SteveStreeting.com

I’m busy, again. A ton of things just bunched up towards the end of the month, and I’m on-site with a customer in Cambridge some of next week, so I’m keeping my head down a little right now. Here’s a news-blast though.

I love Ubuntu server

I’ve been setting up my new server. I’ve probably said this before, but for servers, Linux rocks. I’m ambivalent about Linux on the desktop, where I believe consistency and usability are more important (the Mac floats my boat the most there, and Windows if only because of MSVC++), but for a server Linux really brings great things to the table. Rock solid server apps, ridiculously good performance for the hardware (a mere Intel Atom 330, goes like a greased whippet), easy and most importantly infrequent maintenance. When it comes to distros, I loved Debian for its sensible defaults and great package management, but Ubuntu server takes that and makes it even better.  The added bonus of a LTS version that I know will be supported with security updates until at least 2013 is welcome too, because I like to set these things up and mostly forget about them.

I’m glad Ubuntu’s default mail/IMAP servers are Postfix and Dovecot respectively - they’re just ridiculously easy to set up. I’d been using Exim4 on my Debian box, which was the default at the time, and learned to dislike it because of the over-complex configuration (I’d been used to Postfix when I ran a Gentoo server before that). I’m also planning on trying out Bacula as a replacement for my manual backup scripts this time around.

PSUs hate me

One of my jobs this week was building a machine around some customer hardware which I was testing an abberation on. Having built it, I realised I didn’t have a spare PSU rated highly enough, so I ‘borrowed’ one out of another GPU test machine I had. It ran all day, then decided to die - this just 2 weeks since my server’s PSU died and needed to be replaced. It’s just bad luck - my decent APC UPS should be providing ample power regulation. So, I’ve ordered 2 new PSUs to make sure I have enough stocked in future!

Excitement is infectious

I was happy to show off some shots of my new & improved core terrain system for Ogre, which isn’t entirely done yet but was usable enough to get some nice shots out of. I knew I had to move on to some other work for a while but I was still pleased to be able to show off some initial eye candy (which BTW, is still very early - I haven’t finished yet by any means). I was glad to get some positive & constructive feedback, but of course now people are rushing off an including it in their projects, since all the code is public in svn. Despite my slapping a big red warning sticker on it saying ‘handle with care - volatile material’  and that they shouldn’t assume it works properly yet, people are hacking on it already, with some nice results I have to say (such as Ogitor integration) - but of course with many questions and issues. Such is the nature of open source - it’s a blessing that you get instant, voluminous feedback, and it’s a curse that you get instant, voluminous feedback I hope to get more time to deal with the fallout from that if not next week (because of my travels), then the week after.

The OGRE Patch Mountain

Our community is always active, and it’s great to get patches. I do have a quite high validation standard for the core though, and processing patches can often take a fair bit of time. I try to spend a few hours per week doing this, but mostly that’s only just enough to keep the level static, rather than reducing the backlog, and it still spikes up sometimes (as it has this week) - that’s because even if I get an afternoon on it, to review and test things properly can eat that up very fast.

If there are any experienced members of the Ogre community who would like to assist me with keeping the patch mountain down to a small hillock in future, and are willing to adhere to our high standards of review, please contact me at sinbad AT ogre3d DOT org.

iPhone 3G / 3GS port coming soon

We’ve had a fledgeling GLES rendersystem around for a while, and obviously the iPhone / iPod touch are the highest-profile targets of that. I’d been intending to have a go at it later in the summer, but masterfalcon on the forums has beaten me to it and already has it running (with a few small issues remaining to be ironed out) on the 3G and 3GS. There should be a public release of that in the relatively near future.

3D Web Browsing With OGRE

I love this video. Nice work princeofcode (aka ajs15822)

That’ll do for now I think.

I just  assembled a new server machine, which in the end I chose to house in a shiny aluminium Thermaltake Lanbox, which is relatively compact but still roomy enough for two hard drives, a bog-standard power supply, and plenty of airflow, which is what I wanted. I also knew that the fans on this case were nice and quiet (I have a black steel version as a GPU test box, I wanted a lighter version this time!), which is important for a machine that will be on all the time.

