Welcome to Omnibits for Tuesday, 26 August (Day 2) 0700Oh seven hundred, oh seven hundred millimeters of rain outside. I strongly suspect the competitors are getting SMSs from the meet director releasing them until noon. I'll try to get more official word on that and post it here (couldn't find anything at wpc2014.com).0900Yeah I'm feeling pretty dumb. Since I arrived here this morning I've been aggravated by an occasionally music blast from behind my laptop. Turns out it's the mobile phone the organizer gave me at the start of the meet that never made a beep until this morning.It has 3 text messages. One is extraneous, here are the other two:
And just like there, a new one: 9:17 26/08/14 AE, SP, VFS, 8 WAY RELEASED TILL TOMORROW 27.8.2014 7:45, STANDBY 7:45 27.8.2014 And another one: 9:20 26/08/14 EVERYBODY WHO WANTS LUNCH, PLEASE SEND THE SMS TO 724313888 FOR THE TRANSPORT. THE BUSES WILL PICK YOU UP AT 12:00. I've looked around wpc2014.com for a place these messages are being posted, but I didn't find any. Until I find such a place, I'll share all the messages here. 1100While OSHD is having its file operations functions upgraded to use IFileOperation ...26.8.2014 11:00 UPDATE. 4WAY OPEN + 4WAY FEMALE RELEASED TILL 14:00, THEN STANDBY FROM 14:00. NEXT UPDATE 13.00. 1400 Sorry I missed this while I was in a meeting ... 26.8.2014 13:00 UPDATE. 4WAY + 4WAY FEMALE RELEASED TILL 16:00, THEN STANDBY FROM 16:00. NEXT UPDATE 15:00. .
1500Lookie who I found on the web! Mr Chuck Akers, US Team Leader, at his day job. If you want to see a lot of nice photos from the WPC, find Chuck on the facing book, he's posting lots of good stuff there.1506This SMS just in:26.8.2014 15:00 UPDATE. 4WAY + 4WAY FEMALE 16:30 - 15 MIN CALL. 1635Well, 16:30 has come and gone and nothing from manifest. I think it's time to research the location of a good restaurant in town :)1745Some teams just got a 15 minute calll. Going to run outside and make sure it wasn't my imagination.2100Did you ever have ... one of those days, when you're sure the gods must be angry? ... that makes you wonder what happened to the good karma you spent so much time and effort banking, or maybe that your karma balance was never positive at all? (Reaching for the glass of wine....)Here's how the evening went. 4-Way (Open) and Female went on a 15 minute call at 5:45pm and started going up 20 minutes later. The skies weren't great but videos were showing 35 seconds judgeable. Videos started going into The System ~6:30pmish. But the copy stations barfed on the MP4 files provided by 3 of the first 5 videographers, and I had to "promote" them without being transcoded. (MP4 files -- from GoPros -- do not play properly in slow motion, so OSHD transcodes them to MKV at the copy station, and they then play properly at normal and slow speeds.) Some MP4 files do behave well, so I went ahead and moved them into the folder where the FS scoring system would pull them, instead of the MKVs -- they do perfectly fine as long as the judges don't need reduced speed. Ten or twenty minutes later the real phun began: I noticed that the two "DZTV servers" -- as well as the JukeBox -- were not getting videos from the copy stations. WTF?! Nobody would be able to see the judging without those copies taking place. I had to run back to my laptop and manually copy everything from the copy stations to the three subject computers. I had to do this a number of times for the rest of the evening. Meanwhile the copy stations were not transcoding the MP4s. The only place the sh1t isn't actually hitting the phan is in the FS judging room, where the only problems are a new printer that won't behave, and the MP4 files that won't slow-mo properly. Fortunately the judges didn't need slow motion on the first few MP4s to get the scores right. In the middle of all this, I pieced together what was going on: I used the word "Prostějov" in my competition name in the database setup, just like that. Full competition title, "2014 WPC FS AE - Prostějov, Czech Republic". This name gets used to create the folder names for data storage on all the computers, from copy stations on up. Unfortunately, what I didn't know until tonight, is that both robocopy (a Windows tool) and HandBrakeCLI (my 3d party transcoding tool) both completely choke on the "ě" in Prostějov. "Path not found" system errors. And the only reason I didn't have "Prostějov" in the name of the practice competition the previous two days was I had to remove it to make room for "JUDGE TRAINING and OFFICIAL PRACTICE" (with shouting in the name so users don't accidentally save real competition data to it). And since Murphy likes to kick you when you're down, he decided to start pulling the plug on the power around 8pm. At first it would be brought up fairly soon, but within an hour it was going down every 5 to 10 minutes -- not even long enough to bring all the computers up. Toward the end of this mayhem I managed to get most of the remaining MP4 videos transcoded by hand. But since Murphy likes to punch you while he's kicking you, two of the MP4s would not transcode -- in fact, 413 and 414's videos would not even play in any media player, not WMP, not VLC, not OSHD. Either bad cameras, or bad copies at the copy stations. They have to be re-copied tomorrow. While the judges were preparing to judge the last 3 or 4 jumps, the power decided it would not stay up for more than a few minutes, and when it finally came up one time after the judges had quit for the day, around 9:30pm, I could not get the OSHD (scoring) computer to boot. A few seconds of the Windows boot screen, followed by a very quick BSOD and a reboot. Selecting the "Windows Repair" boot option resulted -- a half dozen times -- in a dialog in which neither the keyboard nor mouse worked to make it continue. It is a very sick computer. Very mad at being robbed of power a half dozen times in a row, in the middle of judging. With no power there is no Internet at the DZ, so I packed up my laptop and headed back to the hotel. The good news is that it looks like all the jumps that were judged had results that made it to the Internet. Only those angry gods know what tomorrow holds. When I can get to the database again, the offending competition name has to be tweaked to appease them. The sick OSHD computer has to be repaired, if it is repairable, and if it isn't, I'm going to have to pulll one of the DZTV servers in for emergency scoring duty while OMAR goes under the e-knife. I had a half dozen or so photos I wanted to share from the boarding area during the first few loads but I'm out of time and out of gas, hopefully Chuck posts his. Forecast is for rain tomorrow, the only ray of sunshine in that being that it'll give me a chance to repair computers and databases. You will surely tune in to better news tomorrow! :) Signing off, t1 |
||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright 2014 Ted & Tim Wagner | All rights reserved.