Gord Nickerson

2012-01-24T15:16:00.001-05:00

Problems with PDFbox Extension in Greenstone 2.85

The new features document for 2.85 indicates that there is significant improvement in the PDFbox extension which is usually an add-in to the Apache web server.

When you run Greenstone it pops up a message box noting the PDFbox extension has not been installed and listing a URL for the greenstone developer's TRAC site.

Problem #1

The files referenced by the URL in the box and on the developer's blog are not valid archive files. Both the .zip file and the .gz file are 8kb in size instead of the expect 9mb and cannot be opened in an archive manager. So you cannot get the latest version. Searching the TRAC site is a lesson in frustration.

I tried packaging the source files from the TRUNK and adding them manually to the greenstone\ext folder but when launching the GLI it fails to load until they are removed. Next i looked at the pdfbox project page but their files don't seem compatible. So i decided to use the an older version.

Problem #2

Finding an old version was a bit of work but i managed to find a link in the TRAC site and to download the .zip (9mb) and to extract the files to the greenstone\ext folder. Ran the GLI and configured the PDFplugin to use the PDFbox extension. Created a new collection and imported a bunch of small PDF files. Only 2 got imported as the others were rejected. The problem was a 'writable error'. I checked the pdf-box folder in greenstone\gli and it was marked as read-only so i reset the permissions for the folder and its contents and re-ran the GLI and the import. This time it looked liked the files were imported but the PDFbox failed with a java error. The workaround was to untick the pdfbox checkbox in the pdfplugin. Now all the pdf's were imported ok but none of the enhanced features offered by pdfbox were available.

After wasting a morning chasing this problem down I had to advise the students NOT to use pdfbox but to go back to the old workarounds of converting their PDF files to older 1.4 versions. A big disappointment!

Installing Greenstone 2.85 on Windows 7

2012-01-11T20:41:00.000-05:00

Do Not Install Greenstone 2.85 as Administrator in Window 7 Ultimate 32-bit

I removed greenstone 2.84 from my machine in prep for the new version. The old version had worked fine and had been installed as admin to c:\program files\greenstone. I also got another laptop over xmas for testing win stuff so i installed 2.85 to that. It runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (argh why so many versions?) and the install was straightforward and ended up in c:\program files\greenstone so i didn't anticpate any problems.

Ran Greenstone-2.85-windows.exe as Administrator and it installed OK to c:\progam files\greenstone but when I ran the GLI and the following error message was returned:

Cannot initialize Network (reason WSASYSNOTREADY)

So we shut down greenstone and removed the software and tried the install again with the same result. We shut it down and then checked to see if anything was conflicting with it's web server. We opened a terminal window and ran netstat:

C:\Users\gnickers>netstat -an |find /i "Listening"
  TCP    0.0.0.0:135            0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:445            0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:3390           0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:5357           0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:17500          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:34378          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:49152          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:49153          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:49154          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:49155          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    0.0.0.0:49156          0.0.0.0:0
  TCP    127.0.0.1:80           0.0.0.0:0

And oddly enough there were 2 instances of a web server running on port 80. We ran a ports check cports using and found two processes listed but when we went to kill them in the windows task manager they were not there! Looks like greenstone did not clean up after itself!

Only a hard reset got rid of them. We next did an install of Greenstone but not as the administrator and this installed the program to users\gnickers\greenstone and it ran fine. We shut it down and checked the active ports with netstat and the httpd instance had shut down correctly.

So the change is that unlike 2.84 the new version cannot be installed using admin privileges (which makes sense). Would have be nice to put this in the release notes.

Those who are installing greenstone for the first time may also run into the problem of some other program using port 80 which is the standard port for web traffic. Older versions of Skype were bad for doing this.

To check type cmd in the start text box and press ENTER. The run netstat using the above syntax. The cports program (search on Google) provides more info that netstat but you must run it as admin. If you have Skype using port 80 set your skype options in the Connection tab to use a different port such as 34378 or something. A list of ports is available on Wikipedia and other sources.

The other solution is to install Greenstone and then select Start > Programs > Greenstone 2.85 > Greenstone Server and select File, Settings from the menu. Now change the Port Number from 80 to something like 8080 or some other port not in use.

2011-11-25T13:03:00.001-05:00

Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10

We decided to upgrade the HP compaq 8510p laptop to the latest desktop and then to add the server stuff we need (LAMP, various lamp apps, etc). The old 80gig hard drives were too small and we were running ver 9.x which did not support the wireless. So we replaced the hard drive with a new 500gig Seagate hybrid hard drive (SSD/SATA) that should be a lot faster.

Installing was quick and it did fix the wireless problem. However, there are a number of issues with the new release (some minor, some major)

The Unity interface is annoying (slower to find what you want)
Windowshade is not longer an option for windows
Synaptic package manager is not longer included

The first issue was to switch back to Gnome. First we installed it by entering the terminal and doing:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and then restarting and logging in again. This provides some login option. First time around we choose Gnome but the screen menus were scrambled and the unity right side dock would appear! Logging out and choose Gnome Classic at login solved that problem. I can't figure out to how to get windows to roll up, a feature i've been using since mac os 7 and one that is much more usable than having to minimize windows in the way and then go all the way down to the bottom bar to retrieve them. I also seem to recall Unity had that annoying Windows 7 behavior that when you move a window to the side of the screen it maximizes the window. What dumb idea, you move windows to the side to get them out of the way because you can't roll them up. It is fast to just throw a window to the side, doing that does NOT mean i now want it to take up the whole screen. Dumb usability ideas - don't they test these things with real users?

The next step is to download and install all my regular apps and then install LAMP. I did this many versions ago using TASKSEL and the results were awful - lots of problems. So i have to decide between 3 install methods:

Method 1 - TASKSEL(easy but does it work better now?)

sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel
select LAMP Server

Method 2 - Manually (more work to install but possibly most stable?)

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Method 3 - 'Bundle' method (newer so maybe give it a whirl?)

sudo apt-get install lamp-server

Of course I have yet to find an informed article that can discuss the pros/cons of the 3 approaches. So it is trial and error.

On the plus side, the laptop is very snappy. Next to get back my apps... Ah good, the Ubuntu software center has synaptic so let's start with that...

PS - one new app that is interesting is under Internet, Desktop Sharing. We will be trying this out as we need to find a good way to showing distance ed students how to do particular tasks. We having been taking screen shots and turning them into movies using Camtasia Studio but that is proprietary and you have to update them when things change. I'd like to be able to stream my desktop to 1 or more students so they can see a process and ask questions.

2011-11-11T20:49:00.001-05:00

Lucicat eBook Server

We downloaded the .zip file from http://lucidor.org/lucicat/ and unzipped them into a lucicat folder in the root of the web site.

Next we opened lucicat.ini in a text editor and set the following settings:

db_type: mysql
db_host: localhost
db_name: lucicat
db_user: lucicat
db_password: lucicat
db_prefix: luci_

We then go to the phpMyAdmin page and create the blank lucicat database and a user called lucicat with a password of lucicat who has all privileges on that database on localhost.

Next we edit lucicat/server/lucicat_settings.php and set the following:

$db_addr = 'localhost';
$db_name='lucicat';
$db_user='lucicat';
$db_password='lucicat';

Next we have to figure out how to set the catalog but i can't seem to load the manual into Calibre.

Tomorrow

Read manual and create a catalog

2011-10-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

Adding MARC Records to Koha

Now that the laptop is running fine we decide to add some records to our system. We have a number of downloaded MARC records from various sources such as the library of congress, weldon library, in batches of 25, 50, 500, 2000 etc for testing. All files have an extension of .MRC

To batch load records

Log in to the staff menu (http://localhost/kohaadmin)

Select Tools, Stage MARC records for import
Click Browse
Select a .mrc file
Click Upload File
Click Stage for Import
Click Manage Staged Records
Click Import This Batch into the catalog

We first try 2000 records and begin the import into the catalog at 10:11am. This took 40 minutes! Obviously we are not running a fast server but a low-end laptop (2ghz duo core, 3 gig ram).

2011-10-18T16:26:00.001-04:00

New Koha Laptop

We had been using Mizstik's Koha Live CD to install Koha to USB sticks. This worked fine for the 32bit version and on my old Eurocom labtop but the new release 8 is 64 bit and that poses a problem. It is harder to create a USB stick in newer versions of Ubuntu as it is now a install with manual partitioning of the USB 'hard disk'. The old version had an install to USB option that was automatic. The other problem is that students may have 32bit systems at home so their USB stick may not work. Finally the Eurocom had a 32bit cpu and only 1 gig or ram so time to upgrade.

The 'new' Koha laptop is a compaq 8510p with 4 gig. I tried installing a mini-pci wireless card but the machine uses a proprietary connector but the wireless USB stick that came with my DVD worked fine. It ran the 64bit liveCD no problem and installed perfectly to the hard drive. This version is 3.2.5, has all the language packs, Zebra support and is a Z39.50 server. There is a Google discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/kohalivecd

Next we set up Koha:

run firefox and go to http://localhost/kohaadmin
the username is kohaadmin and the password is kohalivecd
we select en as the language
the mysql database is koha running on port 3306 under user kohaadmin

The mysql root password is kohasqlpwd, we will install a mySQL client for database admin, although you can also use the web-based phpMyAdmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin).

The public Z39.50 server uses:

port 9998 for bibliographic records with a database name of biblios
port 9999 for authorities with a database name of authorities

No username or password is required to search the Z39.50 databases.

Once the tables are populated it's time to set the configuration for Koha We select the MARC21 format for our records (see: http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/)
We select the following options:

Matching Rules for bibliographic records
Fast Add minimal record format (for ILL)
Simple MARC format (for multimedia)
Default values for departments, status etc
Coded Values
Z39.50 servers list
Sample patron types and categories
Sample Label and Patron Card data
Item Types
Sample Libraries
Sample News
Default Messages
Message Transports
Sample patrons
Sample Holidays and all the rest

The import process starts at 3:02 and finishes in under a minute. The next question is the indexer/search engine. Koha can use Zebra but it is a manual process to configure and to update. Since it is only required if you go over about 10,000 records and for doing demos on a laptop we don't need that many records we decided to skip Zebra for now.

Once installed we decide to test it out. Running a terminal and typing ifconfig procides us with the IP address of the koha laptop. First we test out the admin login by goint to http://192.168.1.114:8080/ and the staff client page is displayed.

Next we test out the OPAC by going to http://192.168.1.114/opac (which is running on port 8081) and the OPAC screen is displayed.

If you just go to the default port for the web server you get a message that:

This is the default web page for this server.

The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.

This means you can create a library portal that incorporates a number of services or apps along with the library catalog in Koha. I've always wanted to show students how to install a CMS and then to create a portal that is linked to Koha.

To test out the Z39.50 we run Greenstone 2.84 and click the Download tab and fill in the z39.50 settings

Only problem is the Greenstone Z39.50 client seems broken again. It was working before as we had downloaded batches of 500 records from the Library of Congress LCDB database server (lx2.loca.gov:210). A search for SQL in the book title would be @attr 1=4 "SQL", a search for books on php and mysql would be @attr 1= 21 @and mysql php and an author search for JK Rowling would be @attr 1 = 1003 Rowling,J.K. I'll have to try this in the lab where i think it was working correctly last term. See: Library Of Congress Z39.50

We decide to look for a standalone client and end up at http://www.biblio-tech.com/html/z39_50_clients.html which lists 5 clients and http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/resources/software.html which has a lot more information. We hit on the
Mercury Z39.50 freeware client which we download from http://www.basedowinfosys.com/projects/mzc in ZIP file format. Once installed we click search, database and it has goodly list of servers from Acadia to York. The Add button allows you to add a server. But there is no place to put the 9998 port number. There is a list of port numbers used but no 9998 and no way is indicated of adding a number although we suspect you could edit \Mercury Z39.50 Client\databases\ztargets.xml. We try anyway and as expected:

192.168.1.114
Result Count: 0
Records Returned: 0
Error Message: Connect failed (10000) 192.168.1.114

Then we try adding the port number to the address and we get:

192.168.1.114:9998
Result Count: 0
Records Returned: 0
Error Message: Database unavailable (109) Default

Which seems to indicate the connection was successful. We test against LC and it works and we export the results as a MARC file and view the .mrc file in MARCedit and it looks ok:

=LDR 00775nam 22002295a 4500
=001 13962025
=005 20050511163127.0
=008 050511s2006\\\\inu\\\\\\\\\\\000\0\eng\\
=906 \\$a0$bibc$corignew$d2$eepcn$f20$gy-gencatlg
=925 0\$aacquire$b2 shelf copies$xpolicy default
=955 \\$apc03 2005-05-11
=010 \\$a 2005927399
=020 \\$a0672328429 (pbk.)
=040 \\$aDLC$cDLC
=042 \\$apcc
=100 1\$aFells, David.
=245 10$aAdvanced MYSQl database programming /$cDavid Fells; [edited by] Shelley Johnston.
=250 \\$a1st ed.
=260 \\$aIndianapolis, IN :$bSams Pub.,$c2006.
=263 \\$a0602
=300 \\$ap. cm.
=963 \\$aVanessa Evans; phone: (317) 428.3211; fax: (317) 428.3310; email: vanessa.evans@pearsoned.com; bc: vanessa.evans@pearsoned.com

ToDo:
The thing to do now is to load up Koha with some records which means i'll have to refresh myself on how Koha works. I bought the packt "Koha 3 Library Management" book so will give it a read tonight.

2011-09-23T14:47:00.001-04:00

Bootable USB Stick and Ubuntu 11

It's taken awhile but i've gotten to like 11.04 but there is one function from 9.04 that i truly miss. In the older version you could easily create a bootable usb stick by selecting System, Administration, USB Startup Disk Creator which automated the process.

That is now gone and the Startup Disk Creator just installs a bootable 'LiveCd' on your USB stick which is not the same thing. A google search reveals lots about installing Ubuntu from a USB but nothing much on installing a real system to a USB. Eventually i figured it out and the process is logical as it is the same as any manual install, but it takes more work than the old USB startup disk creator functionality.

In case someone has to do this here is how i did it. This process used an 8 gig usb stick and the 32bit desktop LiveCD for widest compatibility, a larger stick is better. I decided to create 4 partitions and to use all the space on the stick.

Boot a computer with the LiveCD. This requires your boot priority to have the optical disc 1st. If the Live CD does not boot check your BIOS boot settings (press DEL or F1 or F2 or F10 at startup to enter the BIOS)

When Ubuntu has started insert your USB stick and double-click the Install Ubuntu 11.04 icon

Tick the Install 3rd Party Software checkbox and click FORWARD

At the Allocated Drive Space dialog select the Something Else radio button and click FORWARD

This displays the drive partitioning tool which is used to manually set up Ubuntu. A single existing hard drive in the computer is listed as /dev/sda formatted as NTFS. Your USB stick is listed as /dev/sdb1 with a FAT32 partition and a size of 8018mb

Select /dev/sdb from the Device for boot loader installation pull-down menu and then select your USB stick (/dev/sdb1) and click NEW PARTITIONTABLE to wipe out any existing data

You need to create the following drive partitions:

/boot which is the boot partition. This is where programs critical for booting the system reside
/ which is the root directory. Programs used for running the OS are installed here
swap which is reserved disk space for use as virtual memory
/home which is your home directory for storing files

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 128 in the New Partition Size text box, select /boot from the Mount Point pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 2000 in the New Partition Size text box, select swap area from the Use As pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 3000 in the New Partition Size text box, select / from the Mount Point pull-down menu and click OK

Select Free Space under /dev/sdb and click ADD to display the Edit Partition dialog. Type 2891 (or whatever is the remaining space) in the New Partition Size text box, select /home from the Use As pull-down menu and click OK

Click INSTALL NOW to being the Ubuntu installation process

When the Who Are You? Dialog is displayed type in your full name and choose a name for your computer like gnickers, enter a username and a password and select the Log in Automatically radio button
Click FORWARD and Ubuntu is installed to your USB stick (this takes awhile....)
When complete Remove the LiveCD and press ENTER to restart the computer to the USB stick

Music Center Project

2011-07-02T09:36:00.006-04:00

This has been kicking around in my head since i found three discarded Profusion/X music center devices. They ran a customized version of Red Hat and connected to a licensed music server to stream audio to stores in a mall. Gave one away but kept two to play with.

