My main ubunutu machine is a dell precision 470 with two dual-core xeon 3.2ghz cpu's, 3 gig of ram, terabyte hd and an nvidia pci-e video card. It ran 24/7 without problem since ubuntu 7.10 but when i upgraded to 9.10 a very perplexing problem occurred.
I did the upgrade from the upgrade manager and it went fine. However, i later noticed the machine had hung. Totally frozen and could only be restarted by unplugging the power cord. This happen the next time so i started keeping track. The symptom was that when the video went into power-save mode you could not get the display back and from there the system then froze up. I had to build an emergency ubuntu machine with a dual core 3.0ghz P4 - the difference in speed is so great this is not a long term solution. With a dual cpu machine you never have to wait, a single cpu is so much less usable. For example, on the dual xeon box i can start a 10-20 gig file copy, burn a DVD and read the mail without any lag, on the single cpu such a file copy operation causes a noticeable lag with windows and mouse operations.
Anyway, suspecting the power save settings i tweaked them in various ways without success, even setting the system to never enter power save mode. I upgraded the bios to the latest version but no joy. I then pulled the hard drive and stuck in another and installed windows xp. This ran ok for a day and then exhibited the same freezing problem with the video. The video card is a PNY nvidia one. So i put back the ubuntu hard drive and disabled the nvidia binary driver. No joy there. Finally, i removed the nvidia card and replaced it with an ATI video card.
The system has now been running perfectly for 24 hours without a hiccup. I also noticed that it is quieter - the fans used to run a lot before and now they do not. This may indicate the video card was putting out lots of heat.
So what did we learn. Perhaps the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 did not cause the problem, it may have been a coincidence. The fact the video card had the same blanking problem under windows would seem to indicate this is the case. Anyway, nothing was lost since data is not stored on the OS drive anyway (a good idea - never store your data on the same hard drive as the OS) but i am glad to have the faster machine back...
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Teamviewer
I was looking for a portable application similar to NetOp school to use in the computer lab.
The lab is poorly designed for teaching, the desks go side to side instead of front to back so it is very difficult to get round to help a student, and since you cannot see them or their screen they have to yell for help. Being able to share screens or to troubleshoot from the front desk would be useful. In addition, i was looking for a real-time collaboration programs for online courses, many years ago I had used ms netmeeting on win98 to do collaborative presentations.
Anyway, the search led me to Teamviewer (http://www.teamviewer.com) which has windows and mac versions and can be installed or run as a portable app
from a USB stick. We downloaded and installed on a win XP machine, a macbook, a XP laptop and a dual G5 mac.
Installing, setup and connecting is pretty simple and within minutes i was controlling the mac screen from a PC and vice versa. There is a neat switch partner function which swaps the controlling computer. I was able to chat and look at programs and to show a powerpoint presentation (and make changes).
The program is simple to operate and there is a downloadable manual in .pdf format that runs to 85 pages!
Next test was to connect a webcam and to see if it would transmit video to the remote computer. I fished out an old Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 from the junk box and hooked it up to the XP computer. Thanks to this old OS the camera drivers worked and within a minute i had video up. I was able to transmit the video from the camera from the XP machine to the OSX box.
Some tweaking of the camera was needed to get a reasonable picture, but black and white with no jitter produced a decent enough image. I then hooked up an even older logitech w
eb cam to the Dual G5 but it did not recognize it and logitech's web site is a disaster for finding drivers for a product. So i fired up the macbook which has a webcam. Then i discovered a slight problem - the mac version is v4 while the windows version is v5 so certain functions, like a webcam are not supported on osx. A quick trip to the web site revealed osx 5 is still under development. Bummer.
So i fired up an old laptop with XP, hooked up the old logitech webcam and was able to send that really bad video to the desktop xp machine. I made a screen capture of the laptop vid window running on the xp box.
Unfortunately i was looking at the xp desktop instead of into the camera on the laptop! But hey it works. Unfotunately that old webcam does not have a built-in mic and neither does the old laptop so i did not try out the voice over IP function. I have a bag of mics in the office so we need to do that test in class.
The other neat thing about TeamViewer is that while it is not open source, it does have a free non-commercial use license. While limited, the free version does allow you to do most of the things you would like to test out. Would be nice if they had an educational version, then we could provide each student with a copy so they could chat/vid/work online as part of the online courses we offer.
