Windows 7 on the macbook pro

Today we try windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro. I used to run xp some years ago on the original macbook but forgot to shut windows down one day and it did not go to sleep because of a buggy boot camp driver and ended up burning out the airport wireless. Let's see how we fare now.

There is no reason to run window 7 on this as it is running xp inside of osx (via virtualbox) anyway, but this gives me a laptop for just about anything.

The target machine is a 15" macbook pro with 4 gig ram, 250gig hard drive, intel core 2 duo running at 2.4 ghz and nvidia 8600m GT dedicated graphics. To make it run full speed we decide to go the boot camp route.

Boot camp no longer requires a cd/dvd, you run the book camp app in the utilities folder and decide how much hard disk space to allot to windows. I choose 50 gig. It then asks you to insert the windows install media and runs the windows 7 installation program. You choose advanced or optional setup and select a partition. Windows will complain it cannot install there as it is not the right format. We select drive 0 partition 3 boot camp and click on the windows disk utility and format the partition as NTFS.

Windows then formats the partition, copies over it's numerous files and starts the install. This takes quite a bit of time so we start a quick game of civ2...

finally we get to the setup and create an account and get to the home network. Odd how the win7 gui reminds me of an earlier version of osx.

Ok it starts up but the isight is not working. Network is ok. I'll have to find the drivers for the macbook for win 7 tomorrow...ah, if you run windows update it gets the driver for the video and some other things.

Once installed it boots automatically into windows. In the old boot camp there was a control panel in windows to set the boot back to osx, i don't see it anymore so how to return to osx? I found it in the control panel, system and security.

Ah, here is a good guide:

http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/ which says to do this:

Insert your OS X Leopard (or Snow Leopard) DVD. When prompted, select Run setup.exe. Note: If you’re using Snow Leopard and a message pops up saying “Remote Install Mac OS X”, close that window and eject the CD. Put the CD in again and this time select “Open folder to view files”, navigate to the Bootcampfolder, and run setup.exe.

Looks like this is needed in able to get back to osx - as windows probably toasts the existing boot loader (why you need to install windows 1st before linux on a dual boot machine). So we haul out the 10.6 retail box and insert the dvd.

Works as advertised. Remember to remove the snow leopard cd before rebooting.

When your Mac boots, hold down the Option key to select which Operating System you want to boot into.

There will be 2 hard drive icons shown, your apple one and a hard drive called windows. Select the windows drive. Next we install the apple bootcamp update by running Apple Software update in windows. This loads ver 3.1 which updates some of the drivers.

The macbook gets a little hot during all this updating, i have a fan control applet in osx that cranks up the fans - need to find something similar for winddoze.

Summary

Windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro looks nice and is fast. I must say the Aero window manager is very nice looking.

How useful windows 7 is remains to be seen, but because work is a windows-centric IT place i have to use it sometimes, although there is no longer any compelling reason to do so. Many years ago a windows upgrade would have been exciting, today it is ho hum as everything i need can be done is Ubuntu or OSX and in fact there are things i do there that i can't do easily in windows without purchasing a lot of software or fiddling around in windows innards. During the years windows tried to take over the world with phones, zune's, xboxes and such it lost sight of updating it's os and many people left for better options. Wonder if it will get them back? Probably not - would you return to IE after many years on Firefox and Safari?

PS

Ran the windows experience index and got a score of: 5.1 which is caused by the slower hard drive, the other scores were all 5.9

Reading Books on the iTouch

Earlier we had hacked liam's nintendo DS so we could read ebooks on it. And it works but i don't carry around a DS so i wanted to turn the iTouch into a ebook reader.

When i got the device i immediately jailbroke it so the first step was to restore it to default and install the latest version 3 of the os. Next i downloaded the Stanza ebook app along with the apple ebook reader, the kindle and kobo ebook apps and the dropbox app. I wanted to explore various methods of using the device. The kindle and kobo approach is to tie your mobile device to an online store (like the itunes store) and i don't like that approach. I want to be able to put any ebook on it and to download from multiple sources or transfer directly from my computer.

First off we tested the stanza ebook app. This works well and has a section for free online book sources such as Gutenbery and Feedbooks as well as a link to my fav publisher, O'Reilly and some vanity presses. It is not obvious how to add additional sources, for example - can i add a local source such as a web server on my home network as a source of books?

