using the Optoma EP1080

Finally got my hands on the Optoma TX 1080 aka EP 1080 projector which Paul Bourke recommends. It had some issues which had to be sorted out before use in the Planetarium.

The Optoma logo - Startup logo had to be made a black screen. Logo capture needed VGA input - it did not capture from S-Video. Supplying a 1920 x 1080 signal, it captured with no issues. Takes a minute or so to capture.

Turn off confirmation - When turning off the projector with the remote, it displays "To turn off, press Power button". Since this should not be displayed during the show, had to work out the turn off using RS232 or network option.

Network control - An RJ45 jack allows the projector to be controlled via an ethernet network. It has a built-in web server, and ip address can be set from the menu. Unfortunately, the manual did not mention that the web server is password protected. Found the password by trial and error, admin for the Administrator login. Once logged in, password can be disabled, so that just pressing login leaving the password field blank logs you in. The interface is not fully compatible with firefox, IE gives best results. Unfortunately, our control machine upstairs does not have a network card, so RS-232 seemed to be the way to go.

RS-232 - Tried many times with Hyperterminal, but did not succeed till, by trial and error, found the following:
(a) The projector needs to be turned on after the computer connects to the RS-232 port via hyperterminal or whatever.
(b) The string to be sent to the projector has a space in it. It should be ~0000 1 and not ~00001
(c) Autoit version 3.3.0 onwards are not compatible with Win98 etc.
(d) The control machine upstairs had no CD-drive, and since it runs Win98FE, needed this driver to recognize the 1 GB Sandisk flash drive.

Once I worked out all these, could get an autoit script to send the On and Off commands using a hyperterminal window which was opened at startup.

Time taken to autodetect - Autodetecting the S-video signal was taking more than a minute. Sending the S-video signal using RS-232 ~0012 9 after 30 seconds does the job - brings up the video in 34 seconds.

Mirror deformation - For using the projector in the mirrordome configuration, the mirror needs some support, without which it deforms under its own weight. Jury-rigged with thermocol, will try again using reduced mirror area.

notifications on radio silence

Following a conversation with B, I thought about ways to detect silence when SGH goes off the air on AsiaStar, and using the parallel port for detecting silence and so on. P came up with the Restless Winamp plugin to be installed at the playout server. We did that, and modified the C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Winamp\winamp.ini file by adding
[Restless Winamp Plugin]
Hit_Start_After_Millis=30000
Hit_Start_After_Minutes_Seconds=00:30

P then suggested using the sound card instead for silence detection, and immediately found the Piraside Silence Detector - software which does this very job! Hooking up a modem to the machine can then make it dial P or me when the silence is detected. But it does not work as easily as given on it's home page - a bat file with commands sent to COM1 etc don't work under WinNT or above. XP etc do not allow direct access to hardware from the Command Prompt, unlike DOS. After tests with hyperterminal etc, the solution of choice is currently autoit - using a user dll and control script to send AT commands to the modem. Just simple ATDT to dial the number, using a ProcessWait to wait for a while, ATH to hang up and so on.

adventures with Sony Readers

The Sony Reader PRS-500 had come back to me from A in December 2009, "not working". The screen was showing ghosting, taking a long time to change pages and so on. Sent it to the US for repair and or firmware upgrade. There, nothing was done since the Sony store guys just sent N to the website. Finally it came back, and found it working reasonably well. Probably the battery had some issues due to being left idle for many months, and a few charge / discharge cycles brought it back in the pink.

Because of the delays, purchased a Sony PRS-300 because R was also interested. Tried out the Calibre software, which has matured a lot since its inception in 2006-2007. Found that only the 0.6 versions and earlier support the PRS-500 with old firmware. Conversions to LRF or EPUB take 20-30 seconds per book, and there is a nice bulk conversion system.

Found a small glitch - when "merging" different versions, it is supposed to change all meta data to match the destination version. But the metadata for author in the EPUB files were not being changed. The calibre window shows the correct author name, but on uploading to the device, the device shows the original un-corrected Author name.

Transcend MP 330

Trying out the Transcend MP330. Surprisingly good recording options. 32 kHz ADPCM wav files in Best mode. 128 kbps stereo. With the built-in mic, saturates at two feet with my singing - it is a bit too sensitive. But quality is good. With line-in, AGC - automatic gain control, I think. Only 0.05 second - 50 milliseconds - lag after 45 minutes of recording. I tested it by playing back a wav file from Sathya using the Darla card, assuming that the Darla itself is close to frame-accurate. In terms of frames, for 25 fps, that would be just over one frame. Far better than the M-Audio Mobile Pre!

bash string processing and file renaming

For some reason, some 200 files had not been renamed on the dreamhost download server. Occasional reader emails of files not found alerted me to this.

When I checked the rename shell script, these files were not listed in it. They did have download filenames in our local database, but were not listed in the rename shell script for some reason. Manually renamed them by doing some string manipulation:
find ~ -name '* *' sort > toberenamed.txt
cat toberenamed.txt while read FILE ;
do echo mv \"$FILE\" $(echo $FILEsed 's/ /_/g') ;
done > toberenamed.sh
vim toberenamed.sh
#(to check manually and remove non-essentials)
chmod +x toberenamed.sh
./toberenamed.sh

sample searches and auto suggest

Added sample searches and auto suggest to the search wizard. That seems to make it ready for prime time, so a link also added to the Radiosai home page. Sample searches are javascript calls onclick, with the variables being initialized and the submit javascript being called. Auto suggest is simple-minded in the sense it cannot suggest after one word is typed in. For example, if Concert H is typed, it will not suggest Hariharan, but if H is typed, Hariharan is suggested. Something is better than nothing, of course. This implementation entirely in javascript is from here. The keywords were from descriptions, filenames, festival names etc. in a sort of free association. Later, sorted the auto suggest keywords with alphabetizer.

Then implemented a sort of "hit enter to submit" for the first and last pages of the Wizard. Though it follows the general idea given here, it does not seem to work with IE8. IE8 seems to ignore the Enter key entirely, and does not seem to send any window.event at all when I tested with some code which was to just give a javascript alert.

list all files which have space in them in bash and sort

The most simple-minded way of doing this would be
ls "* *"
but this would not work. This site notes the way to do it - with find:
find ~ -name '* *'
And also lists a neat way of looping through,
find ~ -name '* *' while read FILE;
do
echo $FILE ;
done
The problem is that this lists files in non-alphabetical order. To get it in alphabetical order, The Alphabetizer is available for one-time jobs like my php suggest list. For piping in bash, of course, we can use sort:
find ~ -name '* *' | sort

uploading files to web hosting

Got a DreamHost account, evaluating a move there. Preliminary tests with downloads alone. Initially copied files using ftp from our local machine. Then tried sftp from local machine. Finally the fastest way, sftp from our dedicated server - more than 10 Mbps. Some files which were not present on our local machine had to be selectively uploaded. For that, did the following.
ls /local/audio24 > 24.txt
ls /local/audio96 > 96.txt
diff -Bc 24.txt 96.txt > difference.txt
cat difference.txt grep + > onlynot.txt
onlynot.txt thus has only the files in audio96 which are not in audio24

Used this list to make a sftp batch file - find replace + with put, and put the filenames in quotes.
Had to modify it to
-put "filename.mp3"
because without the hyphen in the front, sftp would stop if any of the files were not found.

CDN roundup

Did a review of hosting solutions for upcoming events. Birthday videos etc would need CDNs. Here is an abbreviated review, with cost being the major criterion, good support also being required.
SimpleCDN - $0.02 per GB - but no response to Moderate ticket in 3 days, hence can't risk it.
CloudFront - $0.15 per GB
Velocix - did not even send a quote in three days.
Voxel - $0.10 per GB, quick and responsive support, free trial.
EdgeCast - sent a quote for $0.30 per GB at 2000 GB per month
Internap - sent a quote for Los Angeles POP alone for $0.25 per GB, else $1.32 per GB...
SoftLayer - $0.18 to $0.12 per GB (minimum $45)
CDNetworks - sent a quote for $1.00 per GB.
You can guess who we picked.