Obviously, the license had expired but the audio form factor of the case intrigued me and upon opening it up i found a Via mini-ITX board with a C3 533mhz processor, 128 mb of DDR ram and a 40 mb hard drive. May not seem promising but that board packs a lot of tech into a small space, there are 2 DDR ram slots, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 ethernet, onboard vga video, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse and 3 pci slots plus a front panel DVD drive. Not too shabby.

After rummaging around in the parts cabinet i came up with two 512mb DDR 400 sticks, a 200 gig IDE hard drive, a pci angle bracket and a ATI rage pro pci video card and a Packard Bell Fast Media remote plus the Cambridge Audio 2.1 speaker set. Unfortunately the pci angle card was not quite the right form factor but i was able to find one on eBay for $5. So for now we upgraded the ram and the hard drive and replaced the stock optical with a combo drive. Not that we will be burning cd's on this unit but it helps to be flexible. When the angle card arrives we can upgrade from the onboard video.

The system booted fine and we went to the BIOS to change the settings. First we assign 64mb to the onboard video, optimize the BIOS and do an 8X overclock of the C3 cpu resulting in a whopping 1Ghz of speed (while you can go above 8x the board locked up at boot). The board's BIOS is a wonder of flexibility with lots of settings. So now we have a 1gig pc with P3 performance - what to install?

We used to run XBMC on a revo so it was a first choice. Unfortunately the live CD does not run on such old hardware, in fact all the media distros we tried failed to initialize the x-windows GUI or failed to boot. Many are optimized for i686 and won't run on an i386 clone cpu. So we tried Microsoft Windows XP pro which did install but failed to install drivers for the network (which is realtek chip), the audio etc. It ran but slowly and hunting down XP drivers on the internet is always a frustrating experience. What about an older version of Ubuntu? So we haul out the 9.04 desktop 32 bit cd and it boots and installs perfectly. Video is not bad, internet works and so does the audio and USB. We remove some of the uneeded services and apps and get a reasonable performance, hey to even runs the GIMP and OO at 2002 speed. You could even use this as a desktop in a pinch, except no flash in the web browser.

The only problem here is that just about any media software won't run on the C3 cpu. The included movie player and the included rhythmbox audio player works but xbmc and vlc won't install. However, we set rhythmbox to run automatically at boot and have in inhale 3 gig of FLAC audio files from the network.

Next we attach the speakers and put it in shuffle mode. How does it sound? - Excellent as a near-field sound system in a small room. Quite pleasurable while working. It's like listening to 70's FM radio. In fact I am using this with singles from 70's/80's and who knew Alice Cooper, ELO, Deep Purple, et al could sound good? I should hook up the Roland monitors to test and then the Spherex 5.1 system to compare.

The suprising thing about audio is that you never know what might sound good for certain applications. I recently hooked up a pair on 1969 Dynaco A-25 speakers to a 20 watt amplifier and fed it from a original Sony walkman cassette. This is certainly not an 'audiophile grade' system but it sounded quite good. In fact i ended up listening to it all week, trying out different kinds of music and inputs. The conclusion was this system sounded best when fed early 80's and 90's funk from analog sources (not CD's!). Gap Band, Dee-Lite, Morris Day, etc all sounded very good in a small room at middle field distance.

Time for some lunch...

Upgrades:

better video using a fast pci video card
customize LIRC to use the packard bell remote
replace default unbuntu window manager with a lighter one
wireless
replace current board with a modern mini-ITX or mini-ATX board?

Calibre Content Server

2011-05-17T17:59:00.005-04:00

The Calibre content server is working fine on the home network. It is currently running on the macbook/win7 laptop. When a device with an OPDS-capable ereader software like Stanza is running the Get Books icon displays the calibre content server library and it is easy to download books to the device such as an iPad, iTouch or Android tablet. Once the course is over i may install a permanent content server using an old G4 macbook.

The problem is the work network. Devices cannot detect the content server when the laptop is running on the UWO wireless network. Devices just display 'Searching....'. This is a problem - you can't demonstrate how it will all work.

The hack i am testing now is to run a rogue wireless access point that is not connected to the internet. A standard linksys wireless router should enable the macbook to get an IP address from the linksys DHCP server and then running calibre should make it available on this wireless network which a device then connects to. Once on that wireless network the content server should be found.

Step 1 - configure the wireless Router

Had to run Fing (look@lan replacement) as the new firmware for the router doesn't display a very good dhcp clients table. Armed with the IP address i set up the linksys to be a dhcp server with an ip range of 192.168.1.20 to 192.168.1.30. We then unplug the cat 5 cable from the linksys to the network router so that it only serves ad hoc connections.

Step 2 - connect laptop to the wireless router

We set the macbook to connect to the LIAM network and lo it picks up the dhcp server and gets issued the IP address of 192.168.1.20 which is as it should be.

Step 3 - run the calibre content server

Done!

Step 4 - connect ipad to content server

Odd, iPad says unable to join LIAM network. It can see the network but refuses to connect. Ok , next we fire up the iTouch and change it's network to LIAM. It connects. We run Stanza and click Get Books. The calibre content server on macbook is listed and there are all the books! We select one and it downloads ok. I wonder if the iPad mac address is not in the allowed table, yes it was not so we add it. We run Stanza, click Get Books, Shared and success. We can now read the Saskatoon Star Phoenix articles we downloaded from the RSS feed in class today.

So the solution to uwo network problem is to bring in our own wireless device and run an ad hoc wireless network. We will test this tomorrow for saturday's THATcamp session.

Ebay Frustration

2011-04-05T14:52:00.003-04:00

Ebay drives me crazy! A good principle for a merchant is 'don't get in the way of the customer'. I go to ebay to buy things. A simple idea - but here's where it gets frustrating.

I don't like auctions and rarely ever participate.

The reason is i got ripped off a couple of times when ebay started and it quickly was obvious that you have no recourse but to leave negative feedback on the seller who immediately puts negative feedback on you. Ebay is no help in resolving mis-representation, faulty merchandise or other problems on auctions from private sellers. The auction model is outdated as a the primary driver of ebay's business.

So 99% of the time i use the buy it now option from ebay stores.

I like stores because they are a business and if they wish to stay in business they have an incentive to keep the customer happy. As one Scot noted a long time ago:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Adam Smith

I don't mind paying a bit more for the service. If things go wrong, i have found an ebay store is likely to work with you to fix the problem. For example, i purchased a Dell Precison 470 recently from Electronics Cafe on e-bay but it arrived with a dead motherboard. They cheerfully paid for the cost of a replacement system board.

Anyway, the problem is keeping track of stores. Ebay does a horrible job of it. Sure you can save sellers into a list but finding a particular store is a pain and trying to build up a list of favorite suppliers seems rather difficult.

I also like local suppliers

The shipping is less and why not support people in your area if the prices are competitive? So why can't i find all the local ebay stores that deal in computers or electronics?

Ebay works ok when you are looking for a particular item but as all grocery stores, bookstores and malls know - the longer your keep the customer in the store the more likely they are to buy something. If ebay made it easier for me to browse local suppliers who sell the kinds of stuff i like to buy then i would buy more. Maybe their tag line should be 'Ebay - Saving You Money'...

iPad, ePad and more

2011-03-11T20:31:00.006-05:00

With the $100 price drop on old iPads we ordered the 16gig model from the Apple store for $369 and it arrived this week. The first step was to hool it up to the macbook and download all the useful free apps from the apple store. Our interest is in looking at the device as a publishing model so we downloaded all the ebook reader software such as Stanza, apple ebook reader, kobo, kindle etc. as well as newspaper and magazine apps like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Post as well as Wikipedia and some comic book readers. We also grabbed the Dropbox app for our online files and the Google app so we can access our Google docs files and our iGoogle desktop and Teamviewer, an excellent VNC type app that runs on all our machines.

The Teamviewer free app allows you to control your laptop or desktop from the iPad not not the reverse. Will have to investigate if the paid version allows the pc/laptop to control the iPad. It would have to translate mouse clicks on the computer to touches on the iPad so this may not be possible. I looked at the vga cable but it is expensive ($35!) and external video is an app function, not a function of the OS.

Update: Saurik has released a VNC deamon for iphone and others have also gotten VNC to work so you can view ipone/ipad from another computer. Only problem is that it requires jailbreaking your device. I did this on the iphone but may or may not with the ipad. Just installed iOs 4.3 anyway...

We browsed the apple store for free books and downloaded a few classics but most of the books we want are sitting on our server in PDF and CHM and epub and djvu formats.

We read some epubs using the apple ebook reader and they were fine. But how to get our pdf's over? We though of using moving them to dropbox and trying the app but then remembered the Calibre to Stanza method we had used to get books into a first gen iTouch.

Running Calibe on the macbook and pointing it to the ebook network share allowed us to choose PDF books individually to import (and convert to epub) or to batch the process. We grabbed a few books and magazines to test out. Then we clicked the settings icon and choose Preferences, Sharing, Sharing over the net. This allows you to run a OPDS server catalog on localhost at port 8080. Once the server is started we goto the stanza client and click the Get Books icon dor Shared which displays a Book Sources dialog box. I typed in Calibre as the name with a URL of http://192.168.1.105:8080 (for the dhcp addr of the macbook) and it connects to display the books in calibre (on macbook).

You can browse by Newest, Title, Authors or Publishers. Clicking on the cover for a book displays a preview of the book and a Download button which transfer the epub to the Stanza library.

As test we bring in a .cbz comic book and some other types. And we convert the Kick-Ass DVD to an MP4 file to test out the video.

Update

Taking screenshots on the ipad is a breeze, press the home button and the power button together and the screen makes a camera clicking sound and then flashes white. The photos in .png are saved and can be viewed with the Photos app. To transfer them to your computer just plug in the iPad and iPhoto runs automatically and retrieves the photos. Select the ones you want and click Import Selected. You can then drag them out of iPhoto. Sweet. While i have not been a fan of iTunes in the past, it is now the cornerstone of the Apple digital world strategy and the integration of apps is impressive compared with the Windows world.

Tomorrow:

Compare originals on the mac with the epub converted copies on the ipad.

Stop Motion Movies with iLife

2011-03-07T17:49:00.003-05:00

Liam wanted to make a stop-motion animation film. He usually just records on the flip cam and uploads direct to youtube. So we built 4 sets out of lego. If i had been smart i would have build the walls in the shape of a + and put it on a lazy susan so that 4 sets could be easily available.

Anyway, I put the camera on the gorilla pod and he shot a series of scenes for his first TV show called Droid Hospital. I fired up iPhoto and hooked up the camera to import the pictures and then launched iMovie to bring them in. It took a bit of fiddling to get the photos i wanted, the quick and and easy solution was to FLAG the photos and then to set IMovie to look for flagged pictures. I also added two google image shots of a real hospital.

It was no problem putting the images on the timeline. But then we got sidetracked as the director decided he didn't want to do the dialog but to have text bubbles with the comments, like an animate comic book. Well, imovie and iPhoto lack the ability to edit photos that way so we fired up Comic Life which is designed to make comic books or comic book movies.

There was no problem importing the photos from iPhoto and adding the comments in text bubbles but getting the pictures out seemed impossible. The Export function exports a whole page not just the image. I could use grab to capture the picture with text but that seemed a lot of effort. The other option was to bring the photos into iWork and add create a blank presentation slide for each picture. Add the text and the export the slides as a series of images. This works in keynote (and powerpoint too). It's a quick way of churning out a web site banner. In fact, in keynote you can add a transparent gif image to your banner as a logo and it will export out a nice png or jpg banner in any shape with gradients and the transparent logo. (powerpoint does not support transparent images but otherwise works the same). Again, this seemed a lot of work.

We decided to go back to imovie and to add the dialog to the scenes. This is fairly easy to do, you select a clip, click the mic icon, select the clip and it countdowns 3,2,1 and record. You do have to time the dialog so that it lasts only for that scene (each pic is a scene). A couple of takes for some and it was done. Then we added sound effects from the limited iLife sound effects library. It would be nice it there were low cost libraries to add sounds like Garageband jam packs.

Anyway, once the sounds and incidental music was added the movie was rendered down and uploaded to liam's account on youtube.

ToDo:

- Find some soap opera sound effects...cheezy organ riffs etc
- Find soap opera-ish theme music for the opening (The Days of The Week?)
- Get some HALO sounds/music samples for the Covenant set and maybe some Star Wars

I have all these so i could extract them myself but if someone has already done it...

Windows - still stupid after all these years

2011-02-23T18:45:00.006-05:00

Now that i am using Windows 7 a lot more for work i am so upset in how useless it is for common tasks. We all knew that file operations were pretty much broken in previous versions, it took forever to do any meaningful stuff with lots of file and it tied up your machine, sort of like working on a beige mac running system 7.

So today i finally got around to do some file maintenance. I attached a 1 terabyte LaCie Quadro external hard disk to the macbook pro using firewire 800 and proceeded to copy about 25 gig of files from the mac to the windows partition. Most of the time was spend figuring out which files to move, the actual 1-5 gig copy operations were complete before i could decide on the next group.

Now i boot the macbook into Windows 7 (boot camp). The external fw800 windows partition shows up. It is a simple task to copy the 25 gig worth of files from the external drive to another external drive hooked up (also a LaCie but firewire 400 formatted for windows). How long do you think this operation would take? I think i spend about 30 minutes last time i did it on Linux (in fairness the linux box has an e-sata connection).

Well, it's been 10 minutes and Windows is still thinking about the copy operation, it actually hasn't even started yet! And the copy dialog box estimates 16 hours! It says 'discovered' 5,764 items and then sits and sits and sits.

In fairness the previous osx copy was between laptop hard drive and external hard disk and this is from external hard disk to external hard disk but 16 hours?

When i do similar file operations on the windows 7 desktop it is slow and ties up the machine. How can that be on a dual 3.2 ghz xeon box with 4 cores? Obviously it is not hyperthreaded - why?

Update

It's 10:15 am the next day and 1,700 files still to be copied, says 9 hours to go! It finally completed this afternoon. I am now moving some files around on the external drive connected to the win 7 pc and every so often it has to re-read the directory from the drive. There is a green progress bar across the top of the file manager and it takes a couple of minutes to read the directory of the 1tb external. No wonder file operations take so long.

The Android Reading Device

2011-02-21T18:33:00.006-05:00

UPDATE: Installing Apps

Took a while to figure out how to do this without using the Android market. Since the wireless is still having problems (although i connected ok at work - must be my 3 WAP's confusing it), i wanted to download and install apps directly.

These are known as non-market apps and all you have to do is:

- Click settings, application, unknown sources to allow install of non-market apps
- Click settings, application, development and turn on USB debugging (i don't think this is needed to install apk files that you copy to the card, but is needed to run an installer application on the desktop that will install apk files to the device, if this is what you want)
- download the .apk files and copy them to the internal SD card or the external SD card
- after copying unplug the USB cable
- run APKinstaller app and it displays all the apps in the downloads directory (if the usb cable is plugged it find no files!)

An cheapo Android tablet came my way so the idea is to see how effective it is as a reading device. I had tried the iPod touch but the screen is a bit small.

This is a 7" 800x480 screen with a ARM 700mhz cpu running Android 2.1 (similar to many models available under names like epad, apad, irobot etc). Nothing fancy but it has a 1.3 mp camera, 2 usb ports, cell, wireless b/g, speaker, earphone and a micro SD slot (32gig max). Only problem is the wireless if flaky, it finds my WAP's but fails to hold a connection.

Anyway we are not interested in this for the internet but as a reader. The idea is to find a device that will allow us to test out various ebook apps and ebook formats. The device came with an ebook app called Shelves that did a decent job with .epub files but failed to open others and not so good at PDF's.

