video work for Planet

Morning went in dumping to tape English, Hindi and Telugu versions of the intro and outro movies for "Wonders of the Night Sky". The DV player had some glitches with some tapes, InshaAllah no problems with these videos.

skype

favourably impressed - no fuss install on Linux also, works over NAT, no interminable delays in the voice, quite low network usage.

converting wmv to ipod

Untested list of software:

Windows: SUPER

Mac: http://www.goripper.com/mac-ipod-movie-converter.html

adding a website in IIS

from a mail to DG

Steps to set up:

Start->Administrative tools->IIS manager

Right Click on Websites tab on left, choose New->Website, go through the
wizard

Choose host header as downloads.radiosai.org or whatever you want to have

Choose the appropriate folder as the home directory

Change dns server records to point downloads.radiosai.org or whatever to the ip
address assigned to our server. (this step can be done only by A for
saicast.org and by me for radiosai.org)

benefits of multitasking

Having the Pilot and the laptop in the Mandir is a boon. During the "waiting" time the previous session's programme editing can be done, and during the session, when there is a non-critical time, I can even finish writing PB!

bug in mandrake 10 network utility

Using drakconf, when I change the ip address and netmask, the broadcast address is not changed. This leads to strange behaviour, with machines on the same subnet being available, pinging fine, but machines outside the subnet not pinging, showing "Network unreachable". Manual editing of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and service network restart works fine.

record number of listeners

We have got a new record for concurrent listeners on Radio Sai, 307 listeners at the peak of the Akhanda Bhajan. And in 2006, we have served more than 148,000 distinct hosts.

router hiccup and routine

Mostly routine work except a router problem at Jo'burg which prevented incoming connects and broke dns resolution from that machine. Changing the router solved the problem.

recognize capacitors

Wanted to verify the value of the capacitors we had, googled

recognize 100 kilo pico farad capacitor

and got www.sfu.ca/phys/233/1064/Reference%20Manual.pdf

installing tor and general comments

I'd found that I couldn't make the latest version of tor - configure was not recognizing the libevent which I'd installed.

Yesterday I was talking to KR about open source and mindsets and spouted my views on it, then thought I'd be somewhat two-faced if I did not give equal coverage of the problems with open source and Linux. And basically the problem is that you have to take time to get quite a bit of stuff working.

So, in this case, the installation doc on the website did not help much, but the INSTALL file in the tar.gz download suggested

./configure --with-libevent-dir=/usr/local

and hey presto, it works!

While using tor too, one needs to do some manual tweaking - the timeout interval seems too long or something like that, and sometimes the speed drops dramatically. Ctrl-c to stop tor and starting it again makes it faster again.