blurry background for video on fulldome using Blender

As mentioned in my last post, tried to get a blurry background effect for the video. Putting a video texture in the Blender World seemed to be the easiest option. As given in this tutorial, the way to do it is to click on World, then on Texture, and then set it to the file which you need. The crucial step is to check all the boxes under Influence:

And to get a blurred effect, the simplest way seemed to be to use the same video, but sampled down to 32x24 pixels, as the World texture.

HD video file on fulldome with fisheye camera in Blender

Tried out the HD flat version of "The Known Universe"  rendering it to the dome using Ron Proctor's fisheye camera. 

(

Edit 2022-09-01 - The webersci link above is broken, not available in archive.org either. A google search turned up https://groups.google.com/g/blendertarium/c/_4n-AwZ6Bs4?pli=1 

Uploading the camera blend file to github, in case that link also goes away - 

https://github.com/hn-88/Blender-files/blob/main/fisheyeCamera.blend

And also, now there seems to be Fisheye camera support directly in Blender - 
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/174750/how-to-make-fisheye-lens-for-camera

)

Brought up the flat video real close to the camera, and tilted it so that the video can cover more of the dome, as below.

The co-ordinates of the plane were
Rotation - X = 125, Y = 0, Z = 0
Location - X = 0, Y = 0, Z = 1.3

This gave an effect similar to the video part in the TSPOG show - probably I need to add some blurring on the blank black area outside the video window like in that show. Rendering took around 1 minute per frame with two threads, and 2 minutes per frame with a single thread. Sample fulldome frame was like below.

tried out firessh

FireSSH and FireFTP - Firefox plugins for SSH and FTP/SFTP right inside firefox. May be useful sometime, when installation is too much of a bother. FireSSH has support for key-based auth as well.

ebook using instapaper

Instapaper provides a read-later bookmarklet, and using that, a series of web-pages can be made into an ebook fairly easily. Instapaper gives download options in epub, mobi and "printable" (from which one can print to pdf). The thing to note is that the page you want as the first page of your ebook should be the last you click "Read later" on. That is to say, last in first out. So, you have to click "Read later" on the last page of your ebook first, and go on to the beginning, and then export from instapaper.

rudimentary planet in Blender, also video texture

Today I made my first Planet. Instead of creating three spheres etc as given here, (which seems to be the same tutorial as given in Issue 9 of BlenderArt magazine) I made a single sphere, just to see how it comes out. With the default 32 segment 32 ring UV sphere, the aliasing was obvious. I bumped it up to 128 x 128 and then used the Earth texture from here, and the result was not bad for what I want to do, which is a flyby.

Things to remember:

• UV mapping means wrapping the texture around the object - U and V are used to describe the 2D mesh since X and Y are already taken!
• For the planet, the mapping used was Co-ordinates = Object, Object = Sphere, Projection = Sphere. (Not Co-ordinates = UV!)
• Smooth shading: as given in Ron Proctor's tip here, using smooth shading makes the sphere look much better. Accessed from Object tools - T after selecting the object.

Also animated a plane with a video texture. For this,

• The plane could be of the same dimensions as the movie, so for a 4:3 movie, a plane of dimensions x=4 and y=3 is good.
• In such a case, the texture mapping to use is Co-ordinates = Generated, Projection = Flat, and Extension = Clip.
• For ease of placement of camera(s) and the plane, the N key which brings up the properties allows numerical entry of values.
• As mentioned before, Emit=1 and Specular=0 are good for video textures.
• In some tutorials like this one, the rotation animation is done by entering a value like 3600 degrees for 10 turns. But when I tried entering a value of 360 for rotating the camera a full circle, it did nothing. When I tried 340 or 370, the camera moved only by 20 or 10 degrees respectively. So I settled for 180 degrees in my test.