Todo: - test out the portable version in the lab with the 9710 class along with the voice over IP
Also, as a lark i wondered what would happen if a pc running the program and connected to another pc then got connected to from the pc it was already connected to....sort of i cu you, you see me (old computer joke). Here is the result - an infinite loop of vid windows.
The lab is poorly designed for teaching, the desks go side to side instead of front to back so it is very difficult to get round to help a student, and since you cannot see them or their screen they have to yell for help. Being able to share screens or to troubleshoot from the front desk would be useful. In addition, i was looking for a real-time collaboration programs for online courses, many years ago I had used ms netmeeting on win98 to do collaborative presentations.
Anyway, the search led me to Teamviewer (http://www.teamviewer.com) which has windows and mac versions and can be installed or run as a portable app
from a USB stick. We downloaded and installed on a win XP machine, a macbook, a XP laptop and a dual G5 mac.Installing, setup and connecting is pretty simple and within minutes i was controlling the mac screen from a PC and vice versa. There is a neat switch partner function which swaps the controlling computer. I was able to chat and look at programs and to show a powerpoint presentation (and make changes).
The program is simple to operate and there is a downloadable manual in .pdf format that runs to 85 pages!
Next test was to connect a webcam and to see if it would transmit video to the remote computer. I fished out an old Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 from the junk box and hooked it up to the XP computer. Thanks to this old OS the camera drivers worked and within a minute i had video up. I was able to transmit the video from the camera from the XP machine to the OSX box.
Some tweaking of the camera was needed to get a reasonable picture, but black and white with no jitter produced a decent enough image. I then hooked up an even older logitech w
eb cam to the Dual G5 but it did not recognize it and logitech's web site is a disaster for finding drivers for a product. So i fired up the macbook which has a webcam. Then i discovered a slight problem - the mac version is v4 while the windows version is v5 so certain functions, like a webcam are not supported on osx. A quick trip to the web site revealed osx 5 is still under development. Bummer.So i fired up an old laptop with XP, hooked up the old logitech webcam and was able to send that really bad video to the desktop xp machine. I made a screen capture of the laptop vid window running on the xp box.
Unfortunately i was looking at the xp desktop instead of into the camera on the laptop! But hey it works. Unfotunately that old webcam does not have a built-in mic and neither does the old laptop so i did not try out the voice over IP function. I have a bag of mics in the office so we need to do that test in class.
The other neat thing about TeamViewer is that while it is not open source, it does have a free non-commercial use license. While limited, the free version does allow you to do most of the things you would like to test out. Would be nice if they had an educational version, then we could provide each student with a copy so they could chat/vid/work online as part of the online courses we offer.
Todo: - test out the portable version in the lab with the 9710 class along with the voice over IP
Also, as a lark i wondered what would happen if a pc running the program and connected to another pc then got connected to from the pc it was already connected to....sort of i cu you, you see me (old computer joke). Here is the result - an infinite loop of vid windows.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Delicious Library
Taking a break from working to see if there is an easy solution to the problem of proliferating DVD movies....
The problem is too many movies which results in information problems:
The solution is of course a database. I've thought of building one from scratch using mysql and php and while it would be fun it would take time i really don't have, both for the development work and then the immense amount of data entry. Last year or so i remember seeing a utility program that used a webcam to scan bar codes and then to retrieve the data from Amazon.
So we went looking and found a program called delicious library at http://www.delicious-monster.com/ which looks good. It is osx which is ok as we can use either the macbook or the imac to scan. We tried an old logitech webcam on the dual G5 but no joy as there are no osx drivers.
The program goes in your applications folder. Double-click to run. The older version ran fine on my dual G5 and even offered to move itself to the applications folder and then updated itself to the current 2.3 version. You can try out the program in demo mode for up to 25 items. You can add an new item by entering info like the ISBN but the webcam is great. Click Window, Video Camera Barcode Scanner and hold up the UPC symbol to the window. Make sure it is the right way, if a beep is not heard in a second or two then turn it the other way round. It picked up Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, La Chambre des Morts, Trailer Park Boys, Blade etc. It was able to identify 5 out of 10 movies by barcode scanning. It is neat that it speaks the title to you once it is identified. For the rest i entered the title of the movie and it found all of them and added them to the database. You can also add books by ISBN etc.