Edit: An update to this post is at http://hnsws.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-cdns.html

first show with new compressors

As mentioned in my previous post, the new air-cooled compressors had some issues, but after changing their location, seem to be OK. But they do take more power. From an old log reading in 1998 log book of a 2009 reading (yes - 1998 book, 2009 reading) the old system had taken 75 kWhr for 9.45 am to 12.15 pm. Today's consumption was 90 kWhr for 9.55 am to 12 noon. And that too with two of the compressors going off briefly when their thermostats reached the set temperatures. Thermostats were set to 22.5-25-27.5 deg C. The theatre was less frigid than before. Hopefully when the outside temp is higher also we will have similar results. Today outside was just 30 deg C.

method to link directly to "listen now'

Following the method given at JGuru and other places, here is something I passed on to my colleagues:

<form method="post" name="submitForm" action="http://www.radiosai.org/program/PlayNow.php">
<input value="on" type="hidden" name="checkallcb">
<input value="on" type="hidden" name="chosencb">
<input value="22346" type="hidden" name="fids">
<input value="22346" type="hidden" name="allfids">
<input value="1" type="hidden" name="play">
<input value="0" type="hidden" name="paHours">
<input value="0" type="hidden" name="paMinutes">
<a href="javascript:document.submitForm.submit()">Click Here to Play Now</a>
</form>

The fids and allfids values will change for different programs. This 22346 value is meant for this link, ie Judy/Sharon Sandweiss interview. For other programs, you can find the fid by searching for the program in our search page, choosing the Listen link after choosing the program of interest, and seeing the code in the PlayNow.php page. For example, for this item, it has the line

s1.addVariable("file","http%3A%2F%2Fwww.radiosai.org%2Fprogram%2FPlayList.php%3Fallfids%3D22346");

fixing the compressors

The AC guys are here to fix the compressor trouble. Now planning to keep two of them on the first-floor parapet and only one downstairs. Temperature readings with a room thermometer kept horizontally: before we started the test, room temperature indoors was 32 deg C. After putting on one of the compressors (and the blowers) the temp near the window was 41 deg C. The theatre was being barely cooled down to 30 deg C. But at least the compressor did not trip. When we opened the windows, the temp near the window quickly dropped to 33 deg C, indicating that indeed there is an air circulation problem. Hope the two feet clearance between units upstairs will be enough! PR has some ideas of baffle walls to prevent hot air being sucked into the rear inlets, too. Hopefully with all that and all three compressors running, we can get the theatre cooled.

One more issue is with the electrical connections. The starters used and the cables used are all getting heated up with the 22 amps per phase being drawn. And that's just for one compressor! If this is normal, then these compressors are less efficient than our old ones, which used to take around 35 amps each - and we used to run only one of them at a time.

Attenuation required

Taking the direct outs from the PA system mixer Mackie Onyx 32.4, found that they are too hot for the XLR inputs of the Tascam US-1641. D made attenuators for me like below:

Only it was not to ground, but to signal return. Checking out the specs in the manual, found that input impedance for the XLR input is 2.2k ohm and for the jack is 10k ohm. So, made the voltage divider circuit above, with a 10k resistor on top, and a 2k below. For the XLR connector, the connection was like

red wire --- 10k resistor --- pin 2 ---- 2k resistor ---- pin 3.

Later, found similar pad circuits with pix of XLR connectors with resistors soldered in. With the attenuation, which turned out to be around 20 dB, the direct outs are fine for the Tascam US-1641, with around 6-10 dB of headroom. Here, what I mean by headroom is that the peak level reaches -10 dB or so when the Mackie direct-out is at its highest level, when the input gain control at the Tascam is turned all the way down.

compressor problems

The new compressors were installed in the second week of May, but apparently they trip within ten minutes due to overheating. 3x 11 ton units from Voltas. The AC guys are supposed to come and do something about it this month. According to a random google search, 8 feet clearance between units seems to be required. But that is for a completely unrelated product....

google spreadsheets and UI design

Multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing is GOOD. Example of a place where this is done - Reaper. Example of where this is not done - Google Spreadsheets. I wanted to "Merge cells" - had to google search for it to find it is done with a toolbar button. The Merge Cells idea came in the first place from K, who is more familiar with Excel...

the sad story of Mandir mixers

After the Yamaha AW4416 went for repairs and came back in the same state, it was the turn of the Tascam TM-D4000 to give problems. Then I shifted to lower-tech - an old Studiomaster Diamond Pro. The Yamaha had Midi working, so I tried to use it in Mandir. Reaper had a good solution for the "PFL" problem with soft-mixers - Cubase 4 LE only had solo, which was going into the main mix also, and Nuendo 3.0.2 did not have the "Listen" button assignable to a MIDI controller. With Reaper, I could make a custom action to mute the monitor tracks, and the monitor tracks were being sent feeds from the main mix tracks. The main mix goes to main out, monitor mix goes to monitor out as a folder. So far so good. But then, once everything was set up, the Yamaha just died. Not powering up at all. Researched and found the Tascam TM-D4000 is capable of acting as a midi controller for faders alone. But it would not physically fit into the current rack! So now I'm looking for a low cost (used?) midi controller, preferably with 16 faders and buttons like the Peavey 1600x or the Korg Nanokontrol. And of course, my flash drive also failed...

death of a USB flash drive

The Transcend JF220 finally gave up the ghost. After all, it was being used every day. Putting it in Linux or Windows showed an unpartitioned free space. I suppose the partition table got wiped. Tried Recuva as the first step. It could not read. Then tried formatting. Windows complained that it was write-protected - 'Windows was unable to complete the format' and 'The drive cannot be formatted'. Tried various tips for getting over that by registry edits. Did not work. Tried formatting in Linux, gparted complained that it could not write the disk label. Tried wiping the first and last bytes as in the script at itrc.hp.com by doing

sfdisk -s

manually and then using that number in

off_t=`sfdisk -s $1`
(( off_t = off_t - 1024 ))

echo "Zap the first megabyte of the device."
echoeval "dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1k count=1024"
echo "Zap the last megabyte of the device."
echoeval "dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1k count=1024 seek=$off_t"

Still no go - the dd took a long time and then said completed, but apparently it was failing. Tried Transcend's own repartition tool from transcendusa.com, that also failed. Concluding that it was a hardware failure.

streaming over GPRS

RK had complained about buffering in the stream while listening with GPRS. He was using Virtual Radio on an LG Viewty. Tried with TCPMP on my phone with buffer settings as shown.