NASA models and more in Blender

Ron Proctor of the Ott Planetarium very helpfully pointed me to the NASA 3D repository. Checking out the Hubble Space telescope model from there, learnt the following:

• Textures need to be in UV mapping mode for them to be displayed properly in this model - Mapping -> Co-ordinates -> UV - and I had to manually map the texture bitmaps to the relevant materials in the model.
• Blender's Textured Viewport shading only works if object has a UV mapped texture (in general).
• Imported model was extremely large as seen in default Blender view. Scaling it down was easier than moving the camera and lights out.
• Ctrl Alt Numpad 0 puts Camera to current view.

getting started with Blender

A few days ago I had done a trial with the Starball file from Weber U's Ott Planetarium. Rendering a single frame at 2k, 2048x2048, took around 2-3 minutes on my machine, running AMD X2 Dual core at 1.9 Mhz with Win XP 32 bit. When that was warped and projected on our dome, it looked pretty good.

Today, I dove a bit deeper, to take the first baby steps towards making our own fulldome show. Printed out the cheat sheet from qubodup and went through the first few getting started tutorials again to refresh my memory.

• Right-click to select an object.
• Middle-click and drag to move around in the view-port, with Shift and Ctrl as modifiers for pan and zoom respectively.
• Shift+A to add an object
• N to numerically adjust location and size
• S R and G for Scale, Rotate and Grab, with X Y Z for constrained motion along those axes.
• TAB to toggle Edit mode and Object mode
• Shift+F10 Image Editor (where rendered output is seen)
• Shift+F5 3D viewport
• Numpad 7 1 3 for Top Front Right views, 4 6 8 2 for rotate, 5 for toggling perspective and orthogonal views.
• Numpad . for Zoom to object.  

Also learnt from this video texture guide to use Emit=1 and Specular = 0 for a video texture. And from this tutorial, learnt to use Projection = Cube instead of Flat - or else the rendered surface may be only on the Z axis, and you may not see it! Rendering with a video texture to 1080p HD - 1920x1080 - went at around 10 seconds per frame.

Problems faced:

• Extrude tool seems to Extrude only along the natural face of the object - some sort of constraint somewhere.
• When I change dimensions of an object using N and then render using F12, it is going back to its original dimensions!

Next steps:

Would probably want to make a set of stills or videos move around the dome as in the IBEX show.

using Digital Universe to create fulldome content

The first step might be to export frames from Digital Universe - this seems to be clunky, and seems to need linux async as given at this page which has a perl script, which links to this more manual method.

But maybe instead I can use the video they give for download.

Zalip internet radio and TeluguStream

The TeluguStream guys wanted to give an internet radio - aka wifi radio - to the local cablewala so that he can easily stream it to his customers. But the Zalip Internet radio seems to be defective. According to this page, the Aluratek AIRMM02F is a similar product, and according to the user-guide of this product, the Favourites saved on the website zalip.vtuner.com should automatically come on the radio when it is switched off and switched on. This is not happening. Also tried as wired client, wireless client also, just in case the MAC address is only for one of the modes. Hence I conclude that it is not working as advertised. So, currently only the five streams other than TeluguStream are available with this radio. As and when vtuner adds TeluguStream, that will also be available. But we can't say when they will add. I have sent a request to them at the stream add page. I also tried updating the firmware using Aluratek's firmware update - did not recognize as a valid firmware file.

iphone 3GS update restore saga

One of my colleagues had a jailbroken & unlocked iphone 3GS, and he made the mistake of updating it in iTunes. The phone was stuck in recovery mode when it came to me.

Googling various terms, the first thing I tried was to use TinyUmbrella to kick the phone out of recovery mode, as given here. That did not work. TinyUmbrella was not able to see any info on the phone, not even ECID.

Gathered info including ECID using USBview as given here.

