MPEG-2 rendering artifacts in Bunnings Warehouse ads

31 January 2010

The past week I’ve been watching the Australian Open. It’s been really awesome to watch, and that’s coming from someone who is normally bored stiff of just about any form of sport.

But one thing struck me over and over again: the Bunnings ads had horrible MPEG rendering artifacts at the end of each one. At first I thought it was due to poor reception, but this weekend we completely re-wired our house’s coax connections with quad-shielded cabling to our TV antenna and bought a new masthead amplifier, which greatly increased our signal quality.

(And no, we didn’t replace it just to watch the Bunnings ads.)

But this remained:

Bunnings ad with rendering artifacts

Yuck. That is definitely not signal loss — that’s crappy encoding. I can give people a (non-reencoded) AVI file of the original if they want proof.

I think it’s mainly a result of the fact that the ad is being rendered at 1080i with the outdated MPEG-2 codec. We desperately need an upgrade to H.264, or even better, Dirac.

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Source IP weirdities with irssi and IPv6

28 January 2010

I’m having a weird problem with irssi and IPv6. The long and the short of it is that irssi is trying to connect to an IRC server on the Internet with a source IP address of ::1, which is incorrect, as ::1 is the loopback address.

My server, glenstorm, is the IPv6 router, which contains the ppp0 interface that connects it to the IPv6 Internet. I am also running irssi on the same machine. It’s a router, so /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding is 1.

So, basically, when I fire up irssi, and type “/connect irc.ipv6.freenode.net“, it hangs when connecting. And for good reason: here’s the (edited for clarity) tcpdump output:

IP6 ::1.34823 > 2001:19f0:feee::dead:beef:cafe.6667
IP6 ::1.34823 > 2001:19f0:feee::dead:beef:cafe.6667
IP6 ::1.34823 > 2001:19f0:feee::dead:beef:cafe.6667

So obviously that’s wrong. And in violation of RFC 4291, I might add (“The loopback address must not be used as the source address in IPv6 packets that are sent outside of a single node.”).

I can hack around it by typing “/connect -host 2001:44b8:7df3:b970::14 irc.ipv6.freenode.net” into irssi, which forces it to use the source IP that I specified. But that’s just a hack — I’d like to get to the bottom of what actually causes it.

Update: Finally solved this. It’s because in my irssi config, I had the following directive:

core = {
    real_name = "Jeremy Visser";
    user_name = "jeremy";
    nick = "jayvee_zzZZ";
    resolve_prefer_ipv6 = "yes";
    host = "glenstorm";
};

It was being told to use “glenstorm” as the “host”, which translates to “resolve the IP address of glenstorm and use that as the source IP address” (I think I misunderstood the meaning of the directive when I put that configuration flag in).

Of course, in /etc/hosts, I had the following entry:

::1 glenstorm

So, naturally, irssi decided to use ::1 as the source IP address. So removing the “host” line from the irssi config fixed the problem. While I’m sure that because of the aforementioned RFC, that shouldn’t have resulted in the subsequent symptoms, at the end of the day, it was simply Unix allowing me to shoot myself in the foot.

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Jazzed up URL bar in Google

17 November 2009

Today, I noticed while I was using Google today (which is a website some of you may of heard of), and I noticed they jazzed up where the URL is normally listed:

I don’t know whether to puke or have a seizure. I liked having the URL there. But then again, the URL is meaningless to 99% of users, because people like to put their head in the sand and create absolutely useless URLs. I’m looking at you, Dell and HP. And a whole lot more.

So yeah, probably a usability improvement. And you can click on the little segments. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s ’cause I’m a power user that looks at URLs. And if I really want to, I can always just hover over the link to get the URL anyway.

I wonder how it works. XML Sitemaps, maybe?

Update: Google has written about it. Looks like they analyse anything that looks like breadcrumbs. Too bad it’s not standardised, and they don’t actually tell you how to do it.

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SWF verification sucks

19 October 2009

Users of my Python-iView application may have noticed that when attempting to watch videos, they cut out after 8MB.

This is because the ABC have turned on “SWF verification”, which translates to “our incompetent head of IT who is a fan of Hello Kitty and also eats puppies decided we would enable this, similar to how passports and airport security actually keep out terrorists and criminals, and also explains why there is no crime in the world any more”.

Which also translates to “security by obscurity”, “papers please”, “fascism”, “коммунизм”, and “Miguel de Icaza”.

Because anybody watching videos from iView in anything other than the Flash-based web interface, e.g. on an underpowered Eee PC, an Xbox, or somebody offline, clearly shouldn’t be doing so. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out — even a manager could work that out.

This really sucks.

(And if you’re the type of manager that actually likes to fix problems and get things done — I know, bowls me over too — then disable SWF verification. It’s, like, a checkbox fix.)

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How to fix menu icons in GNOME 2.28

23 September 2009

For some reason, the folks at GNOME (the “usability” team) decided to turn off icons in menus. Not only does it make them look ugly as hell, but it is nigh on impossible to navigate menus visually.

I am a very visually-oriented person, so this makes GNOME very difficult to use. I find myself constantly selecting the wrong items, even though removing the icons doesn’t actually change their position.

But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the “usability” team has taken the KDE approach to the problem. Rather than setting an obvious and sane default (i.e. enable icons in menus), there is a checkbox to enable the icons again. Brilliant! (not)

So you can go to System → Preferences (the first item in the menu, in case you prefer to navigate visually with icons like me) → Appearance (the second item in the menu), and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus” to get the menu icons back, which gives temporary relief.

Enable menu icons illustration

Like many GNOME features, this one is only partly implemented. GNOME’s new ‘feature’ also removes stock icons from buttons, and the above option does not put them back (well, seeing as though it is captioned “Show icons in menus” I don’t see why it would, but if you’re going to take the KDE approach, you may as well go the whole hog and add another option still).

At first, I thought this was a bug in Ubuntu Karmic (I am running the alpha on my desktop right now). While there’s nothing like being able to have the suspense of not knowing whether your computer will boot up in the morning, I thought this was preposterous. After I found out it was an intentional change (167 KB PDF), it now seems that it’s plain baloney.

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