The rise and fall of digital cameras and or flickr

Searching Flikr.com for Lyme Regis between 1st august one year to 2 years later and noting the number of pictures returned (not interested in video…)

Start year	End Year	Number of Pictures
1995	1997	9
1997	1999	7
1999	2001	67
2001	2003	518
2003	2005	1068
2005	2007	5212
2007	2009	9781
2009	2011	17078
2011	2013	15642
2013	2015	12947

Experimental Cycles render Normal map and displacement map examples

I think I have Blender’s massively awkward node system starting to bleed into my brain

Here is a picture of the brick wall I am experimenting with

Now I have taken this brick wall texture from http://www.cgtextures.com/ ‘cus most of these how do you texture examples always use a brick wall and that nearly always comes from cgtextures

Using GIMP and insane bump plugin (which takes some fiddling with a text editor to get it to work but that's another tale) we can easily generate a range of normal maps and a displacement map

And

So to get any of this to work we must first UV unwrap the thing we want the texture to go on, in this case one side of a wall.

Next for the displacement map we need plenty of mesh so we have to subdivide that wall a good number of times, I chose 30 in this case.

Now comes the tricky part making the nodes.

Blender adds the Diffuse shader and Material Output nodes for you but we must add in a UV Map (under Input…) and set it to the UVmap we just made

Then to each of these jpgs of the wall we have each gets its own image texture node, each one of which is connected to the UV Map node.

Which gives this

The Normal map can either link to the Normal input of the diffuse shader or to the displacement input of the Material Output

Which gives this

Or

The displacement map seems to only go to the displacement input of the Material output node

Which gives this

And as you know doubt have notice each mapping texture I have connected to a Math node (Add –> Convertor –> Math) which just needs changing to multiply so you can adjust the strength of the effect.

POST SCRIPT

Looks like you don’t need to subdivide the mesh for displacement!

And this node layout (I have inserted a neutral diffuser so all we see is the displacement, that's the lower one that is connected to the output)

KDE4 on Ubuntu kills performance

Further test runs (see previous post) have shown a surprising result for KDE4

KDE4 on fedora 20 AMD Athlon 5000 gets about 23.5 seconds a frame with a standard deviation of 8.7 seconds.

Same KDE4 on Ubuntu Studio x64 on the Pentium T4200 pummels performance back to i686 levels of about 40 seconds a frame with a massive standard deviation of 14 seconds

Meanwhile Ubuntu Studio x64 using Xfce on the AMD 5000 gives around 22 seconds average and an standard deviation of around 7seconds ,that is it is pretty much the same as Fedora 20 with KDE4 was! And it had the Matrix OpenGL screensaver running during some of this (its got an NVidia GFX 9800 with the NVidia driver)

Badly tuned KDE4 installs kill performance

Blender: faster on Linux or Windows?

Using the Network render option on Blender version 2.71 I was able to test the same machine on both Linux and Windows, so what was the fastest?

History

I was following this tutorial on making an island environment in Blender and I went down a bit of a rabbit warren when I thought “Hey Blender can work in meters rather than some nameless Blender unit I wonder if I made the island realistically big what would happen”. Well it just took longer to render because now I had to have four ocean squares. As I was in Blender render rather than cycles it was time to break out the network.

Network

My main machine is a Llano A6 3500 (passmark rating 2009) with 16 G RAM, 256G SSD, 1Tb HDD and a 24” widescreen display all running on Windows 7 x64. But over the years I have accumulated other machines:-

• an old XP running desktop with an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4000+ 4Gb RAM  (passmark rating 1285)
• another AMD desktop this time a 5000 Dual core (passmark rating 1228) running 32bit Debian (2GB RAM)
• a Dell Inspiron 1520 with an Intel Celeron M 540 @ 1.86GHz 4GB RAM (passmark rating 542) runs either Windows Vista or Knoppix, in this case Knoppix as Blender refuses to install on it under Vista
• a Samsung laptop with an Intel Core i3-3110M @ 2.40 6GB RAM (passmark 3067) running Windows 8.1 x64
• and finally another Samsung laptop with a Pentium Dual core (Intel Pentium T4200@2GHz passmark 1153, 4GB RAM) running Ubuntu Studio (32bit)

Set up and configuration

Blender’s network render consist of 3 different types of machine:

1. A Master which sends jobs it receives from
2. Clients to
3.  Slaves

Well the useless Celeron was made the Master with all the rest being slaves and the main windows 7 box (with the Llano) also being a client (a box can be more than one type of node on the network)

Results

The passmark ranking order (biggest number = fastest machine) would be

1. Samsung i3
2. Llano
3. Athlon 64 x2
4. Athlon 5000
5. Samsung T4200

Which I know from experience is very wrong!