This particular forum post seemed promising - Did I ruin my 3GS . As suggested there, tried the untethered jailbreak with sn0wbreeze, with the tutorial given at this page. Making a bulleted list of the many trials I did - the last two are the successful ones:

• I tried first with the later version of sn0wbreeze, using OS version 4.3.2 instead of 4.2.1. After creating the custom IPSW with sn0wbreeze, iTunes did not allow the update - I thought it was because TinyUmbrella's TSS server was not running. Making a custom IPSW was taking around 5 minutes on my phone.
• At this point, TinyUmbrella was not able to save any blobs - it was not seeing any blobs on the phone. Running iTunes with the TSS server also did not work, it ended with error 1602. The update process in iTunes was taking around 5 minutes.
• The solution for that was to run sn0wbreeze till the end - I thought the phone was already in DFU mode, black screen - but it needed to put the phone in a pwned DFU mode.
• Running sn0wbreeze till the end where it uses iReb to avoid the 16-- errors, the update went till the very end, but then error 37 in iTunes.
• In the above trials, I had chosen New Boot Rom within sn0wbreeze. Perhaps that was the culprit. So made another IPSW with sn0wbreeze, chosing Old Boot Rom.
• This time it went through, iTunes declared it successful, but phone did not boot. It remained in DFU mode even after reboot.
• TinyUmbrella was able to save some blobs now, and it showed 4.1 and 5.0 beta blobs. So tried the same update, with the TSS server running this time. Same result - iTunes success, but phone doesn't boot.
• Tried New Boot Rom IPSW with TSS server - again error 37.
• Tried New Boot Rom IPSW without TSS server - error 3194 this time. "This device is not eligible for the requested build" - so probably I should go with Old Boot Rom  and not New.
• Back to making an Old Bootrom IPSW, on a different usb port, without TSS. Stuck at preparing iphone for restore.
• Tried a different tack - since 4.1 blobs are seen in TinyUmbrella, why not try with that one. For this, downloaded sn0wbreeze 2.1. This time, it worked like a charm - running iTunes with TinyUmbrella's TSS server on. The phone booted up. But it is not unlocked yet.
• To unlock 4.1, this page points to this guide - just need to add repo666.ultrasn0w.com to the sources in Cydia (it was already there) and install ultrasn0w using Cydia Search. Did so, rebooted, and the phone is unlocked, working fine.

enabling NTP on our servers

While checking bounce processing, found that krishna's time was off by five minutes. Installed ntp as given here,

sudo apt-get install ntp

I guessed that the firewall might cause problems, and sure enough, checking the status with
ntpq -p
found that the peer was not being contacted, the reach was 0. Added a firewall rule for NTP for the DMZ, and all was well.

krishna bounce processing again

Nowadays I keep checking krishna's bounce processing by seeing the phplist messages page - if messages don't show bounces, that means the bounce processing has stopped. And most of the time it is cured by a simple flush of the mbox as given here. Today had to do a flush, after the day of that post - five months.

creating DiscourseStream schedule

Guest post from PB about creating DiscourseStream on schedule page:

Steps:

1. Added new BC Broadcast Center Name: DiscourseStream Bcid: 9

2. Modified the changeover time from 5:00AM to 7:00AM to avoid import issues for the schedule database

3. Modified Playlist import script for Discourse Stream and commented out Asiastar

4. Added SIGNATURE_TUNE to the beginning of playlist files that were already created.

5. Modified the cron for changeover in the remote server from 5:00AM to 7:00AM

6. Added two hrs of DD to today's playlist so that the changeover takes place tomorrow without a break and reuploaded.

7. Modified the csv script to generate csv for Discourse stream

8. Skipped the instrumentals being listed in the csv for DD

9. Modified the schedule database for discourse stream to have the changeover @ 1:30 GMT (7:00 am IST)

10. Added a single program item to start the 27th csv import (NOTE: It can be done only through IE)

11. Uploaded the csv for 27th Sep 2011

12. Modified the DD making script to add signature tune in the beginning of the playlist.

fixing problems with Listen Now page and IE

Newer versions of IE were not displaying the "Listen Now" page with the jplayer audio player. Found that the page was loading when "compatibility mode was turned on - the broken page icon on the right side of the addressbar.