Following apps were downloaded and copied to the SD card:

Aldiko_Book_Reader_1.2.6
Droid Comic Viewer
FBReaderJ-0.7.17
kindle
kobo
Laputa Book Reader
Wattpad_1.9.4
zthMoonReader
PDF_Viewer_0.2.8
Adobe_Reader_9.0.2
beamreader-v120

The .apk files were transferred via USB cable to the SD card on the device along with a smattering of ebooks in epub, mobi, pdf, cbr and other formats. On the tablet APKinstaller was used to install the apps.

Our test document is 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in cbr, fb2,lrf,mobi,pdf,pdb, djvu and rtf formats. So here is a quick first impressions tour:

Adobe Reader

It displays all the PDF files in a nice list but when you click on one it returns the error message 'invalid path' . Not obvious how to change directories to the other card. Not so good.

Beamreader

Loads and allows us to browse for folders and a nice list of all the PDF files. It crashed on 20000 Leagues Under the Sea but opened the other books ok.

PDF Viewer

Runs and allows you to browse for files. No icon but nice large font. Crashes on 20000 Leagues under the Sea. Open other files ok. A bit slow on the pages and refreshes.

Aldiko

Nice display of book covers on a bookshelf. Good navigation control, finger swipes load the next page but not with a turn, it just slides in smoothly from the side. Lots of settings. Neat dictionary function.

Update: you can copy epub files to the eBooks/import folder on the SD card and then in Aldiko press settings, import and it imports the books to the library and displays them on the shelf.

Kindle

Needs the cell or wifi connection to login to your Amazon account. So no further until we solve the wireless problem. Would be useful to be able to read offline.

FBreader

Brings up an explanation screen of how it works. We have to press the Settings button to get the options menu. The library icon goes to the sd\Books folder we had created. We load the 20000 Leagues under the Sea and it works. The navigation is clunky we have to keep going to the setting button. For example the screen does not rotate automatically you have to do it manually and navigation is non-intuitive.

Kobo

Like Amazon you can't get anywhere without an internet connection. Not a fan of this type of design.

Laputa

Cute entry screen with tips. There are nags for the paid version. The bookshelf is empty save for the Bible. Clicking brings up a list of ebook sites like Manybooks, Gutenberg and Feedbooks. The main way to get books into a collection is to download, to get books on your card you have to click the Home icon to get to the top level and then click the settings button. This displays an Import icon that when clicked allows you to browse the internal card, not the micro SD card. I made a Books folder there but with only 2gig of storage this is not a viable option. We loaded in an Agatha Cristie to add to our library and then loaded the book to read. Next is a configuration screen for fonts, flip mode and sizes. One thing odd about Android is the scroll bars work the opposite of what you would think and they are very thin. With the bar at the top you scroll down but nothing happens, you have to scroll up. This seems non-intuitive. Nice quick page flips. Quite readable font. This program is an option especially if you download books.

Moon + Reader

Displays a list of all the files along with the file extensions, i like that! The icons are not good, each book gets a ? icon except the epub book. I think this means it cannot read the others (so why list them, bad design). Ah, if you click on an file format it does not understand, it actually loads it! So a .cbr file display the binary codes, sort of like loading a word .doc file in notepad! Ever worse, if you kill the app and then reload it remember the file you had open and re-opens it. Arrgh. Have to figure out how to close a file.

Wattpad

Requires you to connect to the internet before you can do anything. But if you click OK and then the settings button you get the menu. But there seems no way to import any books into your library. Also, when you click the back button it should return to the previous state, if i had the settings menu open and drill down to a setting and then go back, the menu should be there, not a blank screen forcing me to press the settings button again.

ThinkFree Office

Although not an ebook reader it is important to be able to take along reports and such. I was excited to see if give an icon to the djvu files but it could not open them. We open the .rtf version of 20,000 leagues under the sea. It runs for a while opening the file. Loading, loading, loading. We kill the operation. Interesting, when we go to load the .pdf version of @0,00 Leagues that crashed the other apps, it notes the 'page catalog is invalid' and ends the operation gracefully. Other pdf's load ok. It also does auto orientation and swipes. While a large app it does a credible job on pdf's. Will have to try it on some office files.

Droid Comic (ACV)

Awesome, the cbr files look fantastic. You do have to push the settings button to rotate and zoom but this may make a decent comic book reader.

Summary

Some apps good, others not so good. Android 2.1 suffers from some usability issues on a tablet probably due to it being a phone OS. It says things like 'Shut down your phone?". The finger controls are a bit rough, in particular scrolling is very error prone, swiping a finger to scroll the screen up and down loads an app by mistake most of the time. Larger scroll bars would help, i ended up using my iTouch stylus a lot. Will have to try Liam's extra Nintendo stylii. As to the LCD screen, fairly bright for apps and games but a bit annoying to read text for a long time. Does a cheap Android tablet replace a good ebook reader like the color Nook. No - it was 1/3 the price and it allows you to read your own books without being tethered to Amazon or Chapters. The problem with this device is the settings and exit buttons are the same, press on the left to access the settings in an app but press towards the right and the app exits. Since the button is incredibly small it is very easy to exit. Then again this is not an iPad!

Koha LiveCD 10

2011-02-18T12:37:00.003-05:00

The new Koha liveCD based on ubuntu 10.10 is out so we decide to give it a try. Our first boot on a dell gx280 failed and then we realized this livecd is a 64 bit version and the dell's bios does not support 64 os. We then live booted on our trusty dell precision 470, a dual xeon pc.

The new version has icons on the desktop for the koha opac and for the admin page. Our first goal is to install this on a bootable USB stick.

First we plug in the stick and it is mounted. This is a 4 gig stick running the older version of koha we installed using the liveCD created by Professor Prasad. Next we double-click the install koha live icon and choose english as the language.

The install requirements are 3.6 gig free drive space, internet connection and power.

ODD - when we click the release notes hyperlink it goes to http://www.geekconnection.org and displays the remastersys backup utility page1

The next dialog box offers a chance to download update while installing and a forward button. The problem is that the installer does not seem to offer a choosable location, it detects your hard drive and offers to unmount it. Will it later allow you to choose a location? For safety we decide to shut down, unplug the hard drive and try again.

The liveCD boots and we plug in the usb stick.

Option - start the installer instead of booting the live system. It notes that dev/sda is mounted and offers to unmount it. We choose YES to unmount.

The next dialog box called install offers to erase and use the entire disk or to manually set up the partition map. We go with the entire disk so our maxell 4 gig flash drive will be used.

We click INSTALL NOW and say we are in Toronto with a US keyboard and setup a username of seyler with a password of seyler and log in automatically setting. This is the standard ubuntu install routine.

Now we wait while it copies files and when it finished we click restart and remove the cd. It reboots to the USB stick.

We now double-click the Koha Admin desktop icon which presents a login page prefilled with the default username of kohaadmin and password of kohalivecd. We click LOGIN and the web installer page is displayed.

Koha Setup

First is to choose a language, we choose en for english, assuming that later it can be changed to German. The default mysql database settings are displayed:

database: koha

host: localhost

port: 3306

user: kohaadmin

At the web installer step 3 we select MARC 21 as our 'flavor' with the following options:

- select matching rules for bibliographic records including ISBN and ISSN

- fast add for ILL or on the fly cataloging

- simple for common types like cd's, dvds, cassettes, kits etc

Under Optional we select

- basic default values for dept, item lost status etc

- coded valies for holdings statements

- a sampling of z39.50 servers for copy cataloging

- sample patron types and categories

- sample label and patron card data

- sample holidays

- default item types (material types and collection codes)

= sample libraries and categories, new items and default messages

- sample patrons and default message transports for sending overdues, notices etc by email

Then we click IMPORT button at the bottom of this very long page. We note a couple of errors:

- table 'systempreferences' is full

- table 'marc_subfield_structure' is full

Indexing Engine

We choose the nozebra option as this will be a small library and click CHOOSE and FINISH and are redirected to the staff login page.

We click LOGIN This returns an error message, 'the format your asked for is unrecognized'. We click the back button and choose springfield library this time. same error.

We try http://localhost/opac and the library catalog page is displayed. We try http://localhost/koaadmin to display the admin page. The login notes that our session has timed out. We try logging in to my library but the same error message. I think we will re-do the koha setup and leave out the other libraries optional data.

First we have to delete all the tables from the mysql koha database. We goto http://localhost/phpmydmin and login as user root with password mqr but that does not work. And firefox has crashed so we kill it. The release notes seem wrong. We could start all the way over. So we restart.

Ok. Ready to go again. The problem could be the usb stick only has 28 mb free after install. We decide to limit the optional data installs.

we leave out

- code value for holdings statements

- sample label and patron data

- sample holidays

- sample libraries and library categories

- sample news items

- defined message transports

- sample patrons

and we click IMPORT. If this doesn't work will we use the hard disk portable usb. Only one error this time - 'table marc_subfield_structure' is full.

We try the admin page and the staff client page is displayed successfully. So the problem sees to be space related. Although the staff page doesn't look quite right. So will have to use the portable.

tomorrow

Media Center IV

2011-02-11T20:28:00.005-05:00

Now that the media center is working perfectly we can't resist fiddling about. A new barebones SFF (small form factor) dell gx 280 came our way from Vfxweb, (where i've happily shopped for many years). Socket 775, DDR2, pci-e, sata, pci and lots of USB ports in mint condition for about $30. From the parts box we pull out a P4 2.80 ghz, a 40 gig sata drive, and 1.2 gig of ram and a Nvidia quadro 290 video card which gets converted to a low-profile bracket. We try a 3.4 Ghz P4 but the fans immediately go into full speed mode - need to get a new tube of thermal paste . Boot up with XBMC live cd via an external USB optical drive and it runs perfectly.

I set up some of the shared libraries from Windows 7, no need to set it against the media server yet. The quality of the picture is excellent.

If i run ethernet to the front living room the ancient Zenith 29" professional TV (with VGA input!) could make itself useful when analog broadcast television finally dies. Or i could put in a wireless card, but the problem there is making sure it works with Linux, wireless chip vendors are very bad when it comes to linux support. I am also not so sure about overloading the 3 wireless routers with video traffic. Best to stick to wired, that location used to have cat 5 wire a dozen years ago when DVD players cost $1000 and a giant tower PC with a DVD-ROM and IR keyboard/mouse fed video to the new Zenith 29" TV.

The attraction of putting a media center client there is the display is perfectly orientated to the couch, and high usability of the HCI (human couch interface) is our design goal. A horizontal position is considered preferable to a vertical one in HCI circles.

However, the windows remote did not get detected when i plugged it in. I know it was setup ok when i last used it with the acer revo so will have to look up my notes how i configured the item. When i press the remote the IR lights up and it works fine plugged into a windows 7 box so it is a driver issue - maybe i need to have it plugged in when the system boots.

The only problem is that the install option from the live CD seems to fail with the video display not working. Since this disk is from 2010's project i should download a more recent copy.

I'll do it tomorrow...

Mac Emulation on Windows 7

2011-02-03T18:43:00.007-05:00

Not feeling up to working so what's a guy to do? Obviously since i got rid of the last G4 OS9 machine 2 weeks ago it's time for a CIV II fix. This means emulating a classic mac on some OS. Since the work desktop is now Windows 7 we decide to try that out. We used to run Basilisk on windows xp many years ago so we decide to go that route as the minimum requirements for Civilization II are an 040 mac and a few megabytes of ram.

First is to download and install the GTK runtime environment for Windows that enables us to run software written for the X windows environment. GTK (otherwise known as the GIMP toolkit) provides widgets (on screen controls) and tools to build graphical windowed applications. We go to install verion 2.10.13

The install finds that C:\Windows\system32\iconv.dll may conflict with programs that rely on GTK+ 2. To prevent such conflicts, it can automatically rename the file. If you choose to rename these files, their extension will be changed to .dll.off.

We decide to mess with the windows system files, recognizing the problems inherent in window's reliance on DLL's but no liking having to modify the system. Ok, installed so next we download BasiliskII and extract to a folder. We search the old mac backups and find a quadra 650 rom file and extract it and place it in the Basilisk II folder. We also get a system 7 book disk and put it in the Basilisk II folder and then download the system 7.5.3 files from apple's ftp site. Next we copy the file cdenably.sys from the Basilisk II cd-rom drivers folder to c:\windows\system32\drivers. This driver allows your windows optical disc to read mac disc, pretty well essential for installing software.

Next is to create a fake blank hard drive (which is really a file that looks like a drive). The included HSF Explorer windows utility is used to create a mac formatted 'hard drive'. We select File, Format New Volume and we give it a name of mac with a whopping 1gig of space and select the Basilisk II folder as the location of the 'hard disk' file. Click OK and it is created.
Now that we have a 'hard disk' we copy the system 7.5.3 files to the blank disk image. We go to drag the system 753 folder but it is not in downloads. Where is it. We actually go back to apple's web site! and right click as firefox will remember where the files were saved to. We find the folder and go to drag it to downloads but windows makes a shortcut - we don't want a frickin' shortcut we want to move the files you stupid OS. So we delete the shortcut and now the folder has disappeared! Searching the local hard disk finds nothing. We actually have to restore the shortcut to examine it's properties to find out the folder is actually located at "F:\bin\Dell precision 470\docs\system 753". Arghh. We make sure to CUT and PASTE this time.

Ok back on track, we drag the system 753 folder to the mac 'drive' and it seems to work OK.

We can now exit the utility and run the Basilisk II GUI application which allows you to set the preferences. First our optical drive is D: and we also set the windows size to 1024 x 768 and the ram size to 256mb and the rom file to use our quadra650.rom file. We decide to leave off the network as it is not needed. In the Volumes tab we click ADD and select the system70 book.dsk image and the disk image file we created with the HFV utility. For now the model id is a IIC 030 but later we will change this to a 68040 with a quadra 900 model id.

We click the START button and get the black screen of death...run the windows task manager and kill the application. Must say the OSX way of killing apps is so much less work. It appears and older .exe file may solve the problem, we need the one in the 27-08-2008 build. Ok we do that. Now the older exe is in the Basilisk II folder. We re-run the GUI and click START.

Ah the mac 'boing' and a grey screen. Error message about no Appletalk connection (because we did not turn on networking) and a moment later the old system 7 desktop appears.

Now we click on the mac hard disk and open the system 753 folder we copied there earlier. Double-clicking the 01 of 19.smi icon extracts the files and builds a sys 7.53 cd isntaller icon on the desktop. Double- clicking that brings up a folder with the installer software icon. We click it to start the install.

First we choose a Custom Install and select under System, Universal System for any Mac. Then under Networking we choose Open Transport and Network Software Selector. This will allow our 'mac' to go online if we decide to let it. Hey we could run Netscape 2 for the mac...Finally we click Switch Disk and select the giant 1gig mac 'drive' as the target and click INSTALL.

Off it goes. When the install is finished we shut down the Basilisk mac (Special, Shutdown) and rerun the Basilisk GUI to set our final preferences.

First is remove the system 70 boot disk. We don't need it anymore. Next let' set the cpu and the id and turn on networking. We also decide to check the Enable my Computer box on the GUI which should allow us to drag files from windows to the mac without using the HFV uitility. So we could download mac files and copy over? Will have to test.

Ok we click START and it works but one problem, the CIV II original cd is a dual disc with an audio cd portion and a data cd part and only the audio cd gets mounted. I have a burned backup copy but cdrw's do not seem to get read and cause basilisk to crash with an exception. Ok so we will have to use the macbook to read the discs and then copy the files to the win7 machine and then drag them to the mac and install. I'll do it tomorrow....

ToDo list

1. install Stuffit Expander
2. upgrade to system 7.5.5 (last free one) - should have kept my retail 7.61 and 8.1 cds!
3. install CIV II

2 of out 3 done. I may create a larger 8 machine and see if i can get 8.6 running. Stability is a problem right now with exception crashes quite frequent. But here is what it looks like now.

