The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Inspired by this Parody FCP X ad, but realising I’ll probably never make them at all, and certainly not while it’s still topical, I decided to script up my two ideas for an FCPX “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC”-style ads and release them under Creative Commons so someone with more time could make them (you know, if they wanted to).
Being freed of the need to be able to shoot them, the second one got a bit elaborate. The first one is quite short.
(As a lot of the search traffic coming here seems to be trying to find out what XProtectUpdater is, let me answer that: it is the agent installed by Apple as part of the 2011-003 security update. It handles downloading new “signatures” for apps which should be regarded as malware)
For the first time ever, we have an official Apple malware protection mechanism (and also some actual malware, although it is totally human engineering and requires gullible admin users and it only tries to get their credit card number, so the actual infrastructure damage is nil).
But the threat’s there, and so is the fix, and a responsible admin user should look at deploying it. See: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4657 (which links to several more pages which contain actual info)
In short, we now have a new mode for the “you’ve never run this file before” warning (aka File Quarantine) where known malware elicits a “don’t run this, trash it!” warning.
To go with that we have a malware definitions file and a means of updating them (at some unspecified interval).
But of course, as-is it’s all single-usery and it runs an auto update which may not be appropriate in, e.g., some critical on-air or video editing contexts. And it talks to the outside world via some protocol. So, wanting to deploy it in a managed way, I dug around and found out the following:
Auto updates do not work via a preference plist, the security update installs a launchd item and enables/disables this (via the overrides db à la launchctl unload -w) as you toggle the preference.
The launchd job is called com.apple.xprotectupdater and itself calls /usr/libexec/XProtectUpdater . The interval is every 24 hours (every 24 hours after it’s run, not at any particular time).
XProtectUpdater appears to talk on port 80 and know about system proxy settings (including .pac files). It talks to the proxy and returns 0 if run when I’m on the corporate LAN and 255 (with an error message) if I have the ethernet unplugged. At the Apple end, the definitions file lives here:
http://configuration.apple.com/configurations/macosx/xprotect/1/clientConfiguration.plist
There are defs for quite a few nasties already!
Looks like the defs are locally stored in /private/var/root/Library/Caches/XProtectUpdater/Cache.db, an sqlite3 database. So you could simply push that file out, though that seems more likely to break in the future – but it may be your only choice.
So, it appears in an enterprise situation you can:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.xprotectupdater.plist (or launchctl load etc. to enable)
/usr/libexec/XProtectUpdater (probably with sudo).
I’ve yet to do any of this and you should, of course, only try it yourself if you understand what it means and are ready for anything unexpected.
After getting the more-than-unusually cryptic error: “An operation failed in launchdadd for reasons that you probably can’t do anything about. Maybe you should reboot.” I’ve found that: if you try to change the “auto-update” setting more than 30 seconds after you open the prefpane, it will fail to actually take effect .
Hope that helps someone!
The Post-Code (“ZIP”) I live in covers three actual suburbs – and while this is certainly not the norm, neither is it in any sense a freakish one-of-a-kind geobureaucratic calamity.
Tonight, smh.com.au popped up a little (by their standards very unobtrusive) window saying if I wanted more accurate weather info I could enter my postcode. Now, over the years a considerable number of websites have offered to simplify my whole “input where you are” experience with the “just enter your post code” text box. And for a lot of people, it probably is nice and simple. But the experience I had with smh is all too familiar, and tonight I rail against it!
I entered my postcode – 2044 – and after a second or so of AJAXian information transfer, I was asked – yet again – whether that meant Sydenham, St Peters or Tempe.
Really, Fairfax, not only is the weather for adjacent suburbs perceptibly different, but you actually have the separate forecasts for them? Call me cynical, but I don’t think so.
In fact, I can’t think of many times when the specific suburb has actually mattered – obviously when you enter your whole address it does, but for “find your nearest outlet” or various real-estate searches, or a whole host of sites where the actual suburb does not matter in the slightest, the “simple” process of entering 4 digits turns into a frigmarole. I can’t find documentary proof, but I’m sure at least once I’ve gone through this for something that only needed to know what state I was in!
It happens so often I can only assume some code snippet from the intertubes is getting used and reused. And, FFS people, it could use some refinement!
If you want to reuse code snippets, why not ask me to OK a Google geolocation lookup? That will give my location to within about 20m – surely accurate enough for even the most fine-grained weather forecast?