Looking into the code, found a possible culprit in the Twitter embed code. It just said



in the body, put



in the head of the document.

And all was well again with IE.

more about the iphone and farewell to it as well

Following up on my previous post, finally got it to do almost everything using a combination of tools. Almost everything, except one of my essentials - call recording. It seems to be impossible to do call recording on the iPhone without third party services calling out to their server due to hardware level limitations imposed by Apple. And apparently Android is also the same. So, I'll have to stick to my old Windows Mobile 5 phone!

Coming back to this iphone, installed the following from iTunes on the PC:


Battery Magic - uninstalled due to a startup screen which could not be removed due to non-working touchscreen portion

Planets

Compass Free - uninstalled as the iPhone 1st gen doesn't have GPS

Remote Desktop Lite

GPS Tracker  - uninstalled as the iPhone 1st gen doesn't have GPS

Battery LED!

Teamviewer

APPZILLA

EasyWriter

iTalk Recorder - uninstalled as phone call recording needs paid service.

Got Veency in Cydia installed through iSpirit which was mentioned at this forum page. Then onwards it was fairly straightforward to do anything on the phone, since the VNC client could click even in the places where the touchscreen wasn't working. Mobile Terminal was one of the nice apps loaded through Cydia.

working around a broken iphone

Got a used iphone for Rs. 4k - reason it was going cheap was that part of the touch-screen was not responsive. This happened to be the part just above the lowest line. So, the Call soft-button in the phone keypad does not work! And so on.

Trying to get ebooks into it. SSH not working - probably not installed, though Cydia is present. Trying to install SSH gave an error message in Cydia about being unable to download files - probably an old repository. But cannot click on the OK button for the message. That was in the bad portion, and landscape mode is not available for that screen.

Tried to use the Kindle app - it needs registration, and in portrait mode, which does not work with the keypad. I did not try copy-pasting the username and pw - that might have worked. But anyway, went on to try iBooks. Unfortunately iBooks needs iOS 3.2 and higher, and this is a 1st gen iPhone with iOS 3.1.3. Then tried Stanza, that one works.

Transferring files to Stanza - all the methods seem to need Stanza to pop up a confirmation dialog asking if I want to download - and the Download confirmation button comes up in the non-working part of the screen! Finally got books to transfer using iPhone Explorer.

DD-WRT and Dlink DIR615 revE4

As mentioned in an earlier post, tried out DD-WRT on the Dlink DIR615. What we got was hardware version E4.

Quite simple procedure as given at the dd-wrt wiki. Ours was E4 and not E3. Read somewhere on the forums that changing the last number from 0 to 1 in the E3 firmware with a hex editor makes it work with E4. Tried that, it works. Did the Hex editing of the firmware using Free Hex editor Neo on Windows.  The firmware labelled as E4 in the dd-wrt site has 5 as the last digit - that apparently makes it not compatible with our E4 version.

But plugging it in our network, it didn't work. At first I thought it might be a MAC address caching issue, and tried cloning the old router's MAC address. That also did not work. Then did some tests and found that it was just not routing - logging into the router, ping works in both directions LAN and WAN. But the LAN can't ping the WAN and vice-versa.

Tried posting on the dd-wrt forums, here and here, but finally did not get any solution. Assuming that some hardware limitation prevents it from working as a router without NAT. And the google answers page recommended routers seem to be scarce. The Linksys WRT54G is superseded by the WRT54GH which doesn't support routing mode, for example.

access to audio files from macs at Studio

With MacOSX, the audio directory windows share was not accessible. Reason seems to be the large number of files - seems to get stuck. Workaround - connecting with sftp using Filezilla.