It played for 5 minutes or so after buffering for half a minute. Then buffered for 3 minutes and played for 7 minutes. So, clearly, network is not fast enough. Downloaded a file from stream.radiosai.org - 5.5 minute file, 976 kB, came through in six minutes. So, I'm getting a throughput of slightly under 24 kbps.... If I remember correctly, I got double that at Bangalore, downloading google maps on the mobile, 1.28 MB, in 3 minutes. Both RK and I are using Airtel, by the way. Airtel customer care tells me that they do not have EDGE anywhere in AP. Bangalore is clearly on EDGE.

making conference calls

Found that my Tata Indicom Haier C2030 can't not make conference calls tho' the manual says press Send button after dialling the second number. Probably blocked by Tata. With the Airtel connection on the QTEK 9100, the procedure is

1. Make 1st call
2. Hold
3. Make second call
4. Menu -> Conference.

google maps for mobile

GMaps crashed on the mobile with error message Internal Error: c:\workspaces\gmm-4-0-branch\googlemobile\src\cpp\googlenav\common\resource_loader.cpp:13

This was probably due to me deleting some of the google maps stuff in application data, in order to free up space. There are quite a few people with this problem - ...resource_loader.cpp:13 internal error

Reinstalling gave the same error. Then tried removing old install, then manually deleting files in Program Files and Application Data, then reinstalling. This time it worked. And the new version has voice search enabled!

yet another twist in the tale

The possible solution noted before seemed to work with no problems over the last two weeks. But P noted that earlier, the downloads had the path to D: hard-coded into the asp, so the files in D: were being accessed though IIS pointed to E:. This might have led to the earlier problems, he said. To test this out, we put back the 4 GB of stuff to the playout folder in E: - and the streams continued to work fine. Now we have deleted the stuff in D:, and that drive is pending a Scandisk. But that needs a reboot, so probably we'll keep it pending. Or maybe we can move all the data to E: and do it without a reboot - will think about it.

possible solution to streaming problems

Remembered A telling me that there could be performance issues if too many files are in the same folder. Moved out 600+ files, 4 GB+, to another folder. After that, the streams seem to have stabilized, playing out from E drive. Now I have enabled the Radiosai downloads also, all seems fine. We'll work out some mechanism to avoid this from happening again as we add files. Some sort of directory hierarchy.

ngpay and Java midlets on my phone

My previous post was "under controlled conditions. Finally in a crunch situation, ngpay let me down. Not really ngpay's fault, I should add. This is what happened: At 8 o'clock, had to book a tatkal ticket. The irctc.co.in website was crawling, since thousands of people all over the country would be trying the same thing. Hopped on to ngpay over wifi on my phone. Connected very nicely, got through to the payment page. But.... The HDFC bank password kept getting rejected. Known issue with midlets on this phone, at least I have seen it often with Opera Mini - the shift key or function key appear to get activated on their own. On a normal text field, this can be corrected. But on a password field, can't do much, since only **** is seen. Now I've added my credit card to the ngpay wallet. Maybe with that, I can avoid this issue. Another way out would be to use MyMobiler, like I did last time. MyMobiler can connect over wifi too, so I should test it out.

Edit: April 22 - Did try MyMobiler, did connect over wifi fine. Another solution when without a PC - using the Phone Pad input method.

Then, the passwords etc are visible in clear text before you enter them.

problems with streaming - hard disk usage

Our streams had problems, as noted before. IIS was a possible culprit, with our own download service being the prime suspect. Limiting number of connections per IP address seemed a possible way out. But IIS does not have a mechanism to do that - only global total number of connections can be limited. The disk from which the audio files were being taken seemed highly fragmented - maybe because of all these small files? Anyway, wanted to try defragmenting it. So, copied all to another volume on another drive. Copied using RichCopy to minimize disruptions during the process, with

1. trickle


2. serialize disk access


3. single thread only


4. system buffer disable

turned on so that impact on system performance was minimized. Screenshot:




No problem with the streams while the copy went on. A minor issue when the playout was restarted, the temp audio files could not be overwritten by colinux. Had to manually delete them from Windows.

But after shifting playout to the new volume, again the skipping re-occured in a couple of hours! So, there is some system-wide hard disk usage? The first reaction was to shut down IIS by stopping the websites one by one. That did not solve the problem - at least, it did not reflect in any reduction in the hard disk usage with Performance Monitor as given in my previous post.

Investigating with the tips given on these pages, to identify the process which uses large amount of disk usage by checking out Task Manager, Start -> Run -> taskmgr, looking for processes with rapidly changing values for I/O Read Bytes and I/O Write Bytes and later using Process Monitor to view files accessed by that process. csrss.exe seems to be the process using the filesystem to some extent - Client Server Runtime Subsystem. But it does not display excess CPU utilization as noted here. This forum post notes a similar hard disk issue with csrss. Or maybe there is some process which we did not catch in time. Will keep investigating.

revisiting internet banking from mobile

In my earlier post, I'd described failure of IE mobile and Opera Mini. This time, Skyfire worked with HDFC bank. It still doesn't work with Canara bank and SBI. Of course, it goes through Skyfire's servers, but so does Opera Mini, so hopefully it is as safe as it's privacy policy states. Skyfire drinks bandwidth, so feasible only on an unlimited plan or for emergencies.

ngpay and mchek

Tried out these mobile payment solutions first with the new credit card. mchek has the disadvantage of having only Airtel recharge as the USP. Can't recharge other operators' mobiles if your operator is Airtel! ngpay's USP for me is KSRTC booking. Even when KSRTC's AWATAR system is down, which is often, ngpay works. But ngpay does not have Airtel recharge for AP circle or All India, though the menu item exists. Navigating ngpay is a pain because of the QTEK 9100 mobile's terrible touch screen. Much easier to do it by tethering it to a PC and using MyMobiler.

mchek registration had some hiccups, since the registration is followed by a card number verification which requires a popup. The first time I enabled the popup, had to retry. And on retrying so quickly, I think the card processing back end would have refused the connection, and hence returned "Invalid card". I thought this was because the card was earlier registered with my Tata number. Customer care assured me that the earlier unsubscribe was effected. Anyway, waiting for some time - 15 minutes - and retrying - solved the issue.

free space on colinux and hard disk performance

Over the last two days, there were several interruptions on our streams. Problem seems to be excessive Hard Disk usage, since copying files was taking a very long time. But at a time when the system was behaving normally, trying out the counters
1. PhysicalDisk: Avg. Read Queue Length Should be less than 2
2. PhysicalDisk: Avg. Write Queue Length Should be less than 2
3. PhysicalDisk: % Disk Time more than 50% indicates a bottleneck
as given here indicates that the disk is fine. That page says

to ensure that it was not a processor or memory bottleneck, I also recorded % processor time and available bytes. As you can see from Diagram 1, the processor's average was below 30%. If the processor were the bottleneck the trace would be over 80%. On the other hand, if there was a memory shortage, available bytes should drop below 10MB.

And our processor usage was < 20%, with > 200 MB of memory also available.

Maybe I should try the same checks when the system is crawling. If there is some indication of what application is causing the hard disk usage in some log somewhere, it would have been useful. I suspect IIS, since SSSBPT and the audio downloads are also on this machine.

Checking the colinux virtual machine, found only 100 MB free, 10%. Cleaned up to make it around 40%, 400 MB or so, by the following.

apt-get clean cleaning out /var/cache/apt

As given here, postsuper -d ALL
for /var/spool/postfix

from /home/sgh/playlist,
ls ????09* to find the 2009 playlists, removed them and older ones...

Some interesting info:
2007 Feb asia/africa/america started
2004 Oct started web stream

for /home/sgh/log

mv 0*.check ../audio/log_backup 2> /dev/null
mv 1*.check ../audio/log_backup 2> /dev/null
mv 2*.check ../audio/log_backup 2> /dev/null
etc - the errors to dev null, because mv complains that it cannot keep the same user ownership and permissions.

tail -5 logfile > logfile did not work, so had to do
tail ices.log > icesnew.log
mv icesnew.log ices.log
after taking backup.

