byterock

Well back to the PAWs game again. This is one group of actions that has really got me distracted.

In my last post I manged to get 'SubscribeToShard' to work with my stream decoder though it is really just beta code for now. What first go me distracted was reading along in the Amazon doc I saw a bit about streaming an audio file.

Well the last time I worked on this sort of stream was in the dieing days of the last century??

This got me thinking and I went downstairs and dusted off my good old 2201 and fired it up thinking it might come in useful. Next I had to find some 'C' code and files I had from that time that I think I had on on 3.5 floppy in my upstairs closet.

Well I found the disks and once my HP Pavilion booted up I found that the disks where sill readable and still compiled. Well step one and two done.

Now the test plan I had in the 'C' code is used to confirm that compressed files coming off of streams where coming down correctly. So to accomplish I you would put a canned RealTime file up on the Web then run 'C' program which will set up two workers. One to read the data coming in from the socket and one to read another local version of the file Nibble by Nibble (boy am I old) so it will always know what is suppose to be coming down the pipe. Then you started the test by trying to stream the file.

The 'C' program then sends two signals to the two channels of the Digital to Analog Board I have on my HP and from there to the two channels of the Oscilloscope where the two traces should be out of phase by 4 bytes (one nibble) and visually one could see from the pattern if the data was steaming correctly.

Well just a few problems with the above plan.

First I could not get connected to the Web with the HP, seems windows 3.n is not longer supported and I had no where to plug in my 56k modem.

Second the Digital to Analog board was no longer in my HP (not sure where it went).

Third when I fired up the O/Scope for the first time in 15+ years nothing happened except that acrid smell of old electrolytic capacitors in their death throws and then the single green dot. The O/Scopes version of the blue screen of death.

I suppose I could recap my O/Scope then calibrated it, (would need to buy a high end signal generator and another scope to do that), then I could run that 'C' program on my laptop after I recode it a little to send the digital output to two SD ports. However I would have to make a brace of these

so I could get the digital output into analog so my scope could read it correctly.

Well it would be fun to play with valves again and get my scope working but the time to do all above would see my post count drop to 0 for a few months (though some might like that) and empty my pockebook a little.

Anyway seems all the above was a little premature as I failed to read the rest of the document from AWS where they explain that part of the audio stream is a checksum that can be used as it it streaming.

So I guess diging all that junk out of the basement was for naught.

I did discover that I have left a few things out of my stream decoder namely the ability to stream chunks of data and to limit my streams to the max of one meg.

Well for now I can leave that out for now as the Kinesis data is normally only small amounts of text.

So way off the Paws track today. Hopefully I can get back on track in my next post.