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query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (0, 'php', '<em>Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/twindx/www/includes/database.mysql.inc:167)</em> in <em>/home/twindx/www/includes/common.inc</em> on line <em>141</em>.', 2, '', 'http://www.twindx.com/node/feed', '', '38.107.191.82', 1268303391) in /home/twindx/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 167
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query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (0, 'php', '<em>Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/twindx/www/includes/database.mysql.inc:167)</em> in <em>/home/twindx/www/includes/common.inc</em> on line <em>141</em>.', 2, '', 'http://www.twindx.com/node/feed', '', '38.107.191.82', 1268303391) in /home/twindx/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 167 Irregular Shed - Two words, five syllables.
http://www.twindx.com
The personal website of Steve Anderson, known to some as Irregular Shed due to an hilarious mix-up at the printers. The website contains the ramblings of a fiercely liberal geek dad, with occasional actual useful information lurking in the shadows.enThis site is now mothballed
http://www.twindx.com/node/284
<p>For the time being, head <a href="http://blogger.twindx.co.uk">here</a> for the bloggy goodness. This site will have its posts archived and then will fall into line with <a href="http://www.twindx.co.uk">TwinDX.co.uk</a>, and the two domains will be married up.</p>
<p>Comments are now disabled on this site - most of them of late have been spam so no big issue there!</p>
http://www.twindx.com/node/284#commentsMon, 18 Aug 2008 08:49:14 -0400Irregular Shed284 at http://www.twindx.comMAME in Flash
http://www.twindx.com/node/283
<p>Get the hell out of here. A Korean <em>wunderkind</em> has gone and <a href="http://yvern.com/blog/?p=5" target="_blank">ported MAME to Flash</a>. You can see the results of this most unholy of marriages <a href="http://yvern.com/fMAME/fMAME.html" target="_blank">here</a>. My keyboard's going to get pummelled from <a href="http://www.mameworld.net/maws/set/hyperspt" target="_blank">Hyper Sports</a>!</p>
<p>As one of the commenters pointed out, it was only a matter of time. Adobe showed off what their C++ compiler for Flash could do when they <a href="http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-max-chicago-sneak-peeks/" target="_blank">unveiled Quake playing on it</a>, and it would seem pretty much anything open source could be up for compiling to a Flash virtual machine with pretty good performance!</p>
<p>In other news, this will probably be my last post to the blog in this format. I've been playing with Google Apps and <a href="http://blog.twindx.co.uk/" target="_blank">Swurl</a> and think I'm going to go to a site knitted out of other people's online tools so I don't have to worry about security so much… Wish me luck! <em>(Good luck! – A Reader)</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/283">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/283#commentsTue, 05 Aug 2008 12:36:51 -0400Irregular Shed283 at http://www.twindx.comMost absolutely completely awesome thing ever made ever, ever.
http://www.twindx.com/node/282
<p>Radiohead's "Nude" being played by a Spectrum, dot matrix printer, flat bed scanner and a collection of hard drives acting as the tinniest speakers in existence.</p>
<p><object width="425" height="344"><br />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pmfHHLfbjNQ&hl=en"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pmfHHLfbjNQ&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></p>
<p>Everybody give up, the internet has been won.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/282">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/282#commentsFri, 06 Jun 2008 05:16:52 -0400Irregular Shed282 at http://www.twindx.comReal life Tomb Raider level
http://www.twindx.com/node/281
<p>Yeah, I could do this, provided I was Lara Croft.</p>
<p><embed name="bcPlayer" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" src="http://www.brightcove.tv/playerswf" width="486" height="412" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="initVideoId=1438490562&servicesURL=http://www.brightcove.tv&viewerSecureGatewayURL=https://www.brightcove.tv&cdnURL=http://admin.brightcove.com&autoStart=false" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" seamlesstabbing="false" swliveconnect="true" /></p>
<p>Frankly that's nuts. Walking it in the first place is bananas, but then to waste one hand by holding onto a camera instead of dear life is nuts on top.</p>
http://www.twindx.com/node/281#commentsWed, 28 May 2008 05:20:59 -0400Irregular Shed281 at http://www.twindx.comPracticing Welsh
http://www.twindx.com/node/280
<p>Noswaith dda, Eddie Murphy dw i. Dw i'n hoffi <em>transsexual prostitutes</em>, ond dw i ddim yn hoffi <em>child support payments</em>.</p>
<p>(Three of us non-Welsh speakers in the office are getting lessons, the first of which was today. We have to practice. Hurrah!)</p>
http://www.twindx.com/node/280#commentsMon, 19 May 2008 10:01:54 -0400Irregular Shed280 at http://www.twindx.comBlogging from inside a virtual XP machine. w00t.