UPDATE: work has progressed rapidly on ML for 550D, you should head to magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/550d for the latest, or go to the bleeding edge at groups.google.com/group/ml-devel/
i.e. – probably not worth reading what’s here …
(ENDOFUPDATE)
I’ve just got this working (my camera is not bricked!), my forum membership has not been granted, so I can’t update the various wikis. Instead here I’ll just detail what I had to do to.
disk1s1 or not, use diskutil on the command lineYou should now have a bootable card which display magic lantern message, slightly redundant extra ISO/shutter info and, crucially, you get on-screen audio meters. But you still get audio auto-gain.
To defeat the auto-gain, this thread mentions a new autoexec.bin but if you read to the end, you’ll see it’s been discovered that the name for the config file, “magiclantern.cfg” is too long for the 550D’s brain. You need to shorten it to an 8.3 filename, and put that name into the 5d-hack.c file (e.g. I went with “magilant.cfg“, others favour “magic.cfg“), then build your own. Again, there are build instructions but I had to deviate from them. My notes are below, they’re terse and this will only work if you have some idea of what you’re doing:
• need newer gnutar to run summon-arm script (and make script use it)
• need to get mercurial (via MacPorts)
• makefile patch out of date. Only had to: modify arm path, gcc version (I get 4.5.2, they’re talking about 4.3.2)
• link problems – zero-byte .lds file causing trouble. deleted it. got rebuilt
But the reward is this: audio meters onscreen and silence when there should be silence.
Lately there have been both a 1k and a 10k JavaScript competition. The 10k one is wayy too fancy to appeal to me, but I thought I might have a stab at the 1k.
In doing so, I made a few discoveries about methods to get your js code really small.
I saw this tetris entry which achieves ALL of tetris in 1024 bytes of JS. Goddamn! At first glance, the source is bizarre gobbledygook, but once you study it, it’s actually doing “real” compression: putting recurring bits of text into an array and substituting them into the main code (by searching replacing chars which were not otherwise used in the code). This was obviously done algorithmically, but it occurred to me you could do it manually and use slightly meaningful unicode chars, and end up with dense, quick to write yet readable code – and you didn’t have to compress it afterwards, it was ready to go (I did, in fact, write it with linefeeds in, but I didn’t have to do much)
e.g. you could replace the text “function(a,b,c)” with “ƒ”, and then just have myFunc=ƒ{alert('blah!)}. There’s enough whacky symbols out there in unicode to cover a lot of normal long words – I used ® for “return”, ß for “button”, £ for “EventListener” etc. A quick sample:
d=ƒ{if(e.ß!=undefined){stkTo(X,Y);nuPth(X,Y)}else{up}};\
↓=ƒ{nuPth(X,Y);D.add£('ⓜmove',d,0)};\
up=ƒ{D.remove£('ⓜmove',d,0)};\
t.lineCap='round';P();\
c.add£('ⓜ↓',↓,0);\
D.add£('ⓜup',up,0);\
I managed to fit the first version of my sketchy app into <1k this way. Check out the demo source – it's at least partly readable. Then, I managed to trade off a little more readability and get a version with undo.
But THEN, @getify submitted an entry in the comp which actually did @aivopaas’ compression for you. As I still had a feature or two I’d really like to include, I decided to end my readability experiment (but write it up somewhere – i.e. here) and go for maximum smallness, and here are my notes on achieving that.
The idea behind @getify’s compressor is you first minify it using some other tool – it doesn’t strip whitespace, shorten tokens or any of that jazz – and then compress it.
My code was already at a slight advantage because it contains repetitions where they don’t add functionality, but they do lend themselves to getting substituted out.
Starting with my “decompressed” code (i.e. code in the form I never actually typed it) I first tried Google’s closure compiler (just the web service, I didn’t build it myself or anything), but that had three problems.
First, it converted all my quotes to doubles (see footnote) which @getify’s code just passsed thru and it all broke – but I could fix that manually.
Second, it still put two linefeeds in my code – again, once I worked that out, manually fixable.
Lastly, however, the Closure compiler “fixed” my function declarations to have the right number of parameters – a trick I copied from a few js1k entries is to re-use the same function dec regardless of how many parameters the function might use, thus being able to use the one compressed token for all of them (the ƒ above).
