mpeg-4 transcoding and then watching with
pure-video or mplayer on a potent PC can work real good to make great
cinematographical impression also from DVD material. I ripped a piece
of a (legal copy of) the DVD Amelia, with if I remember correctly
mplayer, which was then put into the correct format quicktime with
ffmpeg with 10megabit/s very large coding bandwidth (which doesn't get
used all the time), and then back to 20Mb/S (!) max mpeg2 for viewing
with the hardware filtered and hardware accelerated PureVideo
(officially installed, bronze version) on a quite fast pc:
The video decoder control windows:
Remember that stills don't always look as good as moving pictures, and
of course I adapted to the screen at hand, but this scene looks like
good cinema, when the camera moves with a lift/tilt over this paris
windy view:
Of course, it goes without saying, I would like a real HD version
better, and preferably not one of tose stone-dead wmv examples.
This is a still from a test movie I made with a not so recent Sony
digital handycam, also after mp4 coding, to get in this case neater
motion blurr and sharper and a bit nicer rest of the picture:
From some time ago made with the same camera, I transcoded like above
this panning picture from France
Just like this movie fragment, which I also used on my graphics page:
and this one, the other part of then river above:
Notice that even though it is clear this cam has its limitations,
though for moving images it shows it uses its megapicel ccd well, that
these puctures are not dead, and you'll for the moment have to take my
work for it that the result on the fast machine(s) looks near
cinematograhic, and I think it satisfies me that I like the result as
being esteatic without the stupid glossyness of many profucts, and
getting some of the 70s movies life skills back.
I took this images from another BBC HD*2/3 documentary, and also
trancoded it:
a winner...
A dvd made from relatively old video material with piano playing from
the famous and important Dr. John on it
also benefits from the combined mp4 transcoding and subsequent
PureVideo
playback:
O fast machines with various players nothing gets near to capturing
every motion visibly and pleasantly.
And this gets not completely but more than a bit there where an
intelligent person likes to think about mp4 transcoded dvd (pal or ntsc
video) of a Copola film:
And some more of BBC HD film:
nice idea to drive through San Francisco
The last image was processed a bit, of course these images aren't like
from a good digital photo camera with good motion blur, these come from
space for free!
A documentary:
these images were actual screen shots, most unprocessed and part of a
moving sequence.
Mini Linux!
I've got my hands on a mini linux system which really works good and is
very practical thus far from ACME
systems. It is about the size of beermat with the height of a usb
connector on its side and really works and even quite fast, starting
form a 4 MB internal flash (in the compound chip) in about 5 seconds to
get ethernet (!) and everything running, including USB ports which
allow disks and cams and such to be connected, discs indeed work, a
small 60GB drive with FAT partition reads and writes fine, except
bandwidth limited by USB to 12Mb/s, I could even serve a video file
from the built in web server!
The connectors in front are the console which I hacked some electronics
for to connect to a RS232 port on a big Linux machine.
Part of the fun is the Open Source development environment, which has a
self-compilable cross compiler and toolset and full mini-linux source
distribution to compile with the cross compiler, which I had already
compiled on a Athlon 3.3/64bit Fedora Core 4 system, in about 10 min
IIRC. It compiled with warnings but no errors, also the executables for
the small processor, and prepared the correct programming file, which
can even be loaded into the small board over the small boards web
server through ethernet. After the compile had succeeded and the board
connected to ethernet I was curious to fund out wether the flash image
could be replaced by the self built one, the result on the big linux
webbrowser looked like this:
Preparing system for upgrade ...
Starting run level 4 (stop most daemons) ...
Waiting for run level 4 to start ...
Run level 4 started.
Waiting for run level 4 to finish ...
... waiting ...
Run level 4 finished.
Stopping some remaining processes.
sending TERM signal ...
Most processes stopped.
The file system will be upgraded after reboot.
Unmounting file system /var ...
Unmounting file system /mnt/flash ...
File systems successfully shut down.
Receiving new firmware ...
No HWID in bootblock, continuing anyway.
Erasing old file system ...
1% 3% 5% 7% 9% 11% 13% 15% 16% 18% 20% 22%
24% 26% 28% 30% 32% 33% 35% 37% 39% 41% 43% 45%
47% 49% 50% 52% 54% 56% 58% 60% 62% 64% 66% 67%
69% 71% 73% 75% 77% 79% 81% 83% 84% 86% 88% 90%
92% 94% 96% 98% 100%
Loading new file system ...