Windows 7 and external Sata drives

2011-01-24T18:17:00.005-05:00

So tonight i finished the install of essential apps on Windows 7 and disconnected the old xp machine. Since all the work files are on the external western digital 1 terabyte external i thought it would be simple to unplug from xp and plug into windows7. All the other computers (mac/linux) have external e-sata drives (so much faster than slow USB), so what could go wrong.

Fire up windows 7 and it doesn't mount the external drive. Go into Administrative Tools, Drive Management and it still can't even find the drive. Weird. After wasting a lot of time poking around windows and looking on the internet it looks like lots of people have similar problems. This boggles the mind. Just to make sure i haul out a second e-sata hard drive, a LaCie this time. Same problem - not mounted. I booted windows with both drives just to be sure.

I goto western digital's site and they have a firmware update and some wd drive management software. Yikes, if i install the firmware what if it bricks the drive? Especially since the backup drives got cleaned and moved to the living room to connect to the Oppo BDP-93 (which btw had no problem mounting the drive, Steve Ballmer). Best to back up the course files.

So i plug the drive into the USB port (all my externals are 4 interface drives, usb/e-sata/fw400/fw800) and windows recognizes it and starts seaching it for music and other files. I put a stop to that right away. Now we start up the copy operation and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait...i said USB was slow, right?

Might as well go and see if the HDCD burning problem with Brasero is fixed....i suspect optical drive has gone bad...i see i/o errors in the log...

To Be Continued

Ok firmware update worked ok but drive still not recognized when plugged into e-sata
Next we install the WD drive manager setup software - installs but no menu item??? and it is not a control panel...

We decide on a low tech solution, grab and old firewire pci card from the box 'o parts and put that it.....OK windows recognizes the card. Let's shut down the external and plug in into there..ok it immediately installs the 'device driver software' and the stupid auto search for content comes up. Gee, in the days of mega terabyte externals maybe the default should be NO auto....

And the drive is there. So let's see - a modern e-sata interface that should be plug and play does not work in Windows 7 but an ancient technology going back to early macs works automatically. Lesson - don't discard your old firewire stuff yet...

PS

Multi-tasking in windows still sucks badly. Doing any kind of large scale file operations ties up the computer completely until the task is done. I am so not used to this. Linux and OSX are so much better at multi-tasking. People focus on whether the OS is 'faster' and forget about all the time you spend waiting for windows. The more time i spend in Windows 7 the less i like it. Sure it is prettier than XP and is not as absolutely annoying as Vista but in reality it is no big improvement.

Media Center IV

2011-01-20T18:44:00.009-05:00

The quest for the perfect media center setup continues...

So far we have been fairly happy with the combination of TVersity media center server and Xbox client. The only problems have been the poor support of Windows for such essential codecs as flac and mkv among others. However it does work ok, playlists seem broken and tagging is a pain but livable.

Today we hooked up the Oppo BDP-93, a player with usb/e-sata, wired and wireless network and a built-in upnp media client. First we downloaded and updated the firmware, a very easy process using a USB stick.

Next we access the Home menu which displays all the options.

Note the built-in Netflix client which works and the Blockbuster client which is banned by the Canadian Gov't (courtesy of the CTRC apparatchiks). These are useful services that are a lot cheaper than Robber's Cable but since your internet comes from Robber's Cable (ya gotta love monopolies) you end up paying through the nose anyway.

With an attached hard drive (USB or eSata!) the movies and music functions read files directly from the drive. This could be handy but then i've have to copy files to that device. I'm more interested in playing streaming audio/video from a media server in the basement. The My Network option lists any media centers on the local network.

One neat thing about TVersity is that you can add YouTube channels and then stream those videos to your TV. We decide to play Dire Straights, "Money for Nothing" because it has also been banned by the Canadian Gov't because 1 person complained. This file is in flac format but it is listed as WAV by the media player.

The audio files work well and sound great. Really cant hear a difference between Oppo and Xbox, which is as it should as the source files are just strings of bits. I didn't try some of the more esoteric files such as DTS and BD (blue-ray rips) yet.

Where there was clearly a problem is in streaming video. Some quicktime (MOV) and MKV and MPEG4 files would not play. When the software has problems with a file it keeps on trying to play it, the streaming does not stop. With one file it even managed to lock up the player, forcing a hard reboot with the power button. In fairness to Oppo it notes this is an experimental feature, albeit one i was very interested in and which partly influenced my purchasing decision. On the plus side, since this is software, updates may come along to fix problems, add codecs and features. I'll have to test all the MKV video files as the Oppo FAQ on the wiki indicates it does support mkv.

Conclusion

A nice upgrade to the old Oppo 980HD (i had two, going to keep one) but the streaming is still a bit rough. The blu-ray video and audio quality was excellent! Much better than it's predecessor, a consumer-grade $250 Toshiba that was really disappointing and turned me off blu-ray.

Postscript - while the streaming is a bit rough and doesn't support all formats, plugging in an external hard drive (i used e-sata) works wonderfully. The oppo plays just about everything including ape, dts, mkv, flac etc - it does all the things you want (which windows media center will not) and the sound quality is excellent - much better than the same track streamed from the media server. I couldn't believe it but they sound so much better non-streamed. Compression perhaps? Anyway, i think the search for the media center is over. So i shutdown the windows 7 media server, the mac pro connect 360 media server and the windows xp Tversity media server. They all worked, some better than others but none were universal. The oppo comes closest so i'm going to use the external hard disk option. This presents a few problems - how do you get the new stuff onto the external disk? The current solution is very low tech - new stuff goes to a folder and once a week unplug the external from upstairs and bring it downstairs and copy over the new stuff. Buy an Oppo-93, the almost universal machine.

Windows 7 and Essential Apps

2011-01-16T18:36:00.004-05:00

The migration continues...

Firefox up and running - back up using the FEBE extension and restore to FF on win7 so your online life follows you.

GIMP installed. Love the latest version. It hung when first run and i let windows diagnose and 'fix' the problem. Ran perfectly the second time.

Audacity installed but the beta version. Nervous about beta but we shall see. Ran fine. The lame and ffmpeg add ons installed fine.

VLC installed and runs ok. We searched and found a windows 7 codec pack which looks like it could solve the media problem. Will test it out later.

Lightscreen - installed ok but took a bit of diddling to get the screen region set by default and keys that worked. Finally settled on CTRL aLT PgUp. Also have to create the Screenshots folder in My Documents. Which exposed one annoyance. When i click on the folder icon on the dock or taskbar it shows a finder-like arrangement with useful links to network, downloads etc, everything except your HOME. Must be a way to add it to the view...Another annoying problem is that while the Network bit shows the other machines which have shares, i can only copy files from the Ubuntu box, not the windows xp box. That's right, windows 7 works out of the box with Linux but not with Windows. All the machine are on the same workgroup and the win7 user name and password has share privileges. It is probably related to that new home group stuff, but wouldn't a better approach would be to respect what is working and then offer to migrate it to the new home group setup? So now if i want to network with xp i have to figure it out. Don't waste the time of the user!

WAMP - downloaded and installed and the wamp control panel works fine, it is under the little UP arrow on the far right tho, took me a few minutes to figure that one out.

Greenstone installed and ran fine. I'm running it out of the user folder to see how that goes.

7zip and clamwin installed no problem.

The scanners are a problem. The USB canon does not work but we expected that as it did not work with Vista. However, it works perfectly with Ubuntu so maybe it changes desks. The big HP scanner is more problematic as it is SCSI and there is no room in the case for a scsi card unless i take out the 64bit network card. Shame as this is a quality built scanner (I have two) and the HP software has worked flawlessly since i bought it 12+ years ago. It even acts as a copier.

Installed a new DVD burner but haven't tested it out yet. I used Roxio on windows xp because there is no port of Brasero. But it may not be a problem as most burning takes place on the Ubuntu desktop anyway because that is where Brasero lives.

And we need to install a lan scanner, i run one once a month just to check up on all the network devices and to make sure nothing is wrong...

Last to do is to install the network postscript laser, which i did for the test install, not intuitive but i think i noted the process here so that's ok. Of more concern is the not almost as ancient epson stylus photo 2200 printer, a real beast (one of the few firewire printers in existence) but a workhorse. I don't think the RIP software for xp will work on win 7. We shall see...

Summary

All my must need apps (which are all open source) installed ok which is a relief, if they do not work with Win 7 then there is no need for Win7 and i've have to downgrade. Since they do there are no shop stoppers so all in all, i should be ready to switch off the old xp machine next weekend...

Windows 7 Media Center

2011-01-12T12:45:00.009-05:00

Since i built a Windows 7 pc over xmas i decided to take another look at the windows media center. Last year when looking for media server we had installed and tested windows media center xp edition and found it sorely lacking. We ended up going with TVersity and Connect 360 as servers and an xbox 360 as the client.

Windows 7 ultimate has a UpNp media server included and it shows up on the list of servers on the xbox so we decided to give it a whirl. The shop stopper for the xp media server had been it's poor codec support. What's the sense of having a media server that won't play your media?

From windows 7 you can run the media server software and it asks for the 9 digit code that is displayed on the media client. Not sure why it does this, it requires a trip upstairs to run the xbox to get the number.

This is the first problem, while the xbox lists a windows 7 media server we cannot seem to connect to it. Even running the Test diagnostic fails to find a win 7 machine. The wizard suggests some options, one if which is the windows firewall settings.

This requires a trip downstairs to check out the firewall, which by default is not allowing media center connections. Why? We have to change the firewall settings to allow media extenders which is the microsoft name for media center clients.

Back up stairs and we still cannot get a connection. We run the network diagnostics, which is a pretty screen.

The wizard suggests creating a new connection. We do this an viola! - it has now found the Windows 7 media center and it gives us a 9 digit number. So now we go back downstairs and put in the number and the extender drivers are downloaded and the media center indexes whatever content is in the shared public folders. So now it is back upstairs again to check it out.

The GUI is ok but nothing special, no competition for XBMC here. Photos and music play fine and FLAC files now work. Adding media libraries is similar to other media servers but the GUI navigation is a bit annoying. As to movies, it played the AVI and MP4 but not the MKV, which is a show stopper. You need that codec support to play extracted blue-ray movies in high def.

What we need to do is to figure out how to turn off the media server service on Win 7 and replace it with TVersity media server which we purchased and that is currently running on windows xp.

Windows 7 on the macbook pro

2010-12-28T20:33:00.005-05:00

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?

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

2010-12-21T10:50:00.004-05:00

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

2010-12-20T13:50:00.014-05:00

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

2010-12-12T10:56:00.004-05:00

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

2010-10-22T14:08:00.006-04:00

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

2010-10-13T09:24:00.005-04:00

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.

Click the Gather tab
Expand the Local Filespace and drag LCDB_@attr 1=4 SQL_500.marc into the Collection window
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.

Click the Design tab
Select MARCplugin
Click Remove Plugin
Click Create
Click Build Collection
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.

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

2010-10-11T14:51:00.005-04:00

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

2010-10-07T15:32:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-13T13:40:00.003-04:00

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

2010-09-01T12:48:00.002-04:00

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

2010-08-12T12:35:00.001-04:00

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

2010-07-24T08:49:00.002-04:00

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

2010-07-04T09:03:00.002-04:00

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.

Koha Live CD to USB

2010-06-02T14:31:00.005-04:00

We had no problem creating a bootable live USB stick from the Koha Live CD using the ubuntu make bootable usb disk option but a lot of the students were unable to get their bootable usb stick to boot - 'boot error' was the result.

I use standard no frills kingston datatraveller usb sticks as i have found them a reliable cross-platform device. It may be possible that some usb sticks are not bootable?

We decide to remove the ubuntu usb install as a factor - and to use unetbootin to create the bootable usb from the koha live CD ISO image.

We downland unetbootin-windows-442.exe and run it. Nice that it does not have to be installed.

Select Diskimage radio button and browse for the koha live cd ISO on S:
Select the USB Drive (F:)
Click OK

It extracts the files from the iso and installs the bootloader. Very fast. I wonder if it worked on the test stick. We put the stick in another machine and reboot. No joy - didn't think so as this stick had the same behavior as the others that failed, when trying to re-format in windows it returned error of 'you do not have administrative rights, disk cannot be formatted'. This stick had been formatted as FAT on an osx machine like the other one that did not work.

We will wipe this stick and try unetbootin with some other ones.

Update: The key symptom of sticks that do not work is that when you put the stick in a Windows pc and try to format it, it says 'you do not have administrative rights....'. I am wondering if sticks formatted under Ubuntu or OSX have this issue. I can't remember if if formatted the 2 working sticks.

As a test we insert a non-working stick and format it as FAT under ubuntu. Once formatted we put it in a windows machine and try to format it again...

YES - that is the problem, if the stick is formatted on the Ubuntu box it then cannot be formatted on a windows box. And if it is formatted on Ubuntu it returns a boot error.

Ok - we go into the disk utility and delete the partition. Now we plug the stick into a windows machine. It is not formatted but we still get 'you do not have sufficient rights to perform this operation'

Back to Ubuntu - we create a FAT partition and format it as FAT but do not check the bootable checkbox. We run the USB startup disk creator and select the USB device (/dev/sdb1) and reserve 1gig for a persistence file. No joy - it must be bootable and cannot be formatted on Ubuntu.

The current theory is that sticks not formatted on Ubuntu should work...and sticks formatted on ubuntu may work on other machines but not in the GRC...arrgh

Update - confirmed. We created a kingston stick in the GRC using format and install to USB and it did not boot the GRC computer but booted my laptop fine. We don't have a solution to the problem except to remove the format part of the instructions and to see if that works. This means we need some more sticks...

iGoogle

2010-06-01T21:04:00.001-04:00

I've been using iGoogle more and more and today made the decision to make it my home page. This meant making firefox on the macs the default web browser instead of safari, which is no problem as i've been using google toolbar which does not run on safari. This means no matter which desktop in the house i go to (windows, linux or mac) i have access to my calendar, to do list, google docs, rss feeds - all in the same place, and when i am mobile with either the mac pro laptop, the windows laptop or the linux laptop i still have access to the same stuff. Excellent!

USB to a Disk Image

2010-06-01T09:56:00.004-04:00

Everyone talks about burning a disk image to a USB but i want to make a disk image OF a USB. My first attempt was winimage portable but no joy. Next we download the latest version of winimage and install it on the HP laptop. Here are the steps we took

Select Disk, Use Removable Disk E: which is our usb stick.
Select, Disk, Creating Virtual Disk Image from physical drive
The dialog box displays Disk 1: 7,831,552 kb Kingston DataTraveller 2.0
Select the Kingston USB entry and choose the create Fixed Sized Virtual Hard Disk
Click OK
We choose a save location and name it koha_usb

The question now is what format - there is .VHD (virtual hard disk) which is a windows format, of little interest to us, and .IMA which is a generic image format, and .VDMK which is a VMware image. Since the lab computers have VMWARE player installed the VDMK may be useful. We had problems trying to use VMplayer several terms ago but maybe we give it a second chance. I'd like to have a format that can then be burned to a USB stick. MagicISO can convert ima files to ISO so we decide to make 2 images, an IMA to be converted to ISO and a VDMK. We start the VDMK imaging process, it takes about 7 minutes. Would be useful if it had a virtualbox image option.

Now that we have images we need to:

- test with VMware player (copy images to 9762 on S: and see if can run)
- convert IMA to ISO and burn ISO to USB and test booting the USB

We install and run MagicISO -the free version is limited to 300mb images so this is no good. Let's test it out anyway - it finds the koha_usb.ima image ok. but can't open it - complaining it is not an image file.

Let's try vmware - we download from their site after filling in one of those annoying marketing forms for registration (we select the first choice on all the menus so the data is garbage anyway)

Ok we got the download - let's install. We then run VMware player and select Open a Virtual Machine but it wants a .VMX file and does not see the VDMK image. We can't create a machine as it wants an ISO file.