We also downloaded the stanza desktop app for the mac, this allows you to read books on a desktop which is ok, but more usefully it lets you convert books between different formats.

Unfortunately, the instructions on the stanza web site on copying books to the itouch from itunes are obsolete (or written for the pc version of itunes). It's odd that i was able to import a bunch of pdf ebooks into itunes to the books library and that there is a books library on the itouch, but there does not seem to be a way to sync the books from the desktop itunes to the itouch. Perhaps they have to be in a different format? The apple web site notes that you need ios 4 or better which means 2nd gen itouch and mine is 1st gen so there is no books tab in the itouch window when the device is selected.

We decide to try to download some books from our web server on the home network. For the mac desktop this is http://localhost which corresponds to library\WebServer\Documents and it has a default web page of index.html which we delete. Next we copy a folder of ebooks in various formats to this folder. We discover that file permissions must be set so that everyone can read them.

We fire up Safari on the itouch and goto http://192.168.1.105 and browse the ebooks folder and select sharpe's skirmish in epub format. But because it is in epub format the web browser cannot open it and there is no way to download. Same for other formats. I was able to open and read html, txt, and pdf because they are supported by safari.

The other option is to use a website that is supported by stanza. So we head off to: http://bookworm.oreilly.com and create an account. It turns out i already created one last year and had uploaded a few books. The idea was to test out reading in bed using a netbook. This was not a success as i found the netbook screen just too small and the device uncomfortable to hold for long periods and so went back to printed books for bedtime reading. So now we decide to upload a Richard Dawkins book in epub format.

This works fine and next we turn to the itouch and run Safari and goto http://m.bookworm.oreilly.com and sign in to our account. All out books are listed. We click on the arrow next to the Dawkins book that says Read in Stanza and the stanza app is automatically loaded and the book is downloaded to the itouch. It works but it got the title wrong.

This works but we would have to convert books from the common chm and pdf formats to epub. And what about all our comics in cbr ad cbz format? A batch process would be useful here, the workflow (automator?) would be to pick up all new books in a file folder and convert to epub format and store in an uploads folder to moving to the bookworm web site. How secure is bookworm and how much storage do you get? I would prefer a local solution - how do you make a web-site stanza ready? It would be a very useful plug-in for Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress. Perhaps the workflow script could be modified to:

- convert ebook files to epub
- upload files to web server
- parse author/title info and enter in the mysql database
- create an xml file with the data for use by stanza
- build html code based on xml file and display as part of a catalog of books

I see people have come up with some solutions to the problem such as this post by cornfed

- use the program CalibreDBxtractor
- see http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62332

CalibreDBxtractor also builds web pages that you can turn on or off at the time of build, the function of downloading the ebooks or just showing the discription of the ebook. The program is now called calibre2opds and is hosted at https://launchpad.net/calibre2opds and requires java and calibre. The progam basically uses the Calibre ebook reader to produce an OPDS compatible xml catalog complete with cross-references and links to web pages. OPDS is the open publication distribution system. From the google code web site:

The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) Catalog is a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom RFC4287 and HTTP RFC2616. Catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, discovery, and acquisition of electronic publications. OPDS Catalogs use existing or emergent open standards and conventions, with a priority on simplicity. This work is part of the BookServer project: http://www.archive.org/bookserver

This looks good. Hey, since the output is html i could use my public folder on dropbox as a testbed.

My Dinner with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7

After a previous disaster (my evening with Vista), that ended up with a lot of cursing, hurt feelings and a windows divorce, I was loath to try Windows 7. But half the computer lab is now 7, and the new students will arrive bearing laptops with 7 and the attendant problems. So i have to learn it so i can be of some help.

This all started when passing the usual dumpster spot i noticed a familiar looking computer. It was a dell precision 450, the little brother of my main desktop (dell precision 470, 2 x 3.4Ghz xeon's, 1.5tb, 6gig ddr2). Students had taken the optical drives, video card and ram but the innards (esp the dual cpu's) looked good so i had to bring him home.



Digging through the parts box resulted in 2 gig of ddr ram, ati radeon 128mb video card, a combo dvd/cdrw and a 250 gig hard drive. Put it together and fire it up and viola, a dual xeon (2.4Ghz) box with HT. Then it stuck me, this would be a good machine to try out windows 7 and i could connect it to the new 32" toshiba lcd with vga, dvi and hdmi (xmas present).

