Oh Stop It!

Motherwell 4-4 Celtic

Just when will the axe fall on wee Gordon Strachan? Surely the best comedy show currently playing, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, Glasgow Celtic's "defence". Lets hope Rangers don't bugger this up.

Project Orange

The Blender Foundation have started a presale campaign for the "Project Orange" open source movie project. I've often written about Blender, the most stunning open source software available (search this site for "Blender"), and this project is instrumental in driving further development of the package. If you contribute to the sales campaign you can have your name added to the credits of the completed DVD release. Pretty cool, eh?

Rest assured my 35euros are already winging their way over to Amsterdam to support the continued development of the software. The current development of Blender is obviously centered on improving the 3D animation tools (to support the movie project) but of most interest to me is news the Blender Game Engine is under active development again on a number of fronts. The GE is instrumental in my interest in realtime architectural walkthroughs. First up is a new physics system for collisions etc and other projects to further increase the power of Blender, great news.

Walkthrough 1
Walkthrough 2

Google Search Site

Google search was added to this blog a while back and seemed to work OK but I was aware that the results provided were not fully complete for the search term provided.

I've just discovered the reason why. When generating the code to be added to the page you want to display the search box on you're asked to provide the URL of the site you want the search to apply to. At first I used a URL of www.digital-air.co.uk, which seems perfectly correct to me but Google Search prefers, and provides fuller results, if you use a URL of the form digital-air.co.uk. A quick change to the code and it seems to be working much better now. Top tip if you're thinking of adding Google Search to your own site.

Google still seems to ignore the robots.txt file I created telling the spider to keep out of the monthly archives as it only confuses the results, strange that but hopefully my dear readers will be able to find the pearls of wisdom liberally scattered throughout this site much easier now.

Tags: Google Search

Kaput

My work mobile phone died horribly yesterday when the LCD screen appeared to implode. Quite a cool effect really but it leaves me with a dead phone.

Looking back through my blog archives and I noticed it lasted exactly 1 year and 1 week. Hmmm, I've resorted to using the old T68i which, despite being thrown down a toilet, still works apart from the number 2 on the keypad (no pun intended, did you see what I did there? Comedy) which obviously prevents dialing any number that contains a 2 or sending a text message containing the letters a, b and c.

I wonder what model of phone my work will supply as a replacement? Fingers crossed it'll be packed full of goodies as befits a man of my talent.

So F*cking What

36 years too late

Do the world a favour, take your guns, put them to your temple and blow your f*cking heads off you deviant, murdering scum.

Never forget, never forgive.

Woof!

Artmedia Petrzalka 5-0 Celtic

Oh dear me, I mean... what? Words fail me. MON had managed to paper over the cracks of a terrible team for three years, but this... even I'm shocked.

Amazon Search Inside

Just noticed that amazon.co.uk has implemented the "search-inside" feature which has been available on amazon.com for some time now. I seem to remember a report, from when it was first seen on amazon.com, detailing how students found a way to download an entire book by using the search-inside feature, little tinkers.

Search Inside! allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now, instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside! is as simple as running an Amazon.co.uk book search.

Yahoo! Konfabulator

Wow, Yahoo have bought desktop widget company, Konfabulator, and released the package for free. That's really nice of them. Now is the time to turn your desktop into a veritable forest of eye-candy.

Virginity

Well, I finally popped my cherry this morning. Nothing much to report, took about 15 minutes all told... left me with a bit of a sore head though. Hopefully I'll get quicker with practice, could even get to enjoy it.

Sudoku

Could I Speak to...

Those four words are all I need to hear down the phone to know that it's a sales call. The perverse enjoyment of just putting the phone down on these bastards has started to wear off so I've signed up for the Telephone Preference Service.

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) helps you to make sure your telephone number is no longer available to organisations, including charities and voluntary organisations who may telephone you with offers and information you do not wish to receive.

It's free and after 28 days of registration any company that phones you with an unsolicited sales call without checking for your telephone number on the TPS database first is breaking the law.