1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 7% 8% 9% 10% 11% 12% 14%
15% 16% 17% 18% 20% 21% 22% 23% 24% 25% 27% 28%
29% 30% 31% 33% 34% 35% 36% 37% 38% 40% 41% 42%
43% 44% 45% 47% 48% 49% 50% 51% 53% 54% 55% 56%
57% 58% 60% 61% 62% 63% 64% 66% 67% 68% 69% 70%
71% 73% 74% 75% 76% 77% 79% 80% 81% 82% 83% 84%
86% 87% 88% 89% 90% 91% 93% 94% 95% 96% 97% 99%
100%
The system upgrade completed successfully.
The unit will now reboot.
To continue, please connect to the unit again.
There may be a short delay before the new connection is accepted.
This connection will now close.
and in at most a few minutes, the board was loaded wit my self-built
linux (I didn't write anything of that of course) and rebooted
succesfully!
I've also made a little program which reads from standardin and prints
the square of a number on stdout, which compiled fine with the devkit
Fedora and ran fine on the board after it had been ftp-ed there in a
split second, stored in a writable part of the onboard flash
memory or a connected (and mounted) usb flash pen, and run from a ssh
remote shell. call it professional.
Maybe I'll be temped to port the compiler to the board and store it on
some big external memory, but sure I'll want to do some IO over the
programmable pins, there are (fast but not screaming fast) serial pins,
even IDE (though no drivers to my knowledge) and 2 parallel ports (I
like that), which should be pretty fast. Ethernet is not sluggish (the
interface is integrated in the hybrid chip) but I don't know how fast
exactly.
Needless to say this think can go in a number of products, for instance
the synthesizer to give it large disk access and USB and ethernet
connectivity, or a amplifer/mixer with webbrowser control, the board is
claimed even to do wireless networking with normal usb wireless sticks,
so we'll see.
Man Overboard!
I was a sailor since 12 and was early on thought this manouver:
any decent saylor should know this by heart, expecially when they
captain a boat, for instance a rental. I don't think many people I've
rented boated with in the past would know, which I think is wrong.
Space Cowboys
Thats a Steve Miller Band song, in pop probably asfar out as "Well you
needn't" or so from Telonious Monk.
I would image it a good subject, I was a young boy a fervent SciFi
reader (from the library I read most of the books from genre
which I liked). I can imagine actual space cowboys when the bad people
hit the extraterrestial.
On earth, an army is sometimes more appropriate, like a response to the
dreadfull poster on my local diary page 27
(about 2/3) I put on the door close to that poster:
Which I guess is from the Vietnam war time.
It is only in the face of great evils and miseries that one thinks
about such dire measures.
I was looking at this
video from Google Video is
is great value (for nothing!) about illuminati, a bit of a taboo
getting broken finally it seems, though not so much in holland.
Fullout war is justified in the face of people defending this kind of
evil:
Conspiracy of Silence - Illuminati
Pedophiles in Washington D.C. (documentary)
Posted to Google by John Conner & The
Resistance
55 min 12 sec - May 3, 1994
See google video.
People opposed to the still fairly hidden New Age and New World Order
can be fould here:
www.TheResistanceManifesto.com with a lot of subjects being raised
for intelligent viewers/readers.
One shouldn't have to dream about all that in Space. Horrible. Lets
shoot the bad ones when they try.
About as far out as I though about the Computer World was to consider
exposing the IT world habits and modi operandi at Unctad:
see here.
NVidia Gelato Graphics
The opposite of that is proven by NVidia, who of course are not
charity or gouvenrment institution and who make money by selling us
great graphics cards, which has released its Gelato high quality 3D
rendering software, accelerated by their hardware to be freely
downloaded, with some limitations, but fully functional.
I didn't render this image, but its an example:
see the Gelato
site if you're interested, but this is hardcore graphics stuff, and
requires compilation skills to use and tweaking to install, at least on
Fedora core4/64, because the free version is only 32 bit, also you'll
need the latest nvidia (not open source) graphics drivers installed.
The teapots earlier on this page I have rendered with gelato in a
minute (!) or so on a 6200 card and 3.3GHz/64 Athon.
This is an adapted example NOT from gelato:
but from a graphics demo application on a 6700 nvidia card which on a
dual core pention 3GHz makes this demo spin at 1600x1200 resolution
very well and fast and nice, the wallpaper is actually a cloud pattern
I photographed myself, but thats hard to see.
What has started most computer hardware
that's right!
Those are books I had at least in highschool, maybe earlier, and I
loved that stuff, to work with, at the time. Beats the Xilinx devenv by
miles in terms of fun and effectiveness divided by time: the above book
is from 1976...