Ok the other option is to make an ISO out of the libliveCD and then run the ISO as a virtual machine. Ok so now we have kohalivecd.iso on the S: drive in the 9762 folder. Virtualbox (v 3.16) is installed so we:

Select start, programs, Sun Virtualbox, Virtualbox
Click NEW, NEXT
Enter KohaLive in the Name textbox
Select Linux as the Operating System and Ubuntu as the version
Click Next
Set the Memory Size slider to 1024
Click NEXT
Untick the Boot Hard Disk checkbox
Click NEXT, CONTINUE and FINISH

Now we have to start up the empty VM and let it know to use our ISO file.

Click START and then click OK
Click Devices, CD/DVD Devices, More CD/DVD Images
Click ADD
Browse to S:\local\courses\mlis\9762
Select the KOHAliveCD.iso file and click OPEN
Click SELECT
Select Machine, Reset
Click on the window and click CAPTURE

This positions your mouse and keyboard into the guest virtual machine operating system. To return to the windows host operating system press the right CTRL key.

Success! The liveCD boots ok. To shut down click the Ubuntu power icon and select shutdown. When you exit virtualbox be sure to SAVE the Machine State so that changes are preserved.

We did the following:

Select System, Admin, Software Sources
Select other Software
Select karmic partner
Select System, Administration, Synaptic
Search for Restricted
Mark - Select for Installation
Click Apply

It was good the VM picked up the network adapter and USB devices automatically. Virtualbox has come a long way since the early days.

Now we need to shut down the virtual machine and SAVE it's state and then restart to see if our changes are preserved.

More 2morO

Audacity on OSX

2010-05-26T19:09:00.003-04:00

Since last summer there is a new version 1.3.12 (beta) so we are going to use that in the lab. So off to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ to download.

Hey the new book on Audacity 1.3 from PACKT just arrived as i typed this..how cool is that? Ok we download the 1.3.12.dmg file and open the disk image. We create an Audacity folder in Applications and copy all the files there.

Libraries

While audacity is good as is, it cannot handle MP3 and other files because of IP laws. So we need to download two libraries - LAME and FFmpeg. The LAME library file gets copied to the audacity folder and then in audacity you select audacity,preferences,libraries and click LOCATE and point it to the libmp3lame.dylib file. It will remember the location. FFmpeg comes in a dmg which has a pkg that can be installed. Once that is done click the LOCATE button for FFmpeg and it is automatically detected. Click OK and yer done.

One thing i am excited about is using Audacity to record telephone interviews using Skype or Google talk. I've finally got my external iSight camera hooked up to the mac pro (which replaced the dual G5 this spring) and it's quite impressive. Not as bright as the iSight in the mac pro notebook (which replaced the macbook this spring) but really nice.

Select Audacity, Preferences, Devices and select the iSight under Recording device. You also have to turn off all skype notifications.

Select Skype,Preferences and click the Notifications tab. Untick the Play Sound checkbox.

Enough for now..time for a snack

Media Server III

2010-05-11T17:44:00.004-04:00

I've installed the TVersity media server on the HP DV9000 laptop so that i could play with the internet a/v settings and also to be able to demo it in class. First we copied over some pic, audio and video files in the usual my nnn windows folders and set them up in the TVersity library.

Next we dragged liam's youtube videos, my flickr photos to the library. The Tversity media server can be accessed from the program client but also from a web browser:

http://localhost:41952/flashlib/ gets you the very nice flash interface
http://localhost:41952/medialib/ gets you to the plain html interface
http://localhost:41952/admin gets you to the admin panel

The HP remote is a disappointment, it only works in hp dvd player. So we plug in the media center remote which uses a windows ehome infrared transceiver. Of course xp has no driver and can't find one. Off to the web and we find lots of people looking for the driver. Microsoft has one but their web site only works with IE. I goto their update site and it has me download a Windows Genuine Advantage plug-in, to "enhance the download experience".

Ok done. Now microsoft gets me to download some tool and run it. Which gives me a code i have to paste into the page. Geez - how to get in customer's way. Finally i can download Update Rollup 2 for eHome Infrared Receiver for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (KB912024) which gets me WindowsXP-KB912024-v2-x86-ENU.exe which i run. Which gives me an error message ' setup has determined the service pack version of this system is newer than the update you are applying' No need to install this update' - oh yes there is because windows cannot run the remote! arggh windows hell.

looks like a registry hack solution here http://it.megocollector.com/?p=8 but time for a break
.
We did find that XBMC supports the hp remote, so the win client version works

Greenstone on OSX

2010-04-28T19:20:00.002-04:00

With more and more of our students using macs we decide to take another look at the osx version of Greenstone, now at 2.83 to see if it is usable. In the past, we recommended students stay away from the mac version and those who really, really want to use their macbook or iMac ended up installing boot camp, fusion or parallels and running greenstone in XP!

So we download the .dmg and click to install. It defaults to Users/yourusername/Greenstone. No way to change drives so it want to go on the sys drive. We decide that is ok and it gets ready to install. Note that to make greenstone actually work it has a number of dependencies. The problem in the past was users had to install and configure those dependent programs and it was not very straightforward. Now the gs installer adds apache automatically as well as installing imagemagick and ghostscript. Sweet.

We do not use the admin pages in the lab with the windows version but decide here to check it out so we tick the enable Admin pages checkbox and give it a password of admin. Click Install and away we go.

When finished we check out the greenstone folder - lots of files but which one launches the application? We click o nthe readmeEn.txt file for enlightenment...looks like the gli folder has the interface..ok but which file in there - client-gli.sh might be the bash script that runs the thing but how do you know? There is a gli.ico icon file...rather than click things at random hoping it will work, let's read the release notes. Ah....it says

On Mac and Linux, use a terminal (in Macs this is found under Applications > Utilities > Terminal) to go into the Greenstone installation directory and run

./gs2-server.sh

The small Greenstone Server will display. Run

./gli/gli.sh

To get to the Greenstone Librarian Interface

So we open a terminal window to the shell which puts us into our user directory (pwd will confirm where you are) so cd Greenstone/gli and then do ./gli.sh and joy - the usual gli interface launches. Since the gli is written in Java it is quite similar in windows, osx and linux.

One difference right at the start. You do file,new to define a collection and then have to do file,open to open the collection you just defined. We decide to test by creating a collection of midi files of Frank Zappa tunes. So we open the test collection and watch the spinner go round and round...this should not be. Ok it's crashed so we need to kill it.

Not impressed - let's try tomorrow to load the demo collection

XAMPP on the Mac

2010-04-28T19:06:00.002-04:00

Last time we did 9713 it was not possible for students to access the web server so they could not copy their project there (for some security reason). We ended up uploading them to the class sharepoint. This time around we are thinking maybe we bypass this by using XAMPP 1.7.3 for the mac. There may be some issues:

The windows version which works on any drive as long as the xampp folder is in the root, so c:\xampp, e:\xampp, f:\xampp all work - in fact you can have multiple different copies of xampp on the same machine, a cheap version of the dev,qat,prd server model for development. The same process also works for xampplite and xampp and xampplite can be on the same drive as they have different folders. This is actually very useful as you can really play around without worrying about losing work.

Anyway, unfortunately the mac xampp version only works when installed to Applications. So we have to test this on lab machines and see what happens. Once installed you click the XAMPP control panel and start the apache,mySQL and even the ftp server. Of course, since you have access to the console you don't really need to ftp.

The students would then copy their content to the /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs folder and access them with Safari at http://localhost or depending on the lab setup they might be able to put their web content in their Home folder and goto http://localhost~username but i doubt if that has been set up.

We shall see...

FLAC's in iTunes

2010-04-27T18:00:00.002-04:00

I've been using iTunes less and less because of it's limited support for the audio file formats i use. But I've been listening to the Connect360 media server from the mac pro and like it, but since i am only adding new stuff in the FLAC lossless format this posed a constraint with iTunes.

Open source innovation to the rescue via Fluke (play flacs in iTunes). I downloaded 0.25b (for beta) and installed. The FLAC extension is now associated by default with Fluke. We go to //Gamera and select You Really Got Me by the 13th Floor Elevators. You could ctrl click and select open with, fluke as well (or right click if you have a 2 button mouse, a useful thing Steve!)

Once you select the file it open iTunes and imports the file. No problem but that was just a little 3 min song. Let's leave iTunes open and try importing the entire Psychedelic Sounds album. Not so good. You can shift click all the tunes but when you ctrl click and choose open there is no Fluke option. So we select Open With, Other and browse to the Applications folder and click on Fluke. Now we tick the Always Open With checkbox and click Open. A dialog box called Adding Files is shown and each file being processing. Doing 21 files on a dual 2.66 xeon mac pro took about 30 second but Fluke terminated with an error. We check iTunes and the files we all added. It is beta after all!

For an unfair killer test let's try a 450mb high resolution FLAC of Count Basie and Sinatra Live at the Sands. We start at 6:15. We get the same error but do not terminate as iTunes shows it copying the file. Wow, it took 1 minute to convert 1:16:03 of high rez audio! Let's test it out, we fire up the Spherex system and press play. Excellent! Great job by the Fluke project team. Highly recommended.

Fluke - http://blowintopieces.com/fluke/

Library Science Portable DJ

2010-04-27T10:45:00.007-04:00

Library Science DJ

Ok - to get a break from marking we created the Library Science DJ kit (LSD) for impromptu dance parties in the library or lab - all done from stuff lying around the house...

The kit consists of:

1 portable mixer board (runs on a 9v battery) with 2 source inputs, mic input, and headphone jack
1 set of speakers (6" woofer) for large areas
1 set of speakers (4" woofer) for small spaces like cubicles
1 set of headphones
1 microphone
1 mirror ball
1 equipment bag

And of course all the wires and connectors. You just need to supply your own iPods or music device, preferably two if you want to do some mixing, fading etc. You could even use a pre-amp ed turntable if you like gouging petroleum disks with a needle.

The small speakers are Synthedata B-55's which are active computer audio monitors but not bad. I use them with my iPod to provide patio music. Made of metal and quite heavy but there is only one amp which powers both speakers so they cannot play too loud. However, they are small enough so i can put them in my back pack and bike them anywhere.
The larger speakers are KRK Rockit 6's which are really nice active studio monitors. They weight over 20lbs each and can really, really, really play loud without distortion. Each speaker has two amplifiers, one for the woofer and one for the tweeter. They have more base than my sub/sat spherex system i'm currently using on the mac. They also have nice controls and inputs but they are too large for the backpack. However, they do fit in the Wike (pronounced wiki) bike trailer so i can still bike them anywhere.

So how does the system sound? - with the small speakers it's ok but only useful in a near-field setup like a cubicle or small office. With the Rockit 6's, you could fill a small club or large lab. The sound field is much wider thanks to the waveform guide around the tweeter and the usable bass seems to get down to about 40-45hz which is very good. Playing high resolution FLAC's from SACD, DTS or HDCD disc's is incredible.

Anyway here are the pictures .....and back to work.

Koha on USB Stick II

2010-04-25T10:21:00.002-04:00

The goal here was to create a persistent bootable USB version of Ubuntu with Koha, dspace etc to use for class. Students would work on their stick each week in the lab, adding software and configuring services. There are some missing bits - like PHP so we have to do some work later to get a full lamp stack running so we can install Wordpress and Scriblio etc.

Format the USB device

Boot with the CD (ubuntu 9.10)
Insert your USB stick
Select the stick and right-click
Select Format from the menu
Select Compatible with All Systems (FAT) from the Type: pulldown menu
Type in your username, ie (mchau99) in the Name: text box
Click FORMAT

This process erases everything on the USB stick and creates a FAT32 partition. The process can be done on a Windows computer in advance but we might as well do it here. We re-format the stick to ensure it is FAT32 and not FAT and to get rid of any proprietary software included by the manufacturer. Your name should be limited to 8 characters or less with no spaces or punctuation.

Install Ubuntu

Select System, Administration, USB Startup Disk Creator
Under Disk to Use select your USB stick
Select the Stored in Reserved Extra Space option
Adjust the How Much slider to 2 gig for a 4 gig stick and 4 gig for a larger stick
Click MAKE STARTUP DISK
Click QUIT when the Installation is Complete message is displayed

Be careful to select your stick and not the internal hard disk! Your USB Stick will be called something like /dev/sdb1/mchau99. This process is used to create a caspar-rw file which will be the 'persistence' file that stores changes between boots. The 4 gig limitation is not from Ubuntu but a constraint of the Windows FAT32 file system. If you were using a large portable hard disk and wanted a larger persistence file it can be done but it requires a manual installation.

Boot From the Stick

Click the Ubuntu menu item in the top right corner
Select Restart from the menu
Remove the CD-ROM disc from the tray when it opens
Press ENTER

The system is now booted from the USB Stick. You can test the persistence by installing something - i first installed the Google toolbar in Firefox and used the synaptic package manager to install Brasero, sbackup, filezilla, and the MySQL Query browser. The query browser was able to connect to the mySQL server running on localhost with a username of root and a password of library. I rebooted the system and the changes were there, so the persistence works!

Backup

So how will students back up their weekly or daily work? With the portable USB Sticks a backup program is included - you back up daily or weekly and if your stick is lost, damaged or just screwed up - you reinstall the portable app environment and restore from the backup. This also makes it possible to have multiple sticks in use.

With the Ubuntu stick it is not so easy - there is no backup option on a menu. You need to be able to create a backup than can be fully restored. I can think of several possibilities:

Option 1 - use sbackup to create a backup of files. Sbackup can backup to local drives or to remote hosts using ssh or sftp. The local host option worked well but then you need a second stick to backup to and until we test the restore we cannot guarantee everything (such as the koha changes) are backed up. The other problem is that although i was able to browse the windows shares and connect to some, i could not connect to //files3 or //files when the user's local files (U: drive) are stored, so you cannot backup to your space. I was able to connect to the personal web space on panther but since that is only 10mb it is quite useless. Backing up to a file storage site via ssh or sftp would be preferable.

So option 1 can work but has some questions.

Option 2

An easier option for the student would be the ability to make a complete image of the USB stick that could be re-created. For example an ISO file. While there are lots of utilities to burn disk images like ISO or dmg to a CD/USB/HD, it is hard to find any information on creating an ISO from a USB stick. In fact, programs like NERO that can create ISO's won't even list a USB stick in their source menu.

Next Steps:

Run the Koha Install and import some MARC records.
Copy the large MARC record files to the S:\local\mlis\courses\9762 for students to use
Test Restore from sbackup with koha changes

Alurateck Libre e-Book Reader

2010-04-21T10:50:00.010-04:00

Decided to see if i would like using one. There were two goals - it had to be inexpensive and non-proprietary, which certainly ruled out the Kindle and the iPad. I purchased the Aluratek Libre pro (in white), a small and cheap e-book reader. It has an SD card slot and a usb connector - important for easy copying and it supports PDF, TXT, FB2, ePub, MOBI, PRC, and RTF files.

First step was to upgrade the firmware. We downloaded and unzipped the folder, connected the usb cable and started copying the folder to the SD card. It ran for a while and then we got an error message about '..too deep' or something and then Windows explorer froze up. We unplugged the SD card and killed explorer. This fixed that problem. We were now able to reconnect to the device's 128mb internal memory which has 4 folders:

Pictures
Books
Audiobooks
adobe-digital-editions

Since the display is black and white i'm not sure why you would put pictures on it! The audiobooks folder would be useful - it can store mp3 songs or real audio books. I'll transfer some of my audio books and check it out. Copying files to and from the device is very slow, very slow indeed. Be prepared to wait.

Connected the device to an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop and copying is fast, copied over some .mobi, .rb, .ltf, .epub and .pdf files for testing. The copying was without a problem - until the device disappeared from the desktop. It still thinks it is connected and does not want to turn off. We had to use the reset button in the back of the unit. Maybe take another try at updating the firmware?

Connected back to windows to transfer the firmware update folder with the .bin file. This now worked but i had to take out and insert the SD card a couple of times before it got recognized and assigned a drive letter. Arrgh the copy fails again with 'the path is too deep' - it's a single folder, jim! Windows then says 'delayed write failed', The data has been lost'. It looks like the unit turns itself off. Maybe look at the settings or try another machine. The copy process hangs repeatedly when there are 10 seconds remaining. But when i compared the files they are the same size so let's try the update process.

