Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (9816)

• Usurper of FATE

  31 juillet 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  Mans sent a message to the FFmpeg-devel list today :

  A new FATE

  Mike’s FATE system has done a great job over the last few years. It
  is however beginning to prove inadequate in various ways :

  [various shortcomings already dissected at length on this very blog]

  To address the above-mentioned issues, I have been working on a
  replacement system which is now ready to be announced.

  Check it out : http://fate.ffmpeg.org/.

  Considering that he just obsoleted something I’ve poured a lot of time and energy into over the last 2.5 years, is my first reaction to this news supposed to be unbridled joy ? Hey, I’m already on record as stating that I wouldn’t mind throwing away all of FATE if there was a better alternative.

  I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure that at this point, the original FATE server is practically obsolete. Mans is already testing all of his configurations as well as the configs I test. As soon as the other FATE installations switch over to the new server, I should be able to redirect fate.multimedia.cx -> fate.ffmpeg.org, sell most of my computers, and spend more time with my family.

  Thanks, Mans !

• Bye Bye FATE Machine

  4 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  This is the computer that performed the lion’s share of FATE cycles for the past 1.5 years before Mans put a new continuous integration system into service. I’ve now decided to let the machine go. I can’t get over how odd this feels since this thing is technically the best machine I own.

  
  
  

  It’s a small form factor Shuttle PC (SD37P2 v2) ; Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz ; 2 GB RAM ; 400 GB SATA HD ; equipped with the only consistently functional optical drive in my house (uh oh). I used it as my primary desktop from March 2007 – November 2008, at which point I repurposed it for FATE cycles.

  As mentioned, the craziest part is that this is technically the best computer in my house. My new EeePC 1201PN isn’t at quite the same level ; my old EeePC can’t touch it, of course ; the Mac Mini has a little more RAM but doesn’t stack up in nearly all other areas. But the Shuttle just isn’t seeing that much use since the usurpation. I had it running automated backup duty for multimedia.cx but that’s easy enough to move to another, lower-powered system.

  Maybe the prognosticators are correct and the PC industry has matured to the point where raw computing power simply doesn’t matter anymore. I fancy myself as someone who knows how to put CPU power to work but even I don’t know what to do with the computing capacity I purchased over 3 years ago.

  Where will the Shuttle go ? A good home, I trust– I know a family that just arrived in the country and could use a computer.

• FATE’s New Look

  4 août 2010, par Multimedia Mike — FATE Server

  The FATE main page exposes a lot of data. The manner in which it is presented has always been bounded by my extremely limited web development abilities. I wrestled with whether I should learn better web development skills first and allow that to inform any improved design, or focus on the more useful design and invest my web development learning time towards realizing that design.

  Fortunately, Mans solved this conundrum with an elegantly simple solution :

  
  
  

  The top of the page displays a status bar that illustrates — at a glance — how functional the codebase is. The web page source code identifies this as the failometer. It took me a few seconds to recognize what information that status bar was attempting to convey ; maybe it could use a succinct explanation.

  Mini-Book Review
  
  Before Mans took over, I thought about this problem quite a bit. I needed inspiration for creating a better FATE main page and aggregating a large amount of data in a useful, easily-digested form. Looking around the web, I see no shortage of methods for visualizing data. I could start shoehorning FATE data into available methods and see what works. But I thought it would be better to take a step back and think about the best way to organize the data. My first clue came awhile ago in the form of an xkcd comic : Blogofractal. Actually, the clue came from the mouseover text which recommended Edward Tufte’s "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

  
  
  

  I ordered this up and plowed through it. It’s an interesting read, to be sure. However, I think it illustrates what a book on multimedia and compression technology would look like if authored by yours truly— a book of technical curiosities from epochs past that discusses little in the way of modern practical application. Tufte’s book showed me lots of examples of infographics from decades and even centuries past, but I never concisely learned exactly how to present data such as FATE’s main page in a more useful form.

  Visualization Blog
  More recently, I discovered a blog called Flowing Data, authored by a statistics Ph.D. candidate who purportedly eats, sleeps, and breathes infographics. The post 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time : A Guide offers a good starting point for creating useful data presentations.

  I still subscribe to and eagerly read Flowing Data. But I might not have as much use for data visualization now that Mans is on FATE duty.