OpenRaster, SPI, etc.

After poking around ImageZ a bit late last night I thought i'd tackle multi-layer reading/writing.

So I wrote a writer and eventually a saver for OpenRaster format. I decided on OpenRaster since it is so simple, and it was pretty much how I was going to write it anyway - only I was going to avoid the XML. Being a zip file makes things simple om Java too. It seems to interoperate well enough so far (since I only have 'normal' blend mode working anyway), although if you save layers in greyscale or 16 bit formats from ImageZ and then load/save them from MyPaint, everything is converted to RGBA 8 bit.

I still need a float format though - I started looking into OpenEXR last year - but that was about when I stopped working on ImageZ for a chunk of time too - but I hit some walls with the test images. I can't recall where the issue was now though. This isn't really a high priority.

Today I thought I'd work on writing an ImageReaderSpi for the format as well - for example since currently OpenRaster files do not display in the open requester. But i got too side-tracked trying to implement meta-data and other features which in hindsight I probably don't need. I might revisit it again later with reduced requirements and see if I can get it working.

Along the way I also played with JAXB XML (de)serialisation which looks pretty nice - as nice as things can get with XML I guess. In general I try to avoid XML as much as possible because I think it's the phlegm, vomit, and anal leakage of devil's spawn, so this was a pleasant surprise. No surprise that it wasn't originally an apache project though ...

Also started work on a crop tool. This is exposing me once again to issues with the tool overlays, so I should probably think about cleaning that up somehow too. I'm using piccolo2d at the moment, but the way I have the tools track the current zoom is a right pigs breakfast.

mediaz <-- ImageZ

I finally uploaded ImageZ to google code, under a new project mediaz. I'm pre-empting myself somewhat here, but i'm leaving room should I develop some other tools - e.g. if the VideoZ stuff ever goes anywhere.

I didn't get around to cleaning up everything I had intended to, so it's well short of being terribly useful, but that's the way it goes I guess. I didn't really want to spend my Saturday at the computer again, but there's not much else to do - everyone else is out and it's a crappy cold, windy and eventually wet day we're headed for.

Update: I had intended to catch up with a couple of mates for some beer and food this evening but I slept in and then it started pissing down with rain so I ended up stuck inside again (watching Port get totally arse-raped by Collingwood). Then I ended up playing with ImageZ a bit more and realised i'd sold it a bit short - there is quite a lot of functionality there after-all, even if some big and rather important parts are missing. I did a bit of hacking on it as well as some house-keeping on the google code page.

Nvidia opencl 1.1

Yay, so NVidia finally released an opencl 1.1 spec driver. I guess now I should read up more on opencl 1.1 and see if there's anything I can take advantage of - so far It wasn't even on the radar because of their complete lack of support; and i'm happy enough with 1.0 anyway. I'm not sure this is really enough to restore confidence that OpenCL is a first-class citizen on NVidia hardware - their weekly emails haven't mentioned OpenCL for months. We're headed for AMD hardware anyway, if only to try alternatives.

Speaking of AMD, I thought I might try to create a Java binding for the AMD FFT library - I wouldn't mind evaluating it to see if it could replace my current FFT implementation (the apple one, as ported in the jocl demos tree). Unfortunately it uses some types and interfaces which are tricky to wrap in Java, at least in a way which works independent of the architecture's native size. So for now I might put it on the back-burner. (I looked at gluegen briefly but it had trouble parsing something - and the error messages it gives aren't much help).

Mailing Lists

I just set up some mailing lists for jjmpeg and socles.

I can't tell from google-code if there is much interest in the projects, but it seems a better idea to set up a mailing list than to receive direct emails about them.

These are still slow long-burn projects i'm working on when I feel inspired, and inspiration varies greatly from week to week.

Bullies, liars, and arseholes.

Hmm, so my sister in law just got sacked from one of her cleaning jobs. After quite a bit of bullying from a fellow employee and what can only be considered racism/discrimination from upper management (e.g. complaining about her diminutive stature in her first week) they finally found enough of an excuse to fire her. A sham 'explain yourself' meeting that went on for hours, followed by a letter saying that she simply lied about everything in the meeting (which is simply not true).

Filthy liars.