The windows 7 install went smoothly, unlike Vista which for some reason couldn't connect to microsoft's server and i had to telephone an autobot to get a validation number to enter. When it was all done i ran the 'windows experience score' and found most things scored 4.5 - 5, except as expected the ancient ati radeon 128mb video card (a score of 1). This had a max resolution of 1024 x 768 and the included windows driver was not accelerated. Tried to download and install a ATI driver without success.
Here is the windows 7 desktop showing the 4 cores in action. Note the Vista desktop background, the only thing i liked about vista! (I even use it on my ubuntu desktop...). The windows update did not fix the video problem but installed the correct driver for the analog devices ad1918b integrated sound chip, which was good as i wanted to try out the media functions microsoft advertising so heavily. I had tested the media center xp edition as a possible living room media center but it was very lacking and thus discarded.

Anyway, with the sound now hooked up to the Spherex sound system (grab one of these if you can find it) and the video sort of working (480p only) we plugged in our windows media center remote and after a few minutes telling it where the media files are located (on a server) and removing the default local options we had a media center.

The audio part works well and goes off to the internet to display the cover art. The look and operation of the 7 media center is very familiar to users of XBMC. I just played mp3's to start from one machine, the main media server has only FLAC files, although the mac pro runs connect 360 and so serves audio files from iTunes. Yet to test if the media center can pick up the connect 360 and TVersity upnp media servers.

We next test out the image function and it works fine. I like it better than the media center client update on the XBOX 360. The last update has slowed the image viewing down and made it more clunky to use.
The big test is movies, it is a media center after all - music and pictures are nice but it HAS to play movies well. And here it all comes crashing down. It took forever to pick up the 976 movies from the server and each time you click the movies option it seems to have to do it again instead of being instantaneous. And the display - butt ugly, where are the movie covers? I watch (and buy) a lot of movies, so i expect and need a good interface. I also like the MKV format (see MakeMKV for mac) but like FLAC for audio, windows lags behind the times. Not only could i not play my MKV video but also the MOV (quicktime) and a bunch of AVI's. A media player MUST play all formats and not just the ones the company decides it has deals with - so now we have to spend a lot of time hacking windows media player yet again to get it to play common file formats.

Summary

Overall, i give windows 7 a B+, it is not totally useless like Vista and did not get in my way much for common tasks. It does the job competently. The GUI is nice (and will be a lot nicer and faster once i add an ATI 4670) and it ran surprising well on just 2 gig of ram (soon to be 4 gig).

The major failing for a consumer OS is the lack of robust digital audio and video support for common formats. Business won't care about that (maybe it is a feature for enterprises!). Basically microsoft doesn't get the digital world anyway....proof - Zune - the 'ipod killer', windows smart phones - 'the ipod/android killer' and their new tablet - 'the ipad killer'...

Ya right..

PS

So i go to add a printer. It's a network printer at 192.168.1.2 but windows fails to discover it on the network. So i Add Printer manually and put in the IP address. It then presents a list of manufactures, and surprise Apple is no longer listed. My laser printers are Apple postscript so i search for a generic postscript driver but that is no longer there and Adobe doesn't provide one anymore. The solution was to choose a postscript level 2 printer like the Lexmark Optra Ep PS and install that. It worked (which is should, that's the idea behind postscript...) and the test page printed perfectly on my ancient Apple Laserwriter...

-------------------
Dell Precision 450, dual xeon cpu's @ 2.4 Ghz, 2 gig DDR ram, 250 gig hard drive, ati radeon 9200

UPDATE

Replaced the existing processors with two 3.2 Ghz 1mb cache hyperthreaded cpu's. Interesting in that when windows starts it updates a driver and requires you to reboot. The cpu score went from 4.5 to 5.0, a moderate improvement. I also upgraded the ram from 2 gig to 4 gig which raised that score to 5.0, all we need now is to install the 1 gig video card which should arrive tomorrow. The end result is a usable windows 7 box for about $240 in upgrades to a freebie..

Update 2

The ATI HD 4600 card arrived and is installed. Take 2 slots. Odd is that it is listed as having 1275 mb of total graphics memory but that only 1000 mb is actually on the video card and 251 mb is shared system memory. I don't want memory shared, that is the whole point of a dedicated graphic card vs onboard graphics! However, i can find no setting to change this. We rerun the performance index and the graphics score has gone from 1.0 to 6.7 so now the slowest component is the ram at 5.0! I check the bios but no setting on shared memory but i did change the agp aperture setting from 256 to 32mb.

