André's Blog

So, yesterday I’ve arrived at my family’s place. Here I still have two computers left. A 1600 Mhz Pentium 4 (Willamette), and a 866 Mhz Pentium 3 (Coppermine)

I should be ashamed to inform you the Pentium 4 only has a Windows XP and a Windows 7 installation…. I should be deeply ashamed…

So… I’ve installed ArchLinux on my Pentium 4. This is a more advanced Linux distro. But I am using it at my computer in Eindhoven for a while now, and I am happy with it.

Well configuring this thing…. basic installation is really basic, you’ve got to install and configure everything. But there is a decent packet manager, so that’s not a problem. Just one little thing I forgot, is to get the ssh deamon running.

You have to allow access to it in the /etc/hosts.allow to get it working. I forgot this step…. apart from that, installation of this thing works without problems.

Now note the machine has a GeForce 4 video card, which means you need an old nvidia driver, the 96 series which are no longer working with currect kernel releases. But X works fine with the nouveau driver, so there is no problem.

Anyways…. apart from Arch… I noticed there is a new alpha version of HaikuOS available. However, on both machines, this alpha 3 version of HaikuOS randomly
freezes. Having the same problem on two machines, I think I’ve excluded a problem with the machine itself, since with other OS’es the machines run fine and with
HaikuOS they both have the problem.

Now, let’s play with some other Operating Systems. I have ArchLinux now, here and in Eindhoven… let’s try something else. The BSD family of operating systems. I think last time I’ve been playing around with those was 2008. So it’s a while ago. I’ve installed OpenBSD now on my Pentium 3 machine.

The partitioning tool, I must say, I’ve made the partitions with sysresccd with gparted. The OpenBSD installer isn’t that friendly with paritions. I remember other members of the BSD family had a better tool for that. Anyways…. partitions were made, and I told the installer to install in the OpenBSD part of the disk.

Well… before it did that, it asked me for root password and username and password for the normal user to log in, and some other questions included if I were planning to use X.

So, it installed the OS, complete with a working X server and XDM. The installed window manager is Fvwm. Let’s install some software. Yet another package manager. What’s it officially called? Packages. pkg_info pkg_add pkg_delete and the likes…. well… let’s see if I can get a xfce4 window manager instead, and install some additional software too.

Well… I said X started, right? But it started in 800×600 resolution. The monitor doesn’t support DDC, so it cannot be auto detected. Now I got xfce running, and replaced xdm by gdm by the way, I tried to start the xfce monitor setting to change resolution. Just to be told the video driver doesn’t support video outputs. I guess I have to poke the X settings manually…

By entering some horizontal and vertical frequencies, I have managed to get the monitor in the desired resolution. But I think this is enough playing for today.
Tomorrow another day, also FreeBSD and NetBSD will be my next toys.

My BeagleBoard is still catching dust, somewhere in a dark corner. I never used it, which is kinda sad, isn’t it.

Well, it only has a digital video output, so I cannot connect a normal vga (crt) monitor to it. (Of which I have a few in the basement)

So, I’ve obtained a used flat screen with DVI-D input, back in the days I still worked at Unilogic, and they were replacing their monitors.

Unfortunately, it’s had 5:4 aspect ratio, and it’s native resolution is 1280×1024, which is not supported by the BeagleBoard. Well, it is supported, but with a refresh-rate of 50Hz, which is not supported by the monitor.

Well… I am using this monitor at my desktop nowadays… But meh…. those modern flat monitors with non-standard (non 4:3) aspect ratios, and things like a ‘native resolution’.

A normal CRT monitor would be much simpler… they usually have the same aspect ratio, and the image doesn’t get distorted when running at a lower then maximal resolution.

But…. there is no VGA output on the BeagleBoard… so… I was googling again…. and I found a Hawkboard.
Another ARM board, and it has a VGA-out. Looking at it’s schema, I saw it used a THS8135 to provide in VGA output. So, I started googling if there was a converter for the BeagleBoard using this chip…. but in stead I came accros this
http://www.linusakesson.net/hardware/beagleboard/vga.php

Very simple circuit… this should do the trick. Why should it be complicated?

