Archive for December 2006

Looping images to the length of some audio

Say I have 2.5 hours of music, and have about 180 pictures I’d like to loop (at 5-8 seconds each?), is there a quick way of doing so? Something along the lines of loop images 10 times, while all music is exhausted? Better still if the final product can be written to a DVD.

X-Lite for Intel Macs (beta)

Have an Intel Mac? Rely on SIP soft phones, like X-Lite? Realize that it always crashes?

Try the beta, from CounterPath. It’s not called X-Lite, its beta, so it might eat your babies, but I’ve been using it for a while (because MySQL loves VoIP), and it works a charm. Looks like my office phone is back in business, even when I’m on OS X.

Document Management Systems: recommendations sought

Is anyone into document (not content) management systems? Is the best solution out there, for the paperless environment, something like KnowledgeTree? I’m looking for recommendations.

The idea here is to scan newspaper clippings, parts of books, and so on, place it in a DMS, and give it tags (like Flickr does), as well as add some appropriate metadata (like maybe the title of the article as text, an OCR conversion of the first paragraph and some notes), and have it as a searchable database.

I’m planning on picking up a flatbed scanner (it seems most USB ones do work with Linux, my aged 10-year-old-scanner that works on a parallel port still doesn’t), and then setting up the document management system that performs some kind of rsync or keeps version control in SVN, so that these documents are also accessible via the Internet (maybe private, maybe public). Services like Amazon’s S3 or even a DreamHost account seem to be viable for this option.

I like everything about KnowledgeTree (from its website, at least), save for the US$2,200 fee for their SMB edition (I can imagine the WebDAV stuff, and integration with Office applications being useful). It however does look like the license is liberal enough to allow extensions to be written… Q2/2007, maybe their OOo plugin will be free for all.

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My migration to Intel

The migration happened about two weeks ago. It took a little over 2 hours to get everything transferred over (in the order of about 51GB transferred over Firewire). Things that needed to get sorted out:

  • A few tools needed upgarding: SMARTReporter, coconutBattery, VLC (which seems to lack a Universal Binary)
  • Upgrade Tunnelblick to a new version. Realize that the old configuration that said “openvpn” would work in getting me back to the network.
  • Reinstalled XCode.
  • Found it rather silly that all the software I had (say, iTunes that was a universal binary on PowerPC) didn’t actually get transferred over, so I had to run Software Update all over again.
  • X11 was missing, so that needed reinstalling too. So did the X11 SDK. Basically anything that came out of XCode, faced this problem.
  • SSHKeychain has no Universal Binary and it looks like there isn’t going to be one anytime soon. Good news is that the source is available, so maybe I’ll do something about it when time permits.
  • The built-in iSight didn’t actually “work” after transferring all my details over. It worked after the first reboot and new software though.
  • GizmoProject of late has been misbehaving on OS X. It would normally refuse to start, but worked fine on my Nokia 770. The upgrade to Intel made things just magically work. I wonder if they’ve broken backward compatibility?
  • There’s a new version of X-Lite, however its still PowerPC based. It also zapped my configuration, so beware.
  • My saved passwords in Safari never really got transferred over. It was transferred over via the Keychain, but I seem to have to enter everything manually again. What a pain.
  • All my MacPorts are PowerPC based. This proved to be a little irritating. The best way to migrate it seemed was to remove all of MacPorts itself (read the FAQ) by doing sudo rm -rf /opt/local /Applications/DarwinPorts /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup. Then begins the arduous task of reinstalling everything. List on the old installation, “sudo port list installed > ports” and then install it via the ports file. Surprisingly impressed at the speed at which things were built.
  • Another EFI updated bringing it up to 1.2. I preferred the OpenFirmware way of getting things done; EFI itself seems rather limited.
  • BitKeeper disappeared. Some might argue that its a good thing, so I got the OS X/Intel build without drama.
  • Apple Remote Desktop 2.2, something I (along with a lot of WWDC attendees) received a few years back doesn’t run on Intel. It complains its looking for an update, yet there isn’t one available. Guess I’ll have to move back to using VNC.

Adobe Photoshop is idiotic. Its as daft as Windows XP. I’ve reached my maximum activations (what’s that, 2? – mind you I already tolerate the you can only have one copy of this application open on the network at any given time). Its a good thing I didn’t zap the Powerbook entirely to install Linux on it, and have it just sleeping so I can comply with Adobe thinking that I may be a pirate. Its stupidity like this that I think I should only use open source software and if it wasn’t helpful, pirate software.

All in all, this was a large usage in bandwidth. The migration wasn’t as seamless as I thought it would be. It ate up a good portion of a day… And now, I can’t sit with my legs propped up on the desk with the laptop on my lap – it burns my skin :-(

Update: I think that in the very near future, I’ll probably have to find it in my strapped pocketbook to buy a Macbook for Mac-related work. They’re 64-bit now, and have everything the Macbook Pro’s have, minus the ExpressCard slot (which I can do without). Looks like 2007 is the year of buying laptops… sigh. At which point I’ll be able to blog about a “MacIntel to MacIntel migration”.

Real-life-scenario: Linux outsmarts OS X in Samba

Safari repeatedly crashed when it was redirected to Starhub’s login.now portal (Firefox survived). In fact, OS X didn’t know how to handle the disconnect from “SHARE2” upon wakeup, I just got the spinning beachball of death for about five minutes before deciding to reboot the machine. How dismal.

In contrast, Linux just disconnected the mounted Samba share and let me continue on with my work. I also got connected to the Starhub portal all thanks to NetworkManager (whose icons are way better than the Internet Connect widget that Apple ships).

All this while awaiting my flight from SIN -> KUL. And kudos to the Singapore Airport, which now seems to have WiFi everywhere not just in their certain powered areas. I did all this while awaiting to board my flight at the boarding gate itself.

Linux: 1, Apple: 0

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Video cameras and Linux Redux – Canon MV920

Last weekend, I purchased a video camera. I bought it about five minutes before attending a wedding (that I was shooting photographs for – the couple are very close friends of mine), and the sales lady herself was amazed at our “last minuteness”. In all fairness, I was only told that they weren’t having any video for their wedding about an hour before the wedding, so I needed some time to do some Google research.

I purchased a Canon MV920 Mini DV video camera. Its cheap (even cheaper now that there’s a $75 rebate that I just found out about), has support for an external microphone, uses the same batteries that I use for my DSLR, and its really small and light. My deal was sweetened with free DV tapes thrown in, as well as a Firewire cable (6-pin; I use the 4-pin iPod converter when connecting to my Thinkpad).

I’m pleased to announce that it “just works” with Linux. Just install dvgrab (its in Core – yum install dvgrab), and simply run dvgrab on the command line. A little while later, stop it, and open up the file which plays nicely in Totem. 200MB for about 1 minute of video.

As its December, and I plan on quite a bit of travel, I guess it only makes sense that I’ll be using more of the video camera, and writing about how funky Linux is with it :-)

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