got to scratch my nose,
take fingers off the flippers,
here comes the ball now.

First, it’s unobtrusive. you get a bare basics environment and nothing else. The base install includes little other than the essential packages and lets you build from there. It’s minimal and lightweight with install ISO’s weighing in at around 360MB and the netinstall ISO’s just under 180MB.

When you need more than the base install, Arch Linux has a package system called pacman, which is a breeze to use. Installing a package often involves little more than executing “sudo pacman -S <package name>”. And since it’s is on a rolling release cycle, there’s no need to wait for the next release of Ubuntu to get the latest packages. Configuration is done via text files; adding services to run at start up requires just an edit to /etc/rc.conf. If you need to build packages, Arch Linux provides the Arch Build System, which is a ports-like build system. If you can script in bash, you can build a package.

Good documentation is also available straight from their site. You don’t need to troll through dozens of forums to figure out how to get something installed, you go straight to their wiki, where there are guides on everything from the basic installation procedure to setting up Linux containers. The wiki also hosts translations of these guides in a variety of languages, which I imagine would be helpful for non-native English hackers.

Arch Linux reminds me a lot of my first Linux distro, Slackware. Both are minimalist, functional, and allow the user to maintain a lot of control over the system. There isn’t much hidden behind the curtain. Arch Linux, however, throws in a packaging system and more current packages. Getting it set up and running couldn’t be easier. For that, it earns a place in my toolbox.

The only wrinkle in all of this is that Mandolux splits the larger widescreen backgrounds into separate left- and right-hand images. However, since I run my display in TwinView mode, my desktop is essentially a single 3840 x 1200 display ( two 1920’s side by side). For the Mandolux wallpapers to display correctly on my background I need to merge the two images into one. I could manually stitch the two images together with an image editing program like GIMP, but since I downloaded a dozen of the background images to try out, doing it manually sounded dauntingly tedious.

That’s when I remembered that the ImageMagick suite of tools includes the ‘montage’ tool. The ImageMagick tools can be installed with the following command under Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then, to stitch the images together I ran the following command:

montage mandolux-ga2k6-*-1920.jpg -tile x1 -geometry +0+0 mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg

in a directory containing mandolux-ga2k6-l-1920.jpg and mandolux-ga2k6-r-1920.jpg (left and right side images, respectively). It is also worth noting here that the first filename precedes the second filename alphabetically, so the files are laid out from left to right in that order.

The result is mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg, which is a file with both images merged into into one 3840 x 1200 image.

Youtube user datamosher has posted a 3-part tutorial on how he created the video for Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil”. He essentially normalizes a set of video clips into a common format with FFmpeg, then uses avidemux to append them together and to remove keyframes. He has also made available a toolkit which includes both FFmpegX and avidemux for OS X.

After installing Boxer, dig up a copy of your favorite old DOS game that’s supported by DOSBox. Copy the files into a folder on your Mac (you do still have a 5.25″ floppy drive, right?). Start up Boxer and drag-and-drop the folder where indicated. That’s it.

Drag-and-drop your games here to install.

If the game needs to run and install or setup program, Boxer will give you a chance to do either before starting the game. Boxer even comes pre-bundled with Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld, and X-COM: UFO Defense. There are additional pre-packaged demo games you can download separately as well.

How many San Francisco sex celebrities can you spot in this music video?

No, your browser is fine. It’s not your bandwidth either.

This music video for “Evident Utensil” by Chairlift reminded me of “The Aesthetics of Failure” (pdf), an article written in 2000 by Kim Cascone about the then emerging work focused on the “glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the the noise floor of computer sound cards.” Focus on these limits of technology or “failure”, Cascone argued, forces the audience to not only rethink the definition of music, but also remind them of the tools involved in its creation.

While Cascone’s article used digital audio and music as examples, this video is an excellent contemporary example. Videos streamed over the Internet are often of such low-quality that we have come to expect the blocky, pan-chromatic artifacts. This video reproduces the abberations so faithfully that one wonders if the glitches are genuine or intended. Like breaking the fourth wall, the tools used to present the video (video encoder/decoder, internet delivery, etc. ) are no longer something the audience is supposed to look past, but now something to brought to their full attention.

P.S. The “failure” reproduced here is the accumulation of visual artifacts left behind by motion-compensation video compression methods without sufficient (or perhaps dropped) keyframes.

Update May 12, 2009: Video embedding for video above was disabled by request. Here’s a link instead.

For recreating the video arcade game experience on the PC, MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is the standard. It works by recreating the hardware circuitry of older arcade machines and loading the game software within this emulated environment. Everything from the CPU, video, sound, and RAM chips is emulated. Under MAME, a wide variety of arcade machines are emulated, from the old Williams machines that ran Joust to the newer CPS3 systems that run the Street Fighter III series. Emulation support for new systems is also added from time to time.