In order to connect, have to import a key as given at this page from FileZilla -> Preferences -> Connection -> SFTP

In order to navigate hidden folders like .ssh in File -> Open dialog box, as given  here

press Shift + Command + Period

burning cds on the mac

Copied some CDs on the Mac using the procedure at

http://www.thinkmac.net/blog/archives/mac-tips-daily-171-copy-cd-and-dvd-discs.html

Create an image using Disc Utility, (make a read-only image to make it faster) then burn the image. This method does not work for audio CDs and protected DVDs.

router failure and fail-over

Last night, power failure and UPS draining caused the servers and routers to go down. The Dlink DFL-210 router did not come back up after power returned. This morning, replaced it with a Linksys WRT54GS - cost around Rs. 3,500

The router which failed yesterday - DLINK DFL-210 - cost around Rs. 22,000

Both these models are no longer available. DFL-260 is a possible replacement, PB checking Indian market cost found it to be around Rs. 50,000.

According to posts on this page, newer routers don't have the built-in static routing which we need, dd-wrt is a possibility.

So, we're planning to try out Dlink DIR-615 and are going to try and load dd-wrt on it.

live video streaming test

Running Adobe Flash media encoder and C++ RTMP server locally for running tests.


First downloaded Wowza server with a free developer license and tested after installing it with the documentation given at wowza forums.

Then tested by copying the same html file mentioned above to another system.

Then tried stopping Wowza and starting the C++ RTMP server. It asked for a username and pw for the encoder to connect, found that it was located in users.lua
Entered suitable values and the encoder connected without problems. Next, tried on the other system with the same test file supplied with Wowza, and it worked.

Next step was an flv player embedded in the website.

Downloaded JWPlayer's latest version, first tried the quick-start method given in the downloaded pdf. That did not work. Reason was wrong path. Even giving full path did not work, since our server was configured not to serve .mp4 - it gave access denied. Anyway, the player was coming up embedded on the page.

Next, followed the docs at
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12535/video-delivery-rtmp-streaming

With streamer address given as a private ip address 192.168.2.2, it did not work. Configured the router to use a virtual server at the Macbook, port 1935 for rtmp, and it worked with the public ip - used the domain name, actually.

Later, tried out the private ip address also - that also worked. The player on the remote server does not need to contact the streamer directly. Only the client needs to contact the streamer. The first time the private ip address did not work was because of other issues with embedding the player - the player itself was not appearing.

automatic email scripts

Removed the radiosai gmail id from the following scripts which were sending automatic emails:

On saiwaves :
playlist_import.sh
lame*sh

On colinux :
test_playlist_sgh_africa.sh
test_playlist_sgh_america.sh
test_playlist_sgh_asia.sh
test_playlist_sgh_discourse.sh
test_playlist_sgh_bhajan.sh

problem with ftp upload using php ftp_connect

The php script to upload csv files automatically had not worked for a while. Checking it out:

This page says that with some firewalls you should connect to the firewall and then connect to the host etc. Tried that, doesn't work.

I suspect that the problem is with the way in which php handles ftp commands. When a put command is sent on our system, cyberoam responds saying delayed due to scanning, and then uploads.

STOR /httpdocs/program/csv/AmeriStream20110818.csv
150-Scanning file for viruses
150-There'll be a delay while we scan for viruses
150 Data connection already open; Transfer starting.
221-Scanning for virus
221 Transfer complete.

I think php's ftp library does not handle the ftp 150 commands, hence it fails.

I have currently commented out the ftp upload part in the mkcsv php script.

ERROR: duplicate key value

PB being out of action, making playlists and doing Telugu database work etc. So, while importing Telugu files, came across

ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "download_filename_file_id_ukey"

This causes some files not to be entered into database, so when importing playlist, it complains that some fids are NULL

Solution was to import files one by one till the offending file was found - a file which had the same name as an existing file, but with space in the filename replaced with underscore. Removed the old entry from database - rather, changed space to underscore for its filename.

setting up vnc

While setting up vnc for doing the Telugu files on the telugubc server, found that it was installed but not running. Using the same script as on saiwaves did the trick, only thing was that it needed vncpasswd to be run before running the script to start vnc, so that we set the password to something we know. And editing .vnc/xstartup is required if you want kde - I changed the default twm window manager to kde. Last line becomes startkde & instead of twm &

procedure for telugu broadcasts

1. Go to ~/new_telugu and copy mp3 files from relevant folder to ~/ftpsent

2. Copy relevant m3u file to ~/playlist directory.

3. cd to playlist directory and run the sed script modifying the commmandline to relevant date, which converts the extended m3u to simple m3u and appends the audio directory path.