Update:

Appalling! I just started up a small 1 gig copy operation of 13,000 files and basically it totally ties up the file manager window. I've never run across this in OSX or Ubuntu. Other windows can be operated and you can run a second copy of the windows explorer file manager to perform file tasks while the copy operation is going on but the original file manager window did not respond until the copying was complete.

Horrible! Windows 7 managed to scramble the file system on my USB stick while copying a file! It now cannot read the stick and wants to reformat it as there is 'no recognizable file system'. The stick will not mount on osx or ubuntu so it has to be reformatted. This never happened in XP, the primary rule is 'do no harm', how can a file copy corrupt and entire file system?

Upgrading the G4

We have an ancient 800mhz G4 ibook that is still quite useful as it is only 12" in size and is fairly light as the internal cd/dvd drive died and was removed. However, it cannot run any os later than 10.4 because the install program checks the cpu speed and if it is less than 867Mhz the program will not work.

However, there is a workaround, basically fake the cpu speed by reporting it to the OS as 900mhz.
First we goto http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26562/leopardassist and download the leopard assist program. This sets up the trick and restarts the machine.

We hook up an external firewire drive and boot the install DVD from that. Click install and away we go...

and after a few minutes it is complete. So how does 10.5 run on an 800mhz G4 with 1.25mb of ram? not bad, i wouldn't run garageband on it but it does well as a web surfer and email machine.

Nintendo DS Redux

A long time ago i was playing with Liam's new DS and thought it was a clever little platform with a lot of potential. It has 802.11b wireless, a touch pad, sound etc in a compact package. A few months ago i picked up an R4 card for his DS but never got around to doing much with it.

Today i downloaded and installed Moonshell 2 to the card on a new 1 gig micro SD card. Tried an 8 gig card but it must be too big. Will have to try a 4 or 2 gig card because 1 gig is a bit small. The moonshell install can take about 30-60mb, depending on functions. See: http://www.ds-xtra.com/MoonShell2

Anyway, the goal was to make the DS into a nice travel machine with photos, music, movies and games - a poor man's iTouch. I had played with the Sony PSP for a while as that also has wireless and a nicer screen. The DS seems to have a more active developer community.

Once Moonshell was installed i ran the LanguageSelect.exe program to set the language to English. The program is written in Japanese and some of the translations are a bit rough but Liam was able to navigate ver 1 ok and version 2.10 is a real improvement. It also contains a bunch of utilities, such as a file converter for movies. Since most movies Liam watches are on Youtube (we don't have TV) I used http://keepvid.com/ to capture Youtube videos and downloaded them in .FLV format and to use the dpgenc DPG video converter included with Moonshell in the dpgtools folder. Now if netflix would write an nds app...

I plugged the microSD card into my pc and created movies, photos and music folders and copied over some files. The next step was to get the shell to run automatically when the DS is booted up - otherwise you have to select the NDS file.

When 'moonshl2.nds' is renamed into' DEFAULT.NDS ', MoonShell2 is started automatically but there is no audio when playing music or video files.

The moonshl2_AltLoader_DKPr27.nds is an alternative loader and renaming this to DEFAULT.NDS solved the problem. Now movies and music play - excellent!

To add applications see: http://dl.qj.net/nintendo-ds/homebrew-applications.html which lists a lot of NDS downloads. You can also get roms ripped from games if you want. Of more use is being able to make backup roms of the games you bought and being able to put a bunch of them on a single card for travel.

Nintendo actively discourages the homebrew developers by changing things - for example this won't work on his DS XL he got for xmas. Oddly enought, despite the bigger and brighter screens, he prefers the convenience of having multiple games so he uses the older DS much more! If Nintendo wanted to sell to the adult market they should open up the platform by:

- moving from 802.11 b to at least G
- creating an app store for downloading of apps, movies, music directly to the ds
- allow third party developers to write apps for the app store

When liam gets older he will probably give up the DS for an iphone/itouch. If the R4 card worked on the DS XL i would trade my netbook to Liam for it and use it at work. It writes memos, keeps track of appointments, takes photos, surf's the web and can play the odd game. There is even a ebook reader app for the DS. I would actually prefer the DS to my iTouch as a portable device because of the card slot and the stylus. My fingers are just too big to use the iTouch/iPhone keypad so it sits unused and unloved.