But tho playout continues, log file is not appended :(
only after playout restarts next day? Anyway, had to restart all playouts by restarting colinux service since the streams started skipping, so the logs have restarted now.

midi works tho' audio is dead

The Yamaha AW4416 came back some weeks back after a stint at Chennai, with no improvement. Apparently it can't be fixed without a high cost. The audio output is dead, and I believe the inputs are dead too. Some of the switches are also not working. Tested the midi connections today by connecting to laptop like in my previous post through a Tascam US-144. The Midi section seems to be fine. They seem to be getting a firewire mixer at the Studio. Then maybe I will get the Tascam US-1641 once again.

hardware debugging - cordless door-bell

A cordless door-bell which K got for me had a funny problem. When I affix the remote switch on our door, it would not work. Remove the switch from the door, and it works, though it is at the same distance from the bell. When KR fixed it to the wall instead, it worked. So, in retrospect, it was probably some sort of capacitive effect from the aluminium door frame acting through the plastic case which was changing the transmission frequency or something.

asp error '8004020f'

BT subscription feedback form returned this error. The many-headed say this means that the e-mail was rejected by the server for some reason. Checked the asp code, it had
Fields("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = "localhost"
which listed the wrong smtp server. Corrected it and it worked fine. A wrong email address, as mentioned here, leads to asp error '8004020e'.

shopping cart code and digital downloads

A google ad on this very blog pointed to www.fatfreecart.com which looks pretty useful. Free shopping cart code for google checkout and paypal. Of course, many hosting companies offer free shopping cart code with their hosting too... And DigiVendor seems to be a useful MySql-Php secure downloads payment option. The Google Checkout API docs detail the process, and provides sample code, too. Similar stuff exists for paypal.

ebook reader for Nokia 6303

Struggled quite a bit for helping V find an ebook reader for his Nokia 6303 classic. C mentioned that it was an S40 phone and not an S60 phone. That helped the google searches. Mobipocket's java version had some signing bug which was not allowing it to work properly. I sent him this list,

ReadManiac

Libris is not free, $10

Wattpad reader
free, but supposed to read books from their website, I don't know if you can read your own files.

Wikitome reader seems to be for Series 40, so may work on 6303

Again, getting books in that format?

And he replied with his solution, MTextReader, which seems much better, and free too.

disabling google buzz in a corporate or academic network

R wanted some way to block google buzz at work. According to him, too many people were spending too much time on Buzz, with a spike in network bandwidth. And following friends of friends and other such undesirable activities. This was my reply.

This question has been asked in gmail support forums also, but since
buzz is integrated into gmail, it seems difficult to block it using
traditional methods. Here is one way I can think of:

Make the user log in to gmail using an older browser, or a browser not
supported in the latest gmail version. For example, I am typing this
in Opera 8.53 - available from oldversion.com - then, buzz is not even
seen. It is not using html view, either - it is using the older
version of gmail, which you can see from the url
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1&ui=1&ov=0
This version has most of the useful things like address completion and so on.

(If you can redirect users to this url when they go to gmail also, it
might do the trick.)

One way of forcing users to use an old browser would be to allow gmail
only on terminal sessions running on a terminal server or remote X
sessions running on a linux server or remote desktop sessions. Since
the user is just logging on to the server, permissions can be set so
that the user cannot install any sw. Possibly such permissions can be
set on the desktops also.

Edit: R says it's not practical for him to change user settings. He will explore a url rewrite using squid's php rewrite or something like that, to redirect any requests to mail.google.com/mail to mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1

malware and more

Once again, malware hit some of our websites. Had to do stuff from this earlier post. These were coming in via ftp from remote hosts. So, ftp logs showing logins from Poland, Bulgaria, etc were red flags. All sorts of stuff, like iframes and links to various sites which were themselves hacked, and so on. Some examples of malicious links, do not visit these!!!
videointerviewtips.com/pdf/free-resources-old.php

and in iframes

jL.chura.pl/rc/

Luckily Google and stopbadware.org have filters in place, warning us. But some sort of pro-active thing should be done, instead of reactive, like this time.

pdf to text

Foxit reader has "Save as text", but only for the pro version. Doubtless there are easier ways to do this, but for the quick and dirty fix without having to install any software, pdftextonline.com does the job. Of course, only those pdfs which have text in them (and not just images) will be useful with this text extraction.

testing Tata Indicom photon plus usb wireless connection

First I tried the McAfee speed test like in my previous Airtel test and it showed 200 kbps.



But then I tried connecting to our studio ftp server, and it started serving at 1500 kbps! This sustained for quite some time, not some caching effect. So, their international ports are probably slow. Again, their speeds seem to fluctuate. Tata Indicom's own test showed Your current download speed is: 695.50kbps

It was able to connect to our colinux machine, so no problems with ssh or rdp being blocked or anything like that. Latency-wise, it seemed even better than our leased line Tata internet port! 186 ms on pinging google.com, versus 256 ms with the leased line. Similar results to tracert as given here.

My tests were on Windows XP, so the built-in drivers could be used. The USB device has the drivers on in-built memory which is recognised as a CD drive. Autorun.exe and all that. For Linux, these people seem to have it worked out. Basically using wvdial, copy into /etc/wvdial.conf

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Phone = #777
Username = internet
Password = internet
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = 1

then sudo wvdial

Edit: Some more info. The device gets a bit hot like a mobile phone during talk-time! Bittorrent speed tested with an Ubuntu CD download, was around 1.5 Mbps again. So, that seems to be the fastest it can deliver. Upload speeds were slightly slower - 800 kbps for the local ftp server. This product is a USB-based one, Tata also has a router configuration. Tariff is somewhat higher than BSNL's wireline ones.

mixer glitches

The Tascam TM-D4000 I'm currently using after the Yamaha 4416 went back to Chennai for repairs, showed its temperamental nature a couple of days back on Tuesday, when it "hung" with blank display and saturated output - all inputs set to +10 dB or something like that. This happened 10 minutes after switching it on around 4 pm. So, the reason S used to report this in the Studio is probably not water condensation. Turning it off and on does not work, have to wait an hour or so. After an hour, turning it on - worked, again hanging after 7 minutes. Turned it off till Wednesday, then it worked fine. No problems yesterday and this morning, either. But must be ready with a backup plan, since this sort of failure is a possibility.

trying out Java streaming radio apps

Tried out various Java apps listed on the radiosai website on my Windows Mobile 5 phone which has a Java environment also, but all of them failed to play. At least VirtualRadio gave an error message:
creating player:
javax.microedition.media.MediaException
NULL
I suppose that is because the Java environment does not have access to an mp3 decoder.

gprs counter for mobile - WM5

Tried out the built-in gprs data counter in HomeScreen PlusPlus, the settings for which which can be accessed via Start -> Settings -> Personal -> Today -> Items -> HomeScreen PlusPlus and clicking the Options button. Or by pressing and holding near the cpu icon.



But for some reason it did not work on my phone. Maybe I should have tried rebooting the phone after setting it or something. But anyway, it showed 0 incoming 0 outgoing even after using nearly an MB - Rs 5.40 worth - by just seeing half a page of slashdot in skyfire!

some fixes for windows media encoding

Some of the VOB files to be encoded showed some audio delay when processed through VirtualdubMod even though they played perfectly well with KMPlayer. Then found this page which explains how to do it with Virtualdub, and this one for VirtualdubMod. Basically,
Streams -> Stream List -> Right-click the audio -> Interleaving -> Delay audio track by xxx ms.
500 ms worked well for me. Virtualdub has the same thing under
Audio -> Interleaving

Then trying to do WME batch encoding as given in this post, finally ended up making a batch file with
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\2.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\3.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\4.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\5.wme"
and so on, with each wme file having a separate input and output file specified. The input file is in two places in the wme file, for audio and video. The wme files are xml files, so a text editor can be used to generate them by modifying older wme files.

But in typical Microsoft fashion, the resultant output files are not exactly the same as the files generated using the WME gui. Because, WMVAppendGui cannot join these files with files produced earlier with the WME gui! Have to re-create those files also with the wmcmd.vbs commandline technique.

BleachBit

From this slashdot story about tracking, went on to EFF's Panopticlick and bleachbit. Bleachbit - removes cache/temp/cookies etc from a variety of programs and plugins including Flash cookies and Java cache - seems quite impressive, a portable version too, along with Windows and Linux versions. Saves space on C drive for the space-constrained, too.

delay in streams and jitter

Today, I sat down to quantify the amount of delay in our stream which is being aired now on AsiaStar also. I noticed that most programs on AsiaStar were starting a few minutes after the hour - like 1.05 instead of 1.00 etc. Checked if the time on the server was correct, yes, it is set to automatically keep the correct time using updates from time.windows.com

Then checked the log to see when files are being played:
tail /home/sgh/ices/asiastream/ices.log
This does not have any timestamps. But
ls -l /home/sgh/ices/asiastream/ices.log
gives last write timestamp, saw this was 13:04

Checked the playlist on xmms, according to the xmms duration listing, it should have been 13:03. So, this adds some jitter.

