Social interaction on the level of the checkout

I was just thinking the other day about just what it is with facebook and twatter that most annoys me.

I think its because for the most part (particularly for facebook), the interaction never really gets beyond the level of discourse during a visit to the checkout. A hollow greeting and perhaps a comment on some immediate concern such as the weather.

That this is amongst people who ostensibly know each other on some personal level - a so-called 'friend' - is quite sad.

World in chaos

Of course, there have been an awful lot of other things occupying my mind of late - the disasters around the Pacific Ring Of Fire, North Africa, the collapse of western economies and so forth. After a while it turns into a sort of 'disaster porn' that you need a break from though. Having empathy for people's plight is one thing but it can become overwhelming and for nobody's benefit.

I'm pretty much convinced that people's plight is just misery anyway. The strong take what they want and the rest suffer. Seems to be the winning evolutionary strategy since we started agriculture, since before that the social groups were too close and small for cheating to win in the long term.

Back to work

After a nice break and some good weather i'm back to work again too. Going is a little slow but i'm making progress and getting back into the groove of things. Must start doing some exercise though - after xmas I gave up on the health kick and have been on a downward slide ever since.

A house full of stuff

Stuff stuff everywhere - it's amazing how much stuff one accumulates over the years, even for someone like me who detests shopping.

After being a bit of a shut-in for a few weeks just doing nothing or poking away at the back yard i've been trundling about on the deadly treadly trying to procure a few more items.

First I was after a West Indian Lime (although I have since discovered that the 'Sublime' my sister in law gave me is basically the same). Unfortunately the closest nursery had none. Neither did the next closest (it was stupidly expensive anyway). So a bit of a hike to the next one - Bunnings at Mile End. Gigantic shop. Gigantic nursery. Not a single fruiting lime tree in their stock. Plenty of grapefruit. I mean who buys grapefruit any more? And fucking greeters and grumpy old ladies as checkout chicks. At least the greeters are hidden behind a 'desk' now, and not assaulting you as you enter the shop. I try to avoid Bunnings but I thought with their super-sized-shop they might at least have some. But once again they've demonstrated they have quantity of quality or range - I found another local hardware store anyway so hopefully that's the last time I ever have to go there. So the last place I could think of was in Beulah Park on the other side of the city across the road from where I used to live. Fortunately they had plenty of lime trees - and hot checkout chicks too. And their prices were even a fair bit cheaper. I bought a couple of tall ones (one for my sister) and rode home with two tree-flags flapping in the draft. Pannier bags are awesome. Now I have to work out where to put it.

That, and making some tomato sauce pretty much did the whole day in.

So the next day I set out to get another PlayTV (for a mythtv instance - only because I know for certain it works well with the computer, the TinyTwin TV tuner I am using currently is a bit crappy) and a chest freezer. I first went to Radio Rentals because it's close. But my patience was already tried somewhat - I got pissed off with the lack of freezers (they had 2 on display), the lack of staff in the giant shop - and the bizarre one-way doors. You go in the front and have exit out the back. I jogged through the isles to get out just to make the point how silly it was.

Next stop was Hardly Normals, or so I thought. I don't like shopping there (or shopping in general) but it was worth a comparison since it wasn't too far away. Unfortunately I had forgotten they closed the one I was headed to and moved it another 5km up the road to a disgustingly giant strip mall. Well to put it bluntly - fuck that, how do they expect people to shop there if you have to travel 10km each way just to get looked at funny and treated poorly? On the way i'd dropped by tricky dickies to see the price on the PlayTV but didn't get one thinking I could try to 'deal' with Hardly Normals to get both, but the lack of shop put a dent in that idea and then I was so pissed off I forgot about it.

I decided to head to the other side of town instead since I know of a few shops that way - but since I was going past home I stopped to look up other shops on the internets and to cut a long story short decided to really 'fuck that', and just bought it online. Last time I bought something just up the road they wanted $50 or more for delivery anyway, with no indication of when it might arrive other than the day (i'm often home but i don't like being tied home unnecessarily). I ordered this from Sydney, $130 below retail, $40 delivery and within 5 hours someone had called to say it would arrive between 11 and 2 the next day (obviously it isn't coming from Sydney). Assuming it arrives that was a much easier experience.

On the plus side I discovered an independent hardware store on the way home - and one somewhat closer too. That'll give me another option when I want to avoid Bunnings. Although the manager warned me not to leave my bike outside for the thieves which frequent the area - unfortunately I missed the opportunity to suggest a bike rail which are sorely lacking in almost all of Prospect (so much for their 'sustainable vision') - there isn't even any parking control signs to lock your bike to ...