I know hardly anyone reads my blog and even fewer locally, but for those, perhaps complain about the lack of cleanliness next time you're in the central market, or maybe just spit on the floor!

I probably wont bother ever going back there myself - not that I was a regular customer anyway.

Playing with Web Start

After a lot of frobbing around I got a simple java webstart demo working for jjmpeg.jjmpegdemos.jnlp

Assuming you have Java Web Start installed this should launch the application - and after a lot of 'this is untrusted' errors should end up with the application running. It lets you run very simple music player demonstration. It uses JOAL for the audio output and jjmpeg for the decoding.

You also need to have the ffmpeg shared libraries installed. A recent version. Which probably means this wont work with microsoft platforms yet - although I suppose if the ffmpeg librariesthat are available here: http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ are in the path it might work.

On GNU/Linux it will depend on compatible libavcodec/etc versions, I'm using using Fedora 13 and 14, and it worked fine on both with ffmpeg-libs from rpmfusion. I also tested x86 and amd64 platforms.

Anyway this is really just an experiment - I doubt it will work in general on every platform.

jjmpeg - microsoft windows 64

Well i've been a bit quiet of late. I wrote a few blog entries but never got around to publishing them - the mood had changed by the time I finished or I couldn't get my words arranged in a readable manner ...

I also had a flu for a week, visitors and other distractions, and writers block for the last few weeks - I hitting some problems with work which paralleled some of the problems I was hitting with my hobby code and everything ground to a bit of a halt. Well such is the way of things. The flu is mostly gone now and I resolved the deadlock with my work code, so perhaps I will get back to hacking again soon.

So today I had a couple of spare hours and the motivation to making jjmpeg work on windows - maybe if I have that working i can drop xuggle [for my work stuff] which is getting a bit out of date now. Actually the main problem is that it's too much hassle to build, and only available in a 32 bit version - and with the opencl code and other issues, the 32 bit jvm limits are starting to cramp the application a bit.

The biggest problem was working out how to compile it, and after a lot of buggerising around I found it was easiest to just install the mingw 64-bit compiler as a cross compiler and I get to keep the nice coding tools I always use and keep myself in linux. Trying to do any work at all - and particularly development - in windows is like trying to ride a bike with one leg cut-off and a broken arm. Unpleasant, and painful.

Apart from that it was mostly just re-arranging the code to call some simple macros which change depending on the platform - i.e. dlopen/dlsym or LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress. And then a bit of a rethink on how the binaries are built to support multiple targets via a cross compiler.

I have done very little testing, but when setup properly it found the library and decoded an mp3 file, which is good enough for me.

(and obviously, there will never be windows support for the linux-dvb code, only for the libavformat/libavcodec binding).

OpenCL killer application?

So i've been trying to think of some killer application that OpenCL could enable.

Sure you have video rendering or processing, signal analysis and the like - but for desktop use these sorts of things can already be done. And if it's a little slow you can always throw more cores and/or boxes at it.

But I guess the big thing is hand-held devices. This is probably why the ARM guys are starting to make noise of late: being able to put `desktop power' into hand-held devices. Still, this is more of an evolutionary change than a revolutionary one - with mobile phones now being pocket computers we all expect that one day they'll be able to do everything we can on bigger machines, with moores law and all that (which is related to the number of transistors, not the processing performance).

I was also thinking again about AMD's next-gen designs - one aspect I hadn't fully appreciated is that they can scale up as well as down. Even just a single SM unit with 4x16 SIMD cores running at a modest and battery-friendly clock rate would add a mammoth amount of processing power to a hand-held device. It has some similar traits to the goals behind the CELL CPU - the design forces you to partition your work into chunks that fit on a single SPU. But once done you get that done - you gain a massive benefit of then being able to scale up the software by (almost) transparently executing these discrete units of work on more processors if they're available.

So, I don't think there will be a 'killer application' - software that only becomes possible and popular because of OpenCL (for one, the platform support is going to be weak until the hardware is common, and even then micro$oft wont support it because they're wanker khunts) - rather it will be the hardware application of placing desktop-power into your hand (and if such performance is only utilised to play flash games at high resolution, I fear the future of humanity is already lost).