The Full Enchilada

Yet, another intriguing episode, been a few in a row, I’m almost embarrassed to think perhaps I’ve turned soft and like them for the sappy love stories developing, don’t tell my woman! But really, the web of connections coming together brings a lot of excitement back to the series. Jack Shephard finally finds out indeed it was the evil smoke possessing John Locke’s form that pretended to be his father, though does the devil ever lie? His city parallel universe version Jack Shepard finds his sister, Claire (pregnant). I was trying to figure out why Desmond ran over John Locke, I think it was just to get him meet Jack Shepard perhaps but then the car scene seemed pretty brutal, like it could have easily ended in death, there must of been better ways to get them to meet than to almost kill John Locke. Well, can’t wait for the next one, its my dose of rest and relaxation these days…

Well, as I promised I just did some Live Video streaming tests with Theora video format (using libtheora on linux). What I can report is a video delay of about 22 seconds. It was about 45 (stream was around 27kbps I think)seconds when I had ffmpeg take the 192 x 144 screencapture area and resize it to stream it at 320 by 240, of course at the new 320×240 it was a bit zoomed in but seems like also the transcoding to resize added about 20 seconds delay (stream was around 58k-65kbps from what I recall). The stream was the linux desktop screencaptured since I didn’t have a webcam on the remote linux box, I served the live screencam stream off of icecast server running on the same box and served it up to view back on my local windows xp desktop through an html5 simple page served by apache on that same box, using the video embed tag to serve the icecast theora live video stream. (there was no audio in the stream, no audio was captured and no audio channel streamed..)

(see my previous post for the audio streaming tests details http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/comparison-firefox-html5-realtime-audio-streaming-of-ogg-vorbis-versus-standalone-player-zinf-theora-libtheora-video-also.htm )

Perhaps I should also mention that I was doing the screencapture of the remote linux box while being logged in to it remotely with NX (using freenx nxserver), but it was just a physical box, not a VMware virtual machine, VPS etc…so I think delay due to graphics driver issues can be overlooked, it was quite responsive and robust while using it through NX (by nomachine) remote desktop.

It’s quite unfortunate that currently video streaming is in a huge disarray, there’s nothing that works on everything, you have to recode/transcode for different platforms and serve with different servers. Apple may claim they’re the good guys pushing for HTML5 standards versus Adobe Flash proprietary plugins but some would say they are dishonest if they would try to play the pro-standards good guy when they do not wish to support OGG and Theora instead of their own AAC format etc…so sure html5 currently supports theora on the desktop but far as I know nothing supports theora on mobile platforms, they support only mpeg4/flac/aac/h264 etc..hopefully this will change soon but with everyone trying to push their own proprietary technology it may take a while if the consumers don’t force them to by demanding open protocols. (just don’t watch streams encoded in PATENT encumbered formats, if everyone did that you’d be amazed at how quickly open patent-free formats would become the most widely used…

Has the serpent given us the ‘forbidden Apple’?

Well, I was bored I guess so I wanted to check out FireFox’s new html5 audio and video tag support. I was able to play a Theora encoded ogg file just fine using Firefox video tag, this was a file I had created using linux screen capture. Anyway, I was more interested in serving a live shoutcast/icecast stream to firefox html5 for a quick easy way to embed live stream without any plugins. I found that it did indeed work, I was broadcasting live through my microphone on my windows desktop computer (Windows XP) to my linux shout server and was listing to the feed back on my windows desktop but at a whopping FULL minute delay! Yes, no kidding everything I said was delayed by a full 60 seconds.

So while it certainly did work just fine, the audio wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t choppy, it didn’t break up, worked fine other than being a full minute behind. I decided to not change anything except the player, I started up Zinf application/player and loaded up my streaming URL into it. I then did the delay test and it was about half of the delay with FireFox, about 30 (closer to 25) seconds or so delay only. It also took considerably longer to do the initial connection with firefox which took around ten or more seconds while with Zinf it only took a second or two for the buffering to complete and the audio to start coming in..and I should mention that streaming live mp3 at 128kbps took only a split second to connect to live stream with Zinf and flash player on website and the delay was just 4 seconds long.

Bear in mind that I was streaming at about 16-20Kbps only! With a Vorbis quality setting of -1 and without stereo, just a Mono stream sampled at 11025 rate. Cranked up to the highest Vorbis quality settings and streaming at around 450Kbps or more, with Zinf I was able to get the delay down to just two seconds! Still can’t jam live over the internet at near zero latency ASIO levels but its good enough for a live broadcast internet radio station.