So on Sunday I also made up a batch of Tomato sauce. I'm fairly happy the way it turned out although I probably should've reduced it a little more as it is a touch runny. But in the end I simply lost patience after cooking and simmering for more than 6 hours, and it should do. I couldn't find the recipe I used last time and since I had a bottle of Ezy-Sauce I'd bought more than 5 years ago I thought it was about time I used that. There's a recipe on taste.com.au as 'Grandma's Tomato Sauce' but it's really just the same as the one on the bottle so I followed that instead. Unfortunately I forgot to shake the bottle before opening it so I stuffed it up a bit, but I made it up with a few more crushed cloves, black pepper and a huge pile of chillies. It's got a nice little kick to it although perhaps a bit sweet for my taste. I don't even use it much myself but it is absolutely scrumptious on a bit of burnt snag in a fresh slice of bread and perfect for hot dogs - so the 4.5L I made should do me for a while.

I'm also a couple of weeks into making some fermented 'tobasco' sauce. I have some 'Cayesan' chillies which have gone ballistic and the chillies were so heavy one of the branches broke off. I didn't even pick all of them off (I managed to save the branch by tying it up) and ended up with about 750g of green chillies. Ideally i'd use red ones but since I had a whole lot of fresh chillies at once I thought i'd see how a green version of the fermented sauce works out. Still a few weeks left on that. Now the Cayesan's are starting to ripen I'm getting a few red ones each day and waiting till I get enough to make something with.

My habanero plants are starting to produce fruit at last too. They taste fantastic as always - I put a couple of green ones in the tomato sauce, I love the almost apple-like sweetness followed by the searing heat. I only just finished the last of the big crop I had 2 years ago and I finally have some in the ground rather than just in pots so I'm hoping for a crap-load again. Although i've had the occasional problems with pests on the ones in pots in general the pests have been under control better this year, and that's perhaps because i'm growing a bigger variety of stuff and it's all a bit healthier with all the rain we've had.

I've finally levelled off the lawn at the back and well on the way to having it full of lush grass. After 3 odd years of having piles of crap, dirt, and general mess it's a relief to have it almost done. It's a pity I don't have a bit more room for horticulture but I think I have the balance about right given the layout of the yard. There's always pots I guess - but I have heaps of those already and they take a lot more work and the plants usually don't grow as well.

Oh, I got my BeagleBoard polo shirt and Beagleboard-XM yesterday evening, at long last - a bonus from working on GSOC 2010. That took a while to arrive. I haven't got it working yet because it uses a different gender for serial cable and I don't have the right PSU and all my cables are in a box behind other boxes, but hopefully i'll get it working soon. It looks like a tidy little unit anyway. I've barely been touching the computer for the last few weeks other than to read a few blogs and keep up with the news (there's been a lot of it lately), but hey, it's summer so that stuff can wait for the long rainy days of winter.

Gran Turismo 5

I finally got over being angry at Sony and played a bit of Gran Turismo 5 on the weekend (it had nothing to do with the discovery of the broken PS3 security over the same weekend - but yay for that).

In a word: unfinished.

Compared to GT3 - which I consider the pinnacle of the series - there are so many graphical issues, slow loading times, poor models and frustrating game-play mechanics.

Models: Some of the models are really bad - almost certainly direct PSP imports. If as reported they spent 6 months on modelling each of the 200 'premium' cars then it was mostly a waste of time - you can barely see much of the interior if you do drive from inside, and there's little reason to anyway. The sounds are pretty weak too.
1080p@ under 50 fps: The sharpness and crispness only shows up how plain some of the models and race-tracks are. I'd rather 2x AA on 720p, so at least the frame-rate could keep up and you could improve the textures (also allow simpler models). It makes the screenshots look bare, and the moving game less than impressive.
Screen tearing: Tearing tearing everywhere. Trying to do too much AA or too high a resolution is all lost as soon as tearing rips the screen in two. I've definitely seen worse tearing ... but that was in games that weren't gran turismo.
Pop in: There's just too much pop in. Occasionally a whole road's worth of shadows pops in while you're driving on it too.
Shadows: Shadow mask is way too low a resolution, as are the environmental maps used for reflections (additionally they have low temporal resolution). Again this looks particularly bad at 1080p.
Volumetric mist/dust: I think the dust and mist actually looks quite nice - at least you can't see it as a bunch of layered animated sprites. Except at the edges that is - where it looks like total shit. Nice algorithm, simply unfinished or simply unsuitable for such a high screen resolution.
Slow/inconsistent menus: Obviously different teams/individuals work on every separate menu system in isolation as they still have the problem where they all look and work differently.
OK pox: Way too many 'are you sure' 'ok?' boxes and so on. Win some money - click ok. Win a car - click ok. Then go to the ticket, click on it, click ok to get it added to your garage. Click ok after it shows it driving up in the dark. Click ok/cancel to 'use it now'. I mean ... really? Its even worse when one considers this is the only game these guys have been working on for well over a decade, and yet the basic navigation mechanics haven't progressed at all - or gotten worse!
Loading slog: This is supposed to be a `next gen' console, why does it still have so much loading delay? Loading a track is one thing but almost every action from going to the car settings to the options to changing menu's triggers another load. I don't consider a 10G `install' a viable option to mitigate this poor design and reportedly it's hardly greased lightning with it anyway. These sort of delays had a reason on the PS2 with it's tiny RAM but there's no such reason on the PS3 - only excuses.