Next, there is the buffering time in the ShoutCast server, and also buffering in the client. This probably adds a few more seconds. Checked the time gap from the time on the log and the time I heard it on AsiaStar - 13:20 on log for next file, I heard it at 13:23. This is probably the buffering on the server + client.

Client buffering probably changes with time. For example: I played AsiaStream on my machine, it was approx 10 seconds later than AsiaStar which is AsiaStream coming after going up and down from the satellite. The satellite round-trip takes approx 2 seconds, so my machine was 12 sec behind the Melbourne machine.

permission error

My colleague got this error from the webserver:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Excel Driver] Operation must use an updateable query.

Googling found these possible causes, and changing permissions for the folder seems to have solved the issue. Allowed the user called IUSR_WEB_SERVER_NAME (the web server) to write in that folder.

Windows media encoding and virtualdubmod batch jobs

Investigating batch converstion with Windows media encoder, found this resource which includes info on the command-line encoder. This page has the info in a more readable form - just
cscript.exe c:\path\to\wmcmd.vbs -loadprofile encoding-profile.prx -input "F:\input-folder" -output "F:\output-folder"
This page explains how to get the prx files from the WMEncoder, Properties -> Compression -> Edit -> Export button. But of course, it did not work for me,
.Error occurred in transcoding: Error Code = 0xC00D002F
since my WME does not work with Xvid encoded files, needs a nominal crop of a couple of pixels before it works. Probably then it uses a different input codec or whatever.

But checking out cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs /? found that it supports WMEncode wme session files too! So next time I can try that.

Virtualdubmod also has a batch encoding option with input and output folders, as given at this page and I used it this time: File -> Job Control, and Edit -> Process Directory from the Job control window.

machine translation of Indian languages

This IIT-built automatic translation engine is interesting, pointed out to me by BK. If you don't prefer the Hindi keyboard, you can use other tools like gmail's or google's or others like writeka, then copy-paste into the duur sampark page. The attached sentence took nearly a minute to translate, and it seems to be highly Hyderabadi Telugu! (Click on the picture below for larger image).

voddler

Voddler seemed a good service, for watching ad-supported movies. But it really needed a 2.5 Mbps connection, so not suitable for us - too much time spent buffering. The interface is a bit quirky too, since they have made it "remote-friendly" for people running media center PCs or whatever, but PC unfriendly, not allowing mouse-clicks! And officially only open for people in Sweden, of course.

disabling TRACK and TRACE

Testing our web servers with the OpenVAS tool (fork of Nessus) at hackertarget.com, it pointed out that TRACK/TRACE need to be disabled. On IIS, it turned out that actually TRACK and TRACE are disabled, verified with telnet as given here.

telnet media.radiosai.org 80
Trying 66.249.27.178...
Connected to media.radiosai.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
TRACK / HTTP/1.0
Host: foo
A: b
C: d

HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
Content-Length: 0
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:30:44 GMT
Connection: close

telnet media.radiosai.org 80
Trying 66.249.27.178...
Connected to media.radiosai.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
TRACE / HTTP/1.0
Host: foo
A: b
C: d

HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
Content-Length: 0
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:30:44 GMT
Connection: close


On krishna, had to disable TRACE - for doing this, googled a bit, finally howtoforge showed the simple way of just adding
TraceEnable Off
to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and restarting the web server.

PS. Initially I had tried with the code for re-write as given at many places, like here
# disable TRACE and TRACK in the main scope of httpd.conf
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE
RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACK
RewriteRule .* - [F]
But this did not seem to work. For enabling mod rewrite, had to do sudo a2enmod rewrite as given here.

Tips for clean audio

A "request for sermon" about tips on getting cleaner audio, and I obliged.

While recording,

1. Record with minimum ambient noise - switch off a/c etc. Don't use mics like wireless mics which give a hiss.

2. Have both shotgun mics and lapel mics for both guest and host in case of video interviews, or have dynamic mics close to speakers' mouths in case of audio-only interviews.

The rest of the stuff has to be done in the post-processing.

1. For each track recorded, do noise reduction using Adobe audition or cool edit pro or whatever, my settings in CEP 2.0 are as shown below, after doing a "Get Profile from Selection" using a section with only noise.



2. After the NR, doing a suitable noise gate, like the one below, is recommended.



3. Only after these steps, if the different tracks (interviewer and interviewee) are merged, and then normalized, we can have best results.

RAID failure on mp3server

The Melbourne uplink had a couple of RAID failures this week. My first suspect is of course the power supply for the external RAID enclosure...

duplicate entries in search results

A listener pointed out the duplicate entries which were being thrown up in the search results, which we knew about, but had not yet fixed. The initial entries to the files table had white-space before the filename, this was making them "distinct" from the newer entries of the same files without the whitespace. Trying to find them using this technique,

select c1.fileid, c2.fileid, c1.filename
from `radiosai_file_master` c1, `radiosai_file_master` c2
where c1.fileid < filename =" c2.filename 

did not work, since the filenames were actually not exactly the same: this was throwing up filenames which had .mp3 and .MP3 extensions. Then tried with a wildcard before the filename, found it matched. Then, making queries of the form

 SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE
 `fileName` LIKE CONVERT(_utf8 '__SPECIAL%' USING latin1) COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci 

(note the two underscores - meaning two characters) found that there are two white-space chars before the filename. CR and LF is my guess. Couldn't find the way to properly search with an SQL Like statement for "Like 'CR+LF+%', since

 SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE
 `fileName` LIKE CONVERT(_utf8 '__%' USING latin1) COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci 

returned

SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE 1

(ha ha!). So, did individual searches for __BV%, __TALK% and so on and deleted those files. Hopefully all are covered now.

withdrawing from some activities

Have stopped day-to-day involvement with some of the sites given on the left-hand side. Slowly other people are taking up various responsibilities. All for the best. The college website sssu.edu.in has a new CMS-based site, and the alumni site saistudents.org has also been relaunched...

application framework on javascript

Interesting project on freshmeat - WAJAF
Demos seen on left-hand side links work, including drag and drop, animation etc.

mounting remote volume over ssh

Briefly thought about remote mounting, googling found this link, but did not implement for video encoding of remote files etc it since my fiber media convertor frequently breaks the connection.

email with attachments on the qtek mobile phone

I think the only way to send email with attachments is to use the built-in pop3 client on the WM5 mobile phone. There was some configuration issue, so I followed the posts at howard forums which linked to the wiki giving the POP info. Mainly,
Messaging -> Menu -> Tools -> Accounts tab -> tap hold on an account to delete.

reducing table size on mysql

As a follow-up to this post, This is what I did in October: after deleting, also did

OPTIMIZE TABLE `radiosai_stream_daily`

That reduced the disk usage from 52 MB for that table to 9 MB. So, Optimize table is what reduces disk usage.

blog becoming useless? Or not?

Now, site search using Google as well as the search bar on top left give no results for many searches, even for recent posts. For example, to find this post, I searched for Delete From Where but it did not find any matches. Gmail's internal search is finding matches, so maybe I will have to log in to gmail and search there! Bing and Yahoo also do not index this blog much, I think.