The update process is:

Disconnect AEBK01F from your computer after the file transfer
Reset AEBK01F by pressing the “RESET” button in the back of the unit
Push and hold both ‘>’ and ‘Power’ buttons for more than 5 seconds to boot up until you see the “Aluratek” logo
Wait for 10 to 20 seconds until the upgrade screen
Follow the on screen instruction to upgrade the unit
AEBK01F will now update the firmware.
Please wait until you see the message “Firmware Upgrade completed!

Finaslly, after a couple of resets we get the upgrade process screen so we press OK. The upgrade process takes about 2 minutes but erases the internal memory so i'll have to re-copy the audio books. Oh great - we get 'Firmware upgrade failed - hardware failure occurs'. So we reset the device. Screw the upgrade...Wonder if the problem is the SD card? Perhaps we should reformat it or try a different card. Right now let's try and read some books - the included .txt ones load no problem. The first .pdf does not load. We try Dawkins in epub format but it 'fails to open the file'. Try another epub and it works! Let's try a mobi file which it skips over so we try another epub and it works fine. The text is not bad - pretty readable but requiring good light. Let's try and copy some more books on this card.

Off to the store tomorrow

Using LAMP for Course Assignments

2010-04-19T15:07:00.003-04:00

We used USB sticks again this year for student projects. The advantage is they allow the student to work anywhere, anytime and to get experience in systems work - installing, maintaining, and troubleshooting. The disadvantages are:

some sticks are sloooooooow
some sticks are not very durable
some people do not make backups

You get what you pay for, so saving $4 on something that contains your term's work is not a good idea! Buy the best, biggest and fastest stick you can afford or even better yet - buy a USB external hard disk. Not necessarily too much faster but definitely more durable. Also, there are 2 kinds of people, those who make backups and those who wish they had...I believe they now call these things 'learning experiences'.

Actually, the whole thing worked ok - some difficulties with old, slow or unreliable sticks but overall not bad and we required nothing from the IT people. Students went away with a complete library system with MARC records and a custom dynamic web site - not a bad portfolio to show a prospective employer.

The dynamic web site project had been a stumbling block - how do you get them to turn in a database, some php files, a css file and some images so that you can run it and take a look? You could run a server but central IT takes a dim view of that. You could use a hosting service but then you are paying out of your pocket. The solution was simple:

Students installed xampp or xampplite or wamp on their computer or USB stick and then installed Joomla. They then developed their dynamic web site. When finished they burned the xampp, xampplite or wamp folder to a cd-rom or dvd-rom and handed it in. The student could even test if the burn was done correctly by copying the xampp or xampplite folder to their hard drive, starting the apache and mysql servers, and running a web browser (same procedure as i follow below).

All i had to do was to copy the xampp, xampplite or wamp folder to my c:\ drive and then run the xampp control panel to start the servers and goto http://localhost/joomla to view their creation. (the wamp control panel works as well). The only downside is that it takes a couple of minutes to copy the folder from optical disc to hard drive. But it works and you have a permanent record.

With USB 3.0 now becoming available, i am thinking we can make a requirement that students purchase an 8 gig stick for the course and install Ubuntu on it and then lamp and add Koha, Wordpress, Scriblio, mediawiki, joomla or drupal, phpBB etc and use this as their server throughout the term. The case could be they have been hired to replace the old static web site and ILS with with a new integrated library portal including porting of MARC records.

Media Center IV

2010-03-24T12:58:00.006-04:00

The Final Chapter

Now that Windows media center is out of the running the search continues for the solution. Here are the requirements:

- must work with an Xbox 360 as the client (not going to use 2 devices)
- must be non-proprietary (no iTunes-like control)
- must work with all or almost all media (multiple formats) on the server
- no TV recording or pvr functions needed as i don't use cable or sat

The xmbc linux solution was perfect except it would not sync the hdmi video thru the pre-amp and plasma tv (worked fine with lcd). So we are looking for plan B.

Since all the media is stored on the network i just need something to read the files and produce a display than is picked up by the xbox client.

The solution seems to be TVersity (http://tversity.com/) a software server. It currently only runs on windows and uses windows media player 11 for some functions but i can live with that for now as they have a linux version under development. The software is only $39 and can be purchased online (which i did). It will also work with some of our other devices such as the bedroom netbook, liam's psp and wii, my iTouch and the various computers strewn about the house. The website has lots of information.

Once purchased a download link is sent in an email message. The only problem was the link did not work - because the email is automated and adds a period after each sentence it thought the url was a sentence, once the ending period was stripped off the URL worked fine and i downloaded the .exe setup file.

Installed without a hitch and had it index the my music, my video and my pictures folders on the network. Next we went upstairs and fired up the xbox and the server showed right up. Connected and everything worked except most of the audio files could not be played. This is because they are high-rez flac, which every audiophile uses - get with the program microsoft!

So back downstairs. Adding flac support to windows media player is not easy. It requires downloading and installign the madFlac datashow decoder (tvsersity uses datashow) and then hacking the registry. Here is the registry patch:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.flac]
@="FlacAudio"
"Content Type"="audio/x-flac"
"PerceivedType"="audio"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\MIME Types\audio/x-flac]
@="FlacAudio"
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Extensions.SpaceSep"=".flac"
"Extensions.CommaSep"="flac"
"Extension.Key"=".flac"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Groups\Audio\flac]
@="FlacAudio"
"Description"="Includes files with .flac extensions."
"Extensions"=".flac"
"FriendlyTypeName"="Flac Audio File"
"MIME Types"="audio/x-flac"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.flac]
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"PerceivedType"="audio"
"MediaType.Description"="Flac Audio File"
"Extension.Handler"="FlacAudio"
"Extension.MIME"="audio/x-flac"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Descriptions]
"414"="Flac Audio File (.flac)"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\MUIDescriptions]
"414"="Flac Audio File"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Extensions\Types]
"414"="*.flac"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
"flac"="audio"

Now flac files play in the media play. I also set up the Wii to connect to the tvestity media center using the flash interface. Kind of ugly but it works with the wii web browser, which is Opera. You can download it for free. It's quite a bit slower than the xbox which is connected via 100mb cable while the wii is such wireless G. One annoyance is that the xbox doesn't have a web browser per se so getting to online content is a bit harder - you have to see up RSS feeds or playlists for internet content. I want to get Hulu channels set up. Of course, since this is Canada we are not allowed to get Hulu (ban the CRTC!) but since i live in Detroit it's no problem. In face, there is a web site called bugmenot.com that has usernames for sites that require registration that you can use for such things...

Anyway dragged some hulu channels into the media server - will see how it works later. Must say hulu is getting some decent content.

PS - xbox live has a facebook extension so you can connect to fb, but it is kind of lame...

Media Center III

2010-03-22T20:53:00.004-04:00

This is turning into an epic...

We installed ubuntu 9.10 on the revo and then xbmc and all the goodies. Everything worked perfectly, the mediaplayer skin on the 24 inch lcd was very sweet. Only problem was the remote would not work. Installed and configured lirc and everything else but no joy. I also found out the remote also workd with the xbox - turning on the media center also turned on the xbox!

What to do? This got me interested in the xbox - which had been a throw-in trade item. It was able to browse the windows shares on xp and pick up video, audio and pics in windows-friendly formats. A neat program called connect 360 for osx set up the mac pro to share its itunes library with the xbox. So far so good. To get this to work on the pc i had to install windows media player and set it to share the files. It works but the windows media player keeps crashing.

This led me to windows media center, it has an xbox extender to allow and xbox to connect to it. So i installed the media center 2005 version on the revo. Took a while to download all the revo drivers and set the whole thing up. You have to download an update and the extender from microsoft and then enter a number from your xbox and after a few error messages it found the xbox. From the now xbox client i could run the media center. This seemed good - a nice skin and it picked up the local content. However, it couild play very few formats that are essential to a media center like FLAC and quicktime etc and while the online channels were neat like NPR it could not play any content as it did not support FLASH..so it is useless.

So we are back to square 1 - cant use apple tv as it is proprietary and doesnt support file formats in common use for content, ms media center is worse, and the open source xbmc is the best but would only sync with my lcd and not the big plasma. We could try the standalone players like popcorn etc but really why have so many devices?

The xbox seems to be the best possibility, the wireless controllers work well and are sturdy, the hdmi video/sound is excellent and the gui is ok. The question is how to set up the back end so that all content is served and played. So we need to test out a number of media types, esp flac for audio and videos. If the windows media player stability could be fixed and configured so it plays all types then that is a livable solution but i find it odd in 2010 to have to still deal with all these problems. I had a living room media center 10 years ago, a pc hooked to a zenith professional 29 inch tube tv that had vga input. The best solution would be to run xbmc as a client on the xbox 360 but ms does not allow that..

tomorrow - improve xbox back end

Another windows PC bites the dust

2010-03-08T19:49:00.004-05:00

The list of purchased but not used Windows licenses continues to grow....

The kitchen laptop, a DEll D400 with 1gig ram, 40gig hd and 11" screen has now been converted to Ubuntu. It has been used the last few years as a replacement for the daily newspaper. Google News is vastly preferable to the local rag. I get to read the Washington Post, the National Post and the Yarmouth Vanguard while having breakfast. Out of laziness it was running windows xp because that is what came with it. Besides the worry of viruses and malware, windows was old and lacked the stuff i needed and use. While it doesn't have great speakers it would be useful to be able to play some of the many tunes in the media center. I did a test of the xbmc client running on windows and then thought if i was going to do that i might as well go the whole hog.

First task was to backup the important stuff - no not the programs or the OS and any data is on the server anyway but the bookmarks, passwords, cookies, form fill data and all the other stuff in Firefox. I use the excellent FEBE extension which creates backups. I backed up to a USB stick and then away we go...

A hour later it was goodbye XP and hello Ubuntu 9.10 - unfortunately the wireless did not work but getting the updates fixed that problem. Installed the FEBE extension and restored the Firefox data and away we go...The window environment is so much nicer and all my stuff is available. Next to install the xbmc client.

This got me thinking about how much i am forced to spend on windows licenses i don't need and don't want. A lot of people are in the same fix as microsoft forces vendors to include windows on their machines or else it will yank their windows license. Very few allow you to substitute linux for windows. Just looking around the room i see:

Dell D400 - came with windows xp now running ubuntu
Dell 1520 - came with Vista, now running ubuntu
Dell 470 - came with windows 2000, now running ubuntu
Dell 620 - came with windows xp, now running freenas
Dell mini9 - came with windows xp, now running ubuntu
Acer Revo - was supposed to ship with windows xp...now running ubuntu
Mac pro - does not run windows but i'm thinking of vmware...
Macbook - does not run windows
G4 Tower - runs apple OS9

There is one machine left running xp and you would not believe the problem i had re-installing xp - their 'genuine advantage' program had some problem and so i had to use the telephone of all things to call a number and get a long code to type in. It was such a pain. Had to do the same thing when i tried vista for a day...

I have a banker's box filled with unused microsoft software. They sell lots for sure, wonder how much sits unused and unloved...

Media Center Project II

2010-03-03T20:04:00.000-05:00

The Acer Revo arrived and it is cute. It sits on a little stand and is less than 2" thick but packed with ports. We fired it up and the installed OS is freeDOS! That's ok, it was supposed to ship with Windows which we were going to wipe anyway. I was just thinking that i've purchased 5 windows licenses in the last year when i bought computers and i use none of them. Sales figures are not the same as 'in use' figures.

As a bonus it shipped with the wireless keyboard and mouse, i'll take that anyday over a version of windows. The included hard disk is SATA but small - 160gig and there is only 1 gig of ram and the usual Atom cpu. I have read that microsoft forces manufactures to adhere to those low end specs if they want to sell windows. Not a problem for this application, as a media center client it only needs an OS and the client software, in fact i could take out the hd and run it from a usb stick. All the audio/video/picture files are stored on the media server (\\megatron). The revo has a wired ethernet port which is ok because we want high speed to the living room. Other media clients can use wireless - we should install the xbmc client on the laptops and liam's iMac. That means all the computers can access the content files which are stored centrally.

We popped open the machine by removing 1 screw and squeezing the side panel. The inside is neat. Added a second 1gig sodimm to bring it up to 2 gig. This is necessary as the video uses the ram, like a cheap laptop it has no dedicated video ram. A setting in the BIOS controls the amount of ram allocated to the nvidia ion chip - we set it to 512mb as we want to output high def video (and sound) via HDMI.

Anyway, we hooked up a usb optical drive, went into the BIOS and changed the 1st boot device to USB and rebooted into an XBMC liveCD. We wiped the hard disk clean and installed - it puts a stripped down version of ubuntu 9.10 with the nvidia ion drivers and the xbmc client on the disk. The internal HD is easy to remove if you want a larger drive, but for heat reasons i would use the eSata connector.

The install and configuration of XBMC was a breeze, the network and all devices were picked up. I plugged in the little dongle for the wireless and the keyboard/mouse were recognized. The network speed was fine, i could browse windows shares (uck) and it picked up the UpnP media server no problem. The skin is incredible, very nice look. Then i plugged in the Vista media center remote and rebooted, it picked it up and worked like a charm. Able to perform all functions, including turning off the unit from the remote. Set up the audio/video settings to 1080i with hdmi sound out and shut down the machine. For setup and testing it was hooked to a 24" LCD via a vga cable.

Then we moved the unit upstairs and plugged it into the Onkyo Integta 9.8 pre-amp. This should route the video and audio to the pre-amp so that any desired video or audio processing takes place in the digital domain and direct the video out via hdmi to the 54" Panasonic and the audio via XLR cables to the power amps and then to the speakers.

This is where we hit the first problem occurred. At boot time the text was shown but with red streaking dashed lines all over the screen and after the XBMC logo appeared the screen went blank and the pre-amp displayed 'no video signal'. So i tried hooking it directly to the Panasonic and no signal at all. It was if the two devices were not syncing the video signal. I hauled up a vga monitor and changed the resolutions - cycling though 480i,480p,720p etc without joy. So off to searching the internet for answers. It seems there are a number of issues with using the liveCD and with HDMI audio/video under Ubunutu/XBMC. Some people appeared to have them solved but there are different approaches and no clear cut answer. This means some trial and error - which will take time. The unit will have to be returned to the basement for more tests.

The other issue is around the updating of the liveCD - once installed, updating is not clear to me. It can be done but again would require research and trial and error. I am thinking a better option would be to just go ahead and install 9.10 on the box along with the XBMC client repositories. This way i get the updates automatically. Plus, i can set it to auto boot the xbmc client anyway. Looks like i need some time...

Finally, i went with xbmc instead of mythTV because i don't have cable or satellite. However, i did install a small, cheap HDTV antenna in the attic and ran coax cable down to the Panasonic which has an HD tuner. I get one channel (SUN TV) over the air. The quality is fantastic. This makes me think that next year when analog over the air TV is finally gone that their would be more OTA high def signals. At that point it would make sense to purchase a tv-tuner card for the media server. The card would have to be supported by linux but once that is installed and setup then any of the clients could get TV as well as being able to record shows (as if there was anything on....)

Google Analytics and Blogger

2010-02-23T10:58:00.005-05:00

I been playing around with Google Analytics and thought it would be fun and a good learning experience to track these posts. So i created a profile for this blog. It tells me that:

"The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website's home page."

Ok, no problem. It allows me to copy the needed code. So i open a recent post, goto the HTML editor and paste in the code.

When i go to save the post i get an error message - "Cannot connect to web site". Odd - i remove the javascript i just pasted it and it saves ok with no error.

- i just added the sentence below and tried to save and it complained about a broken blank line tag error so i removed the code and it saved ok.

I did it again, this time i placed it at the end of the text and it saved ok - maybe just a server problem...of course i now have to place the code on all posts...

Mac Pro

2010-02-22T20:29:00.004-05:00

Latest computer is a Mac Pro. Out with the dual G5 which was a nice machine but could not run 10.6 and was getting a little slow at rendering long video sequences.