Ubuntu Studio

The Athlon X2 was so slow as to not make any odds to the results and it kept banging up errors so I removed it, so here are the average run times from 3 initial runs on the Pentium Dual Samsung laptop running Ubuntu Studio (14) 32 bit times in seconds per a frame

Run 1	46.675
Run 2	45.9125
Run 3	45.7625

For an overall average of 46.12

Windows 7 x64

Same machine but this time running windows 7 x64 (I have two different drives which I swap out, so its not dual boot) Same job with 4 other computers on the network

Run 1	37.23333
Run 2	36.34167
Run 3	36.025

Overall average of 36.5333 seconds per a frame, nearly 10 seconds a frame faster than Ubuntu!
A 20% performance gain by changing the OS

Fedora 20 x64

Now lets install a different linux this time a 64bit version, I choose this because there was a promise of a tuned Blender, which did not happen but stock 2.71 running on Fedora 20 on the same laptop (same CPU, same RAM etc)

Run 1	23.43846
Run 2	20.93571
Run 3	21.00769

Overall average of 21.7939
A staggering 14 seconds a frame faster! I make that almost 70% improvement over Ubuntu and about 40% from Windows

Summary

Update from 32 bit to 64 bit as soon as you can

Is Linux slower than windows?

Doing some test with Blender and so far it looks like Redmond the edge…

Blender Network Render

---

Blenders {optional} Network Render Add-On is a bit clumsy…

You see it has 3 separate types of machine, which are Client, Master and Slave

Only the Slaves render

The Master only sends jobs to the slaves

And the Client controls the master (that's the one you type/click at to get the others to render a .blend file)

Gaze into the middle distance…

Lets see FIVE computers; 3 desktop m/c (all AMD, 2x Athlon and a Llano) a Samsung laptop with a dual-core Pentium thing, and another Dell laptop with a Celeron.

The llano runs Win 7 64bit, Samsung win 7 32, oldest Athlon 3000 runs XP, the other Athlon (5000?) runs Linux Mint and then comes the Dell…

The Dell came with Vista Home Basic, which it now runs off an SSD and I put the max 4GB RAM in it but by golly you would think a Celeron was bad enough but then they fit it out with Intel integrated graphics!  Anyway in Vista it cannot run Blender, but it has too much stuff to change it over to a linux.

Oh look an  8GB USB stick, great  slowly go thru Distrowatch’s  list looking for Live style linux’s. So far of the 8 I managed to get working using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.3.1 (from pendrivelinux) UnbutuStudio is looking the winner.

• 5 (FIVE) computers, three types of machine needed:
• 1xMaster
• 1x Client
• The rest slaves, who do all the real work

I need a Montage

Well the Dell became the Master and the the old XP and Samsung became slaves of about the same level of performance

The AMD (5000?) Linux Mint was also a slave

So my main machine Win 7 64 Lano had to be a client (it is where all my Blender stuff is done). But you can also start another instance of Blender and make that a slave on the same machine. So from 5 machines I got 4 slaves, a master and a client!

Triumph of the Will

And I got about a doubling of performance with the render time of a test animation (in this case of a shark swimming)  of 300 HD frames from 10 minutes to 5 minutes (about 13 seconds of footage)

Job Adverts

Most job adverts are not real;

The job does not exist but is just an agency trawling the interwebs for more bodies.

This is why you will read of 700 people applying for 4 post at a new Tesco’s store as an example.

More photos

	Plumbing
	Daffodil

Some photos

 

Moon

Here is a picture of the moon I took with a 1000mm lens (a 500mm reflective + 2x convertor) on a Nikon D3000

Lichen

And this is some lichen growing on a bench in my garden with some old M42 bellows and an old enlarger lens (50mm) and obviously a Nikon bayonet convertor

Fly

A rather spiffing fly again with bellows

Search for the Perfect Linux

What next

Now I have a list of Linux distros that will work with my laptops wifi what am I after?

I want something which can access the BBC iplayer, my SMB network storage and play a DVD.