Photo 1 - DS Organizer - Calendar



Photo 2 - Music



Photo 3 - Photos




Photo 4 - Movies

Greenstone and Z39.50

The local windows install of Greenstone for Windows contains a Z39.50 client but the documentation on how to use it is out of date and there seems to be some problems in saving the file in shared computer labs. The following was tested on Greenstone 2.83 on Windows XP and describes how to do a title search for books on SQL against the Library of Congress z39.50 server database.

1. Click on the Download tab and select Z39.50
2. Enter the following parameters:

Host: lx2.loc.gov
Port: 210
Database: LCDB
Find: @attr 1=4 "SQL"

3. Click Download

You can set the Max Records if you want. A max of 500 records is returned for any query. The file of MARC records is saved to wherever folder was specified when Greenstone was installed. If installed on your own computer running windows XP this is most likely the C: drive in Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Greenstone\GLI\lx2.loc.gov with the filename set to the search string with an extension of .marc, in this example the file name was LCDB_@attr 1=4 SQL_500.marc.

When we ran this in the GU and GRC computer labs the file was not written even though the Greenstone log said it was. The problem seems to be that user application data is not saved locally but to a network share.

The file itself is a plain text ASCII file containing the 500 marc records. It looks like this:

Records: 500
[LCDB]Record type: USmarc

001 15430621
005 20080908175110.0
008 080827s2008 caua 001 0 eng d
906 $a 7 $b cbc $c copycat $d 2 $e ncip $f 20 $g y-gencatlg
925 0 $a acquire $b 2 shelf copies $x policy default
955 $a ps04 2008-08-27 z-processor 2 copies to ASCD $i jx09 2008-09-08 $e jx09 2008-09-08 c. 1-2 to BCCD
010 $a 2008297695
020 $a 9781590599693 (pbk.)
020 $a 1590599691 (pbk.)
035 $a (OCoLC)ocn179801564
040 $a BTCTA $c BTCTA $d BAKER $d YDXCP $d OCO $d CDX $d BWX $d OCLCQ $d DLC
042 $a lccopycat
082 04 $a 005.7565 $2 22
050 00 $a QA76.9.D3 $b A284 2008

For information on the Library of Congress Z39.50 server see:
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/lcserver.html and for information on the syntax of Z39.50 queries using Yaz see: http://www.indexdata.com/zebra/doc/querymodel-rpn.html

The next step is to import the MARC records into Greenstone.

1. Click the Gather tab
2. Expand the Local Filespace and drag LCDB_@attr 1=4 SQL_500.marc into the Collection window
3. When asked click Add Plugin to add the MARCplug import program

MARCplugin uses a file called marctodc.txt located in the /gsdl/etc folder to map MARC field numbers to Dublin Core metadata based on (http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/dccross.html). It is also possible to use the RFC 1807 Bibliographic records metadata set for the following exercise but we will use Dublin Core as that is the metadata scheme most commonly used for online digital collections. You could also use the qualified Dublin Core metadata set. To use the qualified dublin core or the RFC 1807 metadata set clikc on Enrich, Manage Metadata Sets, select a set and click Add. With those additional sets added to Greenstone you can choose them in the next sequence. However, you cannot have both Dubin Core 1.1 and the qualifed Dublin Core at the same time; you must choose one or the other.

The next step is to extract or 'explode' the individual MARC records from the file.

Select LCDB_@attr 1=4 SQL_500.marc in the Collection Window and right-click
Select Explode Metadata Database from the menu
Place a tick mark in the metadata_set option
Select Dublin Core from the metadata_set pulldown menu and click Explode
Click the Enrich tab



Because Greenstone assigns metadata to files, each MARC record has been assigned to a file with a .nul extension (to indicate the files are really null). Select 00000006.nul to view the metadata.

The next step is to process these .nul files using the NULplugin. First we have to remove the MARCplugin so it does not try and process the records.

