umask and uid for discreet flame

confessions of a pixel pusher linux

Autodesk aka Discreet Flame Flint Inferno applications run under irix or linux. Which is great. Unfortunately it is a long standing practise of those people in montreal to seperate different versions of their application by giving them a different user. Of course that’s just plain wrong and stupid. But if you pay north of 40,000 US$ for a single software seat you stop making reasonable demands. Discreet / AutoDesk does this since more than 14 years, why should they stop?

A couple of simple commands can fix the biggest issues with this. The first one is that each install creates a new user id. The fix is to edit /etc/passwd and give the new user a common id (100 in this example). We assume it was 101 for the new install. Running the following command as root:


find /usr/discreet/NEWLYINSTALLEDVERSION -user 101 -exec chown 100 {} \;

will fix the permissions.

Another annoyance is that they set the umask in the .cshrc of each login. If you run a couple of versions side by side it’s pretty tedious to fix these flags manually. The following does so for all installed versions.

Under Linux you can use sed for this:


cd /usr/discreet
sed -i.bak.umask "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc

For Irix you would need to turn to perl:

cd /usr/discreet
perl -i.bak.umask -p -e "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc

This will make the umask wide open for the user running flame or one of the other Discreet products. Some people might like that everybody can now delete
and overwrite files. Others don’t.

germans and their money

economy politics

Germans don’t like to part from their money. On average each of them has 57.900 Euro (85,000 Dollars right now) in the bank or in stocks. Per person. Not per household. On average people in Germany spend 10% less than they make. That probably explains why S-Class Mercedes or Porsches are a rare sight here. They get made and sold to people that have the money (these days mostly found in countries with oil) or ones that pretend they have (hm, let me guess where that would be). Tragically much of those saved Euro’s were used to finance US mortages.

Right now the Iraq war seems to have cost 482 Billion US$.
So Germany could have paid for 14 of those. From it’s savings.

success and why it is nice

confessions of a pixel pusher interdubs politics technology

Interdubs had an awesome year in 2007. I had a certain expectation where the service should be by now. Development-wise and feature=wise I am behind. I want more features, and I want to write them now. But doing them right does always take more time than I think it would. And, my clients got what they essentially need months ago. Since then new features have been extra and on top of it.

Looking back at 2007 I particularly like the the fact that Interdubs could scale from a few beta clients to more than 20 customers. Many of them with very diverse needs. And all of them seemingly happy: Even though nobody is contractually obliged to continue their subscription each one renewed month by month. People some times wonder why Interdubs is so inexpensive. Specially compared to it’s feature set. I think it makes sense: Having the most awesome feature vs. price ratio means that I don’t have to spend much time to keep my clients happy otherwise. It also helps with marketing: If anybody interested in an online media solution should happen to talk about it to an existing interdubs user I will get a call. And when I get a call it becomes a sale. Sooner or later it does. Always.

2007 was also nice, since I had not to act on my 99.99% uptime or money back promise. By now it would be not so nice, if I can not charge anybody for a full month. Which is the whole point: I believe in Interdubs’ reliability enough to put my money where where my mouth is. Outages might happen in the future. Nothing is perfect. But by giving my clients their money back for a whole month, if Interdubs should be longer unavailable than for 5 minutes I there is at least a plan. If this should ever happen. The looming penalty of a month long ‘invoice outage’ makes it financially viable to upgrade the servers that Interdubs runs on. So that it does not happen in the first place. Or is at least less likely.

2007 I published 590 times code updates to Interdubs. That’s why I don’t like to call things “Versions”. Version 590? Sometimes I just moved a couple of links around, to make a frequently used choice easier to find. A couple of times I replaced or upgraded the entire engine that runs Interdubs. I might have gotten lucky, but at no point did I loose data during those updates. And only about 10 changes were so stupid, that my users demanded a change back or further alteration of what I did. Knowing that I will hear about things going in the wrong direction allows me to suggest things with great liberty. The same concept looks enabling from the other side as well: Interdubs users know that they will be listened to. Sometimes it takes only minutes between a suggestion and the actual feature / change showing up on the site. Actually a great deal of ideas and features that make Interdubs worthwhile are a result of this collaboration.