Once your movies or books or electronics are entered you can publish. The publish button allows you to publish to a folder on this machine or your network, put to an ftp site, or to iWeb or mobile me. We decide to try a folder for now.
Backing Up
Update
Figured it out (with help from my neighbour). The quote marks are because the default is to sort by creator and it is blank for many. Click on the top of the window and sort by Title and now the bookshelves are in the proper order. It's quite fast to a dd stuff and the developers just updated to 2.3.3 so they are active. I want to test out exporting the data and bringing it into a database to offer a search page...here is a pic of my neighbour's collection:
The problem is too many movies which results in information problems:
- deciding what to watch
- what movies are available for loan
- what movies are yet to be watched
- what movies do your have that are romantic slasher comedies
The solution is of course a database. I've thought of building one from scratch using mysql and php and while it would be fun it would take time i really don't have, both for the development work and then the immense amount of data entry. Last year or so i remember seeing a utility program that used a webcam to scan bar codes and then to retrieve the data from Amazon.
So we went looking and found a program called delicious library at http://www.delicious-monster.com/ which looks good. It is osx which is ok as we can use either the macbook or the imac to scan. We tried an old logitech webcam on the dual G5 but no joy as there are no osx drivers.
The program goes in your applications folder. Double-click to run. The older version ran fine on my dual G5 and even offered to move itself to the applications folder and then updated itself to the current 2.3 version. You can try out the program in demo mode for up to 25 items. You can add an new item by entering info like the ISBN but the webcam is great. Click Window, Video Camera Barcode Scanner and hold up the UPC symbol to the window. Make sure it is the right way, if a beep is not heard in a second or two then turn it the other way round. It picked up Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, La Chambre des Morts, Trailer Park Boys, Blade etc. It was able to identify 5 out of 10 movies by barcode scanning. It is neat that it speaks the title to you once it is identified. For the rest i entered the title of the movie and it found all of them and added them to the database. You can also add books by ISBN etc.
Once your movies or books or electronics are entered you can publish. The publish button allows you to publish to a folder on this machine or your network, put to an ftp site, or to iWeb or mobile me. We decide to try a folder for now.
Backing Up
The program stores its data in your home folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library so to backup your database, make a copy of this folder. (or use Time Machine). There is also a backup and restore option on the file menu. I successfully backed up the 12 movies to my folder on the dual G5.
You can also export your data to excel, BibTex, XML, rtf, http://or comma delimited for import to a database.
I saved the file to my folder on the mac and then opened it in Safari to take a look. It's a nice display but the information retrieval options are restricted to only browsing as it is a static web page. Without a link to the underlying data there is no open of answering questions such as what movies do you have by genre or bw vs color or less than 120 minutes starring Scott Baio with a rating of 5 stars.
The web site says you can do a voice search but it did not seem to work for me. The keyword search worked ok.edit
I notice another problem with the browse, the shelves are incorrect, a lot of the items are cataloging as being "" on the first shelf. No problem, right just edit the title info to remove the erroneous quote marks. No can do. So now items are out of order. If you select Edit, Edit Item you get a properties pane. Here you can edit some info as well as adding DDC and LC numbers. It would be nice if the program built display pages based on indexing this data. There doesn't appear to be a way to edit the title. I try to search the forums on the web site but the following error is returned:
gsfnResultsCallback([{"date":"about 3 hours ago","
You can get help in the program but there does not seem to be a way to edit the title! The program has some nice features but is clearly a work in progress. The other issue is that it costs $40, which seems like a lot, particularly with the tie-ins to Amazon for buying like items etc. It would make sense for Amazon to fund the development and give the program away to drive sales from the online site. I can see using it to make a static web page so that friends can browse to see what's available but not sure the cost justifies the value added at this time. Still, a very innovative use of technology. If the amazon data was loaded into a sqlite database in the app and then had some useful searching functions and if the problem with quote marks in the titles was fixed i would then definitely recommend this product.Update
Figured it out (with help from my neighbour). The quote marks are because the default is to sort by creator and it is blank for many. Click on the top of the window and sort by Title and now the bookshelves are in the proper order. It's quite fast to a dd stuff and the developers just updated to 2.3.3 so they are active. I want to test out exporting the data and bringing it into a database to offer a search page...here is a pic of my neighbour's collection:
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