4. run ~/scr*/lame_encoder2422.sh

5. Open playlist from step 2 in kwrite and change / to \, save as m3u

6. Open the m3u playlist in Winamp after lame finishes, to check that all files are present - total duration should be 24 hours and a bit, and it should not show a + symbol after the total duration.

If playlist generation is desired, additional steps:

7. Run scr*/main_ftp.sh which takes files from ~/ftp folder

8. upload files from ~/ftp folder to dl.radiosai.org

9. Run scr*/playlist_import.sh

10. Update missing descriptions from localhost/SGHDescription as with sgh database, if necessary copy-pasting from sgh database

11. Make csv and upload from localhost/mkcsv

bug in our playlist import script

Faced the same problem as given in this earlier post, with the schedule csv/email creating script complaining that SIGNATURE TUNE not found, "PROGRAM NOT FINALISED". The solution is to just search for entries in the playlist table where timestamp is 2011-08-16 06:30:00+05:30 (or whatever date). This can occur at midnight also - as PB pointed out, a bug in the script changes a timestamp of 2011-08-16 00:00:00+05:30
to 2011-08-16 06:30:00+05:30 during the import process. So, verify if the correct timestamp should be 00:00:00+05:30 and then edit the entry manually from 06:30:00+05:30 to 00:00:00+05:30 .

The point to be noted is that the problematic entry may not be adjacent to the actual 06:30 signature tune file, it could be at midnight also.

updating MBV download filenames

The MBV files were imported into Telugu stream database without suitably modifying the download filenames. This caused quite a bit of confusion. PB contributed the following post :

Steps done for rectification:

1. In sgh database on saiwaves run the following query:

select 'UPDATE file_id SET download_filename=' || '"' ||download_filename|| '"' || ' WHERE filename="' || filename || '"' from file_id where filename ilike 'MBV%' \t \o update_mandirbhajans.sql ;

First row of the result set looks like:

UPDATE file_id SET download_filename="MBV_04_RAMA_OM_SRI_RAM.mp3" WHERE filename="MBV_04_SUJITH_RAMA_OM SRI RAM.mp3"

2. Save the result set to a file update_mandirbhajans.sql

3. Replace double quotes with single quotes in update_mandirbhajans.sql

4. In sghtelugu database on saiwaves execute the saved update_mandirbhajans.sql (through phpPgAdmin interface)

5. upload the updated csv files / run the update sql statements on the schedule database through the cpanel

stellarium night sky on our mirrordome

Trying out Stellarium's Mirrordome distortion mode. On the laptop I use, Stellarium cannot use the full screen when in dual-screen mode with different resolutions on each screen, and also refuses overlays like the toolbars on the secondary screen. So, used the Dual-screen clone mode with both displays set to 1280x800. With the default settings, the stars don't look so good on our dome, but some tweaks make the stars look better.

View Settings Window -> Sky tab -> Absolute scale = 2 makes everything bigger and hence brighter, and Relative scale = 0.2 or so makes the stars uniform in size instead of brighter stars being as big as oranges! This makes the night sky much better to look at, more like a "starball" effect.

viewing panoramas on fulldome - simple technique

To make a panorama viewable on the fulldome, tried the following method as given at this page as a shortcut instead of going through Blender or buying commercial software. At the bottom of this page, the type of fulldome image we need is shown. Basic method is simple - make the pan into a square image by resizing, then convert to polar co-ords. In Photoshop it is Filter -> Distort -> Polar Co-ordinates and in the Gimp it is Filters -> Distorts -> Polar Co-ordinates. This produces a fulldome master which I can later distort with tgawarper for display on our dome.

