Three Wise Men

Upgrade Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx to 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

BigWhale — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:48:34 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Maverick Meerkat is still beta software, so your mileage my vary. Plus, Ubuntu upgrades are like carrying nitroglycerin around. Most of the times if you are careful everything will be ok, then sometimes you step on something, stumble and everything blows up in your face. Why on earth would you want to upgrade then? Because you’re adventurous and you want to live on the edge, right? Upgrade worked for me on my computer. I had a minor problem with Nvidia graphics card which was solved quickly. In any case, if you are happy with Lucid Lynx and you have a stable production environment, then you should probably wait. Final release is scheduled for October 10th and most of the show stopper bugs should be gone by that time.

There are a few things that you need to take care before you upgrade. First you need to install update manager core.

$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Then it would be wise to install all the updates for your current installation.

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Now you are all set and ready to go. A warning, that you should backup your important configuration files and your data, would be appropriate. Consider yourself warned.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

With this command you will start the upgrade process. After upgrade manager calculates on what it has to do you will be notified and you will get a chance to abort the upgrade. This is your last warning. After your start the upgrade you should not interrupt it. If you do that you will end up with a broken Ubuntu and tears in your eyes. Relax, sit back and enjoy watching how packets are installed. Or perhaps, grab a bite.

Nvidia problems

When the upgrade was finished I rebooted and I was greeted with text mode login prompt.

Ubuntu maverick (development branch) thefish tty1

thefish login:

(Yes, my hostname is thefish.) If you do not get a nice login window as you used to then first thing you need to do is to inspect your Xorg log file.

$ less /var/log/Xorg.0.log

If you are running Nvidia and you have a dual monitor setup then you will see this error in your log file.

[    10.038] ================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================

[    10.038] This server has a video driver ABI version of 8.0 that this driver does not officially support.  Please check http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X server with a supported driver ABI.

[    10.038] =================================================================

[    10.038] (EE) NVIDIA: Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.

[    10.038] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"

[    10.038] (II) Unloading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so

[    10.038] (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module requirement mismatch, 0)

[    10.038] (EE) No drivers available.

[    10.038] Fatal server error:

[    10.038] no screens found

Fortunately the fix for this is displayed right there on the screen, you will have to edit your Xorg configuration file and add one more option to the ServerLayout section so that it looks similar to this:

Section "ServerLayout"

    Identifier     "Layout0"

    Screen         0  "Screen0" 0 0

    Screen1        "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0"

    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"

    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"

    Option         "Xinerama" "0"

    Option         "IgnoreABI" "True"

EndSection

You only need to add IgnoreABI option! Your Xorg configuration file is most likely /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After you made the change restard gdm and Xorg will start and you will see login window. No need to reboot your computer.

$ sudo restard gdm

You are good to go, login and start exploring and trying out new stuff.

New stuff and the problems

First thing I noticed is the default background. What is the deal with those big orange blobs? Nobody knows, but they say that default background will be replaced before final release.

Default background

Windicators are slowly coming into play. When clicking on a sound icon, or better sound windicator, in the panel you will be present with more options than before. Now you can launch Rythmbox from it and when it is running you can also control it from here. One icon less in the panel, which is good. The bad part is that Rythmbox simply quits when you click close button in the main window. It will have to stay open if you want to listen to the music. To make things worse, minimizing will not get rid of the task list icon and you will have to move Rythmbox to another desktop to get rid of the clutter. On Ubuntu forums there is already a debate on this subject.

Sound windicator and Rythmbox

Gwibber got support for lists, inline pictures from TwitPic and alike and direct messages for Twitter and Identi.ca accounts. Also the infamous OAuth¹ is supported, it has to be since Twitter made it mandatory. Gwibber was also upgraded with a new database; say goodbye to the slow couch database and welcome SQLite. This means, more speed and no more syncing between different computers. A reasonable trade-off.

New Gwibber

After that I gave a shot to Shotwell, a new photo manager. I had to wait for quite some time for Shotwell to import my 30.000 pictures library, but I was pleasantly surprised when it imported my older JPEG images and raw Nikon images that were taken more recently. You will be able to adjust few image settings, but for more complex editing you will have to set external editor. Gimp by default. Most of the other software was upgraded, Gnome in this release it carries version number 2.31.92, kernel will be 2.6.35-19 Among other changes I also noticed that Evolution will display emails in threads by default.