Money Pit

We've finally bitten the bullet and decided it was time to start some major redecorating of the house, first up is the living room. When we moved in our house, over four years ago, it was decided to live with the existing decor as it wasn't completely hideous (I lie, it is), we were broke and we hate decorating. The time has now come to do something about it.

The previous owners obviously had a dog as it left it's indelible smell on the living room carpet (I'm talking about that wet doggy type smell you understand) so that's got to go. The walls have that unmistakable first edition TV makeover style of the early '90s, very twee two types of paper with a border all around the room, disgusting but Lesley now has that all stripped. The plaster's in not too bad shape but it'll take a lot of preparation before it's painted (thankfully both of us dislike wall paper).

The Fireplace was a fine example of a failed woodwork 'O'Level in glorious pine, also completely removed and lying out the back. We're planning to get one of those Electric Fire suites from B&Q as a replacement, unusually we both agreed on the exact one.

So, a new carpet, fire place, curtains, painted top to bottom, new face plates for the wall sockets and light switches, new light fitting, possibly new skirting etc, this is not going to be cheap. I'll keep you informed of the progress, should be done in time for The World Cup and the unveiling of the new Telly, woof!

Tags: DIY Decorating

Technorati Tags

Everybody else is doing it so not wanting to be left behind in the Blogosphere slowlane I've implemented the aforementioned tags. Personally, I've never used Technorati to find anything and the quick tests carried out in implementing the tagging system didn't really inspire me, just more lists of nonsensical crap, but, it is supposed to be the number one Blog search engine so who am I to argue.

Firstly, I doubt I'll add them to every post but instead carefully select them for my most informative and interesting meanderings (rarer than hen's teeth). Secondly, there will be no more than 3 tags per post (of course, I'll ignore this rule within days) as the amount of blogs I've seen that tag every single word of their post makes me scream. Thirdly, I need a cup of tea and a biscuit... back soon.

Originally I used a Greasemonkey script to add a Tag field to Blogger's post window but obviously the shine has somewhat been tarnished with the whole Firefox/Extension gambit. It's practically impossible to keep up with the critical flaws in Firefox at the moment as they seem to come with alarming regularity. Yes, they're patched quickly but the whole point of Firefox was that it didn't have these vunerabilities in the first place. Firefox's approach to updates needs to be looked at. As for Greasemonkey, that's been removed. In it's place I've just added some HTML to Blogger's post template and can use it or delete as required on a post by post basis.

Update: Hmmmm, my recent flirtation with Technorati may prove to be very brief indeed. It doesn't work. I did a bit of digging to find entire swathes of the Blogosphere complaining of the flakiness of Technorati's indexing. Blogger automatically ping their servers to inform them of a new post, I've also manually pinged them but all to no avail, it looks like my blog will die alone and unknown *sniff*. Yeah, they might crawl me eventually but what's the point? The blogosphere's interest will have moved on to a new topic.

All this means that Google will either buy Technorati or start up their own Blog search engine, it's only a matter of time. Where there's a market Google will be found.

Tags: Technorati Blog Firefox

Domain Transfer

Rip off Britain they call it, Thatcher's legacy I say. I've six active web domains (all .co.uk) spread between 2 different domain registration/ hosting companies. As one of the domains is up for renewal I thought it would be wise to rationalise all my domains under one company.

Fair enough, my main supplier will take a domain transfer at no extra cost so I trotted off to the current registrar (www.nicnames.net) to start the transfer. It all started off pretty well after logging in and finding the link to take me to the transfer process initiation. "We are very sorry to lose any customers for whatever reason so please call our Customer Service Department if there is anything you think we can help with." Thanks for the offer but I'll proceed with the transfer... "The cost of a domain transfer is £49.99 ex vat (to cover administration costs)"...You fecking what? Bastards, they make more money from an ex-customer than they do from those that decide to stay.

The domain remains where it is, but I'm seriously considering letting it lapse and then re-register when it becomes available again with my main supplier for £6. Bit risky though and I'm really attached to the domain in question, but £58 for a transfer, sheesh.

Tags: Domain Internet

World Cup Classic Games

Only 326 days to go until kick off of Germany 2006, wooooofffff! As the summer long drought of live football on the telly continues (unless you failed to win the SPL in which case your mob will be in action soon enough) get yourself over to FIFA's official site where you can watch classic World Cup matches in their entirety. Not bad quality either.