When I tried it with a pan of the SSSIHMS, a hi-res version of this picture, found that it looks squished on the dome - need original to be more squarish? Also, building is too far above the horizon. Need more sky and less ground. So, probably the solution would be to take a pan with the interesting parts near the bottom edge of the pic, and clone the sky to make it square instead of distorting it by simply resizing.

download users as csv in Google Apps

CV had a problem downloading list of Google Apps users as CSV - the option was grayed out in the control panel.

This post seemed to have the solution:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=5a8c21e76144b065&hl=en

So, sign in, and then use the following url for the csv file:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/urdomain.com/DownloadUserData/UserData-urdomain.com-20110727.csv

where you must change the date 20110727 for the relevant date. We also have to remember that google servers use US time, so today is still 28 July for them and not 29 July.

Telugu stream playlist - Extended m3u to simple m3u

PB passed on the following info.

cat 26th_JULY.m3u | sed /^#/d | tr '\\' '\n' | tr '\r' '\n' | sed '/\(.mp3\)\|\(.MP3\)\|\(.Mp3\)/!d' | sed 's/^/\/home\/sgh\/audio\//' > 260711.playlist.telugu


sed /^#/d Remove the lines starting with #

tr '\\' '\n' The windows path backslash (\) is changed to line feed

tr '\r' '\n' The Carriage return is changed to line feed

sed '/\(.mp3\)\|\(.MP3\)\|\(.Mp3\)/!d' Remove the lines not having .mp3 or .MP3 or .Mp3

sed 's/^/\/home\/sgh\/audio\//' Add the path /home/sgh/audio at the beginning of each line.




Added tr '\r' '\n' on 26th July 2011.
The line used to end with both \r\n which made ices fail to start the playlist.

\r - Carriage Return - 0D in Hex
\n - Line feed - 0A in Hex

problem playing file from finder for live broadcast

There was some difficulty with using the technique I had used in April for playing an announcement file directly from Finder into the live broadcast. Going through the steps, found that the following sequence is required: First change system audio out to Jack device using Audio MIDI setup utility. Then the Jack setup file which I had created earlier can be loaded.

But in general, this is a bit risky - a better way to do announcement insertion would be to drag and drop the relevant files into the timeline on Reaper. This can be done even when Reaper is recording. The track into which the file is dropped should not be armed for recording - only then will the file play back if Reaper is recording on another track.

more ports on server

We wanted some more ports open on the server firewall, for future expansion if required. The service provider said they have opened the ports, but ShoutCast complained that it could not bind to those ports.

Did some troubleshooting by starting the server from the command line.

Found that the reason it gives for the other ports not to work is:
error opening client socket! FATAL ERROR! Some other process is using this port!

So it is not the service provider's fault.

When I test with telnet, I find (after stopping shoutcast)

telnet stream.radiosai.org 8021
Trying 66.249.27.181...
Connected to stream.radiosai.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 1500
GET / HTTP/1.1
fxÚ
ÍËÎË/ÏSHÎÏÍMÌKÑ5

Yesterday when I tested, ports 8023, 24 and 25 were also probably occupied by the other process. Today, those ports were open, and shoutcast could use those ports.

Using
Netstat -a -b -n -o > c:\netstatnames.txt

and searching for 8021 in that file,
found that the process is
G6FTPSERVER.EXE

So, requested that the Gene ftp be tweaked so that it uses only ports above 8100 for listening, like 8121 etc. That solved the issue.

procedure to change over to live broadcast

On stream.radiosai.org I have created services 8002, 8002live, 8020 and 8020live in addition to the services for the other streams. Batch files

c:\startlive.bat and c:\stoplive.bat do the work of

net stop 8002

sleep 5

net start 8002live

etc

(similarly for the 8020 stream, and similarly for stoplive)

Shortcuts on desktop for these bat files have been created. So, one minute before the live broadcast is to start, like 4.29 pm for the evening programme, just login with Remote Desktop and double-click on the respective icon.