While the official release of MAME is built for Windows, various other flavors of MAME are released for a variety of platforms. One such flavor is SDLMAME, which is easy to build in just about any *NIX environment that supports the SDL library. Another feature of SDLMAME is that it follows the official MAME releases closely: updates to MAME are quickly added to SDLMAME.

Of course, recreating the arcade circuitry is only part of reliving the video arcade gaming experience. The controls are a large part was well. One available controller is the X-Arcade Dual Joystick. The X-Arcade controllers are solidly built with the same parts used to build many arcade controllers. By default, the X-Arcade joysticks are pre-configured for use with MAME with the controller’s buttons mapped to the MAME default keys right out of the box. There are also adapters available for the X-Arcade controllers so you can use them with your Dreamcast, Xbox, and PS2/3 systems in addition to your PC. While not strictly required to play games with MAME, it greatly enhances the experience.

In addition to the hardware, the software from arcade machines is also required to reproduce gameplay. Arcade machines typically store their programs in on-board ROM chips with some newer systems utilizing hard-disk drives or CDROMs. Hobbyists “dump” games from on-board ROMs into files that can be loaded into MAME for play. Games stored in hard-drives and CDROMs are dumped into CHDs, which stands for “compressed hard-drive image” and can also be loaded into MAME for play. Groups of dumped games packaged together are known as a “romset”.

The MAME project maintains a list of dumped games that represent the supported MAME romset. Note that not all games in the MAME romset are working, but are included in case future releases can support them. A great resource about this romset is MAWS, which lists information about all games in the MAME romset in a searchable and browsable interface.

This concludes part 1 of this article. Part 2 (coming soon) will cover how to built and install MAME on your Linux box.

I picked up the Android-powered G1 late last week. I like the phone quite a bit. Here’s a list of things about Android that stood out to me this past weekend, both good and bad.

• When you boot up the phone for the first time, it asks you for your Google account login. If you don’t have one, it will make you create a Google account. There is no doubt that this is a Google phone through and through. Oddly, when I entered my password incorrectly, it claimed to have network access problems rather than reporting bad login credentials. I tried to log in about a half dozen times before I realized I was entering the wrong password.
• There are two email clients on the phone: the Gmail client and a secondary email client for POP and IMAP access. The Gmail client is on par with the Gmail client that I had on my Blackberry 8100. However, the POP/IMAP client leaves quite a bit to be desired. Setting up an IMAP account is easy, but there are a couple things missing from the client. For example, while the total number of unread messages for an IMAP account is displayed, the number of unread messages per folder is not.
• I love the notification bar. Incoming emails, SMS text messages, IM messages are all slipped into a notification area at the top part of the screen. When they first appear, a quick preview of the message is also displayed on the bar. With a quick flick of the finger to pull down this bar, I am given one click access to these messages.
• Instead of using a numeric passcode to lock the phone, the G1 features a neat alternative. The “passcode” is a pattern drawn on a 3-by-3 grid. The phone is unlocked by drawing the matching pattern with my finger on the touchscreen.
• By sliding my finger along the desktop, I can switch between three desktop spaces. Shortcuts to commonly used applications can be placed on these desktop spaces. Applications are stored in a drawer that is opened by flicking on a tab upwards from the bottom of the screen.
• For better and worse, contacts are automatically synced from your Gmail contacts list. Gmail had harvested a good number of contacts from my email, so I had to do a good deal of clean up to keep my G1 contact list less cluttered.
• Up to six applications can be run at the same time. However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to explicitly close an application. As you open more, they are closed in a first-open-first-closed fashion. As my girlfriend noted, you can open the browser, switch to another application, then switch back to the browser without having to wait for the URL to load again (as is the case with the iPhone).
• The trackball is pretty useful when in the horizontal, keyboard-flipped out orientation. It helps me navigate through text input fields without moving my fingers up to the touchscreen. Also, keyboard shortcuts. Nuff’ said.
• Frequently accessed settings like enabling/disabiling wifi are buried a few levels deep in a Settings application. Fortunately, the AnyCuts application available in the Android Market makes it possible to place a shortcut to just about anything on the desktop.

All in all, I think the G1 is a good debut for the Android platform. There are a few interface quirks, but as in the case with AnyCuts, the open nature of the platform and the Android Market are already encouraging the development of solutions. I think this is promising and there is a lot of potential for the Android platform.

P.S. Someone please make a BART schedule application before I am forced to foist a half-assed one upon the Android world.