The highlight must be the greatest World Cup of them all (Mexico 1970) where you can watch all 112 minutes (with commentary) of the classic final between Brazil and Italy. Fantastic stuff, Pele, Jairzinho and Carlos Alberto will we ever see their like again?

Next on your list should be the Italy versus Brazil semi final of Spain 1982, another classic encounter that still remains fresh in my memory. Should tide you over until the flag is unfurled over Ibrox, for lest we forget, Glasgow Rangers are Champions!

Intel Hyper-Threading

Intel introduced their Hyper-Threading Technology a few years ago and it has struggled ever since to reach general acceptance. While all their recent processors have had this technology in-built confusion still seems to exist around it's usage and benefits. As Blender (3D modeling/ rendering/ animation/ Game Engine) now supports (as of version 2.37a) multi-threaded processing I thought I'd demonstrate the usage and benefits of a Hyper-Threading enabled processor.

Read more...


The specification of the workstation used for this test can be seen here and the latest official release of Blender 2.37a can be downloaded from here.

For this test I created a simple Blender scene with 1 sun lamp, 16 Sample Ambient Occlusion, Raytraced with a slight Ray Mirror applied to the floor and OSA setting of 16 samples. Rendered at 320x240 a larger version can be seen by clicking on the image. The .blend file as used in this test can be downloaded from the link at the bottom of this post.

Hyper-Threading can only be enabled/disabled through the BIOS settings of your Motherboard. So after going into the BIOS settings, disabling Hyper-Threading and booting to Windows I had a workstation with a single 3Ghz Pentium IV processor. To check that Hyper-Threading is disabled go to the Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL) and click on the "Performance" Tab. You should see only one "CPU Usage History" graph (click on image to enlarge). This confirms that we have 1 physical processor capable of 1 logical process.

Rendering the image at the default settings contained in the .blend file produced the image in 99 seconds. No other applications were running at the time apart from the Windows processes required by the Operating System. To help iron out any anomalies I repeated the test 3 times and took the average of the results. The results were all within 1 second of each other so confidence is high. As this is a single processor workstation enabling/disabling "Threads" within Blender made no difference whatsoever (as expected). To activate "Threads" press "F10" for "Render Settings" and in the "Output" panel you will see the "Threads" option. Click on (image to enlarge). If you have "Task Manager" open during rendering you will see the CPU Usage hit 100% during the duration of the render.

All well and good, we now have a benchmark of 99 seconds for a single processor with no Hyper-Threading, how much faster can we get this to render? Read on...

Now we'll switch on Hyper-Threading. Re-boot the workstation and go into BIOS set-up and activate Hyper-Threading. Save the changes and continue booting to Windows. To check that Hyper-Threading has been enabled go into Task Manager again but this time you should see two "CPU Usage History" graphs. Nice eh? This means we have 1 physical processor but it is capable of 2 logical processes, Woof!

Rendering the scene again, with "Threads" enabled in "Render Settings" and wooooah, it's quicker, 71 seconds a saving of 28 seconds from a non Hyper-Threading processor. As before the test was averaged out over 3 separate runs. If you have Task Manager running you'll see the "CPU Usage" and "CPU Usage History" graphs hit 100% on both graphs.

OK, but does Hyper-Threading have a negative impact running on 1 thread within Blender? Turn off the "Threads" option in Blender and render the scene again. In theory this should give us the same result as when we had Hyper-Threading disabled (99 seconds). Again, averaging the results out over 3 runs and the figure was actually slightly quicker at 97 seconds. How can this be? Well, even though we had disabled "Threads" within Blender the Hyper-Threading was still enabled within the processor allowing Windows to run it's internal processes without impacting the rendering process resulting in shaving a couple of seconds off the total time. Nice, even if you don't have multi-threaded applications you can get a small boost by enabling Hyper-Threading (albeit very small).

