http://silicontrip.net/~mark/ Random thoughts and projects. en-us Mon, 09 Feb 2004 11:10:03 EST Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:19:14 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/main.xml mark's perl script silicontrip.net silicontrip.net 5 http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090329.html If you may've worked out by now that I have an affinity for chili and as such one of my favourite activities is collecting chili plants and seeds and growing them. 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090329.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090315.html I got bored this weekend and decided to sort my Lego pieces into categories. I even downloaded some of the old instructions for the space models I was given as a child, I even had most of the original pieces. 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090315.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090308.html Unlike last year this year we managed to turn up on the correct weekend. This year we saw, rides, a circus in a suitcase, wakeboarders, water skiers and fireworks. 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090308.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090213.html The bushfires have been bringing an eerie glow to the evening. A pinkish glow late in the afternoon. Maybe a perfect backdrop for photographing cars. 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090213.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090202.html I've completed my first draft of the PCM audio writer for libav2yuv. It simply writes out PCM audio, in local system (big or little) endian signed format. 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090202.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090130.html Due to all of the train issues we've been having because of the hot weather. The transport minister decided that today would be a free travel day. Similar to the 24th and 25th of December last year. However all of us committed travellers who buy Monthly or Weekly tickets, it's not free for us, it's actually just a wasted day, what do we do? How do we benefit from this free travel day? We don't. All the regular commuters get shafted again. They are not making a good case for purchasing long term tickets if they keep springing free days on us. 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090130.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090126.html Australia Day, lamb BBQ, John Farnham and Kylie Minogue impersonations, glow sticks, Australian flags and fireworks... 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090126.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090110.html I started a painting of Astroboy around Christmas 2006. It sat on my wall for 2 and a half years before I got inspiration to complete it. Here it is and some other work I've done since. 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20090110.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081230.html I've made a section of my website available to my Audio related coding. (Very similar to my lavtools video section) Check out the Lib sound utilities. 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081230.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081227.html For Christmas the children got a book called Gallop by Rufus Butler Seder. Which features animation by using a cover sheet of black vertical stripes. So I decided to do my own. 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081227.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081216.html I managed to restore a badly scratched DVD last night, with the help from some toothpaste and hacked up dd_restore. 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081216.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081203.html I saw a bug in the train dot matrix in carriage display this morning. 03 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081203.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081026.html My uncle, who works at the Synchrotron, invited me to their open day. This is what I saw. 26 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20081026.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080718.html I found some documentation about getting OSX to convert a jad and a jar to a cod file suitable for downloading on Blackberry 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080718.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080710.html Although there is lots of information on how to get midlets working on Xcode. Xcode version 3.0 has some changes that makes those instructions fail. Hopefully this will correct those failures. 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080710.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080707.html I have added some features to libav2yuv. 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080707.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080625.html Still trying to work out the best way to build mjpegutils as a universal library? These are some more detailed instructions. 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080625.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080620.html It's only taken me how long? But now I've written a small perl script that generates an xml file in the form of an rss feed. So everytime I write a new article, I can run the script and generate a new feed. 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080620.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080619.html I've spent some time creating a YUV video player which uses Core Video. This is a universal application and requires the mjpegutils library installed. I'm trying to work out how to include the dynamic library in the executable bundle. Any help would be appreciated. 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080619.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080612.html This is more for my benefit as there is probably no way I'll remember these instructions by myself... 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080612.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080611.html I complain alot about people who don't know how to make efficient use of technology and take a proverbial sledge hammer to putting a lid on a jar. 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080611.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080610.html I was away over the queens birthday weekend and didn't have Image Magick or NetPBM installed on the laptop I took away with me. However I discovered that Leopard has a command called sips which can be used for scaling, rotation and image conversion. I've also checked on my panther machine and sips is available there too. 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080610.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080607.html On the First Sunday of each month the model railway club get out their trains to run on the model railway near Gosford. It was fortunate the we had booked a birthday party there and I did get to ride on the 7 inch gauge trains. 07 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080607.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080606.html Ok, this is retrospective news. Now that I have the pictures online, I might aswell let everyone know! That I snuck off and got Married! 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080606.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080604.html I'm heading off to the Central coast today for about 6 days, with the family. I'm not sure how driving for 12 hours with two small children is going to go. But hopefully the portable DVD player will keep them going. 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080604.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080512.html I've added more entries to the macosx command line. 12 May 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080512.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080510.html Due to a change in the RC3 release of mjpegutils none of my tools will compile. I have made changes to all my code to work under rc3. 10 May 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080510.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080421.html Why? because it's faster. Check out the lavtools as always. 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080421.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080408.html The 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Gala was shown on channel 10 on the 31st March. 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080408.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080328.html Being driven into the side of is not really my fault. 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080328.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080326.html Apple have some very funky effects with their Core Image framework. Me, being the yuv video guru (in training) decided that interfacing the 2 would be very cool. Funky Core Image effects on a YUV video stream, very cool. 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080326.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080318.html OK, not really new, I've been running my mail server on a G3 with 384meg of ram for some time now, but only on 2, 4 gig SCSI disks. I know that 4 gig doesn't sound like much, but for mail, it's quite a bit. 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080318.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080305.html I was fascinated by a particular pattern from the Spirograph book, which I had a Spirograph set when I was a child. I still remember the ring and wheel dimensions today (being 105 / 52) The pattern troubled me, as I really desired to draw it but never mastered the pen control needed. 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080305.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080304.html Yeah, yeah, yeah the probe is back Yeah, yeah, yeah the probe is back back, back, back from his magical journey 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080304.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080303.html I've just completed my yuvcrop tool, which can be used to detect matting in yuv sources. It can also be used to crop and matte a yuv video stream. 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080303.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080225.html I discovered a bug in my libav2yuv code today, which causes it to drop frames. It appears to be a problem with avcodec_decode_video not decompressing the frame for some reason. It does not set the frameFinished flag, but indicates that data was decompressed. The source file is mpeg4 so is frame based rather than packet based and the decoder is not waiting for more data. I've changed my source to handle this unexpected behaviour. 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080225.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080211.html ReelTime Infotainment (not ReelTime Media) entered voluntary Administration today. As such we cease to be employed by ReelTime Infotainment yet are being paid to the 15th. 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080211.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080207.html I've written Arcade Fighter as a java applet so you can play it right here. I guess I should write instructions on how to play the game. For those of you who don't know. Arcade Fighter is a simulation of a Collectors card game a friend of mine, Hi Rob, made. He got me to make the simulation so he could play test it. The original application is written so that the computer can play itself and statistics about the game are recorded. The Applet however you play the computer, for one game. 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080207.html http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080201.html I said I might learn how to write a java applet, so here it is The timetable data shown in real time for the Belgrave Lilydale train lines. 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST http://silicontrip.net/~mark/htmlview.php/20080201.html