Next, I’m planning to do some tests with live streaming video in ogg container, theora format and see what kind of video delay I’ll get.

Finally a LOST episode that brings back some of the intrigue and suspense that captivated us in the first episodes. Finally an episode where we actually care about the characters clones/twins or alter dimensional persona/ego living life in the city, having not visited the Island. Hopefully ABC has their writers back on track and we can look forward to more interesting plots with unforeseen turns. I wonder if anyone else would agree, or if I just happened to enjoy this “Lost – Happily Ever After” Lost episode since its the first ‘break’ from annoying (buggy code) server work I’ve had in the last couple days. I hope I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed this episode more than other episodes lately. In fact, I did really enjoy the other recent episodes, not just Desmond’s recent show case with Whitmore or is it Wihtmore or Widmore or simply Witmore, I have no clue. The point is I never really cared for any of the scenes of the alternate reality city characters until now. Next time you think you’re in love at first sight, you’ll wonder if you lived that life in an alternate universe, a parallel dimension. If things continue, I’ll be happy to let them control the horizontal and the vertical into the outer limits in the twilight zone.

I recall being lured in by some Auto Insurance companies claiming to give great rates, yet after going through everything and getting some nice quotes. Way at the end, they finally tell me they need to charge a bit higher rates because unfortunately, even though I never had a ticket in over four years, that there was still a speeding ticket on my record. Apparently, if you get a two point ticket, it can stay on your record for around 7 years! What constitutes a two point ticket may vary, in my case I think it was that the speed I was ticketed for was over 100mph on the freeway. I do recall that day, was a nice day sunny day and I was in a hurry back to work to meet some big cheese, well actually some huge cheese, the boss of my boss who apparently needed to see me right away for help on something. Of course, I didn’t mind an excuse to speed having always had a heavy lead foot. Unfortunately my enjoyment was cut short as soon as the pain hit me in the gut while I quickly applied my breaks hoping to reduce the speed registered on his gun. At the rate I was going it was futile to get it under 100mph in time, I think he had me at 112mpg or 119mph. I’ve been a ‘good boy’ since then so I guess tickets do work, at least for those who can’t afford to pay them along with higher insurance rates.

So if you’re on a budget, remember to always keep it under 100! If you’re rich, I’m jealous, guess you can keep on taunting the cops and flooring that porsche!

I had not used Bind9 for quite some time and recently I was setting up some domains which I really was not authoritative for, ie Godaddy was actually acting as the real SOA DNS server for it but I wanted to TEST and check if my local configuration was working ok. In the past I would just run nslookup, then tell it to use local server with “SERVER IP” or “SERVER localhost” and then when I did my lookups it would return ONLY what my locally running named domain nameserver replied. Everything I tried this time spewed out only records from the real authoritative name servers at Godaddy, ignoring what my local dns named configuration said. I tried with dig mydomain.com @localhost and others. I even tried dig +trace and dig +recurse=no and I also tried in nslookup doing set recurse=no to disable recursion but nothing I did gave me a non recursive lookup!

What finally worked!? I went to a WINDOWS machine and used NSLOOKUP from the Windows XP machine and again with SERVER command set active (dns) domain name server to the IP of my linux box running named. Hurray, looking up the domains this way now showed me what I had configured my linux servers dns with. It confirmed for me everything on my local linux server was working as planned.
I then realized that this had worked from Windows Desktop because it being an external system, BIND had been configured in named.conf to NOT allow RECURSION to external networks so as to not create an open recursive DNS for the world.

So how can I successfully run a non recursive domain lookup from the linux server running bind 9 named? Do I need to edit /etc/named.conf and disable recursion globally for internal network also and do a quick /etc/init.d/named restart ? (yea, it’s rhel-ish ..)

Or what is the correct OPTION flag/argument for dig or nslookup so I can do no recurse, non recursive domain lookups? How about for reverse dns lookups such as dig -x IP.-in-addr.arpa @localhost ?

Gonna crash for the night so maybe it’ll come to me in a twisted morning dream

No doubt about it, Adriano Celentano is one of the best things to come out of Italy!
Enjoy – Confessa:

Enjoy – Per Sempre:

What you want more?

Yep, she’s ready for the Big One…are you?