In the end, I can say that 10.10 is a next step in the evolution of Ubuntu, few minor changes here and there and Ubuntu community proved once again that they can deliver. Ubuntu 10.10 feels faster than 10.04, but this might only be my feeling. For a proper benchmark you will have to wait for the final release. All in all the first impression is good and now the only thing left is hope that one of the future releases will be named as Horny Hippo.

Excellent article about OAuth by Ryan Paul.

Howto: Setting NAT Type on PS3

BigWhale — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:54:24 +0000

NAT stands for Network Address Translation. If you are a causal Playstation 3 user then you probably don’t know anything about this until you have a problem with it. An average PS3 is usually connected to the internet through a router and that router will take care of NAT for you. NAT Type will tell what kind of connectivity your PS3 has to the Internet. Having a Type 3 NAT will result in various issues, your voice chat might not work and you might have other problems with your in-game connectivity. The best solution for this is to check your router settings. In this Howto I will talk about Linksys WRT router running DD-WRT software. Settings for other routers are similar and you can probably use the information from this post to setup your router.

Prerequisites

You will need one PS3 (for obvious reasons), you will also need a username and a password for accessing your router. Make sure that you set your PS3 Internet settings correctly. The easy way to do this is to set everything on automatic then configure your router appropriately.

Router setup

Make sure that DHCP is enabled, if you are using default configuration of DD-WRT then this should already be the case. To be on a safe side, select the Setup tab and then Basic Setup. DHCP type should be set to DHCP Server.

Now you will need to set a fixed IP for your Playstation. Make sure your Playstation is turned off. Open the Status | LAN tab in the menu and you will see the screen similar to this:

Now turn on your Playstation and wait for it to boot and connect to the Internet. Then refresh Status | LAN tab and a new DHCP client should appear:

You can click on the MAC address that appeared and a popup will open telling you that this segment of addresses belongs to Sony. If you have no other Sony devices that are connected to your router, this is your Playstation. Copy this number and select the Services tab in the menu.

Now you need to add PS3 MAC address to the Static Leases table:

Click Save at the bottom of the page and then Apply Settings. You can now power cycle your PS3 to confirm that it got the correct IP from DHCP server. Now, we can move on with configuring th actual NAT.

The easy way

Just enable UPnP like Sony suggests. This usually works, but not all the time, as I mentioned before. You can turn on your UPnP settings in NAT/QoS | UPnP tab. It shoud look like this:

If you don’t get the NAT Type: Type 2 connection with UPnP or you don’t have a router that supports it then you will have to do this the hard way.

The hard way

Sony clearly states which ports PS3 needs for communication with Sony servers and which ones it needs for games and audio/video chat. Many guides will tell you to forward ports 80, 443 and 5223. You do not need to forward those ports and it is wrong to do so! Those ports need to be open for outgoing traffic, they are used for Playstation Store and Playstation Network. Most router software, including DD-WRT, will come with all ports open for outgoing traffic. You shouldn’t be concerned about this. Sony also mentions UDP ports 3478, 3479 for Playstation Network, but I believe that those do not require forwarding.

For voice, video and gaming, Playstation will use UDP port 3658, this port needs to be forwarded, because games will try to connect directly to your Playstation. Open NAT/QoS | Port forwarding tab and add another port forwarding rule. You will need to supply the correct IP of your console. Check the Enabled box, click Save and Apply Settings.

Now when you select Settings | Network Settings | Internet Connection test on your Playstation, the screen should look similar to this:

Happy gaming and chatting. :)

PS: No, putting your PS3 in DMZ is NOT a good idea and will also NOT increase your in-game ping as some guides and howtos claim.

Encoding videos with FFMPEG and H.264

BigWhale — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:59:24 +0000

Prelude to encoding

Encoding videos can be a real pain. While ffmpeg is an excellent utility for converting videos between various formats it is also a pain to use. If you put H.264 codec on top of this, you will get a real mess with command lines that are longer than 200 characters. H.264 is a great format and linux¹ implementation is hiding in the libx264. It will come pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.04, but if you are more adventurous you should try and install the latest versions from SVN repositories as described on Ubuntu forums. The whole procedure is quite easy and very well documented so in this post I will assume that you have installed the latest versions.