http://www.twindx.com/node/279
<p>As threatened in my previous post, I've now got a virtual Windows XP machine for my Eee. I've created a virtual disk image on the SDHC card I was trying to install XP onto natively, and it runs from within innotek's (now Sun's) utterly excellent <a href="http://virtualbox.org/" target="_blank">VirtualBox</a>.</p>
<p>Because I've got two big fat monitors on my work PC, I actually set up the disk image on that rather than squint at the little Eee screen. XP installed in a virtual machine on XP - bananas. Anyway, the upside of this is that I can now use Windows Live Writer on the Eee, and I am now happy. If only there was something comparable that Ubuntu could run without me having to dedicate a chunk of SDHC space and system resources to emulation of a whole 'nother OS... hey ho.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE!</strong> This is how it looks when I use it. I'm running it like this right now, and it's bloody impressive...</p>
<p><a title="Linux Live Writer" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30787616@N00/2495146167/"><font color="#000000"></font><img alt="Linux Live Writer" src="http://static.flickr.com/3049/2495146167_c2429276eb.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>
<p>As you can see, the Windows window forms an integral part of the Linux desktop. It's good!</p>
<p>(Casual readers - I make no apologies to the geeky nature of this post. I'm too chuffed that it all works after the problems before!)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/279">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/279#commentsThu, 15 May 2008 15:54:05 -0400Irregular Shed279 at http://www.twindx.comXP on an Asus Eee's SD card: Epic Fail
http://www.twindx.com/node/278
<p>For the past couple of weeks I've been battling to install Windows XP to an 8Gb SDHC card on my Eee. I've just given up - I've rebooted so many times and dabbled with so many dark arts in the process and it still doesn't work, so... fsck it.</p>
<p>I only wanted it for two things; <a href="http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/" target="_blank">Windows Live Writer</a>, the king of all blog editors (seriously, this is something Linux lacks - there just isn't anything that can hold a light to WLW), and Grand Theft Auto 3 (which <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ9N4p_pdmY" target="_blank">looks great</a> on the dinky screen). I had a spare license I could use to install it and be legal and, seeing as I was planning on installing <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/" target="_blank">Ubuntu</a> on it soon and that XP hoses the contents of the hard drive, I could do the XP thing before getting a proper operating system.</p>
<p>I'm hardly a novice, so things like this should be easy, I thought. Wrong at the first count - XP isn't designed to install onto SDHC cards, so there's a whole load of hacking that has to be done from the outset. Once it's on your Eee, there's some more hacking to be done to make the SDHC card look like a regular hard drive, and then you have to somehow persuade it to leap from the internal drive to the card, and then convince it to boot from it, and it's these last two parts that really push your patience - not least because you have to do all this with the fault-intolerant FAT32 file system (for non-techies, this is the equivalent of a 1960s Yale latch compared to modern door locks) and the whole process is laden with spanner-in-the-works opportunities.</p>
<p>The latest spanner (a carbon-fibre adjustable wrench, fact-fans) in the latest works (taking an image of the internal drive and dumping it onto the SDHC card) is the final straw. I've had enough. Microsoft can extend their XP support for ultra-mobiles for as long as they like, it ain't happening until it works the way I want it. (Speaking of the XP support, they've <a href="http://www.macworld.co.uk/business/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=21271" target="_blank">added so many caveats</a> that it looks like they're insisting on killing the golden goose so that its younger, uglier and less popular sibling gets a whisper of a hint of a chance. Fools.)</p>
<p>So, it's over. My plan to have an XP card are dashed; life is just too damned short. Now to try and install Ubuntu via USB flash drive...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/278">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/278#commentsMon, 12 May 2008 09:59:25 -0400Irregular Shed278 at http://www.twindx.comMaking a network appliance
http://www.twindx.com/node/277
<p>So, I've been neglecting this blog again. It's what I do - a flurry of activity followed by weeks of indifference. But spurred on by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/twindx/2423374373/#comment72157604622212034" target="_blank">a comment from Pip</a>, I've got something I should show off.</p>
