"Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst's bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera."

I love that the web server is actually in the frog. It's the little things.

Does iTunes support MP3 stream metadata, i.e., displaying the title of the currently-playing song as the songs change? It doesn't seem to on any of the streams I've tried (including the DNA streams) but I don't know if that's a local problem, or if it's just not supported.

(I know that Shoutcast, Icecast 1, and Icecast 2 use three different, incompatible, and stupid metadata formats, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this is still a clusterfuck.)

Update: Apparently it works just fine in iTunes with the DNA streams for everyone but me, even if I turn off the Mac's firewall. This proves that my "computer malfunction field" is fully operational on MacOS as well. I had been wondering when that was going to kick in.

Update 2: Apparently it's Privoxy's fault! I forgot that proxy settings are global now, and not just a setting in the web browser. Apparently iTunes runs the HTTP proxy for MP3 streams even though they are neither (technically) HTTP nor on port 80, and -- somehow -- that's causing the metadata to vanish.

You know it's bad when I'm posting random cries for tech help here... So yeah. It's that bad.

The webcast machine at the club loses its mind at least once a week: it appears to run out of memory and crash, but I can't figure out what the culprit is.

The machine is a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ with 1GB RAM and 500MB swap. It's running Fedora Core 3, but I was also experiencing this problem on FC2 and RH9. Memtest86 says the RAM is fine. It's got an Osprey 100 BT848 video capture card and an SB Live EMU10k1 audio card.

I set up a cron job that once a minute captures the output of "top -bn1" and "ps auxwwf" to a file. Here's are a pair of those files as it loses its mind. Note that the load goes from 3.44 to 22.73 in a minute and a half.

I've compared the two files character by character, and I don't see a smoking gun. The differences look quite trivial to me.

So while I was sitting there staring at this, I saw something very intersting happen: "top" was running on the machine's console, and showed 380MB swap available -- and the oom-killer woke up and shot down an xemacs and an httpd.

So, how's that even possible? Does this mean that some process has gone nuts and started leaking wired pages, so that it can't swap at all? Or what?

• syslog: some of the oom-killers
• ps/top: just before things go nuts
• ps/top: express elevator to hell, going down
• ps/top: about an hour after rebooting

So, any ideas?

Update, Dec 29: It looks like something is leaking in the kernel; /proc/slabinfo shows the size-256 slab growing to 3,500,000 entries (over 800MB.) Current suspect is the bttv/v4l driver (since one of the things this machine does is run "streamer" to grab a video frame every few seconds.) That would be about 525 leaked allocations per minute, or around 26 leaks per frame.

kernel 2.6.9-1.681_FC3, xawtv-3.81-6.

Update, Jan 12: That was the culprit. This is the fix:

--- ./drivers/media/video/bttv-driver.c.orig    2005-01-11 14:54:15.477911088 -0800
+++ ./drivers/media/video/bttv-driver.c 2005-01-08 13:49:44.000000000 -0800
@@ -2992,6 +2992,9 @@
                free_btres(btv,fh,RESOURCE_VBI);
        }
 
+       videobuf_mmap_free(file, &fh->cap);
+       videobuf_mmap_free(file, &fh->vbi);
+
 #ifdef VIDIOC_G_PRIORITY
        v4l2_prio_close(&btv->prio,&fh->prio);
 #endif

--- ./drivers/media/video/video-buf.c.orig      2004-10-18 14:54:08.000000000 -0700
+++ ./drivers/media/video/video-buf.c   2005-01-08 13:50:04.000000000 -0800
@@ -889,6 +889,7 @@
        int i;
        
        videobuf_queue_cancel(file,q);
+        videobuf_mmap_free(file, q);
        INIT_LIST_HEAD(&q->stream);
        for (i = 0; i < VIDEO_MAX_FRAME; i++) {
                if (NULL == q->bufs[i])

So I think I got my OpenBSD firewall woes worked out, but I could use a sanity check... What I have seems to be working, but I'd like some confirmation that my assumptions are true.

(  Read on if you understand this crap. --More--( 6%)  )

DNA Lounge update, wherein you look at pictures and listen to a humorous audio clip.

I know it's like shooting corpses in a barrel, but there have been a lot of great headlines lately:

• Jesus battles zombies
• Dead May Rise Above Christ
• Zombies push Jesus from top
• Undead zombies knock resurrected Christ from top slot

And today:

• Recording industry Web site downed, possibly by zombies

• Zombies defeat robot Jesus
  "It emerged last week that Mel Gibson had used a robot Jesus, costing more than £200,000, for some of the scenes in his Biblical epic."
• "Dead" Devours "Christ"

DNA Lounge update, wherein we feel the love for webcasts, paint, and urine.