The new machine has the same metal case and look but dual 64-bit Xeon dual-core cpu's running at 2.66 Ghz, 6 gig fb-ram, ATI radeon X1900 pci-e video card and a 1 terabyte sata disk. I like the fact it has room for 4 sata hard drives and with 2 free ram slots i could end up with 12 gig of ram. It is also quiet - more so than the G5 which never got loud but could rev up when busy. The single cpu, dual-core XP box runs the fan a lot more and a lot louder and the dell precision 470 is deafening when all 4 cores get busy.

There are a lot of comparisons about apple's prices compared with dell and yes apple does charge a lot for a mac pro. The dell 470 is comparable in specs - less ram, same hard drive, same video, but slightly faster cpus - 3.2ghz vs 2.66 ghz. Since i bought i bare bones, added the cpu's, ram, hard drive, video etc it cost me about $500 to build and it probably runs about the same as the mac pro. Is it the same quality, no. It's cheap plastic and looks it and right now the fans are going full speed as it is rendering a dvd, burning a cd-rom, serving video/audio to upstairs and downloading some stuff. By comparison, the mac pro is made of solid metal, looks classy and is whisper quiet as it goes about it's business. I would say the mac pro is a McIntosh amplifier and the Dell is a NAD. Nothing wrong with a NAD, i've got a 500 watt beast that does the job but it doesn't look or act like a McIntosh.

How fast is it - i've always found dual processor machines so much 'smoother' to use. It's never a question of raw speed but that with 2 cpu's you never have to wait. The video snaps yes, and windows are responsive yes, but the real test is to start up some copying. While i typed this i cloned the original 250 gig drive to the new bigger drive.

The other thing that is noticable is the quality of the video. My setup has the 3 main machines (linux, osx, and windows) on a large L shaped desl so that my chair just turns around to work on a machine. The monitors are all similar sizes and quality and the video cards about the same but the quality of the video rendering of the mac is so much more lifelike. Actually i would rate them as mac 1st, linux 2nd and windows 3rd. As a test i put the same wallpaper (image35.jpg from Vista) on all 3 machines to compare. Same result. In fairness i am using XP and Vista does have a nicer looking screen...shame the rest of it was so bad.

anyway - got it get back and switch drives, set up time machine and then try out some apps...

Chrome running on USB stick

2010-02-19T11:01:00.001-05:00

Posting this from a USB stick in Lab A running ChromeOS and logged into iGoogle. Boots up pretty quick and runs ok. Picked up the wired ethernet no problem. The username is facepunch and the password is facepunch.

What is weird is having an operating system with no apps or settings to tweak or all the other stuff. Takes a bit getting used to - the Apps menu lists a number of typical apps like Calculator, Calendar, Contacts but they are all web apps. Takes a bit of getting used to. I set up the first tab to go to my customized iGoogle page. I also added a bunch of extensions such as this blogger one, a facebook one, dictionary, local weather etc.

There are a couple of rough edges which is to be expected. There are frequently lags when your typing outpaces the system, it goes away for a second. This also affects the mouse - the polling seems off in that the mouse is not there when you go to move it. The workaround is to right click the mouse to 'wake it up' and then cancel the action.

Media Center Project

2010-02-18T23:53:00.002-05:00

This is a project to build a client/server based media center using a small pc connected to the media server (which is just \\godzilla, a dual xeon ubuntu desktop).

We were orginally going to use the shuttle xpc which was purchased for the games project a couple of years ago and ended up being a desktop when pc games lost their allure. (discovered i only like turn-based strategy games that make you think, a very unpopular genre so not many options)

Anyway, the shuttle was converted to ubuntu desktop and a DVI to HDMI cable purchased. I had some qualms about this approach as then you needed multiple audio cables and there was concern about an agp video card keeping up with HD video.

As it turned out the shuttle xpc is 7 3/4" wide and the new entertainment unit when fully populated with the pre-amp, 2 power amps and 2 optical disc players only had 7 1/4" of free space. So out it went. I then researched all the embedded media players available such as the WD, the popcorn, Dlink, Apple TV etc. The apple is the easiest to get working but ties you to iTunes which i don't want and will not play all media types. The WD is considered about the best, although Asus has a new player that is pretty good. However, all of those players do not support all the open source formats i use for a/v so they were out. They also tend to use windows shares browsing, which i did not want to do. This led me back to the original idea, the only way to ensure all the stuff i have can be played is to use a computer-based solution.

The problem is that computer-based media players like the shuttle are expensive and come with windows media player, which i don't want because it will not play all the open source formats. The solution was either to build my own box using an expensive pci-e video card with HDMI output for video and audio, or find a cheap and small box with that capability.

After a little research i settled on the Acer Revo, a 7.1″H x 7.1″D x 1.2″W computer that has an atom 1.6 cpu, 2 gig of ram, and the nvidia ion chipset with HDMI audio/video out. And it is cheap! The next step was to decide what software to run. I flirted with the idea of MythTV because i've always wanted to try it but it is geared towards PVR and TV tuners and TV watching. I don't watch much TV and don't even have cable or sat - i just want to access the terabytes of media files on my network. The solution i decided on is the XBMC open source media player. The idea is for the revo client to run the xbmc client and connect over the network to the UPNP media server (\\godzilla running upnp). I did a test using the shuttle xpc running the xbmc client and running mediatomb on the server and it worked ok. Not crazy about medatomb at first glance so will spend more time on that end when the revo arrives.

Also ordered a windows media center remote that was listed as working with xbmc. Since the revo can be set to come up in xbmc this means no need for a keyboard. There is also a liveCD fo xbmc so the whole thing can be tested out without installing.

Will post how it works out when it arrives.

Chrome on a Stick

2010-02-18T23:43:00.002-05:00

Now that we have Koha running on the USB and the computer lab has agreed to change the boot sequence of the computers to USB - CD - HDD it is time to look at some interesting alternatives to windows.

The Chrome OS has a lot of interest as it is designed to make the browser the OS so that all apps and data live on the network. And since i am trying hard to downsize the number of machines running around here (down to 4 now!...plus 3 laptops...but i just ordered a revo for the media center client project which starts next week). Anyway, the clever folks at http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ have created a USB image that can receive updates. A VM image will be ready soon but for now we download the ChromeOsFlow.img file to \\godzilla (the main ubuntu box - back in action after a bad PNY video card experience) and run the imagewriter program to burn the chrome image to an old 2 gig USB stick. Ubuntu Imagewriter is a simple program that burns a 'disc' image, sort of like burning an ISO image with Brasero.

The whole process takes about 4/5 minutes and when done you have a bootable USB stick with ChromeOS. What i plan to do with it is to test out the machines in the lab and maybe some of the home machines as well and the revo when it arrives. Will let you know how it goes...

Koha LiveCD

2010-02-11T14:02:00.004-05:00

Writing this from Ubuntu running on a USB stick in the lab. Even better, it is running the Koha ILS (and Dspace, and OAI harvester and dbWiz - things i have wanted to use in class but could not because of the IT limitations).

Thanks to the great work of Dr. ARD Prasad (ard@drtc.isibang.ac.in) there is now a LiveCD of Koha 3.0 available. Goto http://sf.net/projects/liblivecd and download the .iso and burn the image to a CD.

You can run it from the CD and login to the Admin module or just use the OPAC (of course, until you set it up it has nothing...)

OPAC is http://localhost/opac
Admin is http://localhost/kohaadmin

the admin username is kohaadmin and the password is library. I was able to set up Koha in a few minutes and then use the built-in client to make a Z39.50 connection to the Library of Congress server and do some copy cataloging. With some books in the OPAC i was able to do some searching.

Since the OS is Ubuntu 9.10 i decided to make a bootable USB version, the idea being i could then save settings, tweak the install and add some more programs.

In Ubuntu select System, Admin, USB Startup and select your stick. I first tried a USB stick formatted with ext2 filesystem but it did not mount, so i had to reformat the stick as FAT32 so that it was detected. The Install to USB function asks how much space to reserve on the USB stick for persistent data, i select 512mb on a 2 gig stick. The Ubuntu image is about 670mb so i figured this would leave enough room.

The entire process takes about 4 minutes and when you restart the USB boots into Ubuntu from where you can setup and run Koha. Just launch Firefox all the information you need is displayed. Sweet! Many thanks to Mr. Prasad for this. I have some screenshots of the Koha setup but i need to work though it a couple of times to understand all the options and then write it up for the class lab.

There is another Koha Live CD done in Aug 2009 available from Mizstik projects at http://mizstik.com/projects/koha-livecd/ but i have not tried it. Maybe a comparison should be done. I notice the same site has a mod for Openbiblio called the Home Edition. Will have to take a look, wish someone would take over that project and get it going again...

EIFL: FOSS for Libraries

2010-02-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

EIFL: FOSS for Libraries

This lists identifies viable FOSS solutions for libraries and provides details on the software as well as its FOSS user and developer communities. When the software is known to be in use in eIFL.net member libraries, this too is noted. Links to the main project site and the download site are included and each entry is reviewed on a monthly basis to keep it up to date.

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade problem

2010-01-17T10:01:00.002-05:00

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...

Teamviewer

2010-01-15T20:54:00.006-05:00

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 web 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.

Delicious Library

2010-01-02T10:45:00.005-05:00

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:

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:

Openbiblio Working with Amazon lookup

2009-11-25T15:47:00.002-05:00

Thanks to LIS student Kris Meen, we now have the Amazon lookup working with the Openbiblio ILS. The problem had been that it installed ok but that every search turned up zero results.

We had obtained an access key by registereding with Amazon web services. The problem was that Amazon provided a key ID as well as a secret access key.

We had originally followed the instructions for the patch and edited the amazon conf.php file and added the secret access key. The solution is to use the access key ID not the secret key.

Open Biblio Again

2009-11-03T20:09:00.002-05:00

Back to the little library system. We tried to get the Library of Congress lookup patch working without success. I think we made all the changes but it seems to be looking for a .php file in the catalog folder. Will troubleshoot later.

Today we want to try web biblio, a fork of the open biblio project. We downloaded the .zip from the open biblio downloads page link and unzipped the webbiblio3 folder to xampplite/htdocs.

We then went to http://localhost/webbiblio3/install/ to bring up the installation instructions. First task is to create the mySQL database. We open a DOS command shell and run mysql -hlocalhost -uroot to connect to the database server running on the USB stick and issue the following commands:

create database webbiblio;
use webbiblio;

mysql> grant all privileges on WebBiblio.* to webbib@localhost identified by 'zx8180';

Interesting, you don't have to edit the database_constants.php file as the instructions contain a web form that does it for you. I'll leave it as the default of root with no password as this is a USB stick - otherwise we would change it to the webbib user we just created.

After clicking SUBMIT the message database created successfully is displayed. We click on the link and the home page is displayed. We click the Admin tab and login with username admin and password admin.

We want to take a look at this system as a solution to the digital files problem. We have terabytes of digital files, mainly ebooks, video and audio. With this system we could grab cataloging data by doing a LOC or Amazon lookup on the ISBN and then upload the matching ebook file or audio/video file. There is a 128mb limit on file uploads but that can be changed.

We note an error 'upload folder is not writable'. Looking at webbiblio3 folder - where do the uploads go? No information on the web site. Looks like you got to search the source code to figure it out. Documentation is nice....

Greenstone on the Mac and Linux

2009-09-28T18:40:00.003-04:00

Since the new version of Greenstone now includes the remote GLI client, we are keen to test out a server install and to use the client to connect to a portable server, either linux or osx based.

First we download the .dmg from http://www.greenstone.org and extract and run the 2.82 installer. This installs to /Users/gnickers/Greenstone and we select the core, imagemagick and ghostscript. We also enable the Admin pages checkbox with the usual password.

Click Install and away it goes, completing in 42 seconds. In the Greenstone folder we find a bunch of directories:

apache-httpd - the web server
gli - the librarian interface for building collections
bin - executables
collect - collections
image - CSS files and images

The greenstone server interface (GSI) is an application to start/stop the local library server. On Linux and OSX it uses the apache web server that comes with Greenstone.

I see the gs2-server.sh file is there and on linux this requires a trip to the terminal and the ./gs2-server.sh command but it's been years since i did much in the cli in osx. We try it out in terminal and it works. However, port 80 is in use or can't be assigned. (apache already running?) so it assigned port 8282 and pops up a dialog box. We click Enter Library and the server control panel starts up in the web browser. However Safari returns 'can't connect to server'.

Curious to see if localhost is running we try port 80 but nothing. So what's using port 80? We don't have skype installed...

Ubuntu Install

So we try the linux version. The installer program runs just the same. We open a shell and cd Greenstone and type:

./gs2-server.sh

and get the same message about 'port 80 in use or can't be assigned'. We click Enter Library but get the same 'Failed to Connect to locahost:8282

Time for some research....

HeidiSQL tool for mySQL

2009-09-23T21:04:00.004-04:00

We have been using XAMPP on USB sticks for teaching for some time now. One of the problems has been the limited tools to manage the mySQL database server:

- phpmyadmin web interface
- mysql command line text-mode client

While the command line client is fast and has a lot of advantages it is somewhat an alien way of working for students. The web interface is more familiar but is slow and very old web like.

Of course you can use some of the great third-party tools for mySQL if they are installed but the general use labs only have the mySQL query browser. My favorite 2rd party tool is Navicat for OSX, I first purchased it years ago for a database project, it did everything well. But it is commercial (although they now have a free Lite version) so out of the student's reach. What we really wanted was a nice GUI tool that would run as a portable application.

Well, amazing enough such a creature exists and it is called HeidiSQL. Goto http://www.heidisql.com/ and have a look. There is a portable version that takes only 4.6 mb of space on a USB Stick.

Run the .exe installer and point it to the PortableApps folder on your USB stick. You don't have to install it there but if you do then it automatically gets added to the Portable Apps menu. Note that you don't actually have to have Portable Apps installed to run any portable application, you can just run the .exe file. However, having a nice menu system is a bonus that helps keep things organized.

When you run the program it brings up a connection manager for your session. Just fill in localhost for the IP, root for the User and click Connect! If you do not specify a database it will show you all the databases on the mySQL server, if you specify a database it only shows you that one.

For a light client it has lots of features, import/export of data and sql files, data search/edit etc, user account admin, SQL queries, database admin and it can even create views. What's not to like?

I think we have found a winner for class use. For more information goto:
http://code.google.com/p/heidisql/ which provide the following list of features:

With HeidiSQL you will be able to

generate nice SQL-exports
synchronize tables between two databases
manage user-privileges
import text-files
export table-data as CSV, HTML, XML and SQL
browse and edit table-data using a comfortable grid
create and edit stored procedures
batch-insert ascii or binary files into tables
write queries with customizable syntax-highlighting and code-completion
monitor and kill client-processes
connect to servers via commandline
and much more

We will know more by the end of term...

MARC Records into Greenstone

2009-09-23T19:01:00.005-04:00

This was a test of getting MARC record imported in Greenstone digital library software and automatically filling in the Dublin Core metadata elements

The first step was to get the MARC records into a file. There are three ways to do this:

- save some records from a library OPAC
- find a file of marc records on the Internet
- use a Z39.50 client

We tested the first two methods. The library OPAC was straightforward, you do a search and tag or select the records you want and then view them. There are several options such as ProCite and MARC format, so we selected MARC and the local disk option and saved them to a file.

The downloaded file was called export.txt so we renamed it export.marc for importing into Greenstone.

