Maintenance

Problems with my VM freezing in Delphi, and being unable to shut it down. Culprits include (but may not be limited to) dexplore.exe (the MSDN help system that Delphi seems to use -- killing the process helps), BSQL.exe (I think this is a Borland daemon), and possible graphics drive problems caused by the new monitor resolution.At the moment Windows is frozen in the process of shutting down.

I'm in the process of figuring out whether it's practical to do basic video editing on my Ubuntu machine. We have to record some video for another purpose, so we've taken the opportunity to see what the state of video editing is on 64-bit Ubuntu.

Recording video is straightforward on the camera, but the audio quality is problematic. We should be able to use an external microphone, but to do that we also need to hook up the condenser mic to one of the mic pres (to get the phantom power), then hook that up through an adapter to get a one-eighth TRS plug that will go into the camera. We haven't got through all that process yet.

Getting video off the camera is easy; the camera mounts as a drive, and the video is just an MP4 file. Getting the MP4 file into DV can be done using Kino, but that's about all Kino can manage; it doesn't seem to produce audio output on playback, and has no usable audio configuration settings dialogs, and it freezes for long periods when doing edits. So that's not really usable.

PiTiVi is supposed to be simpler, but that wouldn't start at all, due to audio problems. I'm now installing cinelerra, which Greg reckons is nightmarish, but I think we have to try it because it's the most serious package available. It says it uses Pulse Audio, and should have more config options from the audio point of view.

Cinelerra starts up OK, and can load and play the DV capture from Kino (it crashes when I try to load/play MP4 directly). At first, I couldn't get audio to work over the USB headphones, but eventually I discovered that setting the audio driver to OSS, and the device path to /dev/audio2, I got audio -- presumably, to the system, the usb headset is /dev/audio2, which will be handy to know in other apps too. So far this looks quite promising. I've been able to drag two copies of the video clip (from the Media area) onto the timeline, and apply various transitions between them.

I've begun pulling gear from Lab C. I have the teacher station, the projector and the DVD player/audio setup out. I'm waiting on WO to come and pull the TAO speakers and the cabling for the projector.
I also need to bring in a reversible drill to pull down the white board and so forth.

Much stress and excitement this morning trying to get my new monitor to work properly alongside an existing monitor, when they're at different resolutions (the new is 1920 x 1200, and the old is 1600 x 1200). The way to get it working with Ubuntu 64-bit (Intrepid) seems to be this:

• Disconnect the smaller monitor leaving only the bigger one plugged in, and reboot.
• Ubuntu correctly detects the new monitor, and configures its resolution correctly. Set the refresh rate if necessary in the Screen Resolution applet.
• Hot-plug the old monitor, then do Detect Displays in the Screen Res applet. It will detect the smaller monitor correctly, but shows it as "Off"; Select "On".
• The applet will ask for permission to change some settings (presumably writing to xorg.conf). Agree and authenticate.
• Reboot, or restart X, and the two monitors will now work happily together.

There were some wrinkles:

• Doing this disabled the fglrx properietary AMD driver, which turns off desktop effects (Compiz). I may try turning the driver back on, and the effects back on, later today, and I'll report on whether that works or not, but if it doesn't I can live without wobbly windows.
• The larger monitor is the main monitor, and so I had to move it to the left position to get the desktop to work right. There's no easy way to swap them around in software without the ATI Catalyst Control Center applet, and that won't work without the proprietary driver (see above). So I've moved the monitors physically rather than trying to do this with software.

I came across this, which recommends running this command in Terminal (all one line):
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Which will cause mounted network volumes to be accessible to Time Machine.

I haven't tried this yet, but reports are that further effort needs to be made, at least under 10.5.2. So just in case this is still a problem (my iMac is now at 10.5.6), here are some instructions (taken from here):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Backing up Macs to WHS using Time Machine on OSX 10.5.2:

1. First install required update. This fix is required in OS X ver 10.5.2 to improve Time Machine SMB handling (SMB is a protocol used between PCs for regular file sharing in a LAN). This update also fixes some bugs in the wireless network support. This fix can be downloaded from Apple. Without this fix our Mac crashed when 20% of backup was done. Link: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/timemachineandairportupdatesv10.html

2. Start finder and connect to the network backup share on the WHS server.

3. The setting TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes=1 needs to be in the systempreferences for the SMB share to be selectable as a Time Machine destination. This can easiest be done by starting a terminal session and enter defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

You may check that it is correctly written by giving the command defaults read and finding the entry near the end of the systempreferences file.