So, why are HDMI(DVI-D) to VGA converters to expensive? This circcuit that I’ve found is just a few resistors and two transistors.
So, this circuit should costs about 4 euros!!! Why are those converters a few hunderd euros?  (Okay, thet are connected to the DVI-D port, and this circuit goes to the LCD interface….)

So, I guess I should get some resistors, transistors and a soldering iron, much cheaper then a hdmi to vga converter or a new monitor…

As I am rebuilding the BlaatSchaap site, I want to keep it
up to modern standards. So, I am using HTML5 for it.
If you look at it’s DOCTYPE you will notice it is HTML5.

You might also know that I have run a radio station in the
past.

I think I have been experimenting with this in the past
and ran into issues too.

The problem, the HTML5 audio tag is very suitable for
playing audio files, but it fails for audio streams.

Chrome connects to the IceCast server correctly, and when
I tell it to display controls, it claims to be playing, but no audio
is produced.

Firefox 3.6 fails totally and will only display a ‘loading’ symbol
when the controls are enabled.
Firefox 4.0 beta8 nightly build will behave like Chrome, and
be playing ‘on screen’ without producing sound.

The only browser that appears to be successful playing the
IceCast2 stream is Opera. For this test I’ve used the
release version 10.63. Even though it plays, there are some
issues related to the fact that the javascript API for the audio
tag assumes it handles files, with a fixed size, rather then an
endless stream.

The first issue is, there is no stop() function. Only play() and
pause(). This results in, it will continue streaming when one
‘pauses’ the playback. This is to be expected when one
pauses the playback rather then stops it. One solution to
this issue is to write and delete the audio tag from Javascript.

HTML:

JavaScript:

By deleting the audio tag this way, it will stop the connection to the server too. But there is still an issue. The stream is still buffered. When once starts the stream again, by rewriting the audio tag into the html document, it will start playing the buffer it had been playing before, and so, plays a few seconds of old content before it resumes the current live stream.

It seems the audio tag is not suitable to play radio streams. So far, the only reliable way to play radio streams, semi-platform independant, is using a Java based ogg player: Jorbis (http://www.jcraft.com/jorbis/) which I have been using on my site before. But still…. it depends on Java being installed.

So… I wrote something about religion a while ago, and I promised to write some more about the subject.

Right… so… let me take you back to a time when I was a wiccan. I had a friend, who didn’t accept my religion, a friend who said I was being deceived by the devil himself. A friend who asked me if I wasn’t affraid I wouldn’t burn in hell for not believing in his God.

Later, it turned out this friend was being brainwashed by this sect. He managed to get out of this sect, but then, he was talking to me, talking about returning there. In that sect, he felt like he found a place where people cared about him, a place where he had friends.

But when he was out, he was all alone again, alone against he big bad world. And even though in that sect he didn’t have freedom. The music he liked to listen, and the music he liked to make himself, was being disapproved, for example. But still, he was thinking about going back there…

What does this mean??? What does it mean??? Maybe it’s not about believing in their God at all, maybe it’s just about belonging somewhere, to belong to a group. To be accepted… But in the end, to be accepted for someone you are not.

To belong somewhere, to be accepted, isn’t that what turned Christianity to it’s success in it’s early days. Yes, there have been the days of the Inquisition where non-believers were being punished, but before that?

The image of the devil was created after the Gods of the old religions. So, after converting enough people, peer pressure would persuide the ones not converted yet, and even…. made them prepared to kill those who didn’t believe in their new God.

Also, I wonder, what was the world like, before Christianity was forced upon the people. Things like marriage were things done by the Church in the early days. But what were relationships like before Christianity? Christianity promoted monogamous relationships, right? But were
they like that before Christianity?

Now, let me take a little detour to science fiction, okay? Star Trek: Enterprise. On board of this Enterprise, there is this Doctor Phlox, a Denobulan. In the Star Trek: Enterprise series, there are a few episodes in wich the Denobulan society, and their polygamous relationships have a role.

The way I watch the Star Trek series, and observe the different social structures of different species, makes me think sometimes as a reflection of our own. It makes me sometimes think they were created to question our own.