Edit: Googled, found this thread, and tried cache:hnsws.blogspot.com in google search. Showed last indexed in Dec 2nd week. That's not so bad. Then, found Delete From Sql site:hnsws.blogspot.com does return the relevant post. So, maybe the <pre> tag contents are not indexed?

restoring clipped audio

Searching for 'noise reduction tutorial' in Cool Edit Pro's help system, found a Howto for restoring clipped audio:

To restore clipped audio while retaining the amplitude

If you have clipped audio (sound that’s overly amplified to the point of distortion), Cool Edit Pro’s Clip Restoration effect can help clean it up. Here’s how to use it without changing the volume of the waveform.

1. In Edit View, use Edit > Convert Sample Type to convert the file to 32-bit audio.

2. Run Effects > Noise Reduction > Clip Restoration with “Input Attenuation” set to 0dB.

3. Run Effects > Amplitude >Hard Limiting with “Boost Input” set to 0dB, and “Limit Max Amplitude” set to -0.2dB to bring the restored clipped audio back into normal range.

4. Use Edit > Convert Sample Type to convert the waveform back to the original sampling frequency if desired.

joining multiple VOBs into a single DVD

As given in a previous post, this is fairly straight-forward when the resulting DVD can fit in a regular DVD5 disc. But when it's bigger, must use DVD Shrink. And DVD Shrink does not play nice with the ifo files created with ifoEdit. Had to
1. Create ifo files separately with ifoEdit for each PGC ripped into it's own folder making sure DVDDecrypter had the File Splitting set to 1 GB in settings. Still didn't work with Shrink.
2. Had to rip one of the parts with DVD Shrink itself, shrinking it in the process
3. In Re-author mode of DVDShrink, drag and drop required ifo files
4. Set Start/End Frames for each title, hit Backup.

free iphone app for streaming audio - Fstream

From geardiary, Fstream is a free app to listen to streaming audio.

creating a DVD from miniDV tracks

Captured the intro and outro tracks in 3 languages from miniDV tape to DVD. Used NeroVision Express write directly to DVD feature to capture to a rewritable DVD+RW. Could capture multiple takes without having to erase earlier takes - I'm not sure if this is possible with DVD-R, but possibly yes. Then renamed the VOBs as VTS_01_01.VOB, VTS_01_02.VOB and so on and used IFOEdit to create IFO files for quick mastering.

ID3Tagit tutorial

Made by K, here is a tutorial for iPod users for tagging their music files.

Tagging music files for iPod users

new warning for right-clicking on zip file on shared drive

Right-clicking on zip files on shared drives now give the message “This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Would you like to continue?” Apparently this is a "feature" MS has added from IE7 onwards. That link, as well as this one and this one, gives workarounds if you do it a lot and are annoyed by the popup.

update to processing audio post

Wanted to add an update to the audio processing post. Found that the search box in the blogger bar at the top of this blog was not working too well. Google site search - the "search hnsws.blogspot.com" option at the top of the page - was working better. I'm not removing the blogger bar just yet, because some time ago the opposite was true, with site search not returning proper results.

Anyway, here is the update. To the info in the earlier post of 2006, this auto-trim-crop tip has to be added. Also, in Sound Forge version 7 (and above?) the normalization has been tweaked a bit, so that -12 dB is almost as loud as -10 dB in the earlier Sound Forge 4.x. So, in batch processing, the processing settings look like this:



One more point to be mentioned is that when processing audio sent for regional language broadcasts, I have to select the regions with similar levels based on visual inspection and normalize them separately - m on Sound Forge drops a marker at current cursor position, and double-click on a region selects it.



Filenames for these (other language broadcasts) are also in a pattern, this can be easily learnt by looking at the older files.

AOL FBL and finding the relevant subscriber

AOL's Feed Back Loop redacts the aol email id, even redacting the X-Subscriber header. So, we've to dig through the mail server logs to find the subscriber. First we have to find the message id which the mail server reports -

Received: by krishna.radiosai.org (Postfix, from userid 33) id [11 char alphanumeric id]

and use that id for

cat /var/log/mail.log | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]
or
cat /var/log/mail.log.0 | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]

USB mics

C asked about USB mics, the Blue Snowball and the AKG Perception since he was on a budget. I asked him to be careful of hiss as some buyer's comments indicated, and also my bad experience with the M-Audio Mobile Pre. Pointed him to the Tascam US-144, which seems to be not only frame-accurate but also quite low noise and has low latency monitoring. Tested today with inputs trimmed for balanced line level signal output from the Yamaha AW4416, max noise level was a sample value of 3 == better than -80 dB. Of course, the digital SPDIF input is even better, with the max noise sample value being 0! For the time being, C has borrowed A's US-144.

outlook email on the QTEK 9100

Sending attachments from the QTEK 9100 wasn't possible till now, since I got an error configuring the Outlook email for gmail. Googling gave this page which linked to this wiki for Windows Mobile 5 devices. My earlier mistake was to not check the 'use separate settings' for sending mail. For deleting the earlier misconfigured POP3 account,
Messaging -> Menu -> Tools -> Accounts tab -> tap hold on an account to delete.

quickly view page source

To quickly view page source of potentially infected web-pages, we can use

view-source:http://website.address.com

in the Firefox address bar.

cool edit pro limitations

Cool Edit pro on Sathya was supposed to route out each track to one of the outputs on the 8-out Darla card, and I was supposed to mix down using the Tascam TM-D4000 mixer. But CEP 1 was not up to the task - I thought it was due to the tracks being too long, 90 minutes each. Even restricting to just 4 tracks did not help. Thought Audition might be good - but it was not supported on Win98. CEP 2 was able to open the tracks, but while playing, gets MMSYSTEM errors if I put 4 long tracks. The fact that they are on a network drive adds to the mess. So, tried cutting up into 15 minute pieces. Even those pieces, even when copied to local drive, were too big for CEP2. So have currently suspended work on this. Will probably try mixing down in Studio using the Nuendo/Yamaha AW4416 combo, maybe in the summer or something.

latency

Investigating latency for S, checked first on the Mandir celeron and US-144.

Changing the setting on US-144 control panel from highest latency to lowest, the output latencies seen in Device Setup of Cubase were, from highest to normal to lowest, 64, 29, 5 ms respectively. The 64 ms makes the lag quite audible. The 5 ms setting makes the system unstable. Testing with same signal being applied to digital and analog inputs, can discern a faint lag in the analog, audible as a sort of reverb-like sound. Measured to be approx 57 samples or 1.3 ms by comparing recorded waveforms.

S had a latency of 24 ms. That was disturbing for him when listened on headphones. Changed to lowest latency on US-1641 control panel - that made it 10 ms, acceptable for him. Of course, if this makes his system unstable, he would have to compromise...

re-authoring DVDs without menus with IFOEdit

IfoEdit has a create IFO button at the bottom. So, if you already have VOB files and just want to create a playable DVD with a single title on it, just name the files as VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB and so on, put them in a VIDEO_TS folder, and point IFOEdit at the folder. You can choose to create the output in the same folder itself for this operation, it just creates the IFO and BUP files. Faster and quicker than any other way. Of course, more advanced stuff like menus and so on may be easier with other tools. Will explore dvdauthor and its gui later. As of now, noting that it needs de-muxed files - m2v and ac3 etc. Demuxing seemingly quick with BatchDemux - ten minuts for around an hour of video.

Opera mini impresses

Browsed for nearly an hour with opera mini on the QTEK 9100 mobile with "Load Images" turned off in settings. Expected a GPRS bill of something like Rs. 20-30. But it came to only Rs. 1.80! That makes it 300 kB transferred. Quite efficient, since I was browsing wired.com. Opera did not disconnect the GPRS connect even as I was reading each page, and so kept the bill down. I believe the connection times out when using IE, so each reconnect charges 30p. Ease of page navigation was also good in Opera. Small user-friendly touches like auto-flowing the text to fit screen without disturbing the general page layout and so on.

repair mysql database

Today, the Sai Inspires db showed an error,

Database error 145 while doing
query Table
'./the_name_of_our_db/si_usermessage' is marked as crashed and 
should be repaired

Solution from PB:

mysql -u root -p
mysql> show databases;
mysql> use the_name_of_our_db;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> repair table si_usermessage;

directly writing a DVD in real-time

Found that Nerovision Express (my version is 3) has the option to directly write to DVD if a video source is connected. Useful for quick conversion to DVD from any video source including firewire. Pluses and Minuses:

+ Finishes the recording in real time.