As I said in my previous posts, I was determined not to put an optical drive in this machine. It really doesn’t need one, since all the system software will be downloaded anyway - the only possible use for an optical drive would be to boot the machine in the first instance, and that seemed a total waste. I know DVD drives are cheap, but why clutter up the box with one just for the rare occasion when I need to manually boot? The same goes for floppy drives, which are such dinosaurs I can’t believe some new machines still come with one present - the only possible use for a floppy drive these days is to provide a slot that you don’t mind a toddler feeding jam sandwiches into.

No, instead I wanted to boot from a USB flash drive. I’d never done this before, so I scouted around for the best ways to do it. Syslinux came up pretty quickly as the primary contender, but being lazy I hunted around a bit longer to see if anyone had a simpler way than configuring Syslinux manually. That’s when I came across UNetbootin.

What a fantastic little project! It took literally 5 minutes from downloading, to creating a bootable USB disk with the distribution of my choice on it (UNetbootin will download your chosen distribution automatically - or you can supply an ISO of your choice if you want), to booting up the new machine. I couldn’t believe just how simple it was! I chose to put Ubuntu 8.04 Netinstall on the disk, which clocks in at a tiny 9Mb because it’s just enough to boot up the installer to start downloading the real packages direct, but if you want, and you have a big enough USB stick, you can a complete distro on there too. But this way, I can use a crappy old USB stick I have lying around as my boot device.

A great little tool anyway. I love it when things are easier than you expect.

Oh, this is so ripe for satire I really can’t believe Microsoft didn’t see it coming. Or, perhaps they did and just ran with it anyway, for funsies. It appears Microsoft’s Australian website is encouraging people to switch to IE8 by offering an online treasure hunt, where a series of clues will lead you to a site identifying the location of the $10k (AU$ presumably), which can only be viewed with IE8. They gleefully point out:

“But you’ll never find it with old Firefox. So get rid of it, or get lost.”

So, let’s stack up the issues here:

• Microsoft has resorted to offering a monetary incentive to encourage people to use its free browser. Is that an admission that based on just the merits of the product itself, IE8 probably wouldn’t be the user’s first choice? I’d guess that people who actually choose their browser (rather than accepting what they get preinstalled) are not that likely to pick IE8.
• ‘old’ Firefox? Last I checked, IE predated Firefox by some years, and the latter has a new version coming out in mere weeks. Resorting to empty name-calling now? Dear me.
• Websites that only work in IE? Wow, welcome back to 1999 guys. ActiveX, Outlook Express bindings - ah, the memories. The horrible, eye-watering memories.

A Mozilla dev has already fired back a response, but really I don’t think it needed one. I think the fact that this promotion exists at all, and the tone which it takes, speaks volumes about how much the browser landscape has changed in recent years.

I’ve harped on many times about how I think centrally controlled services like Facebook are the antithesis of what the Internet was supposed to be about - a distributed, decentralised place with authority controlled at the leaves by those with most interest in maintaining it, rather than some corporate hub holding all the cards.

Well, it seems like a small bunch of companies are starting to latch on to this idea too, a welcome respite from the huge number of ventures that just want to be the new singular nexus of your internet life. Google Wave certainly ‘gets it’, if the reality reflects the stated vision where the open-source software can be run anywhere, not just on Google’s servers. And Opera Unite is making the right kind of noises for me too, even if right now the service is embryonic.

In essence, it’s a semantically richer, more secure version of BitTorrent - the ability to share files, photos and media within interfaces dedicated to that purpose, serve web pages, and chat, but by making direct connections with your peers rather than going through a centralised hosting service. Opera Unite provides the software to perform the hosting from your own devices, and provides the discovery and network trust systems to allow people to hook up.

