Thursday, February 28, 2008

3-Day Comcast Internet Outage

Comcast internet went down for me starting Tuesday and it hasn't come back up yet. We had a snow storm and all but I can't think what kind of a problem that could cause that couldn't be fixed in a day.

EDIT: Turns out it wasn't an outage at all. My connection was being blocked because I had Comcast change the plan on my account and modem had to be re-registered. It would have been nice if the customer service rep who changed my account had let me know what to expect.

EDIT 2: On the first two calls to Comcast, automated messages informed me of an outage and some sort of maintenance work. I hung up without talking to a rep, assuming the problem would be resolved.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Video Playback Problem Fixes

Have been putting up with bad color in video playback. I would adjust the "Hue" setting in the media player but the colors were always off. Turns out the culprit is ATI's video driver. That'd explain why video applications had this problem but Flash-based video applications didn't. Flash must not use video card acceleration for video playback. Not on my computer, at least.

The exact problem is that a bug in ATI's driver swaps U and V color coordinates in YUV color space.

The forum thread about the problem suggests the following solution:

launch gstreamer-properties from terminal
change the video output plugin to custom
change the video output pipeline to:

ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)YV12 ! xvimagesink


Yet another problem with video playback I've been having is that some files will have a green band on top when played in VLC. I thought it was a deinterlacing problem since some deinterlace option changed the size of the green band. But There was an online discussion about this also. The fix is to change VLC preferences to use a differnt video output module. Using X11 video output module instead of the "Default" option got rid of the green band. As a bonus, this change also got rid of an artifact where fast-changing image would show that the video was being rendered in two steps triangles.

These problems counted two in the ever-shrinking list of reasons to have Windows around. Not many more left. I think I can safely delete my Windows partition soon.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Pattern of Inaction (Sweet Regret)

Saw a girl at a boboa tea place today. Was with her friend. Wanted talk to them. Didn't. Kept my laptop open, earbuds on, tried to ignore her. But I'd catch myself glancing their way from time to time.

Which is not out of the ordinary, I guess. I do this all the time. Each time I get to savor hours of regret afterward. Mmm...

If I think about it, she's no different from any other cute girl I've never talked to and don't know a thing about. But that doesn't help for some reason.