Passed some folks holding up Obama signs on Camelback, and without thinking, I threw up the devil horns sign. To me, that means “You rock!”. Not sure what it means to forty- and fifty-somethings, though, and I hope they weren’t offended.
Read more...Unix “make” as a model for media conversion...
OK, this is a lot less complicated than I thought. From An Introduction to the UNIX Make Utility:
Make has a set of default rules called suffix or implicit rules. These are generalized rules that make can use to build a program. For example in building a C++ program these rules tell make that .o object files are made from .cc source files. The suffix rule that make uses for a C++ program is
.cc.o:
$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -c $<
where $< is a special macro which in this case stands for a .cc file that is used to produce a particular target .o file.
So in the media server, if I mark my compiler object as requiring type binary/o, and link a text/cc to it, the compiler object should look at the environment for rules that output binary/o. Among them, it will (hopefully) see one linked to a compiler object that takes text/cc. (I know in the real world these compilers are the same, but this is my contrived example and I’m sticking to it.) It feeds the text/cc into the compiler linked from the rule, then feeds the binary/o output to the initial target compiler.
OK, let’s try a better example: we have a Screen which expects a binary/image, and we link a text/html to it. We go find a rule that links to ImageMagic “convert”, which outputs a binary/image, but only accepts text/plain input. Looking for rules that output text/plain, we find one linked to “lynx” that accepts text/html. So the path goes:
text/html -> text/plain -> binary/image
This could probably be drawn out to several more steps, though I worry about speed in finding the correct path. If I recall right, looking up “graph traversal” in Programming Game AI By Example will help me there.
Read more...Oh, how I wish I'd had a PROPER camera with me...
A DSLR with a nice telephoto lens, or anything other than my cell phone camera, which took this huge moonrise and shoved it in a grainy corner of the image. Oh, well, here’s a cropped version.
A trend toward violence...
Diana returned from her pulmonary function testing conference late last night. She didn’t have a terrible time, but I could tell the highlight for her was a stop she and her friends made at a Coach outlet store, rather than the conference itself. She described it as a madhouse - crowds of people (many of them Japanese tourists), staff scrambling to keep the disheveled stock in order, customers asking each other where they found that purse. I asked her if it matched the cliche image of a horde of women fighting over a clearance table. “No,” she said, “but my friend did get pushed once.”
“Wait a second,” I said, “she wasn’t pushed by an elderly Japanese woman, was she?” She was.
I’m reluctant to stereotype, but this is something several friends and I have noticed about older Japanese. A few weeks into my exchange trip there in 2002, several students reported incidents of getting elbowed aside (in my case, by a lady I didn’t even see beforehand). The culprits were both male and female, but always over 50. They never actually hurt their “victims”, but they were always spectacularly rude.
I don’t think it’s resentment toward gaijin, I’ve heard Japanese students mention the same thing. And besides, while they’re arguably entitled when US citizens are on Japanese soil, why do it over here? Are we supposed to “respect our elders” and get out of the way or something?
Read more...Git vs. Subversion on the family photo archive...
17,993 files, most of them .jpg and .avi…
SVN repo: 36.8 GB .git directory: 30.1 GB (Git wins) SVN working copy: 47 GB Git working copy: 23.5 GB (Git wins a LOT.)
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