fpgg 2007-07-31-r31
31 July 2007 08:04:00
fpgg, my software
Thanks to photos of my
trip to Eastern Finland a few days ago I got the
motivation to fix fpgg to handle images with arbitrary
aspect ratio. Until now there was a problem with images with other aspect
ratios than 4:3 and 3:4.
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Short trip to Eastern Finland
30 July 2007 21:02:50
photos, travel, update
I hardly do any travelling in Finland, except for travelling 400 km
North to see my parents in Tervo maybe two, three times a year. While I have
already filled my quota, my wife have been talking about going to Juuka to
visit her father's childhood home -- the place where she had spent countless
summer days in her childhood. Since her father was going there, we
decided to take advantage of free transport, and to kill two birds with one
stone. For the next five days we would be seeing Juuka, Koli, and Tervo. This
time I would also take my wife's old camera with me.
I will spare you the details about our little trip, and suggest you take a
look at the few photos I have selected to put online. Nothing special there,
just some scenes of Finland in summer. It's a rare occasion you know. :-)
Photos.
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Browser wars
16 July 2007 21:02:50
software
While developing Woclema I had to run
web-browser remotely over SSH. My first choice,
Iceweasel, a re-branded
Firefox, is already running
with my account on the remote host so it's out of the question.
Dillo and
links(2)
doesn't support CSS so they're out as well.
Opera?
Mostly fine, but all Qt-themes I've seen are either hideous or rely on heavy
graphics -- and as such, are network-intensive. Do I really have a choice?
Suddenly I remember by "old love", a browser I never really used,
but liked nevertheless.
NetFront. It's not a
perfect solution, but does the job fairly well. It supports most of the stuff
you'd expect a browser to support, but it's not perfect. The UI of Netfront SDK
for Linux is not something you'd like to use as your primary browser, and it
renders pages such as Slashdot incorrectly.
But still, it's very useful for purposes like mine.
Being back from work and Olympic sized swimming pool near my apartment, I
did a quick run of Iceweasel, Opera, NetFront and Dillo to make a useless
comparison. All contestants but Dillo are 32-bit. (Dillo depends on libglib1.2,
which is missing from my chrooted 32-bit Debian unstable as of 17 July 2007.)
Browsers are started from command line either with the address as parameter or
as home page, window maximised to full screen, and page reloaded if
necessary.
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
wnd 12021 3.6 1.3 126852 27004 pts/5 Sl 00:22 0:02 (iceweasel)
wnd 12077 3.3 1.5 54852 32228 pts/5 S 00:23 0:01 (opera 9.20)
wnd 12100 0.2 0.3 72504 6988 pts/5 S 00:23 0:00 (dillo)
wnd 12107 7.2 0.5 20736 11784 pts/1 S+ 00:23 0:01 (netfront)
I know the results are not exactly scientific or accurate, but I think they
give something to think of. To get better understanding of their memory usage,
I should also be running xrestop or such... I'm not even going to try to
measure the rendering speed, but using my first impression as sophisticated
scientific tool, I'd give the contestants the following grades (10 being the
fastest):
- Dillo, 9 points
- NetFront, 8 points
- Opera, 5 points
- Iceweasel, 4 points
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Trickle, userspace bandwidth shaper
10 July 2007 10:11:09
network, software
I'm sitting at work, reading my email though my home computer, listening to
Nectarine. I've been listening
Nectarine and
Kohina exclusively for ages. For some
reason I'm suddenly totally fed up with these tunes. I start transferring some
music (legally ripped from CDs I own, of course) from my home computer to my
workstation here, just to realize reading email has suddenly become very
sluggish. That is something you get with an asymmetric xDSL-cable with no
traffic shaping set.
I've used Wondershaper to set
up intranet-global traffic shaping rules back home, but since my upstream limit
varies from day to day, it's not very practical. One day I can upload 80 KiB/s
just fine, another day mere 50 KiB/s will bring my SSH-connections to
near-halt. Obviously I should be shaping the traffic per process. This is where
Trickle comes in
picture.
In the most basic use case Trickle is trivial to use. To copy a file to
remote host using scp, you can limit the upload speed to, say, 40 KiB/s:
trickle -u 40 scp bigfile host:
As I'm copying several files from my home computer while at work, I just
issue the following command:
trickle -d 40 -t 0.1 ssh kikai \
'tar -cf - audio/Christopher_Franke_-_Babylon_5' \
| tar -xvvf -
Since compiling from the sources available on Trickle website at monkey.org
didn't work out too great, I grabbed the sources (and patches) from local
Debian repository.
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Sopcast - Free P2P Internet TV
1 July 2007 10:46:00
software
Now how did I manage to miss Sopcast?
Internet telephone and video have been around for ages, and so has peer-to-peer
voice communications. I've heard of P2P video (or television) projects (e.g.
Joost and the one from Piratebay), but nothing concrete until now. Apparently
Sopcast isn't exactly new -- it appears in my IRC-logs in March
(2007). Anyway, good to know such thing exists. Maybe I get to release my fancy
Sopcast channel guide (with command line, ncurses, and GTK UI) released one of
these days. :-)
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