<p><a title="Reduce, reuse, recycle" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30787616@N00/2423374373/"><img alt="Reduce, reuse, recycle" hspace="0" src="http://static.flickr.com/3193/2423374373_32a04bfbb6.jpg" border="0"></a></p>
<p>This here is my new network appliance. It's a <a href="http://www-uk.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=UK%2FLayout&cid=1123521947038&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=4703861806B02" target="_blank">Linksys NSLU2</a> (aka a Linksys Slug) with a pair of hard drives in an old DVD Recorder case. The Slug, bottom right, is a tiny Linux box that is used to put USB devices on a network, and being Linux-based it's absurdly hackable. I've got it hooked up to two hard drives via generic USB-to-IDE adaptors, <a href="http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=ide+usb+adaptor" target="_blank">picked up off eBay</a> for about £8 each. These are the sort of thing that every self-respecting geek should have knocking about the place because they're incredibly useful for hooking up drives to PCs for data recovery and things like that - and they're so cheap you can afford to have one in a drawer, just in case.</p>
<p>On the bottom left side are the two power supplies that came with the USB-to-IDE adaptors. They take 240V from a kettle-lead and output 5V and 12V on a Molex connector, and plug straight into hard drives or optical drives. Originally I'd planned on using the original PSU from the DVD recorder to run everything but I realised that the peak power consumption could be a little higher than what it was rated for, so I had to get creative to get everything running from a single mains lead. In the end I made a little distribution box from terminal blocks and ran mains cables to the drive PSUs and to the crazy adaptor visible at the top right - to run 240V into the Slug's "wall wart" adaptor I hacked open an old three-way adaptor and reworked it to become a low-profile UK mains socket.</p>
<p>Incredibly, it all works! It runs a little hot at the moment though, because I've not managed to get the drives to spin down when not in use - I need to do a little hacking to get that fixed. I've kept the original fan in the case so that I can get some extra airflow in there as well - I'll just tap 12V from one of the drive PSUs.</p>
<p><a title="Slug up and running." href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30787616@N00/2423374377/"><font color="#000000"></font><img alt="Slug up and running." hspace="0" src="http://static.flickr.com/2109/2423374377_ca2111d805.jpg" border="0"></a></p>
<p>Here it is, running quietly in the corner of the living room in its small, recycled case. It looks like a DVD Player - amazing!</p>
<p>What next? Expansion. I've got a 4-port USB hub in there as well, so I can run three more USB sockets to the back of the case, and getting the drives to sleep is top of the agenda.</p>
<p>So there you go, Pip!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/277">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/277#commentsMon, 21 Apr 2008 17:42:39 -0400Irregular Shed277 at http://www.twindx.comHacking BBC iPlayer; How the BBC secretly went DRM-free and I saw the Emperor's New Clothes
http://www.twindx.com/node/276
<p>Last Friday, the BBC <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7283702.stm" target="_blank">quietly rolled out</a> a version of their much-criticised (and rightly too!) iPlayer to support Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. What they didn't want people to know is that, because the Apple devices brilliantly <a href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/03/05/no_flash_on_the_iphone_says_jobs.html" target="_blank">lack Adobe Flash support</a>, their hand was forced into delivering an MPEG4 stream. More than that, because they haven't licensed Apple's DRM (after all, they've spent a fortune on that Microsoft tat), they're delivering streams to small Apple devices with no DRM restrictions.</p>
<p>As soon as I heard about the iPhone support, I knew it had to be handled in a manner different to the streaming Flash. The Flash streams are handled by a proprietary Adobe protocol called RTMP (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol" target="_blank">Real-Time Messaging Protocol</a>, although I like the idea of it being Read The Motherflippin' Pamphlet) which is a headache to try and get data from in anything other than Flash. It's possible, as <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pip/2111249286/" target="_blank">Pip found out</a>, but not with free software (at least as far as our experiments concluded). So other means were being used. I set Firefox up to pretend to be an iPhone and headed to the BBC iPlayer site.</p>
<p>After wading through various scripts, I discovered something quite splendid - MPEG4 files were being distributed over HTTP, and after snagging one, it was truly DRM free. I did what anybody in my position would do - I put a screenshot up on Flickr, and showed Pip my handiwork.</p>