If you had Task Manager running for this test you will have noticed that the CPU usage only reached 50%. This is because Windows is calculating it as 1 process running at 100% and 1 process running at 0% giving an average across both processes of 50%. It's this fact that seems to confuse people resulting them in declaring that activating Hyper-Threading in effect halves your speed when running a non threaded application. This, as you've seen, is not the case. Simple conclusion is, if you've got a Hyper-Threading capable processor then activate it. There is no downside and a big upside to doing so.

Can we make it even quicker? Yes we can. For many Blender releases now An][ares has been producing an unofficial build which optimises the code for higher-end Pentium and AMD chips. In theory this should give another speed boost to reduce render times. You can read all about the optimised build and download it from this thread on Elysiun.

After installing the optimised build I ran the same tests as detailed above to gauge the further boost that can be expected from the new code and Hyper-Threading. With Hyper-Threading disabled in BIOS the scene rendered in 70 seconds (the fastest yet). Again, the results were averaged over 3 renders. An amazing achievement for the optimised build. But what would happen when Hyper-Threading was activated? After enabling in BIOS and re-booting the test scene was run again with "Threads" enabled within Blender, the result.... wait for it.... 53 seconds. Holy cow! By ditching the official build for an optimised version and switching on Hyper-Threading we've taken the render time from 99 seconds down to 53 seconds and all for free.

To summarise the results;

Official Blender 2.37a
No Hyper-Threading, no "Threads".......99 seconds
No Hyper-Threading, with "Threads".....99 seconds
With Hyper-Threading, no "Threads".....97 seconds
With Hyper-Threading, with "Threads"...71 seconds

Optimised Blender 2.37a
No Hyper-Threading, no "Threads".......70 seconds
No Hyper-Threading, with "Threads".....70 seconds
With Hyper-Threading, no "Threads".....69 seconds
With Hyper-Threading, with "Threads"...53 seconds

Another big advantage of enabling Hyper-Threading is that it allows your computer to multi-task much more effectively. If you're running an application that is eating up 100% of your CPU time then you'll know how difficult it is to use your computer for anything else. With Hyper-Threading you would be able to have your computer rendering a scene while working on another application, checking e-mail, browsing the web etc without noticeably impacting the render time.

Unfortunately Blender only supports a maximum of 2 threads. On my Dual Xeon workstation with Hyper-Threading enabled I have 2 physical processors capable of 4 logical processes. Blender can't make use of all of them but Yafray can :-) When I get the time I'll run a few trials with Yafray rendering across 4 threads.

Blend file used in this test: abstract.blend

Don't Quote Me...

...but I think today is the 10th Anniversary of my graduation from Glasgow University. I could be wrong though as my only real memories of the day are; it was fecking hot and I was in a foul mood. No change there then.

Anyway, Ian has some smashing photos of the day in his gallery, check it out. All those hopes and dreams, world was our oyster... where did it all go wrong?

To those that I'm still speaking to, Happy Graduation Anniversary (unless it isn't). Thankfully we were never going to be one of those groups who have a reunion at the drop of a hat, gawd we were a bitchy lot, best years of our lives ;-) *big wave to the VC*

Update: Just had a thought. Maybe there is a reunion and the b*stards didn't invite me?!!? Nah, surely not?

A Day in the Life...

So, we were playing around with the video camera at work today and decided to make a short documentary on a typical working day of a genius Design Engineer (played by myself, naturally).

I think it captures the essence of the inner torment quite well.

London 07/07/05

A brief feeling of elation, celebration, positive news, looking forward... and then it was gone. I wasn't going to post anything about the recent events in London but this story on theregister.co.uk has prompted me to comment.

I can only agree with the sentiments of the above story. What the f*ck are people thinking? Like many I'm sure, I turned to the web (BBC News) to find out what the hell was going on last Thursday morning (I remember doing the same thing the afternoon the reports started to filter through on 11/09/01). What had happened and how bad was it? Facts, not opinion, are all that matter in the immediate aftermath. If this is the future of reporting, you can keep it.

As I'm writing this ITN are appealing for anybody who took pictures in the immediate aftermath to contact them, or tell them your story or, and I can't honestly believe this, "if you're one of the people in this remarkable photograph of the bus, please contact us." WTF?