The focus of this test and tutorial will be on video production, more specifically on an average YouTube Vlogger video. This means, one pass encoding, high compression and very uniform videos. For encoding movies and other videos with very dynamic content and big changes in the scenes you will have to look elsewhere of wait for another post. :)

Test setup

For the test video I used a short clip that was provided by Nixie Pixel, do check her out on YouTube. Video was recorded with Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 with the resolution 960×720 at 25 frames per second. GStreamer‘s gst-launch utility was used for capturing and the clip was recorded as raw data – video/x-raw-yuv. Audio was captured with an external studio USB microphone and encoded with 1536 kb/s.

The initial file size was 745 MB (780252094 bytes) for a 29.8 seconds of video. All encoding was done on an old Core2Quad Q6600 running at 2.4 GHz with 4GB of RAM. I used -threads 0 parameter with ffmpeg to use all CPU cores while encoding. System load during conversion was around 5.5 and it took from just a few seconds up to two minutes to encode the whole clip.

Latest version of ffmpeg comes with a decent number of preset options for encoding with libx264. I will not go into details about each and every option because that would be a wrist slashing material and quite a long read. However, I will use the presets to simplify the encoding. I decided to use six different presets: hq, veryslow, default, fast, veryfast and lossless_slower. With this I used two different crf² parameters: 15 and 28. They are both maximum and minimum of what is usually recommend. 15 being lowest compression and highest quality/bitrate and 28 being the opposite. Time was measured with the time command and file size was reported by ls -lh command.

Encoding command that I used while working with different -vpre and -crf parameters:

$ ffmpeg -threads 0 -i bw-test.avi -vcodec libx264 -vpre default -crf 15.0 \

  -acodec libmp3lame -ab 64k -ar 48000 -ac 2 -f mp4 out_default_15.mp4

Sound was always encoded with libmp3lame, I know that mp4 files should have AAC encoded sound, but a lot of times audio and video were out of sync after YouTube processed the video. That is why I usually stick with mp3 encoding for sound. For vlog type videos, I encode sound with only 64kbs. Which should be more than enough for human speech.

The results

Results include time needed to perform encoding, file size of the encoded clip and a couple of screen shots. One of Nixie talking and the other of llama walking, so there is at least some motion blur on the video from the llama.

$ ffmpeg -i bw-test.avi -ss 00:00:6.7 -vframes 1 -vcodec png \

  -f image2 sample_original_1.png

$ ffmpeg -i bw-test.avi -ss 00:00:24.10 -vframes 1 -vcodec png \

  -f image2 sample_original_2.png

Here are the two screenshots from the original uncompressed clip, clicking on them will give you a larger version.

Results are in the table below, clicking on time and file size will open both captured frames for the respective test clip.

crf	hq	veryslow	default	fast	veryfast	lossless_slower
15	0m 43s 16 MB	2m 50s 15MB	0m 31s 18 MB	0m 24s 17 MB	0m 9s 16 MB	0m 41s 17 MB
28	0m 22s 2.3 MB	1m 18s 1.9 MB	0m 14s 2.3 MB	0m 12s 2.5 MB	0m 6s 2.1 MB	0m 19s 2.2 MB

Complete test video is available on YouTube, I decided to upload the -crf 15 -vpre veryfast version of the video.

The conclusion

End results are a little bit surprising. After numerous tests I decided that I can only show a relevant difference between both extremes; minimum and maximum compression. If you compare the -crf 15 screenshots, they are almost identical. Even when comparing very fast and very slow or lossless presets.

When the value of crf is increased the quality will decrease and when it reaches 28 the change is very obvious. If you use -crf 20 you will get a decent balance between the file size and the quality. Just to be sure, I spent some time on YouTube watching various vlogs and other stuff that people post there. After seeing that, I am pretty sure that you can use the worse settings that I mentioned before. Veryfast preset and -crf 28. Your videos will be encoded in no time and upload will be fast and nobody will notice the loss of quality. ;)

And now the time has come to talk of many things, of shoes and ship and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. :)

and other similar operating systems
CRF – constant rate factor

Cloning Ubuntu Linux – The easy way

BigWhale — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:29:09 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Your Ubuntu Linux installation is getting bigger and bigger and you are running out of space on your hard disk. You got your new hard drive and now you need to clone your old drive to the new one. The dreaded cloning is actually quite easy and relatively simple to do. The only thing you will need is a little patience and some typing skills. No special software just your already installed Ubuntu Linux.