2007 was a very successful year for Interdubs, so I had to decide what to do for Holiday presents. I decided not to send any at all. Instead I asked my kids to pick a charity. They suggested “Doctors without Borders” which I liked as well. So instead of sending gift baskets around some people got vaccinations that they needed.

Being able to decide on these things what to do is one of the perks of running your own company. Today I found Charity Navigator and realised with great relief that only a very small percentage of the interdubs donation will go to the adminstration.

I am certainly looking forward to move Interdubs forward in 2008.

applescript to run a command on each file dropped on to it

Apple technology

These lines will run /path/command with a first parameter of the file name that got
dropped on the Apple Script app:


on open (ItemList)
repeat with thisItem in ItemList
do shell script "/path/command " & POSIX path of thisItem
end repeat
end open

Simple. And unintuitive. AppleScript would rule the world if it would have JavaScript syntax for instance. Instead apple idiots made “Automator”. What a silly piece of shit. Only fanboys spend time to learn a buggy and totally non portable interface like AppleScript or Automator. I could have bothered with Windows if I would want that. Oh, the script above fails to work when there are spaces in the name. Thanks AppleScript.

Happy New Year

misc

google gaming became a 24/7 operation

Apple’s market share continues to grow

the future is clear, if you are smart

history

Paleo Future is a blog that collects part predictions of the future. The usual flying cars and rocket belts. This interview with TA Edison is an execption to the rule. He got it all right. Probably because inventing much of those changes were what he did all his life.

Mr Edison contradicts the rule that knowledge dampens innovation.

airport security

history politics

Patrick Smith writes about the TSA and how we fight an attack that happened six years ago, that is over and could not be repeated.

music and technology

art confessions of a pixel pusher media technology

The Rolling Stone writes about audio technology and music and how things have changed in recent years.

Technology and Art influencing each other is a very interesting topic for me. This article touches on a couple of interesting points. Not more though. Without any respect for the matter it tries to discuss it merely assembles unrelated facts and sound bytes along one imaginary audio/digital axies. From production to consumption it bounces back and forth. Emitting half educated statements along the way.

A couple of articles, better researched would have been much better.

The bigger question is how I get my wife to approve the move of the Stereo from the attic into the living room.

power consumption of Game consoles

technology

Compared here are the power consumptions of the three current consoles Having graphics from a couple of years ago pays of big time for the Wii here. If all 13 million sold Wii’s would be running they save roughly the power that Hoover Dam in Nevada generates. If you would assume that 13 million PS3/XBox360s or PCs would be running otherwise. This excludes any transportation losses etc.

Even more interesting is the comparison of power consumption for Movie playback. During gameplay you actually get different results from the Wii versus the high performance consoles. But the movies look the same.
As shocking as those graphs look it costs roughly 4 cents more in energy to watch a 2.5 movie on a game console / PC instead of a dedicated player.

format wars, winner: DVD. again.

confessions of a pixel pusher history marketing media

750,000 HD DVD players and 2.7 million Bluray players have been sold in the last 18 months that the formats have been available. In those BluRay numbers are about 2 Million PS3 consoles included. 4 Million Bluray discs have been sold, 2.6 Million HD-DVD ones. Which comes down to 1.5 Bluray and 3.5 HD-DVDs per device.

The DVD of “Knocked up” alone sold more often than all HD-DVD and Bluray formats combined. I wonder how the marketing budgets would compare.

In 1998 9.8 Million DVD Discs had been sold. Almost ten discs for each player that was out there. People loved DVD. They still do. As for the two replacement formats they could care less it seems. And that’s only partly a problem of the rivaling formats. I think that DVD is good enough for people. Most simply have neither the hardware setup nor the desire to spend allot of money for the extra resolution that the new formats provide.

Here the DVD hardware sales:

315,136 1997 (April-December)
1,089,261 1998
4,019,389 1999
8,498,545 2000
12,706,584 2001
17,089,823 2002
21,994,389 2003
19,999,913 2004
16,147,823 2005
19,788,279 2006
10,252,893 2007 (January - July)

sources: current HD numbers past DVD device numbers, reversed via the linux ‘tac’ command. I had no idea it did exist. DVD disc numbers Warner DVD sales in 1998 DVD sales in 1998 and 1999