DNA Lounge update featuring the very modern stylings of EmCee WhinyPants.

• BBC has a live RealVideo webcast from a camera on top of a building in Baghdad. I guess we'll know the blitzkreig shocknaw is in full effect when it goes bluescreen. I'm especially amused that the URL has /sport/live/ in it.

• Google refuses an ad for a "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" bumper sticker, because it is "hate speech."

Because I use this program that idiotically doesn't have an option to auto-connect at startup, but instead requires you to click a button, I just wrote a script that:

• finds that window on the screen by its title;
• finds the position of the third subwindow of its first subwindow;
• moves the mouse there;
• generates a mouse-click event.

I am utterly repulsed by this, but it works (for now), and hopefully when I have a power failure in the future (as tonight), then my home icecast stream will re-start automatically instead of staying dead until I come home and click the shiny, candy-like button.

[...] Already reeling from a stagnant economy and the illegal but widespread downloading of copyrighted music from the Internet, the recording companies will now face a perfectly legal influx of European recordings of popular works.

Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in European Union countries, compared with 95 years in the United States, even if the recordings were originally made and released in America. So recordings made in the early- to mid-1950's - by figures like Maria Callas, Elvis Presley and Ella Fitzgerald - are entering the public domain in Europe, opening the way for any European recording company to release albums that had been owned exclusively by particular labels.

Although the distribution of such albums would be limited to Europe in theory, record-store chains and specialty outlets in the United States routinely stock foreign imports.

[...] ``The import of those products would be an act of piracy,'' said Neil Turkewitz, the executive vice president international of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has strongly advocated for copyright protections. ``The industry is regretful that these absolutely piratical products are being released.''

The industry association is trying to persuade European Union countries to extend copyright terms. Meanwhile, Mr. Turkewitz said, ``we will try to get these products blocked,'' arguing that customs agents ``have the authority to seize these European recordings even in the absence of an injunction brought by the copyright owners.'' [...]

RIAA to shut down

The RIAA today continued its war on the pirates which plague the music industry. It has decided to turn its attention to the real pirates: the ones that make millions from the artists they claim to represent, while screwing them out of their money. To this end, the RIAA will shut down at the beginning of January. Bye bye!

(  screenshot  )

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

"Perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" asked Amy Weiss, the RIAA's Senior Vice President of Communications recently in this email to The Register.

It's a question which has baffled many of our readers, and us too. Perhaps it's a kind of Zen koan, which needs to be repeated many times before making sense. If so, we can't report any success.

But the RIAA seems to be having a few problems with the facts itself.

Yesterday it issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners.

Only there weren't 421 burners, but "the equivalent of 421 burners."

In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy?

"There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed," was the official line yesterday.

[...]

Wow, check this out, from RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter): the author of the Yahoo deal on which the new RIAA webcasting royalty rate was based has come forward to say that the deal was specifically designed to make it impossible for small webcasters to compete!

Mark Cuban says:

Now, no one asked me any of these things prior, during, or after the first or second pricing. I'm not sure that this matters. But if it does, here it is: The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.

Please don't drop dead of non-shock.

We saw The Scorpion King today: that movie is a lot of fun. Oh man, it is so much better than Episode II. (Though I will concede that Ep2 will spawn the better toys.) rzr_grl would groan every time there was a chain-mail-bikini moment, but I think it helped when I reminded her that she was supposed to be communing with her inner 13-year-old boy to properly enjoy a film like this. It was not as good as Conan the Barbarian, but hey, you can't touch the classics.

I'm enjoying the new friends-of-friends hack way more than I can explain.

I'm sorry to report that the Download show on June 20th has been cancelled.

The band's representative had signed the contracts and webcast agreement, so we thought we were done: we went ahead and announced the show and started selling tickets. Two days later, they came back to us and said, ``by the way, no webcast.''

We webcast everything here at the DNA Lounge: it is one of the primary reasons this club exists. We never would have booked a show with a performer who was not ok with that (most of them see it as a benefit!) So the fact that we found out about it so late doesn't change that: no webcast, no show.

We're very sorry that we found out about this so late in the game. We didn't mean to get your hopes up unnecessarily. We really had every reason to believe that the deal was done, and the show was on.

I'm furious and depressed and went into a little more detail on the new DNA Update.