The regular obligatory disclaimer: This procedure worked for me several times, I use it almost on a daily basis and I had no problems with it. Your mileage my vary. Make sure you double check all the commands that you type and that you do not format your data drive. You will end up with two empty disks. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

The very basic scenario is assumed here. You have one hard drive installed as /dev/sda and you want to replace it with a new one. You could just add the new drive and mount it to /home directory for example, but sometimes that is not what you want. I am also assuming that you have SATA drives. This procedure can also be used if you get a new computer and you do not want to bother with new installation. In this case you will have to be more careful if you are moving from one platform to another.

Step 0 – Prerequisites

First make sure that you have all the software installed:

$ sudo apt-get install grub-pc rsync

Yes, that is it.

Step 0.5 – Disk juggling

Turn off your computer, connect your new hard drive and turn your computer back on. Make sure that you do not disconnect the old drive, you still need it. ;)

Step 1 – Partitioning, formatting and mounting

Check where your new drive is, it will usually be accessible as /dev/sdb. Use fdisk to partition the hard drive and then mkfs to format it. If you created more than one partition then you will have to mount all of them. In this example the unknown user created swap, root and home partitions. Here’s how you mount them:

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/home

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt

$ sudo mkswap /dev/sdb1

Step 2 – Cloning

After your new partitions are mounted you need to copy all your data to the new location. You will do this with rsync.

$ sudo rsync --exclude="mnt" --exclude="lost+found" --exclude="sys" --exclude="proc" -avP / /mnt/

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/mnt /mnt/proc /mnt/sys

No need to copy /proc and /sys, they are virtual file systems and they will be created later on. You still need to create the directories that were not copied.

Step 3 – Rescuing the system

Data is transferred and now you need to take care of few other minor details. In /mnt/etc/fstab you will have to change the UUID string for mounting the partitions. I suggest that you replace UUID with /dev/sda2 for root disk and /dev/sda3 for /home. This will vary depending on your configuration. If you are feeling adventurous you can find the UUID’s of your new partitions and replace the old ones with them. Use the blkid command to get the UUID for each partition.

$ sudo blkid -p -o full /dev/sdb2

/dev/sdb2: UUID="1a78c1f3-d9d0-4bbc-8dc2-603c2b46f5fc" VERSION="1.0" TYPE="ext4" USAGE="filesystem"

$ sudo blkid -p -o full /dev/sdb3

/dev/sdb3: UUID="7f5a59ae-43c2-4747-a369-6fc01244ee21" VERSION="1.0" TYPE="ext4" USAGE="filesystem"

Now just copy and paste the UUID into /mnt/etc/fstab.

If you are cloning your disk to be used on a different computer then you should also take care of network interfaces. Delete the last line, or the last two, depends on how many network interfaces you have, in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. The lines should look roughly like this:

# PCI device 0x8086:0x294c (e1000e)

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

I will not go into details here, let’s just say that Ubuntu will remember what names were used for your network interfaces and when you boot into the new system you will end up having eth1 instead of eth0.

Don’t worry, the lines will be back once you reboot your system. After this you can shutdown and disconnect the old drive. Now turn on your computer and boot into a non working system. Have no fear, you will get it fixed in no time.

Step 4 – First boot

Your boot loader will die. Don’t worry it was supposed to, because it doesn’t know what to boot from and where your new disk is. What you see now is a Grub rescue shell. Does it say on the screen that you can use help? Lovely, because you can’t, Grub still didn’t load the help. Now you have to boot your computer manually. Like this:

insmod /boot/grub/linux.mod

linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro

initrd /initrd.img

boot

First you load the Linux module so that you can tell Grub where to find Linux kernel and initial ram disk. Then you can boot. If you have your root partition on /dev/sda2 then you should see your computer rebooting. After you login, open a terminal so that you can fix Grub:

$ sudo update-grub

$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda

$ sudo reboot

Step 5 – Second Reboot & The End

After the reboot everything should be back to normal. If you are again stuck at the Grub rescue prompt, then repeat the above procedure with Grub and rerun update-grub and grub-install. As you can see, cloning disk isn’t not so hard and you don’t need any special tools or software, except your beloved Ubuntu Linux.

Screencasting your games – Monkey Island 2

BigWhale — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:42:30 +0000

It was a thing of a moment. We decided to try some live streaming of Monkey Island 2, special edition. After realizing that Xfire fails miserably with streaming games that are not listed as supported we went looking for another solution.

Livestream’s Procaster was the first thing we tried and while we had some trouble at first it picked up rather nicely and the overall quality was decent enough.