There are lots of issues with this approach of course - such as whether you trust the hosting software not to punch holes in your local security, whether you really want to have the bandwidth issues of self-hosting, what happens when your machine is off, etc. Right now, I don’t think it’s that workable as a replacement for centralised systems, but that’s not the point - the point is that the principle of entrusting all your unencrypted data to a single online entity is eventually not going to be good enough anymore, and we need to be developing alternative approaches. If the future is truly in the cloud, we need far more than what the cloud offers right now - which is to say services that while user-friendly, require you to give up far more control over your data than is feasible for anything remotely important. Sure, you’re happy to put photos on Facebook, and Twitter about all those things that you don’t mind the world knowing, but that’s a very specific, non-critical subset of the data we all increasingly need to hold. Would you be happy to scan your bank statements and put them on Facebook, even if you set them to private? Of course not - but if the cloud is to realise its potential, these are the kinds of harder applications we need to try to address.

I’m not saying Opera Unite addresses that - not even close. But the fact that people are exploring alternative approaches to the 100% centralised model is a positive sign to me. We need to start tackling how we use entirely public transport & repository systems (ie the cloud) to securely store and exchange important and sensitive data, and I say that’s impossible to address with an entirely centralisd model, because a centralised model focusses control in too few hands. Encryption gives us the ability to store and transport secure information in plain sight, but it’s traditionally a very tricky thing to make easy to use for the general public, particularly when multiple parties and ‘controlled’ sharing is required. Thus, one approach is to focus on securing the transport instead (which is easier, and why SSL is ubiquitous) and lock down access to the leaves more tightly. Opera Unite is an experiment in the leaf model and may well inform the process, leading to more innovation in this area down the road.

Bah. I’ve used svnmerge for ages to meet my Subversion merging needs, but a change around property management in Subversion 1.6 makes it no longer work anymore.

Yes, I know Subversion has had its own merging features since 1.5, but I still use svnmerge because it works well, it generates me detailed merge commit messages, and it doesn’t require me to upgrade all my repositories to use it. Sourceforge was on Subversion 1.3 for ages so this was very useful, but even now they’re on 1.5 it’s a PITA to upgrade your repository, because you have to re-upload the whole thing to do it (I already have a local rsync copy anyway, but you have to locally upgrade it and re-upload). Obviously this is not the kind of thing you want to be doing when development is going on, and especially not when you have Summer of Code students getting on with things.

The answer for me was to downgrade back to Subversion 1.5 because that still works both ways. I’ll maybe start using Subversion’s in-built merging once I’m confident it’s no longer less functional than svnmerge, and when/if I can find a suitable window to take the repository offline for everyone for a few hours. Right now, it’s just not worth the hassle.

[edit]Aha - an alternative is to use this patch to svnmerge to make it work with svn 1.6’s altered error reporting behaviour when deleting a property. For some reason the svn 1.6.2 official Windows distribution didn’t seem to have this in the contrib folder.

Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire hit BBC2 last night, having been previously aired in the US via Comedy Central (this was a joint BBC and CC production). As a spoof of a fantasy genre, it was pretty much required watching by yours truly, being as I am torn between indulging my inherent sci-fi/fantasy geekdom, and being cynical about the general derivativeness of most of the genre.

It was a strange beast - a real melting pot of some genuinely funny moments mixed in with some predictable gags; occasional comic gems mixed with a smattering of naff, crude humour. I can see why many of the critical reviewers hated it, but I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed it. I can happily ignore the duff bits, because the good bits were fun, and the subject matter is right down my alley - how often do you actually get to enjoy a spoof fantasy story written deliberately for comedy effect (rather than being accidentally hilarious, which is sometimes good too)? Ok, so this wasn’t exactly The Princess Bride, but at times it was channelling elements of it, even if it was erratically.

The stars of the show were Sean Maguire (Krod), as the delightfully insecure hero, and Matt Lucas (Dongalore) as a public-school educated, fantasy version of Dr Evil. Lucas was the more consistent, being almost 100% funny for his entire screen time; even though I’m personally not much of a Little Britain fan, I think he was very good in this. Maguire definitely had his moments though as a post-modern male hero.