1. Click the Design tab
2. Select MARCplugin
3. Click Remove Plugin
4. Click Create
5. Click Build Collection
6. Click Preview Collection

The record index will look something like this:

	Beginning Microsoft SQL server 2008 administration / Chris Leiter ... [et al.]. (00000010.nul)
	Best damn Exchange, SQL and IIS book period / Conrad H. Agramont, Jr. ...[et al.] (00000011.nul)
	Data transformation with dts: sql server 7 and 2000 / James Samuelson ... [et al.] ; [edited by] Gina Brown, Karen Wachs, Laura Loveall. (00000012.nul)
	Database benchmarking : practical methods for Oracle & SQL server / Bert Scalzo ... [et al.]. (00000013.nul)

If you select a Title and click on the icon to get the text of the record, nothing is shown. This is because there are no files with text, we only have metadata. The Document icon should either be removed or the DocumentText instructions changed to display meaningful metadata and a cover image would be nice.

1.

You can now proceed to create some useful indexes using dc elements and to format the display of your indexes (and to remove the full-text search function) to create a useful bibliographic collection.

Digitization of old CD's

Since i haven't played a CD in some years, i finally got around to getting rid of the dusty cd cabinet in the upstairs 'media room' sometimes called living room. As i boxed them up i realized there are some songs i don't have digital copies of so i will have to either spend time searching and downloading or digitizing them myself. Most of the stuff i have is eclectic so it is unlikely to be in an online music store.

Now that we are using Connect360 on the mac pro for all the existing MP3 files and Tversity on the windows server for all the FLAC's and movie files, there is no need to keep audio CD from long term storage. We will not be converting any audio cd's to MP3 but rather to the higher resolution FLAC as digital masters and then downconverting to MP3 as needed.

The problem is that i want to use the mac for ripping the CD's but i don't want to use iTunes for that. I want to rip to high resolution FLAC's and then convert to MP3's if needed. First we take a look at Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/) for OSX. While this is still beta (less than version 1.0) it has a lot of nice features. We set the output as FLAC to a folder on the external drive and insert and an audio CD. It gets the metadata from the net, rips and converts the files and ejects the disc, all in 3 minutes. Excellent!

Wonder if it supports multiple drives, i have a couple of Firewire external cd-rom drives, a plextor and a lacie i could hook up. All you would have to do is to feed it a CD every few minutes.

Greenstone Z39.50 lookup to Library of Congress

In Greenstone 2.83 for Windows click the Download tab and select Z3950. Type in the following settings:

HOST: z3950.loc.gov
PORT: 7090
DATABASE: voyager
FIND: @attr 1=4 "SQL"

This sets up a connection to the Library of Congress Z39.50 server and does a search for books with SQL in the title.

Tick the max records checkbox and set the number to 5.
Click Download to start the retrieval

The search log indicates it completes successfully but no file of marc records is found in Application Data folder:

from Yaz log:

Opening connection to z3950.loc.gov:7090
Access database: "voyager"
Searching for keyword: "@attr 1=4 SQL "
<>
Yaz is Gathering records: 1 - 50
<>
Saving records to "\files3\Faculty$\users\gnickers\Application Data\Greenstone\GLI\cache\z3950.loc.gov\voyager_@attr 1=4 SQL _50.marc"
Closing connection...

The log file was written in:

U:\Application Data\Greenstone\GLI\log\download-Z3950994507293.log

but no .marc file. I tested with 500 records and 50 records and 5 records. I created z3950 folder manually and re-ran query. No joy. The Greenstone documentation notes:

"You can view the downloaded MARC files on the Gather panel. On the left-hand side of the panel, double click the Downloaded Files folder to expand its content. The subfolders are named by the Z39.50 server url. The MARC files are named as the combination of database name, query, and max_records if max_records is specified. These MARC files are physically stored in a temporary cache directory. "

This could be a Greenstone bug, further investigation reveals 3 PERL errors. The c:\program files\greenstone\perlib\downloaders\Z3950Download.pm file at:

Line 146
Line 156
Line 159

Next we replaced the voyager database label with

LCDB

Which i got from the loc page. In fact i replace the greenstone settings, which seem quite old with:

HOST: lx2.loc.gov
PORT: 210
DATABASE: LCDB
FIND: @attr1=4 "SQL"
MAX RECORDS: 5

which retrieved 5 records but none were saved. I changed the MODE setting from Librarian to Expert and re-ran the query. No joy. We then removed the max records setting and got 500 hits. Nothing saved.