Bonus points for playing any other catch up services.

Search for a Linux wot works

Distrowatch is both a website and podcast about whats new and sexy in the world of Linux

Well after the surprise of Pardus I thought lets slowly go thru each distro on its top 100 list

The idea is to come up with something that can cope with iplayer, hopefully legitimately on my previously used Dell inspiron 1520

Here is a spreadsheet to show how far I got...(blue ones are where the wifi works)

Pardus on Dell Inspiron 1520 with celeron 540

Got a 32" LCD TV and wanted a laptop to watch iplayer on it
So £100 secured a Dell Inspiron 1520, celeron 1Gb RAM 80gb HDD Intel IG (yuck), broadcom wifi chip and Vista Home Basic
What a festering pile of shit!
Video playback jaggy user response non-existent

Well then I found Pardus, a Turkish Linux distro with that gorgeous KDE 4 (which now almost works...)

The WiFi worked out-of-the box, yes I kid you not just gave it my WPA password and bingo, broadcom! Ah!

Anyway this thing flies BETTER THAN a dual core 4GB windows 7 m/c !

AND all the multimedia keys on the side (mute, vol+/- play/pause...) all WORK

The only problem? I keep having to run setxkbmap -layout gb or else it thinks I have a US keyboard

One day I will figure out which start up script to put that in

Or just maybe I will try Mandriva... but loving this Pardus

Hitler for breakfast

Google Lab, home of some grey if not black swans, a great place!

Anyhow my snippets are ngrams and fusion tables

In reverse order, fusion tables shows a link between income and smoking, really poor people don't.

Ngrams shows us what we find important, I tried music(Beatles v Elvis), Hitler, breakfast and to make it all come together tobacco .(Hitler V Breakfast here)

In a nutshell music is right at the bottom of that list, even at the very height of the pop music 60's scene, Hitler just about as important as food but despite the fact everyone is a non-smoker tobacco beats the lot!

Is this the story of the 20^th century? See how eggs overtake smoking during wars, also how by the end of WWII tobacco starts a steady decline, in fact it seems to peek when the worst of the 30's depression is upon us!

Could it be that the reason the worlds economy went into free fall was the smoking habit? Could it be a combination of spending money only on the one product and its health effects snuffed out the rest of society?

This graph would seem to support another idea: that we should talk about Hitler to stimulate the economy!

I look smug as I put away my slide show , put on my coat and leave a table of the powerful reeling from this science based observation

Snow Joke

Ah don't it look all crissmassy and stuff

3600 Frames

An old school super 8 film has 3600 frames, which at standard speed is played at 18 frames per second

That 3 and a third minutes (3mins 20 sec.)

Now 640x480 is a VGA frame in pixels, at 24 bit colour (8 bits / 256 shades for each red green blue) is about 900k per a frame, uncompressed

That’s under 4GB for 3 minutes 20 seconds for 3600 frames, uncompressed

So one 4GB SD card in almost any digital camera will when set to its lowest resolution equal at least one roll of super 8 film

Add in the fact you will be saving jpg and not bmp and you can divide that by 15

So a 256MB SD card recording VGA resolution images to jpeg is about the same as one roll of 50ft super 8 film

Android Audio

Idea for Microphone Array
Ever wanted to record multitrack sound? You know like 5.1?
How, there is usually only one mic jack on a PC?
Well why not hook a bunch of microphones to a bunch of 802.11g WiFi cards and stream it over, a 44100 Hz sample rate @ 16 bits is 705600 bits/sec at full tilt 802.11g could cope with 80 such streams (well in theory), so 6 even 10 should be no problem
HOW
Now the microphone wireless module would be a soundcard style ADC a TCP/IP stack and a WiFi circuit, which would be Google's Android running on some mobile phone style contraption with an XLR socket to attach said microphone.
WHY
An array of microphones recording at the same time can be used like a virtual boon mic, moved by software rather than on the end of a pole. It would enable clearer sound, as you can cancel out the background fuzz look at wikipedia's entry on the subject