Importing

1. We ran the GLI for greenstone and created a new collection
2. Click the Gather tab, expand the Local Filespace
3. Drag export.marc into the Collection window and ADD the MARCplugin
4. Right-click on export.marc in the Collection window and select Explode Metadata Database
5. Select Dublin Core from the metadata_set pulldown and click Explode
6. Click the Design tab
7. Select Marcplugin and click Remove Plugin

You can now build and preview the collection but the display will be all wrong. Remove the default search and browsing indexes. Now you have to create indexes based on the Dublin Core metadata set, for example an Author index:

1. Click Design, Browsing Classifiers
2. Select AZcompactlist from the Select Classifier pulldown menu
3. Click Add Classifier
4. Select dc.Creator from the metadata pulldown menu
5. Place a tickmark in the allvalues checkbox
6. Place a tickmark in the buttonmane checkbox and type in Authors as a menu label

Let's also add a Subject index:

1. Select AZcompactlist from the Select Classifier pulldown
2. Click Add Classifier
3. Select dc.Subject from the metadata pulldown
4. Tick the allvalues checkbox
5. Click OK

Build and preview to see the new indexes, but the display will still be a bit off. The next step is to change the formatting instructions for the web pages:

1. Click Format, Format Features
2. Delete the first and last lines in the HTML Format String box

Once the above two lines are deleted you can refresh the web pages - html or css changes do not require a rebuild. However, if you click on the icon to view the document no text is displayed and the document heading is wrong.

1. Click on Format, Format Features
2. Select DocumentHeading in the Choose Feature pulldown
3. Delete the text in the HTML Format String box

This gets red of the incorrect document header. Now to fix the 'no text' document:

1. Click Format, Format Features
2. Select DocumentText in the Choose Feature pulldown
3. Replace [text] with the following HTML code:

You can add a little inline CSS to pretty up the presentation but you get the idea. The final step is to remove the buttons as there is nothing to detach and highlighting makes no sense in a short bibliographic record:

1. Click Format, Format Features
2. Select Document Buttons
3. Delete the text in the HTML Format String box

You can now preview the collection. Obviously there is a lot more that could be done such as having the index nodes indicate how many records they contain using the [numleafdocs] variable and we could make a much nicer display by tweaking the external style sheet....

Appendix

I downloaded the Terry Reese's excellent MARCedit program to do a little experiment on the marc records files i have saved from the library OPAC. I wanted to test out converting MARC to Dublin Core. Here's what i did:

1. Renamed the export.marc file to export.mrc (marcdedit does not recognize .marc extension)
2. Ran MARCedit and selected MARCbreaker
3. Select MARC -> Dublin Core
4. Choose export.mrc as the input file
4. Choose an export file of weldon_dc.txt and clicked Execute

It created a plain text XML file that uses rdf:description and replaces all the MARC tags with Dublin Core tags. Here is a snippet of the file of records:

Accelerated SQL Server 2008 [electronic resource] /
Walters, Robert E.
Coles, Michael.
Farmer, Donald.
Ferracchiati, Fabio.
Rae, Robert.
SpringerLink (Online service)
text
Berkeley, CA : Robert Walters,
2008.
eng
Data structures (Computer science)
Springer eBooks.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-0606-4

The problem is that i cannot get this file to explode in Greenstone, it imports as one file of one record using LOMplug. I'll have to do some research on this tomorrow...

XAMPP on a CD

2009-08-30T18:35:00.004-04:00

Xampp on a CD

The goal today is to produce a self-running cd-rom containing the XAMPP stack along with joomla so that students can burn their projects running on a USB stick to a CD-ROM.

Requirements:

USB stick running xampp with joomla installed
AMPstart software (replaces the xampp control panel)
autorun.inf file
autorun.bat file
ampstart.ini file
cd-rom burning software

The autorun.inf file consists of:

[autorun] open=autorun.bat icon=joomla.png Label=server

I created a small icon of 32x32 pixels. When ampstart is running the icon is in the windows system tray. Double-click on the icon to shut down the web server and unlock the cd tray.

The autorun.bat file consists of:

@echo off rem script to make auto-run xampp joomla lis 9710 cd rem creates a mysql data dir on c because mysql needs a writable folder mkdir c:\mysql\data xcopy xampp\mysql\data\ c:\mysql\data /E start AMPstart.exe

the ampstart.ini file consists of:

[database] overwrite=1 folder=c:\mysql\data [website] website=htdocs\joomla startup=index.php port= [cd] eject=1

The eject option ejects the cd when the web server is shut down. Will it work? Our previous attempts at running from a cd failed and this is when we started researching ampstart. There are some other options we might add later to the .ini file if this works.

[WEBSITE]
website=\path\to\web\app

You can also auto open firefox if it is not the default web browser with:

[WEBSITE]
ExtBrowser=\path\to\browser\executable\file

If you want to make the site seem more realistic in a demo (such as a real looking url instead of localhost) use:

[WEBSITE]
ServerName=somedomain
website=\path\to\web\app

To auto shut down the web server when the web apps ends use:

[WEBSITE]
ShutdownOnClose=1

And to set the duration for the ampstart splash screen use:

[LOGO]
duration=n_second
;default 0 (depending on loading time of web server)

Ok so here we go - burn the cd from the usb stick. Here is the folder structure. It suddenly occurs to me that we have been closing the disc so that it is read-only. What is we made the disc a multi-session? Could mysql then write to its data directory on the cd?

Might be worth trying if this test fails.

Ok and it fails because it could not copy the mysql data folder to the c: drive. Why? Let's step thru the command one by one in the windows shell. The mkdir command works as their is a c:\mysql\data folder. The xcopy fails with an invalid path error. Time to haul out the ms-dos manual...ahhh i'm using the /E switch but it requires the /S switch:

/S - Copies all files in the current directory and in any subdirectory within it.
/E - Copies subdirectories, even if they are empty. If you use this option, you must use the /S option also.

But that doesn't account for the 'path' error. If i change directories to xampp\mysql\data and end up with a pwd of \xampp\mysql\data then the xcopy command works perfectly. But when executed from the root of the usb stick it fails. Ok, this suggests a workaround - just cd into the data folder and then run the xcopy command, a hack but quicker than trying to recall how ms-dos works. So out new autorun.bat looks like:

@echo off
rem script to make auto-run xampp joomla cd
rem creates a mysql data dir on c because mysql needs it
mkdir c:\mysql\data
cd \xampp\mysql\data
xcopy *.* c:\mysql\data /E /S /C
cd \
start AMPstart.exe

Ok - time to burn another CD. This one fails too - mysql error 'could not make a copy' but it did make a copy. The webserver app then just tries to run and fails. Since ampstart is running maybe the error is from the ampstart.ini file. Let's change that to:

[database]
overwrite=0
folder=c:\mysql\data

[website]
website=htdocs\joomla
startup=index.php
port=

[cd]
eject=1

Ok burn another CD...which fails with 'cannot load mysql'. I went looking for the ampstart site but the domain name seems to have lapsed. But the search turned up Lampix, a bootable cd based on knoppix. See: http://lamppix.tinowagner.com/ But it hasn't been updated since 2007 and getting your files from the USB stick to the CD is more work than we want to do. There must be a solution somewhere...

Of course they could just hand in their projects on USB sticks but until they are less than $5 a gig this is not a realistic option...

Dell Mini 9 Ubuntu Update

2009-08-24T14:34:00.002-04:00

I've been using the dell mini 9 for a month or so now and it's time to upgrade it to ubuntu 9. The rationale is:

the dell ubuntu install is version 8 so it is old
it uses the dell repositories so not many updates
samba was broken on install, which is unforgivable as we have to coexist with windows

So time to update to 9. The question is how - we have the 9 cd and a usb dvd so we could go that route or we could do the notebook remix route and use the USB key method which is appealing.

First we get a torrent and download ubuntu-9.04-netbooks-remix-i386.img which is an image to be burned to a usb stick. Next, off to the package manager to install usb-imagewriter version 0.1.3 from the repository. We put in a 2 gig spare stick and run the program using:

Applications, Accessories, Image Writer

It returns an error 'no target devices found'. So it did not find a USB stick. We note the mounted stick does not have the orange usb symbol on it so we unmount it and plug it into another usb port. We check and this is listed as /dev/sdb

Re-running image writer works. It asks us for an image. We select the netbook-remix img file and start writing it to the usb stick.

Ok now that it is done put it in the dell mini and boot it on up. We first select the try option to see how it will look and if samba networking is fixed. Up it comes we click on networking and //megatron and //mothra show up immediately. We can't mount mothra shares so we try megatron. No joy here. Networking works as we can get to the internet but not to my local network. On the plus side this is running pretty fast off the usb stick.

Also not sure i like the desktop - it is designed like all the netbook OS with a bunch of icons cluttering up your space. This is supposed to be better? We do have an inspiron 910 img we could try as well as the stock ubuntu 9 cd. Let's try the CD first.

Ok we plug in a usb and boot to the liveCD mode and try to browse the network shares. The machines show up but unable to mount their shares to see them. Internet works but not the local network. So we might as well keep the machine as is and if time permits do some samba troubleshooting. This has always been a weakness of Linux, imho - osx works perfectly well with windows shares and it is a multi-vendor world. I don't like windows but we have to co-exist with it so it should just work.

VNC on the USB

2009-08-02T10:25:00.003-04:00

Remote Access via the USB Stick

Last week while cleaning out the storage device i ran across an old vnc program. I had used this in class some years ago to connect to the Linux server i was running in my office. It got me thinking about adding VNC capabilities to the USB stick.

There is no listed VNC downloadable application at http://portableapps.com/apps but you can add non-installable programs to the environment. For example, I setup winamp for an internet radio on a usb stick demo some terms ago.

So off we go to http://www.tightvnc.com/ to grab the latest version of the viewer which is tightvnc-1.3.10_x86_viewer.zip from which we extract vncviewer.exe

Next we create a file folder called vnc in the /PortableApps folder on the USB stick and copy vncviewer.exe to that folder. From the Portable Apps menu we select Options, Refresh App Icons and the menu item TightVNC Win32 Viewer is added. You can do this for most applications that do not install but you have to create a folder for them else portable apps will not create a menu item.

VNC Server

The next step is to set up the VNC server. Since our portable server is a mac mini running osx server it already has a VNC server, we just have to turn it on. So over to the mac and select System Preferences, Sharing. We place a checkmark in the Screen Sharing box and set a password for the VNC viewer. This is for version 10.5, which has made some changes from the setup used in 10.4 but instructions for 10.4 can be found at http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vnc-server-is-included-in-mac-os-x-104/.

Connecting

Backto the USB stick we run VNC viewer and enter the IP address of the osx server.

It makes the connection and the password box is shown. If we had not specified a password in the VNC server setup for osx then any vnc client could connect to and administer the osx server! We enter the password and the mac osx server desktop is displayed. Everything works but of course the screen refreshes are a bit slow as is usual with vnc. The idea behind this is to create a portable server that can be taken to class and used to demonstrate various technologies. The reasons behind this approach are:

- corporate IT is against users running servers from their offices
- if they install a server it is so locked down that students do not learn necessary skills
- most IT depts are windows-centric in a world where windows is rapidly becoming irrelvant

Why mac?

So why is the server running mac osx? Well, their are a number of reasons that make this the best choice for a portable server. Here are the criteria i developed:

- portability: the server must be portable which means light and small
- open source: the server must run common standard open source technologies such as perl, php, apache, ruby, mail, mysql etc.
- GUI: the server must have a gui interface for easy of use in a classroom. Doing lots of typing is a sure way to lose the interest of the students in a class....

So what are the options? The first choice would be a laptop and there are some nice laptops (i own 4) but all have compromises or limitations. My best laptop runs Ubuntu 9 and can be a portable server, in fact it runs a number of useful things as virtualbox vm's (windows, ubuntu server 9 with joomla, mac) but it is too heavy for lugging about. The 11" laptop is not quite light and portable but the battery last for less than 2 hours which makes it rather non-portable for class use. I am toying with the idea of making it into a full ubuntu server. The problem with ubuntu server is that there is no gui. I tried a long time ago (ver 6, 7?) to install the server and then install the desktop but it was a failure. May try again.

One neat possibility is the netbook which is a 2 gig DT atom 1.66 with 64 gig ssd with a battery life of 3.5 hours. This is running the dell netbook version of ubuntu (8). I'm thinking of moving this to the ubuntu netbook version of 9 to fix some issues (samba) that are needed. Right now it has Xampp running but it is a pain to maintain/administer due to it being installed in /opt instead of the user's home directory. This means you have to sudo everything when you want to do stuff - an unecessary annoyance, IMHO. It would be easier if it ran under the user account.

We could use the mac laptop but the consumer laptops cannot run osx server and also use desktop apps like iLife. The solution would be to put osx server on a portable drive and choose to boot from that. I may look at the macbook pro this fall.

Anyway the mac mini is small, runs standard os software with a nice gui on top and does all we want. What's not to like?

time for some lunch

USB Drive Speeds

2009-07-24T13:01:00.005-04:00

Since we have been using USB sticks for lamp applications over the past few terms it has become clear that not all USB sticks are the same. They may all be 2.0 but the speeds are obviously different. I have been recommending students purchase sticks that are advertised as Windows Vista 'readyboost' capable on the assumption they have to meet a certification program for speed.

With Vista going the way of windows me we need another way of finding good usb sticks so we need to test the speed to answer the question of how different are they?

So off we go to http://mikelab.kiev.ua/index_en.php?page=PROGRAMS/programs_en and download check flash, a utility that performs read/write tests on a USB stick. This program has the advantage of not needing to be installed so you can keep it on your stick to test another stick anywhere. It runs in dos-mode (which may be a disadvantage to some)

So we download it and open a terminal in windows and type chkflsh and then select a currently mounted USB stick. There is a bit of a bug, you must select one of the NT based system choices and then select the Temporary File choice in the radio button menu before you can click START.

If you just leave it on Temporary File then START is greyed out. Of course you nornmally want the temporary file option as the other 2 options wipe the stick clean - destroying existing data.

USB Stick Speed Tests

Our first step is on a cheapo 1 gig GTX stick formatted as FAT32. READ speed is constant at 16.2 mb/s but the write speed is awful hitting a max of 5 mb/sec and frequently dropping down to 4 mb/sec.

Next up is a 1 gig Kingston DataTraveller formatted as FAT. The READ speed is 13.9 mb/s with a truly awful write speed of 1.2 mb/s probably due to the use of the slower FAT file system.

And the same model Kingston Data Traveller 1 gig formatted as FAT32. The READ speed is 13 mb/s with a write speed of 2.7 mb/s. The read speed is the same but the writes are twice as fast.

Next a Kingston Data Traveller 2 gig formatted as FAT. The READ speed is 13 mb/s with a write speed of 5 mb/s. This is much faster writing than the 1 gig model. I should backup and convert to FAT32.

Next a Kingston Data Traveller 2 gig formatted as FAT32. This is a more recent version that my white data traveller model. The READ speed is 16 mb/s with a write speed of 10 mb/s.

And a Patriot 2 Gig formatted as FAT32. The READ speed is an amazing 24 mb/s with a write speed of 3.2 mb/s. This is my daily XAMPP stick, might be time to change...

Finally, we have a Kingston Data Traveller 8 gig formatted as FAT32. The READ speed is 17 mb/s with a write speed of 7 mb/s.

This was my daily XAMPP stick until my foot sent it flying and broke the plastic case. Can't believe the ITS people bought computers in 2009 with the usb ports on the botttom of the case. Now the stick is held together with duct tape and it still works but it's retired from regular service.

We would like to compare with our portable 80gig SATA hard disk formatted as FAT32 and running off the usb port but chkflash 1.09 cannot handle this. So we downloaded HD_speed, another dos-based non-installable utility. The USB portable hd READ avg was 24.4 mb/s but we could not test the WRITE data rate without destroying the existing data.

We assume it is faster but it can't fit on a keychain, more of a shirt pocket item as it is about the size of an ipod touch, although a bit heavier. You will note the preponderance of Kingston USB Sticks. I've used them for years and found them quite reliable. Never had one die on me unlike sandisk and others.

Conclusions

Check the file format on your stick, if FAT back up the data and reformat as FAT32
Buy a new stick, it is probably faster than your old workhorse
Higher capacity sticks are probably faster than lower capacity ones

Latest test is on a maxell - one of the new thin sticks that looks like a piece of plastic with some gold 'finger' connectors. These sticks should be immune to the bending and eventually breaking that happens with the square USB connector on many sticks. We ran Check Flash 1.09 on it using the 'temporary file' setting and got a result of 15.5 mb/s for reads and 4.8 mb/s for writes so it is slower than my faster sticks.