more podcast/on-demand adventures

B asked that the podcast page be revised to have one Download link, which would force a download dialog, and one listen link, which would let people listen on-demand.

The download part was already researched earlier, with a script from ASP101.com . Slightly modified to prevent people from accessing any files outside the relevant folder, using split(strFilePath,"\") and split(strFilePath,"/").

The asp script would not run at first, and IIS6 was giving a 404 error! Had to go to Web extensions and explicitly allow asp.

Next, it was running out of buffer for larger files. Googled, found that the default buffer was 4 MB. Some of our files are even > 20 MB. While non-buffered solution might have been more elegant, since that has to be implemented site-wide and might cause other weird side effects, decided to go for increasing the buffer. AspBufferingLimit in C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\metabase.xml

Adventures:
First opened the metabase.xml in Wordpad, modified and tried to save -
couldn't, since IIS was running. Stopped IIS from Services->IIS Mgt (it
stopped SMTP, SSL, WWW Publishing service etc) and then saved, OK.

But when started IIS Mgt, refused to start. Wordpad had corrupted the file,
adding ? in various places. Opened it in Notepad to see line numbers, checked
the various line numbers shown in Event Viewer error messages, guessed the
correct characters (like Proce?s = Process ) and saved the metabase.xml. Then
IIS Mgt service started OK, SMTP, SSL, WWW services started OK, but
stream.radiosai.org website was not showing anything, other websites were OK.

Guessed that some of the corrupted lines were in the logging part, so opened
the logging in Properties of Radiosai Downloads website, added a tick mark to
"Time taken" and restarted the website -> Voila! it works.

totem and firefox crashes

Totem video player was crashing when it autostarts on putting in DVDs. Opened totem, opened an mpg file on hard disk, saw that the window size was set very small, changed to view 1:1, exited, then no more crashes.

Firefox 1.5 is fast and renders stuff which had problems with my old Mozilla, but it keeps crashing, like when I start typing here without the entire page loading, when I quit while a page is still loading, and so on. Then an X restart is needed to use it again, or else I go back to Mozilla like now.

using X-apps on remote Windows machine with putty

Posted in PCQ forum:

"VNC will need its port to be open, and by default it is unencrypted.

In case you want to tunnel X over SSH for greater security, you can do that also. You should install and run an X server on the Windows machine. There are many, including free ones based on cygwin.

Xming, a Free Software port of the X Window Server to Microsoft
Windows.
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Xming

can be download from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156984

(This is from PB)


(VNC in "listen" mode also probably works - I've not tried this. X-Manager is a shareware X server on Windows which has the ability to connect over ssh built-in.)

Once you have an X-server running on Windows, in putty, tick the check-box "Enable X forwarding" in Connection->SSH->Tunnels

Then run any X app from the ssh commandline, and the relevant window will open.

file truncated

The email daemon sent
Total length for playlist : 23 hrs 38 mins 38 secs.
Playlist Status : ERROR

Commented out rm $SUM_FILE_LENGTH in the test_sgh_playlist script, saw the file lengths in ~/tmp/sumplaylistlen.tmp found the ARMY DD to be the culprit, re-uploading. Put the rm $SUM_FILE_LENGTH back.

Windows crashes with DVD writer

I've not yet got down to analysing why XP crashes with the DVD writer - mostly while reading. Probably some driver issue, since it does not happen the machine is booted into Linux. So, instead of correcting the problem, I'm just doing my Cd/DVD work in Linux, except for the Audio CD extraction. For that also, Dharma with the Plexwriter is much faster. (Plexwriter 24/10/40A CD writer versus Sony 16x DVD writer).

removing unnecessary volume shortcuts

KDE / Automount had made /mnt/removable /mnt/removable2 /mnt/removable3 on my Desktop - whenever I shut down without unplugging, remove the USB device and restart and re-plug it, a new shortcut was being created. Tried to remove them by deleting the entries from /etc/fstab and restarting the session. Didn't work. Spent half an hour trying to find relevant .desktop files. Didn't find any. Finally just restarted the whole system, that did it! Now the entries are removed, and when I plug in a USB device, it is seen as Hard Disk and mounted at /mnt/removable

Hindi web development links

Here are some very informative pages about implementing Hindi:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html#dreamweaver
says dreamweaver MX supports Hindi, and gives instructions on configuring

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/southasia.html
gives detailed info on what unicode encoding means and how to do web
development with unicode, including using dreamweaver. Read this page in its
entireity to understand the subject well.