I’ll definitely be watching the next episode: if you’re willing to not be too critical about the weaker parts and just want some fantasy-oriented laughs, it’s on Thursdays at 9pm, BBC2.

Ok, so I’ve been doing a bit of looking around for my new server builds. As I’ve thought about this, I’ve firmed up my requirements to the following:

• Low-power, low-noise
• 2 x 3.5″ SATA2 hard drive bays (hot plug not required, I’m just going to use Linux’s built-in RAID1 again)
• All standard, replaceable components - no custom PSUs especially
• Small form factor (as much as possible given the other requirements)
• Cost-effective
• Performance almost irrelevant

The things I have decided on:

• CPU / Motherboard: Intel Atom 330 on D945GCLF2 motherboard. The Atom’s power usage is great (8W idle), the 945G chipset is not so great (25W!) but as a combo they’re still pretty damn good, and not expensive. VIA do the only other alternatives but I’ve had some issues with VIA in the past.
• HDD: 2 x Western Digital Caviar Greens, because they’re low-power and run cool
• 1GB miscellaneous RAM
• No optical or floppy drives, I don’t need them (boot from USB flash drive, OS and other software will be directly downloaded)

The main problem I have now is finding a case. It has to be relatively small, and preferably stackable so I can put two of them on top of each other. Most of the Mini-ITX cases have 2 problems: they either don’t take 2 HDDs, or they use a custom PSU (or both) - I’ve been burned with having a custom PSU on a Mini-ITX machine that failed before, with no replacement available, and have no intention of going down that route again; everything has to be stock, so I can whip it out and replace it easily even if the case model has been discontinued.

Some cases come with an external ‘power brick’ PSU which in itself is pretty standardised (60/80/120W usually), but I remain concerned about the DC circuitry that the brick connects to in the case; if that fails it could be a pain. At least a standard PSU is replaceable in its entirety very easily. And plus, those cases that externalise the PSU tend to be too small to take 2 HDs anyway - all except the Chenbro ES34069 but it’s stupidly expensive.If anyone knows of any others, and has experience of the resilience of external DC power systems, please let me know.

So in the absence of a better option, I’m leaning towards a standard ‘cube’ case like the ThermalTake Lanbox - I have one of these already for a test machine and it’s good, if a little heavier and larger than I actually need (and even the lowest power standard PSU will be overkill, even if I go for an 80 plus certified one). If I was a case designer, I’d take this case, slice about 4 inches off the side and a little off the top, and I’d have precisely what I want - a stackable compact mini-ITX box which uses all standard components and can fit 2 HDDs comfortably. Is that so much to ask?

I bitch about Windows on occasion, but I have to give it credit for System Restore, which saved my ass today.

Some Cisco VPN software which I was trying to install to help a client completely f*cked all my network access on my primary workstation, effectively rendering it useless. Not only that, but it refused to uninstall (hang), or disable (hang) in any way, even from safe mode, and appeared to install no useful tools or documentation with which to diagnose said problems, while disabling all other useful diagnostics (ipconfig returned nothing, device manager claimed both Cisco and regular network devices were fine, all other configuration tools just hang). After much swearing & experimentation I remembered System Restore, which I’d never had cause to use before, since I’ve never got myself into such a dead end before, but which worked like a charm.

I’ve used Window’s own VPN connections before and they’ve been fine. Cisco though, what a PITA - I’ll definitely think twice about trying to use that again. That combined with my server’s PSU mucking about today has not made this one of the most stress-free days. I guess it’s karma for having a good day yesterday.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to get my local server situation sorted out - I’m still running an old version of Debian on my primary server, which works fine but really needs swapping for Ubuntu LTS now, and in addition, the hardware is getting long in the tooth.  It’s still running on an ancient discarded home PC, an Athlon 1Ghz with 512Mb RAM and software RAID1 disks - and runs all my office functions (mail, web, test environs, backups, data sync, databases, you name it) beautifully with that. Linux is just so good at doing more with less on the server that I’ve allowed it to languish on this hardware for probably a little too long - it’s noisy and sucks way too much power for what it’s actually doing.