I really can't see where all the time went to come up with this result. Although the modelling and engine coding no doubt took a long time, all of these things can be done in parallel and they would have been playing with the PS3 as early as Evolution Studios anyway (Motorstorm devs who are now polishing their 3rd game), so it can't be the coding. There doesn't seem to be any obvious delay on the 'critical path' that could have caused such a long release cycle for such an unfinished game. Apart that is from poor management. Sony for letting them get away with it and Polyphony for fucking around too much. I'm not counting the over-detailed modelling here either, i'm talking about the engine and menu systems.

It just looks like Sony demanded that they stop fucking around and release it by xmas 2010, perhaps because the PS4 is coming up, or simply to ensure the PS3 hadn't hit it's inevitable decline.

It's only beta quality - a decent beta, but still lacking all the polish we should all expect from such a triple-a game. If I were to review it I wouldn't give it more than 60% given all of the above (a low 'C'/'Pass' grade), and the fact the game itself isn't much other than `GT4-HD'.

If it was a launch title then there would be good excuses for all of these problems, but it isn't.

Branchy code

This week I was looking at feature detectors - and one of those I was trying is FAST. This is pretty much the definition of branchy code - a function which is a single if statement of 2900 lines.

I didn't think it would be something that would map to OpenCL particularly well, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I simply took the if statement and wrapped it in a kernel which I call for every pixel, and added a simple list append function at the end (more on that below). With a bit of playing with the kernel work size I got it down to about 75uS for a 1024x768 frame at around 1000 output points.

I still haven't done non-maximum suppression or the like but it certainly lives up to it's name - it's damn FAST. I've been playing with SURF and others and even a partial implementation is licking 2000uS/frame. FAST seems to be very sensitive to noise and camera focus though, so i'm not sure I can use it - hopefully the non-maximum suppression will help.

GPU List Append

One problem with GPU coding is that it particularly likes having large well-defined data-sets to work with, and what I needed to do was just generate points beyond a threshold. In the past i've just had a separate post-process which 'reduces' the data, but that input had already been reduced and wasn't just a whole frame's-worth.

So I came up with something very simple based on atomics. I don't know whether it's the best solution but it seems to work ok in this case.

kernel void somekernel(..., global uint *indexp, global float *posp) {

    // do stuff

    if (result > threshold) {
        uint index = atom_inc(&indexp[0]);

        if (index < 1024) {
            posp[index] = (float2) { x, y };
        }
    }
}

Anything that then uses the 'index' count just has to limit it to the maximum (e.g. 1024) and away it goes.

Leave

As of about an hour ago i'm now on leave until next year. Yay. I've been hanging out for it for the last few days and it's been pretty difficult keeping the motivation level up (despite working on some interesting stuff). Yard should keep me busy and i'll probably get into some hacking before long too. Maybe i'll finally play GT5 and 'upgrade' the PS3 firmware. But for the rest of the day it's time for SFA. And maybe a brewski or twoski. I've got one more wort busy in the cellar, and once i've bottled that next week i'll have over 100 longnecks - and even if that isn't enough for the whole summer it should be a good start.

Stuff

ImageZ

When I get a spare time and a bit of inspiration I hack bits and pieces and work on making this usable for what I need it for. I'm using it now for screenshots - i really like the save requesters and simplicity of the interface. I added a 'resize image' function which works fine, but I was having trouble with getting the scrolled pane to recognise it's content had changed size. I have something that mostly works but I got sick of fighting with it so left it for the moment.

I also thought about the tool mechanics - the affine tool doesn't really work as a per-application tool, and i'm thinking of making it, and all of the tools per-window instead. I don't have a good feel as to whether this is a good, bad, or insignificant move. At the least it might help me clean up some messy input routing - although there's a few hours of menial work getting that sorted out.