House Price in Barrels of Oil

Here is a list of Oil prices in US$ from 1946 to today

Year	Nominal	Inflation Adjusted
1946	1.63	17.76
1947	2.16	20.58
1948	2.77	24.72
1949	2.77	24.99
1950	2.77	24.42
1951	2.77	22.63
1952	2.77	22.20
1953	2.92	23.23
1954	2.99	23.61
1955	2.93	23.22
1956	2.94	22.96
1957	3.14	23.74
1958	3.00	22.05
1959	3.00	21.90
1960	2.91	20.88
1961	2.85	20.25
1962	2.85	20.05
1963	2.91	20.20
1964	3.00	20.56
1965	3.01	20.30
1966	3.10	20.32
1967	3.12	19.84
1968	3.18	19.41
1969	3.32	19.22
1970	3.39	18.56
1971	3.60	18.88
1972	3.60	18.29
1973	4.75	22.73
1974	9.35	40.29
1975	12.21	48.21
1976	13.10	48.91
1977	14.40	50.48
1978	14.95	48.71
1979	25.10	73.44
1980	37.42	97.47
1981	35.75	83.54
1982	31.83	70.07
1983	29.08	62.02
1984	28.75	58.78
1985	26.92	53.15
1986	14.44	27.99
1987	17.75	33.19
1988	14.87	26.70
1989	18.33	31.40
1990	23.19	37.69
1991	20.20	31.51
1992	19.25	29.15
1993	16.75	24.62
1994	15.66	22.45
1995	16.75	23.35
1996	20.46	27.71
1997	18.64	24.67
1998	11.91	15.52
1999	16.56	21.12
2000	27.39	33.79
2001	23.00	27.59
2002	22.81	26.94
2003	27.69	31.97
2004	37.66	42.35
2005	50.04	54.01
2006	58.30	61.37
2007	64.20	64.93
2008 (Jun)	126.33	123.88

Trouble was I could only find GBP/USD exchange rate data going back to 1971, that was on a daily basis, so after reformating it so Access could read it, I found the annual averages

1971	2.436067
1972	2.47952
1973	2.428504
1974	2.340334
1975	2.221666
1976	1.804766
1977	1.744875
1978	1.918436
1979	2.122367
1980	2.324648
1981	2.024318
1982	1.748045
1983	1.51591
1984	1.336781
1985	1.297436
1986	1.46767
1987	1.639788
1988	1.7813
1989	1.638202
1990	1.784103
1991	1.767354
1992	1.766306
1993	1.501607
1994	1.531853
1995	1.57847
1996	1.56066
1997	1.637635
1998	1.657347
1999	1.6172
2000	1.51557
2001	1.439648
2002	1.502527
2003	1.634656
2004	1.832999
2005	1.820373
2006	1.843367
2007	2.001999
2008 (Jun)	1.85448

House prices from Nationwide are by quarters, so again a bit of washing

1952	1890.74
1953	1883.754
1954	1862.798
1955	1927.996
1956	1995.522
1957	2025.793
1958	2056.063
1959	2118.932
1960	2263.299
1961	2463.55
1962	2617.231
1963	2840.767
1964	3103.887
1965	3353.036
1966	3541.644
1967	3734.91
1968	4009.672
1969	4221.566
1970	4480.029
1971	5106.394
1972	6959.878
1973	9044.568
1974	10077.66
1975	10845.61
1976	11866.37
1977	12804.84
1978	15261.4
1979	19829.94
1980	23287.58
1981	23953.54
1982	24850.98
1983	27622.98
1984	31076.12
1985	34377.71
1986	37626.64
1987	43164.24
1988	51405.05
1989	61513.78
1990	57683.31
1991	54626.02
1992	51815.19
1993	51210.66
1994	51633.31
1995	51245.26
1996	53394
1997	59199.25
1998	65200.71
1999	71121.81
2000	80365.71
2001	88798.97
2002	106406.8
2003	127245.8
2004	148658.3
2005	156324.6
2006	166469.6
2007	181363.6
2008 (Jun)	168973.4

And finaly some graphs
House price (UK) in Oil barrels


House Prices in GBP

Bottom of the housing market

Where is the bottom
Nationwide publish an Excel spreadsheet of historic house prices
Likewise we can find various inflation calculators

We look at the low point of the last housing crash we find Q1 of 1993 as the low point, at £50 128
Pumping that number into an inflation calculator, which only gives us up to 2007, hmm but its somewhere between £71,213.17 and £107,289.06

The last price on the Nationwide list is £156 828 so another 30 to 50% to come off yet

We would assume average earnings would effect house prices the most, in which case its about £87 500 for the average house, 45% to remove