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/devanagari.html
links to MS keyboard layouts etc

http://www.bhashaindia.com/phonetictool/
links to Phonetic input software (transliteration) from Microsoft

http://padma.mozdev.org/
(if you want to copy-paste from websites which use methods other than Unicode)

http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/Downloads
has a fonts package if you want some more fonts

http://ncb.ernet.in/matrubhasha/indicwritej.shtml
( is a Unicode input tool. Not really required, unless you want to try its
transliteration capabilities - if any. includes detailed installation
instructions at
http://ncb.ernet.in/matrubhasha/downloads/indicwritej/version1.0/Install_IndicWriteJ_v1.0_Windows.html )

http://ncb.ernet.in/matrubhasha/products.shtml
(speech to text and text to speech products, just for fun)

more on dvd

Another thing with making dvds. Using DVDShrink to cram in 4.5 hours into a dvd, need to put the "High Quality Adaptive Error Compensation" to 'Smooth' instead of the default 'Sharp'. The default is good for stuff with higher bitrates.

Also, deinterlacing the video at the encoding stage may have been a good idea.

And, of course, the known problem of writing DVD volumes created with DVDStyler with Nero - it says VIDEO_TS.VOB not found... - probably related to the fact that DVDStyler does not allow you to put in a starting video. So, iso file is the only option. And that needs a filesystem which supports files > 4 GB...

my experience with dvdstyler on windows

Copying and pasting from the bug report I've posted at sourceforge for dvdstyler:

Version DVDStyler-1.4_1-win32u.exe on WinXP with
Service packs etc installed.

Windows crashes repeatedly when the iso filesize
reaches/ crosses 4 GB.

Filesystem on which the iso was made was actually ext3,
mounted on Windows with the ext2 driver for Windows
from fs-driver.org

(Finally rebooted into Linux, changed the xml file's
paths from Windows paths to Linux paths, successfully
made iso in the same volume.)

(Other windows utils like Virtualdub have no probs
making files > 4 GB on the same ext3 volume)

lots of saicast video uploads

Not much happening in Mandir + nearing upload limit at Jo'burg + not feeling like doing coding for podcasts + wanting to get rid of CD clutter + wanting to get some disk space cleared up = lots of uploads to saicast!

salary

Finally learnt what the "salary scale" means.

2000-200-3000-400-4200-800-5800

means starts with basic pay of 2000 which increases every month till the salary reaches 3000, and then increases at the rate of 400 per month till it reaches 4200 then increases by 800 per month... and so on. Of course, this set of numbers is totally fictitious.

upside down display!

Just now got a call from RP, saying his display (on WinXP Pro) had turned upside down when he went away locking the screen! Display driver corruption, I suppose.

Of course, there is an option to turn it upside down, as
http://www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk/rl/servicesupport/techsupport/Consumer/faq.htm
point 19 says.

getting isilo onto the Palm Pilot v1

Unfortunately, I could not locate the PCQ CD which had the iSilo application for using on the old Plam Pilot. The one currently available requires Palm OS v3 and above, and this one is v2. So, tried the Wayback Machine and found the old iSilo site. iSilo Free was available from archive.org itself. For the others, traced the name of the downloads as iSiloWeb.zip (for Windows) and iSilo386.zip (for Linux) and found them with Google at

http://www.mypalm.ru/utilit/iSiloWeb.zip

and

www.zdnet.de/downloads/prg/d/1/de0DD1-wc.html

These produce files almost exactly the same size as with the current iSiloX utility (for plain text files), but are recognized by the older version of iSilo.

disk full

sftp to Joburg gave error
Failure
ID mismatch 600 != 9
or something like that. Of course, reason was disk full...

podcast and planet

Yesterday was a biggie for routine work - processed half a GB of files to upload! That's quite a few hours of broadcast, and quite a few CDs. Did quite a few on Friday, too.

And today was productive in other areas -

1. go-ahead from KVR for changing our planetarium control system wiring, changing the computer signal injection from before the input multiplexer stage to after the output demultiplexer stage....

2. podcasting code tweaking for nearly 3 hours at a stretch till now.

firefox steals mozilla window

Interestingly, having a firefox window open causes it to "steal" windows from mozilla opened remotely on another machine with X-forwarding! Instead of a window with the remote mozilla, the local firefox opens another window!

Only way out was to close firefox, or use konqueror instead on the remote machine.

installed firefox

Installed firefox 1.5, and find many pages load faster etc. Some optimizations? Or just that I was browsing at a time when the Net was faster? Anyway, Gmail is accessible...

radiosai mails changed to gmail

made MX records point to krishna, with krishna forwarding radiosai domain also to gmail accounts like for the sssihl domain. No more mail-box-full-bounces, InshaAllah.

Making playlist, troubleshooting horns amp howling in Mandir (9.45 to 10.45, it was due to a bad amp) and then the gmail acc creations and config took all morning.