VideoZ

Not much progress here, still thinking of what to do. I setup a webcam input using V4L4J - although i'm not terribly happy with the way it passes data around (it takes 3 copies to get it onto the graphics card). I also started looking into some OpenGL 3.x stuff (no fixed function pipeline) but my heart wasn't really in it and I didn't get very far - although for the most part it looks pretty straightforward. Thinking I will just try to get a couple of video input streams going and work on some simple cross fading and swipe functions to start with and that will let me play with ideas such as timebase correction and chroma keying and the like.

But I just haven't gone anywhere near sound - if sound on linux is fucked, it's even more fucked in java. That will be a hassle.

Leaks

Well good to see at last Rudd stating the obvious - the leaks are the ultimately the yanks fault for not being able to handle security properly. Although I really just think he's playing the astute politician here - partly blow back against the US diplomats for being a bit blunt about him. And also I would suggest to play up to the local feel and to contrast with the totally nonsense statements from the PM and the AG. But she deserves all she gets in that regard, what an utter idiot. Still, his statements are the only clear ones by a member of the ruling party that they might have another purpose of being in power other than serving the interests of the USA.

Booze n Fat

Well the experiment continues, although i'm drinking in moderation again (work bbq today aside!), and eating in moderation too. I was surprised at how quickly I got used to eating basically half or less of what I was eating before - and feeling less hungry than I had been. My scales are a bit crap and it varies so much depending on when one weighs oneself but i'm shedding in the order of a kilogramme a week. Mood has been all over the shop though - and when I do drink a bit it gets pretty low - which is another reason to slow it down. And sleep hasn't been great either. Although I think in general although i'm getting less sleep i'm normally a bit more refreshed - but that's so subjective it's almost impossible to tell.

Yard

I have a good batch of leave coming up so i'm starting to think about the yard. I should be doing the shed but i'm putting that off ... but in the meantime I have some garden beds, lawn, and paving to work out. The more I think about it the more vegetable growing areas I want - they are just so much more useful than grass or flowers. Although I'm also aiming to get another citrus in - a tart lime like an african lime would be my choice. I have one decent spot left for that but i'm growing a tomato there at the moment ;-)

I had a good think about it yesterday and think i've settled on a plan - need to move a few tons of dirt and a pile of metal out the way to lay the wall foundations though (which is why I ended up hacking yesterday rather than going further). My chilli plants are going pretty well (already 10cm fruit on the cayenne pepper plants), tomatoes are looking good, i'm using the mints daily in dinner and last years basil has started growing again. I also pruned most of the roses right back since they have finished flowering for now and had too many long stems which were falling over. Citrus is also sprouting like crazy - maybe i'll finally get some fruit again this year. I also planted a few seeds in pots for a bit more variety - although it's a bit late in the year to start with seeds so i'm not expecting a lot. If the rain keeps up this year though it should be a great growing season.

A bit wet.

Got out with an umbrella during a lull in the downpour and took a couple of shots of the road outside.

My small rainwater tank is already overflowing too - it was well under 1/2 full this morning (it's 2100L).

Well that looks like about it for a couple more hours anyway. Fortunately the forecast hail held off - at least for now.

Update: We ended up with 70mm of rain in about 18 hours, which although not unheard of isn't a typical spring storm around here.

Pretty clear cut ...

From the 1st of december, a statement which shocked me somewhat:

“I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website,” Gillard said today. ‘It is a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do.’’

From today:

But asked directly what Australian laws had been broken by either WikiLeaks or Assange, Ms Gillard said the Australian Federal Police were investigating.
"The foundation stone of it is an illegal act," Ms Gillard said today.

But the "foundation stone" was the leaking of the documents to the website, not the publishing of the cables.

"It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks, if there had not been an illegal act undertaken," Ms Gillard said.

Obviously the spinmeisters told this lawyer (who should have known better) that calling things illegal without basis probably wasn't terribly wise. Now of course there will be the plausible deniability that she was only ever talking about the 'foundation stone'(?) and not any action of wikileaks ... although to suggest that from her first statement above really beggars disbelief.

Well at least the opposition - deceitful hypocrites though they are - are making some noise about this, finally spotting what an outrageous statement it was for the country's leader to make. The greens could be a bit more vocal mind you (although that may simply be the media's tendency to ignore them).

Update: The ABC has just published an open letter from more than a few influential people who aren't too happy with the bend-over behaviour of the supposedly sovereign and free democratic government of ours.

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