Is a news story only a story if it's accompanied by grisly photographs of dead and injured with neatly packaged soundbites of "I heard a large bang and saw a blue flash" variety? Is this what we have become? This isn't news, it's entertainment and I for one don't want to be involved and I suspect[hope] most of my fellow Northern Ireland countrymen feel the same.

"This species has amused itself to death." Roger Waters, 1992

Yafray 0.0.8

The new version of Yafray has just been released taking it to 0.0.8.

YafRay is a free, powerful raytracer, released under the LGPL license. It enables you to create fantastic images and animations of a photo realistic quality some of which you can see here.

Used in combination (Yafray doesn't have a GUI but can be operated from the command line) with Blender to set up the scene, apply materials and lighting it can produce some stunning results with full Global Illumination, HDRI, photon mapping etc.

I've been using Yafray since 0.0.6 and this latest release seems very fast with a lot of much needed additions to improve integration within Blender. You can check out an image I created previously with Blender/Yafray here.

BT Exchange Upgrades

Further to Demon's announcement that they will offer free speed upgrades, as and when BT get around to carrying the work out on a user's exchange, you can check the scheduled timescales for your own exchange here.

According to this my local exchange will be upgraded during August 2005 and should provide me with the full 2Mbps bandwidth.

London Olympics 2012

I'm genuinely excited that London has won the right to host the 2012 Olympics. A fantastic achievement with Seb Coe being singled out, by those in the know, for particular praise but I'm sure the full package and team were instrumental in the decision coming down in favour of London.

Highlighting Britain's Olympic heritage, multi-cultural society and strong Paralympic tradition the IOC made the right decision. There will be trials and tribulations along the way (most likely a huge Government bail-out package) but in the end I'm confident this will benefit the whole country in ways we can't even imagine yet.

As a side note, how chuffed must our great leader, Uncle Tony, have felt when he greeted President Chirac at Gleneagles today? Eh, life sometimes throws you the sweetest treats once in a while. Up yours Chirac, you arrogant f*cker... shrug that off.

iPod Mini Woes Updated

So, Apple have sent me the empty packaging for the return of my goosed iPod Mini. Once packaged I have to call UPS to arrange a pick up and keep my fingers crossed that they repair and return it for free. Goodness knows how long this is all going to take.

Read more...


I was well aware of the problems they had with earlier generations of iPod batteries but I hoped they'd sort them out by now. The deal arranged to settle the class action brought against Apple should have been the end of it but as I wrote previously their forums are completely awash with problems relating to batteries in their latest range of iPods.

The thing is rechargeable batteries are my thing, it's what I do. The company I work for turn out about 60 million Li-Ion battery packs a year primarily for mobile phones, laptop computers and other forms of consumer electronics. The customer return rate that we would expect to see is around 1 in 100,000 packs. Now I don't know how many iPods Apple are selling but I'm pretty sure it is nothing like the numbers a mainstream mobile phone would sell (10s of millions). The complaints on Apple's own forums would indicate that they are seeing a much larger failure rate than the technology should suffer. So what is the problem?, and believe me, they still have a huge problem.

It's certainly not the quality of the cells they are using. Li-Ion cell quality is based entirely on geographical origin. The best quality cells (and highest cost) come from Japan. Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo etc lead the way. Next in the quality ladder comes Korea with LG and Samsung the biggest players in cell manufacture. Lastly come cells from China. In a word, pish. Poor quality control but the lowest Li-Ion priced cells you can get. The biggest supplier is BYD who currently make most of Motorola's mobile phone battery packs (take from that what you will) but rumour has it that will change soon. Anyway, I digress, Apple use quality Japanese cells that should not be seeing these level of failures.

So what is the problem? A couple of things have come to my attention from reading a bit deeper into the iPod. Firstly, the self discharge (where a battery will discharge to empty even though the iPod is switched off) is a direct result of keeping the hard disk ready for operation. Apple did this to make sure the iPod was instantly available to deliver music the moment it's activated. Fair enough, nobody wants to wait while the hard disk spins up and positions the heads but the power drain is knocking hell out of the battery and seriously shortening it's life. A more sensible solution would have been to give the user the option to put the iPod into a deep sleep to save the battery at the cost of a longer boot up time.