4. Go to Time Machine settings and select the share as destination - it should now be visible.

5. The backup should now start automatically after 120 s. In OSX 10.5.2 the backup will fail but you should be able to save the name of the file in the WHS share catalog before the file becomes deleted after a minute or so. The file is called something like "machine name"_wireless mac adress.sparsebundle. If your machine name contains spaces or is longer than 8 characters, change it. Make sure your machine name does not include spaces, symbols, etc. (just numbers and letters) and keeping the name of under 8 characters before starting the backup attempt. Backup can be restarted by deselecting the destination folder, and then reselecting it. What you need is the sparsebundle file name. (A eight alphanumeric machine name is maybe not needed with the fix mentioned above - but I changed it anyway)

6. Open the program Disk Utility to manually create a sparsebundle. The Help file tells you how. Use the first part of the filename "machine name"_wireless mac adress but leave the .sparsebundle out. As part of the creation process, you will be prompted to assign a size to the sparsebundle. Select a size less than that of your NAS volume's physical capacity (and it is probably a good idea to leave an ample amount headroom so that Time Machine has space to do its thing, minimum the size of the disk being backed up). The file will typically be less than 100Mbyte when it is created so don't worry about the size for now. Put it on your desktop. Unfortunately, I can only vaguely describe the settings for this file since the setting naming on our system is in Norwegian but here is at least some clues: No partition, no encryption, format MAC OS extended journalled standard, packeted disc image.

7. Copy the newly created sparsebundle file to the WHS share root. Make sure there is no trace left of the previous attempts to create the file. Also delete any .xxxxxxxxx files in the root (this is maybe only valid on non-WHS Linux based NAS?). In WHS Explorer the sparsebundle file will be shown as a folder. When you have it on the share, delete it from the desktop, but save the name - you might need it again.

8. Remove the backup share from Spotlight. It helps makes things go faster. Go to System Preferences - Spotlight, then under the "privacy" tab, click on the Plus sign and add the backup share under devices.

9. On the WHS console disable duplication on the share used for Time Machine backups (This is as a safety measure for as long the data corruption bug still exists)

10. Now start the Backup by selecting the WHS share as destination in Time Machine settings.

Following this procedure our backup presumably works, at least for now backing up from MacBook Air via WiFi to a HP WHS. Unfortunately it runs quite slow so testing takes time. Also, restore is still untested. As one can see, this is quite complex and there is many things that can go wrong so "shrink wrap" SW should be developed.

Here are the sources used to put together this procedure:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137
http://www.99.se/mac-os-x/242612-att-f-time-machine-att-fungera-med-windowsserver-via-samba.html (Swedish)
http://babygotmac.com/a/leopard-1052-airport-express-and-time-machine/
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/03/19/time-machine-and-airport-updates-1-0/
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/10/12595/

Michael J. is working on embedding Flowplayer (a JW Player competitor). His notes:

I had to download the flow player installation stuff from the website.
They include some javascript in the download, and encourage you to use
the javascript to add the player to the web pages. It's a jquery like
syntax.

<script type="text/javascript"
src="flowplayer-3.0.6.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="flowplayer.embed-3.0.2.min.js"></script>

The documentation implies that flowplayer.embed-whatever.js isn't
necessary, but it doesn't seem to work without it. Smile and nod. Also
make sure that you have flowplayer.swf and flowplayer.controls.swf in
the same directory.

The documentation and examples on the website imply that the player can
be embedded in any element on a web page, but that didn't work for me at
all. The javascript would embed the player in any element, but the
player only seems to pickup the URL from from the @href attribute on an
<a> element. No combinations of javascript parameters and goofy goodness
would let me see a video in a <div>. So I put an <a> inside a <div> with
the correct @id and @href attributes and fired it all up.

<div id="popupContentContainer">
<a id="popupContent"
href="videos/Interviews/BathWeb/BathWeb1.mp4"></a>
</div>

And on the fifth day, lo there was video. And it was good.

Interestingly, you can change the href attribute with javascript before
your javascript call to embed the player in the page. Which by the way
looks like this:

$f("popupContent",
{src:'flowplayer.swf',width: 240,height: 240},
{ autoPlay: true,
autoRewind: false,
loop: false });
}

The end result for me is that I can put 90 images on a page, each one
linked to a .mp4 file, and have the video file play in the popup
lightroom thingy with some fancy jquery.

Dismantled and removed my old Windows PC. Now that the 64-bit Intrepid box is stable and the VM seems to be working fine, I can reclaim some desk space. Cleaned the desk -- horrible but necessary, takes longer than you think...

The default contrast/colour schemes in Terminal and Text Wrangler have been giving me headaches (literally) so I fixed it by installing bbcolors and a custom bundle integrator called SIMBL. I now have a low-contrast, syntax-highlighting setup in Terminal and Text Wrangler that doesn't give me a headache. I attach the whole shebang for setting this up.