bug in our podcast pages

Our on-demand pages were not appearing properly on IE all these days! The problem was not closing </object> tags for the flash player!

But even with properly formatted object tags, IE draws the page very very slowly, even scrolling is very slow. Will have to look for an alternate way of doing things. PB suggests google player...

asp bug in DateAdd

This bug relates to the return value of DateAdd when presented with a date-time object which doesn't have date info, but only time info. Caused our schedule page to show 12/31/1899 instead of 12 AM for midnight.

Copy-paste from a mail I wrote to RI about this:

Adding a (fictitious) date part to the
 (relevant) time part seems to
 solve the problem when it is a simple string as in testdatetime.asp

In the actual radiosai.asp code, things get more sticky.

There, the time part is a Date/Time formatted recordset field.

response.write(rsSGH("dps_Time"))
yields 10/26/2006 1:00:00 AM which already has a date part tacked on! And the 
buggy part is, when the time crosses 6.30 pm, the date part vanishes!

What I did was to convert it into a string using the built-in type conversions 
by just adding a space in front of it.

d=" " & rsSGH("dps_Time")
DateAdd("n",addTime,d)
for the times upto midnight and 

d="27-Oct-2006 " & rsSGH("dps_Time")
DateAdd("n",addTime,d)
for the times midnight and later. 

instead of DateAdd("n",addTime,rsSGH("dps_Time"))

changing default applications

Changing the default application for a file-type - in kcontrol (in Mandrake, this has the menu shortcut K -> System -> Configuration -> Configure your desktop)

Components -> File Associations.

According to http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.linux/16472

changed the default app for html to firefox, but with a change - firefox needs the "Command" field to be

firefox %u 

- not

firefox openURL %u text/html

like for konqueror

mp4 video files

Digital digest has a good guide for playback and conversion - http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/MP4_Usage_Guide_page1.html

Unfortunately mostly Windows. MEncoder is always there... as also the latest MPlayer.

Monitor calibration prg

From A - a link - http://freepctech.com/rode/004.shtml to Nokia test monitor calibration software.

sending Sai Inspires mails - procedure

1. Choose the template which you want to send with, make it "Default" using
the radio button beside it on the right side.

2. Choose 'send a message' from the RHS menu column

3. In the content tab, just put a space as the content, choose Save changes at
bottom.

4. In the scheduling tab, embargo until a few minutes earlier, or midnight of
the day you want to send. choose save changes at bottom.

5. In the Lists tab choose Sai Inspires list radio button, choose the send
message button.

6. Choose process queue from RHS menu. It is safe to close the browser window once it finishes the initial few seconds of processing.

network traffic graphing

R wanted an easier solution than MRTG.
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/103
has quite a few links, including cacti
and quite a few nice mrtg configuration tricks. The following from "doc" is a nice one.

Here's a mrtg example that simply uses ifconfig to obtain statistical info: ** /etc/mrtg.cfg **

WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg
WriteExpires: Yes
Refresh: 300

WithPeak[^]: wym
Suppress[^]: y
MaxBytes[^]: 96

Title[^]: Traffic Analysis for HOST.NAME

Target[eth0]: `/usr/local/bin/mrtg-data eth0`
MaxBytes1[eth0]: 13107200
MaxBytes2[eth0]: 13107200
Title[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for network device eth0 [External]
PageTop[eth0]: Internet Link

Target[lo]: `/usr/local/bin/mrtg-data lo`
MaxBytes1[lo]: 13107200
MaxBytes2[lo]: 13107200
Title[lo]: Traffic Analysis for network device lo [localhost]
PageTop[lo]: Local lo / loopback device

And /usr/local/bin/mrtg-data:

#!/bin/bash

DEV="$1"
if test -z "$DEV"; then echo No device specified; exit 1; fi

INFO=`grep $DEV /proc/net/dev | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -d: -f2`
RECEIVE=`echo $INFO | cut -d" " -f1`
TRANSMIT=`echo $INFO | cut -d" " -f9`
UPTIME=`uptime | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -d" " -f4-`

echo $RECEIVE
echo $TRANSMIT
echo $UPTIME
echo "HOST.NAME"

hosting problems

Nettigritty seems to be having some problems - yesterday the dns server for our domain went on the blink, today the pages were asking for uname and pw! Thankfully their tech support is real fast.

electronics components pinouts and specs

Registered at digchip.com and am using it instead of the Motorola manual for 74xx series pinouts etc.

Connect speeds

Here's a very interesting graph from Google analytics about the connections speeds of visitors to media.radiosai.org: and this is the largest percentage of dialup users among radiosai sites! Saicast has the minimum, with 9%.

convert long txt files to a series of short ones

http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php

Courtesy Wired Mag.

This might be useful for me too! But I suspect I need 2kB for the Pilot and not 4kB like the iPod.

Google talk goes thru proxies too...

http://seclists.org/firewall-wizards/2006/Jun/0060.html has some interesting stuff about google talk blocking...

Audio processing...

...currently going on in this "lean period" 'tween festivals is - 1984 Gita Discourses, talks by American devotees ("Sandweiss Collection")...

more on the on-demand audio

Following up on my earlier post the on-demand part was met by a nice flash-based player, XSPF Web Music Player. Adding all this makes the html markup a bit long, but it seems worth it!

routing

SCh (MTech) had asked me some days back two routing related problems:

1. A multi-homed Win2K machine was being used as a router between two subnets. Machines on either sides could ping each other, but Windows shares were not accessible - solution?

2. A hardware router, "Broadband router" from DLink, with the requirement again of machines on either side to be able to use Windows shares on both subnets.

I'd collected some links:

for win2000 routing: http://www.duxcw.com/dcforum/DCForumID2/2003.html
An example of a hardware router: http://corz.org/comms/hardware/router/bt.voyager.205_router.recipes.php
For effective routing, make the router the default gateway: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/winntas/deploy/implip.mspx?mfr=true

Told SCh I couldn't help with the DLink router without knowing the exact model number. The other problem he solved himself - the Win2K machine had a firewall running, which was blocking Windows Networking.

Edit: (added 20th Nov, from a mail I sent him on 11th Nov)
Googling 'DLINK DI-524 manual' gives the Dlink page with the manual as well as
a simulation of the web-based configuration wizard. It appears that with this
router, what you want to do - allow machines on the other side of the network
to access windows shares on the inside - is not possible directly. The manual
clearly states that this router only works with NAT - no direct modification
of router tables is possible.

You can use the Virtual Server setting in the router and allow machines
outside to connect to machines inside, but configuring it for more than one
system would be difficult for Windows shares.

tor libevent problem

Found that many people have the same problem as me with compiling tor (tor-0.1.1.24) which says it requires libevent. Installing libevent again doesn't help - it says

error: Found linkable libevent in (system), but it doesn't run, even with -R.  
Maybe specify another using --with-libevent-dir?

Don't know the solution yet.

Edit - resolved - here.

Refresher course in source rpm s

To install package.src.rpm, do

rpm --rebuild package.src.rpm

which will compile it and create an rpm file (binary) in /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i586/ or someplace (which will be printed out)
Then just do

rpm -Uvh

of the created rpm file.

Picasa saves the day

The Kodak Easyshare CX 4320 which I'd been using with flPhoto (and gPhoto2 I suppose) suddenly commenced non-cooperation. Tho the thumbnails would be displayed, "Download" produced no effect. Finally installed Picasa, and it worked like a charm. But no EXIF data, and need to "Export" pix after editing. The editing tools are real easy to use.