I’ve been meaning to do something about it, but today the PSU on the machine decided to ‘take a break’ which was a bit annoying. It came back up again after a complete hard reset (disconnecting the power), but that’s given me a kick up the arse to get it sorted out. Everything is replicated daily, so it wouldn’t be a disaster if I lost it, but even so it would be a PITA to have to deal with.

So, I’m in the market for new server hardware. Not rack mountable, and preferably small, quiet and low-power. Since that inherently means that I’m looking at a custom enclosure, I’ll probably need two of them to provide redundancy, since beyond disks they won’t be self-repairable. I already have a home media / backup server which is pretty nice, a QNAP TS-209, but that isn’t appropriate for my main business needs, since the OS is in the firmware and so not flexible enough for installing new packages etc.

I’m liking the look of the Tranquil PC BBS2 - hardware RAID (hot-plug SATA2), Intel Atom 330, low power consumption (57W with 4 drives), reports of running Ubuntu on it seem positive. They do a pre-packaged version of it with Windows Home Server on it too, but that costs about £100 more (once you’ve deducted the cost of the HD they bundle with it), and in any case WHS doesn’t really do what I need (I need to replicate my public server environments which are already Linux, and I have access to more free software with Ubuntu anyway).

Anyone know of any alternatives, or have opinions about Tranquil PC? As I say, the downside of custom enclosures is that non-HDD failures require a manufacturer return to fix, so I’d have to factor resilience issues in, but I really want to be a bit greener / quieter with my servers in future

[edit]Ok, the BBS2 isn’t looking quite so attractive given that the RAID controller is not a real hardware RAID controller at all, it’s one of these semi-software BIOS jobs which are not very well supported in Linux, and aren’t much of a step up from software RAID anyway. I could still get one, use software RAID and just not hot-plug I guess. But, seems a bit of a waste.

I’ve just pulled out & replaced the PSU in my existing server because it died again. Here’s hoping it stays up until I can replace it! The fact that I can do that makes me think twice again - maybe I can just build a power-efficient machine instead, and keep the fixability…

I can’t remember who made the assertion / joke that if you looked through an infinitely powerful telescope you’d end up seeing the back of of your own head, but I was reminded of that by a certain event today. In the last couple of years I’ve often Googled for a particular subject and ended up with the top hits pointing me back at one of my own posts in the OGRE Forum or on my blog, in a weird self-citing manner. In the worst cases, these posts answer or clarify my own current question, because a thought process I’d had a few years before, and then forgotten about, can often be useful. It’s like having a stack of your old notebooks in the cloud! Or an archived clone of yourself pointing out how age is making you stupid.

The other weird experience is when you download or otherwise get hold of a piece of software, and unexpectedly find that it uses your own code. I’m sure this is common in open source circles, because users of open source don’t have to tell you when they use your code, but nevertheless it’s still an odd experience. It’s especially nice when you like that piece of software - this happened to me today with PixPlant 2.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was reviewing tools for normal/displacement/specular map generation from reference sources, and I’d been evaluating CrazyBump and ShaderMap Pro. Evak in the OGRE Forums suggested I try PixPlant2 because he liked it. So I did, and I was impressed - the texture generation seemed as good as CrazyBump, but it’s cheaper ($175 rather than $299), and it also includes tools for creating tileable textures from original sources, detecting repeating patterns, straightening things, and blending the edges for you.

So, I was already leaning towards this purchasing PixPlant2, but then as I was browsing for textures, I noticed that the PixPlant2 application folder had some familiar files in it - such as OgreMain.dll, and rather familiar material files in the media folders! Checking the docs, sure enough OGRE was credited as a dependency. The application I ended up gravitating towards included software that I wrote!

To cap it all off, they’ve been very nice and offered me a free copy, so my normal map generation needs are entirely satisfied, for far less than I was expecting to pay. It’s not often things work out quite so well!