Then I tried jsmin (again via a web service). While its compressed code was maybe 20 bytes (a whole 2%) larger than Google’s, the result out of @getify’s was smaller. My hand-squeezed 1022 bytes was now 954. But I could see that there were still improvements: @getify’s had separately tokenized “=function(e,x,y){” and “=function(e,x,y){t.” – where the former could be substituted into the latter to save 15-odd bytes! Also, the compressor, very cleverly, uses the ASCII characters below 32 as tokens so as not to have to use unicode chars (which are at least two bytes). The downside is, it can only have 31 tokens, so it picks the 31 best, but leaves room for improvement. Now, there are plenty of unused roman letters and symbols – Q and Z don’t appear, so as I added my remaining features, I added a few more hand substitutions to try to keep me below 1024. There are still a couple of repetitions (the word “button” the most obvious) and a couple of other tricks I used when I did then hand compression, so I know @getify’s could be improved and I wonder whether, once improved, it could get itself back under 1k again!?
But there’s another point here which is that, while it’s a very neat trick, there’s been just a little more development put into gzip, et al. I vote the next js1k comp limits you to 1k after gzipping. it would still reward tricks like repetitive function decs, but free us up from trying to reinvent the wheel, and including that wheel into our 1024 bytes.
I ended up fitting 2398 bytes into 1022 – admittedly that was starting with comments, which broke down like this:
| Original code | JSMin’ed | @getify compressor | hand tweaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2398 | 1442 | 1044 | 1022 |
The entry is now up, and here it is in action (again, owing a little something to those who came before it)
skech app doing a van gogh
@aivopaas has now put his JavaScript compressor up – it does a better job than @getify’s, as expected, and would reduce my entry to 988 Bytes.
I also found CompressorRater which runs your code thru 4 different compressors and lets you choose the one that does the best. (However my code, which has raw html output by document.write() calls, got mangled, at least I knew there was only a byte or to between the main ones)
the way the compression works is to declare one big string that gets substituted into, so you want to use only one kind of quote in your code so you can quote it with the other – e.g. this is one string
"alert('dog'+'cat'+'ferret')"
which you can then eval(), if the quotes were all the same, you’d get a parse error.
In the past week, I’ve read three separate peices comparing either the US, the “Developed World” or broadcast TV to the Roman Empire just before it fell (well, I skimmed a few, there was a lot of detail). Finding parallels is a fun game to play, but I couldn’t help thinking:
I read them in the Roman alphabet, over two months with Roman names, most of the words over two syllables were Roman (well, French) and my state Premier and Federal Opposition Leader regularly consult with representatives of the Roman Pontifex Maximus.
So, provided they’re prepared to change a little, uncle Sam, the first world and the networks might not have so much to fear.
(BTW here are two of the articles:
)
For a long time, I’ve been looking at the resolution of cheap digital cameras and wishing they’d get some video capability. And, much more slowly than I’d like, we’re getting there. While DLSRs are well into killer territory, I’m not quite ready for that kind of investment. Down the cheaper end, ”stills” cameras are getting closer to really usable video, while “video” cameras are slowly taking better stills, but either involves some compromise. At the end of the day, stills cameras have vastly higher resolution sensors and it is there that I’d like things to end up.
From a practical point of view, I’ve long ago stopped taking my video camera anywhere, but the 640×480 video on my Fuji S5700 is not great, depsite the you-never-go-back convenience. I needed a new stills camera with decent video, and the more decent, the better.
The Lumix FZ-35 piqued my interest as, on paper, it ticks quite a few of the critical boxes:
As specified, you can spot some drawbacks straight away – but I need to make the point that I was expecting drawbacks, this is a cheap camera, so this is not an exhaustive list
At the end of the day, the only bona fide task the camera will be doing is replacing a seriously ancient Canon 4:3 DV camcorder (so ancient it doesn’t like to load tapes), so it can be a little rough around the edges, it’s still going to be a huge improvement.
Most reviews have dealt with the FZ35 as” a stills camera with video, but who cares about the video?” So, specifically wanting the video, what can I add?
First off, the frame rate disappointment. As a patriotic Australian, I grey imported the FZ-35 from eBay (at not far off half the recommended AUD price). Turns out Panasonic lock the frame rate to the region sold in, and charge more for the EU and AU models (the aust/NZ model is in fact suffixed GN).I had a squabble with the ebay vendor, but at the end of the day it’s Panasonic that I’m disappointed with – they’ve made this thing cost more everywhere in order to make specific models, what a waste of time..
Now, you can get to the service menu on other Lumix cameras. The service manual for the FZ50 says you can change region, but only if your camera was not Japanese to begin with. I’ll keep digging on this – 25fps is something I really don’t want to go without, and there can be no technical reason not have lower frame rates such as 24 either. I’ll get my hands on a service manual eventually…
It’s pretty good, but definitely below what 720P can do. Colours are great, but pics are both slightly soft and show quite a bit of “ringing” from some sharpening algorithm. Why this should be, with a 12MP sensor is puzzling – no doubt cheaper but, as with many of my small gripes with this camera, I can see no hard technical reason why it should be so.