Procaster supports streaming of any Direct3D game together with sound and in the free version you can mix output of your web camera and your screencast. We also had some trouble with the sound being recorded from the camera and we needed few minutes to figure out how to turn off the extra sound input. Here is some room for improvement, an audio mixer that can be controlled while streaming.

All in all, the broadcasting was an interesting experience and we are likely to do some more screencasts in the future. We were pleasantly surprised with the recording of our video. If you missed it and you are not bored with pirate oriented adventure games you can watch our screencast below.

Watch live streaming video from bigwhale at livestream.com

E3 2010 – The Lost Footage of Silly

BigWhale — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:47:20 +0000

We will let the video to speak for itself. This is a small amount of material that we recorded on E3 2010. Next time we will be more organized, more prepared and more ready! We promise.

E3 2010 – Post Mortem wrap up

BigWhale — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:32:45 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

A little delayed wrap up of E3 is in order. Games, gadgets and entertainment, they were all there. Rigor mortis is gone and everything is starting to decompose, so we will get on with out impressions about the event. Teaming up with Nixie Pixel turned out to be a great success (make sure you also check her E3 Highlights) and the amount of swag collected in just three days was amazing. Headphones, keyboard cleaners, Power balls, Dog tags, T-shirts, sweaters, press kit USB drives and DVD discs, and so on and so on.

Let’s duplicate

Three major things happened at E3. Sony Moved, Microsoft Kinected and Nintendo has gone to 3D. All three players on the console market simply had to come up with something sort of new. First Sony decided to duplicate Nintendo and they created new controller which looks and feels like an advanced version of Nintendo Wii remote. The bonus is that it has a prettier ‘light bulb’ on top of it and can be used as a fake ice-cream. To try out Sony Move you had to make an appointment and Sony was booked for three days. We didn’t get to try it.

Microsoft also decided that they need to do something new. Project Natal was announced a while ago and on the grand opening, which happened two days before E3, they told everyone that it will bi called Kinect. Yay, for kinetic connection or wherever they were going for with the name. To tell you the truth, Kinect is an improved version of Sony’s Eye Toy that was available years ago for PlayStation2. Waiting lines, we decided to call them queues just to sound a little nerdier, were up to two or three hours long. Because our team was limited to three people and only one dedicated to TWM, we decided just to take pictures of people jumping in front of the camera, flailing with their arms and kicking with their legs trying to play Kinect games. They looked ridiculous, but they seemed to be having fun. Kinect was everywhere on E3. Dancing, exercising, running, jumping, …

So who did Nintendo duplicate? Microsoft? Fortunately, no! Nintendo, again, made something genuinely new. They upgraded their Nintendo DS into Nintendo 3DS. Still in its prototype Nintendo 3DS is a first console that can reproduce 3D images using a special method called autostereoscopy. Since the waiting queues for Nintendo 3DS were even longer than Kinect queues, we decided to skip testing the prototype. People are reporting mixed feelings about the whole thing, so we will have to wait until 2011 when they scheduled the initial release.

Games

All in all, this was an entertainment expo and we were eager to see the games. There were some great titles announced and this time we got to play with few games. We were really looking forward for Fallout: New Vegas. Truth be told, there was a little disappointment since all we got to see (and play) was Fallout 3 with new wasteland and orange-colored user interface, instead of the traditional green. From the interview with Bethesda people we gathered that you will need to get skilled in hand-to-hand combat and smuggling. Guns are forbidden in casinos. Level cap will be at 30. Main story line, side quests and the rest of the things will stay pretty much the same. No footage or pictures since we were not allowed to take any. The highlight of the whole Bethesda visit was bumping into Felicia Day. :)

We were also shown a presentation of Rage, the upcoming game by Id and published by Bethesda. Again, we had to put cameras on stand by. Decent graphics and fairly good game play. But the bitter taste stayed behind when we were leaving the closed presentation: “Another running around the wasteland RP game” …

Kaos Studios and THQ as a publisher made a really good impression with their marketing campaign for Homefront, new first person shooter where United Korea invades USA. Fly a North Korean flag on your car and park for free, good call! We also got to see trailers for the upcoming Warhammer 40.000 Space Marine and the Warhammer 40.000 Dark Millennium Online a lot of promising things published by THQ.