I also tried the OAI harvester function, although this is not supposed to work on the local version, only on the server install.

Select Download, OAI and enter the following settings:

SOURCE URL: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0
RESTRICT to SET: cwp
MAX RECORDS: 5

Click DOWNLOAD and see what happens. 0 of 5 files are retrieved and the log shows:

Parsing OAI identifiers.....
<>
Gathering OAI record with ID oai:lcoa1.loc.gov:loc.pnp/cph.3a00275.....
Unable to save oai metadata record: No such file or directory

Looks like it kind of worked except there was no place to save it or no file to save. An examination of the perl code might help.

I also tried the SRU function using the information supplied in the Greenstone documentation but we could not get a connection. The log shows:

Opening connection to http://z3950.loc.gov :7090
Cannot connect to http://z3950.loc.gov :7090

We tried the LOC SRW server at:

http://lx2.loc.gov:210/LCDB? 

But Greenstone gave error messages in trying to connect.
For details on the LOC server see: http://www.loc.gov/z3950/lcserver.html

Would be very interested in seeing an example or hearing from someone who has this working!

Skype

Liam has been chatting with his chum via ye olde pots but it is long distance. So i was thinking of Skype as a solution that would put off getting him a cell phone for a bit...

He has an iMac so i signed him up for Skype and installed it. Worked fine with the iSight and his mic, a logitech usb upgrade from the built-in mic. I restricted his calls to people in his contact list and filled in the list with me to start.

We tested it out this weekend with us calling upstairs/downstairs and he thought it was pretty cool. The only problem was this is the 1st week of term and the Rogers network can't keep up - the connection is up and down like a yoyo. My theory is their DNS server gets overloaded and things time out but who knows for sure? Anyway it is was moderately successful as a test - next step is to get his local and far away chums signed up and let them have have it.

And i have to add it to my linux laptop too...just need to get the damn dell webcam working. Vendors who build equipment using parts such as wireless and cams that are known not to work with linux is beyond my comprehension - i would love to see 'linux-certified' stickers on equipment - because i would pay for that!

GPT Protective Partitions and Windows XP

I upgraded the hard disks in the mac pro to 1 gig models and put the 500mb old drives to use, one as a time machine for the macbook, another in the media center and the third as a 'clone' drive to backup the last XP box called Gamera.

The idea is to automatically clone the xp system disk in case of failure. The document files are stored on the network but re-installing windows and it's application is not a welcome chore.

The problem was that XP could not format the mac osx drive. It listed it as a GPT Protected Partition but could not access it. I booted the Gparted liveCD which listed the drive and seemed to allow me to change the partition to NTFS but when i rebooted into XP it was still locked into GPT.

The solution was to drop into the windows terminal or CLI by running cmd. At the command prompt type:

diskpart

to run the disk partition utility. You can now list your disks, select a disk and clean it up. In this case we see there are 4 disks, disk 0 being the XP system disk and disk 1 being the osx disk.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 466 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 466 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Online 699 GB 0 B
Disk 3 Online 932 GB 0 B

DISKPART> select Disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

Once the disk is cleaned, then run control panel, administrative tools. computer management, disk management.

This brings up the disk initialization wizard which allows you to select disk 1 and to format it as NTFS. The disk now shows up correctly as sys (G:) 465.76 gb NTFS.

The next step is to find a windows version of the great osx utility - carbon copy cloner. The requirements are:

- creates an exact copy of the system disk including boot data and permissions
- updates the duplicate disk automatically on a schedule
- open source or non-proprietary


I think DriveImage might work but first we download XXclone. It's pretty simple, you can set the backup drive to be bootable and then copy all the files. It also has an incremental copy option.

Next we run DriveImage XML which is free for personal use. It has a backup option but also a drive to drive copy. We decide to test copying c: to g: which will take some time...

The Koha Laptop Project

The idea is to build a portable 'server' that i can take to class to demo stuff and to bring to small labs so students can use it like a server. How well the second idea works out remains to be seen. The first step was to find a laptop that works with Linux and is cheap but powerful enough.

First attempt involved an HP dv6000 but i could never get the wireless to work. So that went to the flea market. I was tempted to use the dell D400 in the kitchen but it is underpowered for a server, fine as a firefox platform. I checked dell's canadian site but couldn't find any with Ubuntu anymore so i looked at the list of dell machines known to run linux.