To illustrate this, below is a detail of a paintbrush taken from a movie, compared to a plain ordinary still photo of the same, downscaled by Apple Preview to the same resolution (note that you have to click the pix to see them full size, below is a shrunk preview). The video one shows a huge dark line around the white hair, as well as quite a bit less resolution. (You can also see some of the compression artefacts you get with AVHCD Lite). I actually did this comparison last in the review and it’s pretty terrifying – I wouldn’t have thought the video was that far below the stills.
The sharpness can be adjusted ± 2 (units of what I don’t know) from the default, but at -2 I could see no less ringing (or, in fact, any difference at all. This setting may be applied “upstream” before downscaling) nearly all the video on this page was taken with the sharpness at -2. On less contrasty material, the results are closer to perfect.
Here’s a quick compilation of what I’ve been able to snap in the past month, accompanied by something I threw together in Garage Band. (see note below regarding FCP black crushing – I’m hoping this will be fixed in the future)
When shooting stills, you can choose an ISO setting from 80 up to 1600, with video it’s a much higher 400 to 6400 – which is also the ISO of the lower-resolution “Hi sens” mode. That may be a clue to the soft pictures: the downscaler for the hi-sens and the video modes may be being multi-purposed. While the high film speed might seem like a plus, it does have the downside that (as others have discovered) if you want to shoot in daylight at 1/50th or 1/60th for the ol’ film look (or at least the 180º shutter look), you’ll need a multi-ND filter (panasonic sell an 8ND, but it is a vanilla 46mm mount). You particularly want the ND if you want to shoot at f/4, which is reportedly the sweet spot for sharpness with this lens. People are also using NDs to prevent the sometimes extreme smear this (CCD-based) camera exhibits. You can set the ISO to auto,and it seems to go below 400, but the problem is it jumps in 100 ISO increments, which you don’t want in the middle of a shot.
As should also be evident from this: if you scale down to some kind of “web” resolution, like a nice round 640×360, you do have some pretty schweet web video.
Apart from the frame rate, the camera delivers in full: as well as focus, aperture and exposure, you can lock the ISO, white balance (which you can set manually beforehand). Full proper manual shooting. If you had a really solid tripod, you could pull focus and zoom (using double system of course to avoid all the clunks the microphones would pick up as you push teensy buttons). The manual focus features a little zoomed-in focus assist, just like a real camera!
There are any number of demo movies on the interweb: this is a frigging long lens! (or rather, there’s a long way between fully wide and fully tele). Google “FZ35 zoom test” – and check out all the closeups of the moon on flickr.
The OIC works very well, but you’re not going to be able to do free handheld at the long end. When I took the shot below, I was pretty impressed, taken handheld on a ferry, but back on a monitor, it’s a little bumpier that I thought (you can also see that I didn’t have the ISO on manual and that my very old polarizer was a bit dirty).
Pictures still look pretty sharp at the long end, too. And, you can get some shallow depth-of-field at the far end – though often you have to get a long way away to actually fit what you want in.
Could be my use of Class 4 cards, but the movies I’m shooting are running at about 13Mb/s – the blurb does say it’s VBR, so maybe 18 is the absolute max? Not sure. It would be nice for them to really be 18Mb/s.
iMovie 09 happily opens the card in the SD card reader – coverts to AIC of course. FCP 7 is similarly at home – mount a card and L&T sees it straight away. VLC 1.x will play the raw MTS files (but still with some shifts on what I assume are I-frames), and that ole workhorse HandBrake will happily convert these into various other formats (None readily editable, but it beats the hell out of QT X for delivery encoding.) And, the raw .MTS’es upload directly to YouTube as well
IOW no editing issues at all for me. I did notice that FCP was showing the imported footage using the full luminance range (i.e. blacker-than-black, whiter-than-white) – whether the camera’s wrong or whether FCP’s interpreting it wrongly I can’t say. (You may have noticed a little more black-crushing than was necessary on the clips above). I tried one of the same clips thru Handbrake and the gamma’s quite different (and better IMHO) so we’ll blame FCP’s implementation of AVCHD Lite for now.
I ran across this clip while looking for other stuff, so it can do a pretty OK job under the right conditions. For anything serious, you’re talking double system.