Secondly the battery charging regime. To cut costs Apple no longer include an AC adaptor (at least with the iPod Mini, not sure about the other models) to charge from a wall socket. Big mistake. The main source for charging is with the supplied USB cable from a powered USB2.0 port on the owner's computer. Unfortunately the computer just isn't capable of delivering the required charging current. You'll be lucky to get more than 0.5A through a USB port. So the battery takes much longer to charge even though Apple claim that 1 hours charge should take the battery capacity up to 80% full, bollocks, I've never seen that in my experience. Maybe I did have a duff iPod right from the start but I'm not so sure.

I spoke to the EE (Electronic Engineer) today and he wasn't surprised with the problems I, and many others, have experienced with the battery life, charging and performance of the iPod. The battery is virtually identical to those that are in 100s of millions of mobile phones around the world. I plug my phone into the charger, it charges for an hour and that's it for an entire week. Apple need to seriously rethink their design and implementation of the iPod power supply.

Lesley has her eye on an iPod for herself but I'm really reluctant for her to consider buying one at the moment. Further updates to follow (batteries are really, really interesting... honest :)

Pavement Art

Simply amazing. Puts the tuneless piper in Buchanan Street, Glesga to shame.

There's even more fantastic artwork here.

Xbox 360 Graphics

I've got more than a passing interest in 3D modeling and graphics rendering so the hullabalu surrounding some screenshots of a forthcoming Xbox 360 game title piqued my interest.

To say that these are jaw dropping would be to put it mildly. To see such graphics running within a game in realtime and not pre-rendered is simply stunning. I'm not a gamer, but the resulting applications possible from such power has got my mind spinning. I seem to remember that Sony's newly announced console has even more raw processing power than the Xbox. There's a huge market waiting for a software developer that can create and release a suite of tools to streamline the production of the models and environments required, not for games per se but a multitude of digital media sectors.

Pink Floyd

Lets be honest here, and this is hard for me to write, but fat d*ve stole the show, pulled his pants down and pissed all over everyone who came before and after.

Considering all four of them are well into their sixties it just shows nothing beats experience. The camera lingered a bit too much on fat d*ve, totally ignored Rick Wright on keyboards, but as he was the guitarist and lead singer on the all of the songs chosen apart from Comfortably Numb I suppose that was to be expected.

Roger and fat d*ve even looked like they enjoyed it but I doubt they'll ever be seen together again. Still, pigs do fly.

I'm not feeling the love

Quite possibly the greatest Rock&Roll picture of all time (taken yesterday).

Grin and bear it

Do not, for one minute, think this is them taking the piss. That's Roger (god) on the left and fat d*ve (boo) on the right. Tomorrow they'll be on stage together at Live8 performing as Pink Floyd for the first time in 24 years. The hate these two men have for each other should not be underestimated.

We don't like fat d*ve in this house. Will they make a public show of reconciliation tomorrow? I hope they do, I really do.

iPod Mini Woes

Awh pish, my iPod Mini is broken. It's been playing up for a while now. At first I thought the battery life had fallen apart but it now appears that it hasn't been charging properly.

The charge icon would come up, the battery would appear to charge but it would never end. When disconnected the fuel gauge would show it to be full but within an hour it would die with the gauge still showing full. It then required a hard reset to bring it back. Now iTunes wont recognise it's connected, maybe it's the cable that's buggered, either way it's going back.

I remember reading Apple's terms and conditions when ordering and being quite shocked at the return procedure and the charges they would levy. We'll see, I'm not known for paying for other peoples mistakes. I'm off to Apple's website now to see about returning it for repair, wish me luck.

Update: Well, I've requested a return for repair (they'll send me a shipping box) but they don't want the cable. If the cable is the problem they'll come back and say the iPod is fine and charge me?!!? I have a really bad feeling about this.

I then dicovered Apple's iPod Mini forum, good grief this is a busy place with over 100 posts today alone, many of which describe my exact problem with dozens of posts relating to battery issues. What the feck is going on? The 2G iPod mini is claimed to have 18 hours battery time but I've never seen even half of that in the past 3 months. I've got an even worse feeling now.