<p><a title="Faked iPhone BBC iPlayer" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30787616@N00/2316284105/"><img alt="Faked iPhone BBC iPlayer" src="http://static.flickr.com/2009/2316284105_a1bb0b9871.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>
<p>Then the news spread and the traffic started, helped mostly by legendary copyfighter <a href="http://craphound.com/" target="_blank">Cory Doctorow</a> making a big deal about it over at <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/08/bbc-drops-drm-from-i.html" target="_blank">BoingBoing</a>. My investigative ham-fisted hackings inspired a bunch of other people to write scripts to pull the MPEG4 files from the servers, whilst other people found the same thing at roughly the same time and started making the most of it.</p>
<p>All in all, 7th March 2008 should be remembered as the day the BBC accidentally opened the flood gates and gave the world DRM-free downloads. If only it were down to something other than poor-design, decisions and ineptitude by the department running the project - the department that pissed millions up the wall and spent many months making a <a href="http://blog.ipdev.net/2007/08/iplayer-technology-review.html" target="_blank">dire Windows-only DRMed offering</a> that has been largely ignored since the leaner streaming Flash afterthought was added to attempt to appease the techie populous.</p>
<p>Anyway, a quick review of the MPEG4 files - they're pretty good. Not high def by any stretch of the imagination, but then the target platform is a handheld device. I've found the picture quality to be a bit better than the Flash stream (but with the advantage of being able to save them without black arts being involved), and better than some of the Windows downloads I saw when iPlayer was launched. Perfectly watchable, and brilliantly watchable on anything that can handle MPEG4 - so all the platforms that the BBC had been ignoring, hoping the grumbling would go away. I recoded <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/ashestoashes/" target="_blank">Ashes to Ashes</a> to fit my iPod because, being DRM-free and based on a published standard, it's possible to do this...</p>
<p><a title="BBC iPlayer for iPod" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30787616@N00/2323983465/"><img alt="BBC iPlayer for iPod" src="http://static.flickr.com/2055/2323983465_b646082a54.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>
<p>What will the BBC do next? Who can say. They have a few options, though. They could discontinue support for the iPhone and have expensive egg on their face. They could license <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay_%28DRM%29" target="_blank">FairPlay</a> from Apple, giving the streams DRM, and face questions from the board of governors and the government about why they're wasting licence-fee money on two different forms of DRM. They could carry on as it is, and hope that a tiny minority of people use it, or they can embrace the future and offer it up to all. I imagine the third option will be what they choose, but we can hope for the fourth.</p>
<p>Anyway, my favourite implementation of laying hands on MPEG4 files come <a href="http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/bbc-iplayer-mp4/" target="_blank">courtesy of Matthew Somerville</a>. It's awesome goodness. So awesome that I hacked together this Bookmarklet! Drag the following link up to your bookmarks, and then click it whenever you're on an iPlayer page and you'll be whisked off to Matthew's site where you can see what you can actually get hold of.</p>
<p align="center"><a href="javascript:URL=self.location.href;pid='';if (URL.indexOf('bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/')!=-1) pid=self.iplayer.pid;else if (URL.indexOf('bbc.co.uk/programmes/')!=-1) pid=self.aps_pid;else alert('Can\'t see a programme to process!');if (pid!='') self.location.href='http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/bbc-iplayer-mp4/?p='+pid;" target="_blank">iPlayer Downloader</a></p>
<p>And that, my friends, is what I did with my weekend.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/276">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/276#commentsTue, 11 Mar 2008 09:27:17 -0400Irregular Shed276 at http://www.twindx.comJack's alphabet
http://www.twindx.com/node/275
<p>Jack's speech is getting better and better. Here we are, doing the alphabet together, whilst finishing off changing a pooey nappy...</p>
<p><embed src="/utils/mp3player.swf" width="200" height="20" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="&file=/uploaded/alphabet.mp3&height=20&width=200" allowscriptaccess="always" /></p>
<p>... of note is that Jack knows the 'Q' comes after 'P'. Seriously, he's just turned two and he knows his alphabet better than some people who've been given filing to do.</p>
<p>(Starting with 'W' was just because I love the way he says it!)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twindx.com/node/275">read more</a></p>http://www.twindx.com/node/275#commentsMon, 18 Feb 2008 12:00:47 -0500Irregular Shed275 at http://www.twindx.com