We also couldn’t get past the Magic: The Gathering Tactics. Mainly because it was on the entrance to the West Hall. The Gathering Tactics is a slightly modified version of the popular card game. It will be available for PS3 and PC and published by Sony Online Entertainment. Online play will be supported and there are rumors about ability to buy additional cards, trading and auctions. The more you pay, the better you play?

Tron Evolution: The Video Game by Disney studios is showing a lot of promise if you like mixes between third person shooters married with platform jumping Ratchet & Clank a-likes. We played PS3 version of the game and the first impression was great. If we can get our hands on a new customized Tron themed PS3 controller then the mood setting will be perfect.

Gadgets

There is no entertainment without all the gadgets. Portable steering wheels with seats, fake gun-like controllers, joysticks, flightsticks, giant hamster balls, power-glove like devices, headsets, microphones and at last and definitely least, removable crosshairs stickers for your monitor. You will simply rule in hardcore modes of your favorite first person shooter. Two gadgets left an impression. The ForceTek power-glove like controller with its interesting concept of controlling a jet. People simply could not get to control the aircraft with their arm, but once you get into the feeling it is really easy. The lin … err … queue started to form behind us, so we kindly left before our airplane crashed.

The second gadget was the removable crosshairs sticker for your monitor. The impression was not all that great, it was more of a jaw dropping and banging the head against the wall impression. what can we say? There is market for almost everything as long as it has the ‘gaming‘ label attached to it. What you can buy is a transparent sticker that you stick to the center of your screen and it will aid you with aiming when you are not looking through the iron sight or scope of your gun. We think they promised a decrease in reaction time in percent. Almost as seen on TV. :) Sorry, no picture this time.

Booth Babes

Words are unnecessary here, we will just post few pics in the gallery below. Some thinking is in order, because Nixie was already asking herself if booth babes will help and revive the E3.

Under The Line

E3 was a hyper-packed, content rich and eventful expo. Next time we are visiting, we are going there with a plan. Not just any plan, but a cunning plan. At least three people are required to cover the event fully since so many things are going on at the same time. Three days – eight hours of expo, ten hours of after parties and three hours for commuting and meals, yes we were left with about three hours of sleep per night. Jet lag helped a lot.

E3 2010 – Expo Coverage

BigWhale — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:18:03 +0000

E3 Expo or Electronic Entertainment Expo opened. We teamed up with Nixie Pixel and despite all the catastrophic disasters, ranging from erupting volcanoes that prevented air traffic and various oil spills that prevented ship traffic and seafaring, managed to get to Los Angeles on time.

All the major players in the electronic entertainment industry are here, E3 expo is the biggest industry-only event and we are covering it. Of course our focus is on strange, bizarre and insignificant. Big guys are getting their love too, but we are trying to focus on the little, borderline-crazy things, people and booth babes.

Generating sample XML from XSD or DTD in Eclipse

RRunner — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:55:26 +0000

: Image by carol shergold via Flickr

Feature is useful if you are writing your XSD schema files or you have XSD schema files and want to create sample XML files for schema elements. Process is the same for generating sample XML files from DTD files.

How to do it. Simple.

Create a project and add, import or somehow see created, generated XSD files in Project Explorer.
Select your desired XSD file.
Right-click and choose Generate->XML File
New XML File wizard will pop-up where you define where generated file should be saved and what should be it’s name. When desired information is input-ed press Next.
In Select Root Element window choose root element of your sample XML file. Root element can be any element defined in XSD file you choose to use for generation of the sample XML.
Set content options and pay special attention to optional attributes & optional elements. Check those if you would like a complete XML sample.
Name-space information is populated with name-spaces defined in chosen XSD file. You can manipulate the existing name-space information by changing prefix, adding additional name-space or create new name-space.
Once you are satisfied click Finish.

And presto you have your blank sample XML. Edit it with the information you wish to present and your sample XML is ready. No XMLSpy or any other commercial tools required.

10 reasons why Lena won 2010 Eurovision Song contest

RRunner — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:11:39 +0000

I usually don’t do this, but here goes:

She did everything for “him” or maybe “her”?
Satellites should be slim, so they are commercially acceptable for launch.
Her Englisch is purrfect.
Swaying of the background vocals.
Dramatic stop at about 2:15 of the song allowing listener to think about the lyrics.
Geeks had 3 reasons to get hooked … left, right and … no no … physics, orbit and satellite.
Maybelline sponsored televoting with free promotional gifts?
Prepaid phones are available at reasonable price.
Men actually voted!
Its not about the voice but about spirit and presentation.