The flea market yielded a very cheap Dell Inspiron 6400. Cheap because there is no battery, the Vista OS wouldn't boot, and it was missing an ALT key but those are not needed.

The machine is decently powered with 2 gig ram, 120 gig hard drive and a P4 duo core cpu. The seller told me it had intel pro wireless so it seemed a good choice.

I installed 9 but the wireless (the dreaded broadcomm 43xx - the seller was wrong) did not work so i upgraded to version 10 and it was able to see my WAP's.

Next - setup Koha

Greenstone - Cannot import PDF files

The problem is when adobe comes out with a new version of the file format it is incompatible with older versions, for example some new pdf's cannot be imported into Greenstone. This is noted in the log:

"PDF version 1.6 -- xpdf supports version 1.4"

The solution would be to convert existing pdf's to an older version such as 1.4 or earlier. If the pdf's were produced from some other files using a program like Open Office should produce pdf's that Greenstone can use.

http://www.topshareware.com/pdf-1.6-to-pdf-1.4/downloads/1.htm lists PDF Version Converter 1.0, a program that converts Convert PDF file between different versions for compatibility purposes. I've not tested this. Should be other programs or even a web site that performs a similar function, a program that works in batch mode would be preferable.

Koha on the HP 6000

This morning i decided as an experiment to change the old windows xp laptop, an hp 6000 into a dual-boot machine with one half being linux running the koha library system. The laptop sits in the corner unused 90% of the time anyway. I no longer have any interest in windows, xp is useful occasionally for legacy applications but using vista or vista 2, er windows 7 would be huge steps backward in functionality and usability from my macpro labtop or the ubunutu laptop.

The first step was to divide the hard drive into a windows NTFS partition and an Linux ext3 partition. There are commercial programs to do this, i used Partition Magic for years and found it a good, reliable application but it's not installed and the version i own is old. So we download a bootable Gparted cd image and boot it from the optical drive.

The Gparted live CD contains a ultra minimal Linux environment, complete with a sparse GUI. The gparted tool runs and shows you the existing hard drive(s) and their partitions. The first step is to shrink the existing NTFS partition to 60 gig. Plenty of space for XP as I'm not likely to add any new windows apps. Are there new windows apps? Name a 'killer' application that you would purchase windows for. No one buys a OS to run an OS, it's a platform to run applications that you use to do things. The OS is an enabler that should just work. I can't think of anything i want to run on windows besides the occasional use of Microsoft office for work.

Anything i used to do on windows i now do in Linux, at a lot less cost. I bought DOS 2.2, 3.0, 4, 5, 6.22 etc and Windows 2.11, 3.0, 3.11, 95,98,2000, xp, vista and many, many applications over the years. The only software purchases i've done lately are OSX 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 that came with various macs, and iLife/iWork that did not (and some small online purchases from app store, and web sites like Tversity).

So now about 90% of the things i do are done in open source applications or on a mac. The last reason for using windows is that workplaces are still windows-centric. One would think Microsoft would concentrate on making those things work better (think Sharepoint) instead of trying to dominate the 'youth market' with zune, xin?, xbox etc. It's like your dad trying to be cool by growing a ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt...let's face it, Windows is your Dad's operating system and Microsoft is the Dad 'n Lad brand of OS, and no stupid marketing campaign can change that fact so Microsoft - stop trying to be cool and accept you are a middle aged geezer in a white shirt and tie who works in big government and industry.

Anyway, now that i think about it why do i need a windows laptop anyway? The machine is too slow to run Vista (1.8 ghz dual core, 2 gig of ram) acceptably and there is no windows programs i really need on a laptop. So we decide to go the whole hog and boot up with the Koha Live CD and install, using the entire 120gig hd and wiping out Windows. Bye bye. We are now down to one lonely windows desktop which will probably go this year.

The install goes fine, and it picks up the wired connection and offers to install the proprietary drivers for the broadcom wireless and nvidia graphics. Next we want to upgrade from 9 to 10.4 but that does a fair bit of downloading so to save the internet bills we might hump the machine to school tomorrow. This would give us a fairly decent linux box with a fully functioning version of Koha. Sweet. There are a ton of apps on the dual xeon box so we want those too! But for now we grab the ubuntu-resticted-extras from the synaptic package manager. At a download rate of 1003kb/sec this does not take long.