- Once you press stop, you cannot write any more into that DVD.

- No fancy menus - a default menu of Nerovision Express.

- Preset to approx 90 minutes of recording, not more.

issue with starting vnc on saiwaves

The one-line script for starting the VNC service on localhost with the required port and bit-depth would not work when I logged in with putty, but was working when I ssh'ed in with Linux! Felt the issue was with the tunnels I had defined in putty. Starting the session without the tunnels, the script works fine. If the tunnels are opened from another instance of putty also, the script "hangs". Some sort of port conflict, I guess.

leftover files from Windows update

When I found a folder feb890il9089876 or something like that in L:, thought I had been hit by a virus. But found inside the folder an i386 and an AMD64 folder, and looking at the inf file MSXPSDRV.INF and googling, found that this was a leftover from dotNET framework 3.5 update. Was able to delete with no issues since I have only one login on this machine. Or maybe it was because this was an ext2 drive and not NTFS or FAT32.

internet banking from mobile

The browsers on the QTEK 9100 mobile phone are not upto doing internet banking: Tried to pay a bill from onlinesbi.com using both IE and Opera mini, but both failed at some point during the confirmation of the transaction. Some javascript issue I believe. Bandwidth usage - if images are turned off, seeing a couple of emails on gmail or going through to the login or some other screens on the bank site use less than 50 kB, so charged at 30 paise if using Airtel's GPRS network.

printing on thermal printer with Linux

Apparently thermal printers, like dot-matrix printers, also use certain escape codes and the rest of the text is treated like "Generic Text". This experts exchange page says at the very bottom, it may be better to have the code directly in the app. And this MSDN forum post links to a pdf with escape codes. PB used the OpenBravo forum for help.

From PB's private blog,

Using EPSON TM-T88IV parallel port on ubuntu 9.04
In openbravo configuration set the printer as epson - File - /dev/lp0
To make the printer accessible by a normal user set the permissions:
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/lp0
Note: These settings are lost on reboot.
To set these permissions on boot, I added the following line in /etc/rc.local (in Ubuntu 9.04) before the exit command
# For parallel port printers add:
chmod a+rw /dev/lp0
# For USB printers add:
chmod a+rw /dev/usblp0

airflow not enough with one AHU

Today, KR tried closing a damper on one of the AHUs and using only one AHU with one compressor. Air flow seems to be not enough - the projectors in the dome ports not getting cool air, feet cool but head hot. Control panel is cool enough.

Edit: AHU is air handling unit - the big blowers for our centralized air-conditioning system.

checking for malware without getting infected

Can view pages' source by entering

view-source:http://google.com

in address bar of firefox. Nifty for a quick check for malicious code. Noscript etc are also there for javascript, of course, but I think that would not flag malicious iframes.

telescope

J brought a telescope for trouble-shooting, not able to focus. A reflector. The first problem he diagnosed himself, that was an alignment issue with the main mirror. Looking into the tube while he aligned the mirror using the screws at the back fixed that. The other problem was that he was attaching the eyepiece to a "balfour" tube and then to the eyepiece screw mount. Attached the eyepiece directly (it fit better, too) and the focus issue was solved too. Non-motorized, 72mm main mirror aperture, total magnification of around 400x, I think.

Acer Aspire One netbook

M left his Acer Aspire One netbook with me to give a graduate student. The most striking thing about it is how light and compact it is - can really carry around like a book. 1 GB RAM and 350 GB hard disk, 1.5 gig Atom processor, so it's faster than the Celeron I use in Mandir! Keyboard is a little cramped for touch typing, as all the reviews say. Can get used to it, but shifting back and forth between regular keyboards and the netbook would be difficult.

fring

Cool Edit Pro and Skype stopped working on the desktop - perhaps it was after installing DRM Removal from Giveaway of the day. Using SoundForge instead of CEP, and fring on the QTEK mobile. At first, fring seemed to have issues with sound. Sometimes it needs checking with the "fring test call" - the mic doesn't work. A bit tinny, but reasonably OK except for a nearly 1 second lag. Mainly quick and convenient, till the laptop comes back.

Edit: Confirmed that the DRM Removal was the reason for the CEP errors. Removed DRM Removal, CEP started working again. But Skype still has errors on startup.

power consumption on a Thursday

kWhr readings:

                 904         905
9.45 am         3435        15610.6
12.10 pm        3446        15685.5

trying Cisco's Linksys "iPhone" CIT200

Tested out this skype-phone - needs skype running on the computer on which the base-station is connected by USB. Voice quality just as good as any cordless (DECT) phone, has an option for speakerphone and hands-free also - 2.5 mm handsfree socket. The minus point is that it needs the PC to be on with skype running. But it's half the price of standalone wifi phones.

bridge mode on Netgear wireless router WGR614

One of my former colleagues had an issue with his Airtel broadband, wireless and his laptop - every time the power failed, he had to connect his laptop to the DSL modem directly, "repair" the connection, then connect the wireless router and so on. Airtel tech support asked him to reinstall network interface drivers on his laptop. That seemed to work - the wired network now worked without the need for "repair". Then he wanted to add the wireless router into the mix, and it appeared that disabling DHCP was the way to go. So he assigned ip addresses in the same sub-net to the DSL router's LAN interface, the Netgear's LAN interface and to the laptop's wireless interface. He was able to ping the wireless router, but not the DSL modem. Then he changed the port on which the DSL router was connected to the wireless router - initially it was connected to the "uplink" port, now he connected it to one of the "normal" 4 LAN ports on the Netgear. Now everything works. It seems this is the way to do "bridge-mode" (as against NATing) on the Netgear WGR614 - googling brought up this page which links to the Netgear KB article.

recording on windows mobile

Recording calls with the QTEK 9100 was quite simple - the recording utility works quite well if the mobile is not in hands-free mode. Speakerphone on or off, it records both sides of the conversation quite well. If recorded using the notes function, it ends up in pwi format. To convert that to wav, this page has the run-down:

1. Open the pwi file in Word
2. Right-click on the audio object speaker icon
3. Open the pwi file in Word
4. Choose Sound Recorder Document Object -> Edit -> Edit menu -> Copy
5. Open another instance of Sound Recorder, choose Paste Insert and Save As.

miscellaneous vnc problems

I had miscellaneous vnc problems with the server running Suse. Unable to use smb4k to mount windows shares and rdesktop not opening using the VNC connection. Error mesg was

rdesktop server-ip
Autoselected keyboard map en-us
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
 Major opcode of failed request: 1 (X_CreateWindow)

Thought it might have something to do with the window manager - twm and not KDE. According to this page, I could change it by editing ~/.vnc/xstartup to

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/startkde

But that did not help. Then thought it might be the colour depth. Changed the colour depth to 16 as

vncserver -geometry 800x600 -depth 16 :68

That did the trick.

Next, vncserver was getting into a loop or something when I try to run it from a putty session, but not when I run it from a terminal in Linux! This turned out to be some sort of vnc allergy to ssh tunnels - when I used putty without any tunnels, vncserver created desktops without complaints.

Then P solved the issue with smb4k:
In settings -> configure Smb4k -> super user
checked the boxes which say "Use super user privileges to mount and unmount shares", and also for 'force unmounting', gave the su pw when asked. Now it mounts.

using sed

The Cygwin install on the server running colinux doesn't have vi, so sed is useful on occasion. This useful page has the basics. String replace has the syntax

's/{old value}/{new value}/'

like

$ echo The tiger cubs will meet | sed 's/tiger/wolf/'
The wolf cubs will meet

which of course you can pipe to a new file.