I can’t directly comment on the HDMI as I don’t have the mini-to-fullsize HDMI adapter needed to actually plug this in to a TV. But I did note that the composite SD video is not active when shooting – so there’s a pretty good chance you can’t capture over HDMI while live shooting to get uncompressed HD.
I’ve listed a pile of negatives, but I’m pretty happy with the camera – it cost 1/5th the video camera it’s replacing and it slaughters it. If I could get into the service menu, and set it to 25fps, that would be really good. And if something like CHDK came out for Panasonic, and we could get that dreadful sharpening turned off on the video, and any frame rate we liked, and all the other benefits, that would be super great. Based on the FZ50 manual, I also think a skilled hardware hacker could get external audio in.
The camera’s just about a quantum leap at the cheap end of the market. There are several more to go.
There are books, there are courses, there are crazy people claiming “experience” will help you.
Unnecessary.
Just follow these 10 simple steps and you will be producing content indistinguishable from the world’s best.
Like all work to a deadline, Flash is a compromise: you need to decide what is important, and what isn’t. Then, devote your work time accoringly:
There, that’s it. Keep these in mind and you practically cannot fail. Perhaps there will still be an occasion where you are not sure which way to jump, all we advise you to do is think of the golden rule:
All that glitters is gold. Pure gold, baby!
UPDATE2: Snow Lep really broke TM backups for me – I think the extra complication I had over everyone else is that my server was a ways back on 10.3.9. I’m finally today (Oct 16) writing to a backup again – thanks to switching to SMB (but sharing anything other than your home folder is a further trick). So I think we need a bit of a rewrite here! In the meantime, this would be the best, shortest article I’ve found on doing this with snolep: macosxhints.com – 10.6: Set up Time Machine on networked AFP volume.
UPDATE: Yep, Snow Leopard has broken my backups, which worked perfectly for 6 months. Initial reports are you just need start from scratch. I’ll get back to you on that. The short version is these unsupported backups are a little prone to corruption, but as we say “soooo much better than no backup”.
There are a few posts about on the interweb regarding using the “TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes” flag to use any old network share as your Time Machine destination (I found this one the most useful). I think a lot date from about 10.5.2., and several have little retractions at the end, some then state that later 10.5 revisions made it work better. The recent ones say “just turn it on and go”, which certainly wont work if your server is a 1999-built G4 running 10.3 like mine.
So, does it work or not? How hard is it, what do you do? I just had a stab, it appears to work and I think I have streamlined the process somewhat over any of the posts I’ve read.
In super-short, you only have to do two things:
Before going any further, some sober words:
Here’s what I did (I have condensed fairly heavily, you need to know how to use a Mac, but this is still the simplest method I’ve seen):
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
It’s all working rather well! My initial 150G backup survived several wake/sleeps, several more deliberate “stop backing up”, and most incredibly, two kernel panics on the server hosting the share, and now the hourly incremental takes just a few minutes. I now have both household backups going to the shared disk. I even restored one whole tiny file, and it worked
What remains to be seen is whether the system will cope gracefully when the disk fills up – this was the issue with the 10.5.2 hacks – once full, the system did not “thin” the backup data properly – it seemed to delete it but not actually free the space; and then it would try to throw away some more in a rapidly spiralling deletion-of-death.
What also remains to be seen, of course, is a large-scale restoration after some sort of disaster. This is the $64K question not just for hacked Time Machine, but for TM itself.
Tonight I finally reached the 200G limit on my sparse bundle (nothin beats VMs to waste a pile of space in a short time!). And my MBP did not grow the disk image, so it looks like you can use this method to store the backups from several systems on one drive (as speculated below).
Those who have tried to use one disk for more than one Time Machine user will know that it doesn’t really work: TM is built to fill up all the available disk it can, then start getting rid of old stuff, so the disk fills up very quickly with the most profligate user’s stuff, and then you can’t add any more (users) to it. The workaround I and others have used is to partition the backup disk. This works but you then have to share out n TM disks, set them as time machine disks, and individually connect everyone. And you still have to buy another drive and do it again once you have n + 1 users.
It would seem that by creating the sparse image to a size of your own choosing, you could manage this much better. However, the system may grow the sparse bundle later on if it thinks it can. It is certainly telling me the amount of free space on the (whole) disk as being the amount it has left to use.
And lastly, it’s pretty cool (and well out of character) for Apple to allow this. I’m personally very glad and let’s just hope they don’t taketh it away. (Like, for example, the video out on iPods)
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pg twitpix