Laying out on the beach may in fact be one of the best places to be during the ‘Big One’, the big California earthquake that seismologists have been predicting since time began. Contrary to many fears, it will probably not create killer tsunamis, that would happen if the epicenter was an ideal distance off our coast so that it would send the water towards us.

If you think you’re very safe at home, that you can quickly jump out your window, take a look what’s out your window, a ton of electrical lines and poles ready to fall on you? Gas lines ready to burst and explode all around you? Now you’re beginning to see why enjoying a nice day at the beach away from power lines and gas pipes and other waiting to happen explosions and dangerous chemical leaks.

And no, it isn’t likely that the entire state of California is going to fall into the ocean as you may have seen in some movie, but if that’s the case there’s no point worrying about preparations to survive one is there? (Unless you’re rich enough to keep a long range helicopter at seconds notice…)

If you happen to be home during the Big One, keep in mind Butane and Propane are heavier than air and can accumulate to high concentrations, stay away from gas reservoir tanks or pipes, seal off any valves, and do have some emergency supplies handy. Depending on how bad it is, you should realize it may not be so easy getting drinkable drinking water for a while and there may even be food shortages if its a really bad one destroying transportation. You can worry all you want about flashlights and the like, but what you really need is good access to food and water and safe place to sleep.

Of course it wouldn’t hurt at all to have one of those crank or solar powered radios or even high powered walkie-talkies or shortwave radio transmitters to keep in touch with family or friends and to hear public service announcements from the government. Some areas may see huge increases in violence during such emergencies, so use your own judgement and creativity to protect yourself and your family, the police force will be much too busy with emergency issues to be of any use for anyone’s protection during that time, especially businesses with goods.

It was sickening to hear some of the comments over the web nonchalantly condoning such evil barbaric behaviour. Racism exists and will exist forever, it is not bound by any skin color, people of all races have plenty of racists among them but how can people excuse murder if the victim maybe was a racist by someone’s definition? What if that 69 year old bedridden man, who was recovering from heart surgery, was indeed a major racist? It’s ok to murder him in cold blood? What if he even tried to cheat the two black workers and pay them less than agreed, does that make it ok to murder him? Even if he refused to pay at all, is murder in any way excusable!?

Some of the comments I have read on the web read along the lines of “not paying them for there work to feed there families isnt murder?”

This is the same ideology that terrorists all over the world use. They claim it is perfectly OK to murder innocent men, women, and children in retaliation for what they feel is some sort of oppression, or sometimes even for as little as disrespecting their ideology.

Now back to this story, there apparently was a 28 year old worker involved also who struck the elderly 69 year old man laying sick in bed, struck him several times with an iron rod or and/or some machete and a big club according to police and crime scene investigators. After the 28 year old man struck the old man, the 15 year old took his turn, apparently neither of them being disturbed by what authorities said looked more like some animal slaughter house, he was bludgeoned so badly he was barely recognizable!

Police said, Terreblanche was lying on his bed when he was attacked between 5 and 6 p.m. on Saturday. “There was blood all over the place, pools on the mattress, the pillow, the floor and splatters on the walls and ceiling,”

Some blamed the (ANC) African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema, saying he spread hate speech that led to Terreblanche’s killing. Malema had led college students in a song that includes the lyrics “kill the Boer.” Boer was used as a derogatory term for whites in the song.

The ANC insists the song is a valuable part of its cultural heritage and that the lyrics — which also refer to the farmers as thieves and rapists — are not intended literally and are therefore not hate speech. This stance by the ANC organization is blatant endorsement of racism itself. No respectable white political organization could get away with such inflammatory racist propaganda and they rightly shouldn’t but respect and trust can only be built through cooperation from both sides. How can they denigrate whites without just giving them more reasons to justify their racist views?

Perhaps this Terreblanche white guy, was a very terrible person, perhaps he deserved to die, perhaps he derserved even more than that gruesome beating to death. He may in fact deserve to burn in Hell forever, but regardless of this, cold blooded murder of a helpless, non-combatant person should never be excused!

(South Africa will soon be the FIRST African nation to host the FIFA WORLD CUP SOCCER TOURNAMENT)

I had to renew several domains today, OUCH! I did save some money using Godaddy coupon code gda334a today on 4/5/2010 again this worked as of April 4-5-2010 but it didn’t give me 30% off, I don’t recall exactly but I think it saved me around $10, $12, or $15 dollars max.

It’s unfortunate that many of these coupons do not work for regular renewals, they’re more generous with new purchases etc…but at least it’s something of a price break.