The article mentions that sed can change any printable character with another printable character, but use tr instead for unprintable characters. It also discusses append and insert.

Tally caveats

For TALLY users - if your installation license misbehaves, this info might help.

The following is an extract from a long post by one of my colleagues. The full version has lots of humour, I have just extracted the "lessons".

At one of our units, the Tally installation had a few little problems since the day we installed.... It might be useful to someone who faces a similar issue or someone can tell us what we might have done better.

First, the lessons: (for those who want to move on) :
1. Keep your system date and time current before activating Tally.
2. Register at the Tally site.
3. After you activate, there is such a thing called 'Update', which you should do within 45 days. Can do offline, but nobody will tell you.
4. Don't expect good English from Tally Customer Service.

phone as bluetooth modem

Finally a lucid article in smartphonemag.com which also points to an article in smartphonethoughts.com for PC configuration gave the crucial info - the number to be entered in the dial-up networking is *99# - once this is done, everything works. Apparently this is a code which tells the mobile phone to connect to GPRS connection which has already been set up. There are other similar codes found on googling - *99***1# for example, and another is *99*1#. Maybe this means the first GPRS setting in memory or something like that. Anyway, this provides a way to dial up with the USB connection also without using the USBModem_Dialer.exe - use the *99# as the number and the USB modem as the device. But here, two caveats:

1. The Modem Link software has to be running on the mobile before the USB is connected.
2. The APN has to be entered, since Modem Link doesn't seem to remember it.

APN entering has to be a bit of voodoo, as explained at the pdagold article - it has to be entered into the modem properties. In my case, the path is different from the pdagold article - in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager -> Modem properties -> Advanced tab -> Extra initialization commands. Here, entered AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com" where airtelgprs.com is my APN. Then, the normal windows dialler works.

using the phone as a modem

Followed the excellent article at pdagold to connect to use the phone as a modem. Basically it requires that I start the Modem Link software on the phone, "Activate" on the phone, and use the provided dialler with the appropriate APN. Bluetooth modem is proving to be more difficult, will try it later.

Speed tests - 48 kbps using McAfee's speed test, and also by manually counting the number of bytes.

As you can see, the testing involved around 2 MB of data transfer, lasting around a minute more for a total of around 7 minutes, and this cost approx Rs. 12.

DNS requests not resolving

We faced a strange problem on fs3 of DNS requests not resolving - nslookup would complain that even the default dns server could not be contacted and would time out after 2 seconds.

nslookup
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can't find server name for address x.y.z.p: Timed out
Default Server:  UnKnown

Googling gave many hits on configuring the dns service properly, and advice to run

ipconfig /registerdns

All these didn't work - finally the issue turned out to be a firewall problem after all: TCP/IP filtering was turned on, and ALL UDP packets were being blocked. TCP/IP Properties -> Advanced -> Options tab, TCP-IP filtering Properties, Changed radio-buttons to Permit All for UDP Ports and Protocols. That solved the problem.

SPF restored

No wonder the SPF was being shown as bad by the tools in my previous post - whoever shifted our domain to the new dns servers had also forgotten the spf records in addition to many cnames. Restored it today.

Signing emails with DKIM

Yahoo once again started rejecting mails from our mail server. I wanted to title this post "Yahoo mail admins need to grow up" but then thought better of it. After filling in their bulk sender form for the third time, decided to enter their Complaint Feedback Loop programme. Had to implement DKIM first, so headed over to howtoforge after googling. Test mechanisms were in the centos setup page and the DNS setup required a request to our ISP. Then signed up for the complaint feedback loop, and the next day got 3 'complaints' - these 3 guys marked our mail as spam to cause yahoo to block 3000 of our subscribers.

In case the howtoforge articles vanish, here's the gist:

sudo apt-get install dkim-filter
sudo mkdir /var/dkim-filter
cd /var/dkim-filter
sudo openssl genrsa -out private.key 1024
sudo openssl rsa -in private.key -out public.key -pubout -outform PEM
sudo vim /etc/dkim-filter.conf

Here, un-comment the following, with the appropriate domain name. The selector can be anything, only remember to set the same selector name in dns. Relevant dkim-filter.conf settings:

# Log to syslog
  Syslog   yes
  # Required to use local socket with MTAs that access the socket as a non-
  # privileged user (e.g. Postfix)
#UMask   002


# Sign for example.com with key in /etc/mail/dkim.key using
  # selector '2007' (e.g. 2007._domainkey.example.com)
  Domain DOMAIN.TLD  
  KeyFile  /var/dkim-filter/private.key
  Selector  mail 

# Common settings. See dkim-filter.conf(5) for more information.
  AutoRestart  no
  Background  yes
  Canonicalization simple
  DNSTimeout  5
  Mode   sv
  SignatureAlgorithm rsa-sha256
  SubDomains  no
  UseSSPDeny  no
  X-Header  no

Actually setting the X-header to yes is useful for initial debugging - then, checking the headers shows you right away if the milter is working. (Milter = Mail API Filter, from sendmail-speak). Then

sudo /etc/init.d/dkim-filter start
sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf

to add the following lines to the end,

milter_default_action = accept
milter_protocol = 2
smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:8891
non_smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:8891

And then finally restart with

sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart

The DNS record to be set is of the form

mail._domainkey.DOMAIN.TLD. IN TXT "k=rsa; t=y; p=MIGfKh1FC.....bfQIDAQAB"

where mail is the selector, DOMAIN.TLD should be your domain name and the p=is the key from /var/dkim-filter/public.key

Once the dns propagates, you can check by sending email to yahoo or gmail - gmail shows as "signed by radiosai.org" when you click show details. domainkeys.sourceforge.net lists some test tools - some of them are a bit flaky. I got dkim=pass from crynwr.com but sa-test@sendmail.net reported my SPF as bad - I thought it was working.

add Google contacts to windows mobile without using Outlook

Googling got this link which pointed to this great solution.

1. Install PIM Backup
2. Change the extension of the Outlook formatted .csv file to .csc
3. Zip the file and change the extension of the .zip file to .pib, copy the pib file to the mobile.
4. Run the PIM backup app on the windows mobile, and choose the Restore option, browsing to the .pib file above. It gives the option to allow duplicates or update existing contacts and so on.



Here actually the third option is what I selected - add contacts and update old etc. BTW the screenshot was taken with MyMobileR using which you can control your mobile from your PC.

more with the QTEK mobile

Posting this with the QTEK mobile with wifi at home. Wifi at work working as of now only in "Open" mode and not WEP or WPA. But probably will have some workaround. Home wifi needed freebase to make the SSID broadcast - it couldn't connect with SSID hidden. Saw some google results about WM6 having that feature, but this one is WM5 and can't. Skype for WM was disappointing - 10 MB download, and the sound was stuttering on wifi. Fring looks much more promising, and feature packed too. Skyfire looks really good, and streams youtube videos without buffering over our 256 k connection.

QTEK 9100 mobile

Set up the smartphone to use wifi at home, but not yet working at PSN with the Airport - probably the hidden SSID is causing the problem for Windows Mobile 5. Infrared works fine with the Toshiba PDA, but transfers to the laptop @ S3 were not going through. Bluetooth also the same. Set up with mobireader total commander etc. Will set up skype as and when the wifi is operational.

GPRS setup on Airtel was simple enough, but had to call customer care.

Start -> Settings -> Connections tab -> Connections -> Advanced tab -> Select Networks
Here, Programs that connect to the internet should connect using 'My ISP name'

Start -> Settings -> Connections tab -> Connections -> Tasks tab
under 'My ISP name', manage existing connections -> Modem should be Cellular line (GPRS) and the apn name or access point name should be airtelgprs.com, username and password to be left blank.

Charges are currently 30 paise for 50 kB.