To stop live, wait 70 seconds after the ending point - usually the Jaikar after Arati - and double-click the stoplive bat file. The BUTT has to be running during these 70 seconds too. This is because of buffering of the stream by the Shoutcast servers.

Edit: Initially we experimented with using Scheduled Tasks to automate the changeover, at least for the startlive which was a fixed time. But Scheduled Tasks don't run if the password is changed, and then we would also have issues when DST kicked in. So, decided manual change-over was better. And the next day the manual change-over came in useful when we had a long power outage at the Studio and could not change to live till 50 minutes into the morning session - recorded filler was played on air at that time.

importing SGH M CDs into local database

Found that only upto SGH M 244 has been imported into SGH database. PB reported that after shifting to the Dell servers, the script that imports the cd into the database failed as it had some gui components in it and not just command line. Checking the code, found the following and modified:

1. The script mount_cd.sh had a call to the binary message

which basically just displays a message to insert the cd. I have made this into an echo statement.

2. After that, main.sh had a call to the binary question

That also I turned into an echo statement.

3. Next, check_if_all_mp3.sh called the binary error

That also I changed to a simple echo statement. Then a call to question, which I turned to echo and read.

4. Next call to error and question come from main.sh which I again changed to echo and read.

5, Next came check_if_cd_entered.sh which had calls to error which I changed to echo.

6. Next, check_bc_entry.sh had a call to broadcastcenter, but it had already been commented out.

Importing worked after this.

colinux instabilities and D drive

There were some issues with our streams skipping files, and the problem seemed to be on the filesystem of stream.radiosai.org. Stopping the webserver on stream.radiosai.org which referenced files on the D drive seemed to solve the issue. PB did some research, and said the following:

Yes, the issue could be the windows file system size or its way of dealing with long file names. But the failure in reading might even be due to Colinux. Windows has never complained in sending the data to Colinux but CoLinux always complains in not able to read the data. The Colinux change log does mention about I/O errors.


Was going through this link on Working with File Systems which says:

If you use a large number of files in an NTFS folder (300,000 or more), disable short-file name generation, especially if the first six characters of the long file names are similar.

Every time you create a file with a long file name, NTFS creates a second file entry that has a similar 8.3 short file name. A file with an 8.3 short file name has a file name containing 1 to 8 characters and a file name extension containing 1 to 3 characters. The file name and file name extension are separated by a period.

If you have a large number of files (300,000 or more) in a folder, and the files have long file names with the same initial characters, the time required to create the files increases. The increase occurs because NTFS bases the short file name on the first six characters of the long file name. In folders with more than 300,000 files, the short file names start to conflict after NTFS uses all the 8.3 names that are similar to the long file names. Repeated conflicts between a generated short file name and existing short file names cause NTFS to regenerate the short file name from 6 to 8 times.

To reduce the time required to create files, use the fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 command to disable the creation of 8.3 short file names. (You must restart your computer for this setting to take effect.) For more information about disabling 8.3 short file names, see “MS-DOS-Readable File Names on NTFS Volumes” later in this chapter.

If you want NTFS to generate 8.3 names, improve performance by using a naming scheme in which long file names differ at the beginning of the name instead of at the end.

But again, disabling 8.3 filenames systemwide seemed a bit drastic, and could lead to other unexpected problems elsewhere. So, for now we have not done the disabling.

wifi radios for radiosai

Since WorldSpace broadcasting stopped, a lot of queries about ways to listen without a computer. Found that wifi radios are quite cheap in US and UK, but almost double the price in India.

This one, for eg. is around Rs. 4.5k in the UK while in India, the listings start from 10k. Other cheaper options in India other than mobile phones are products like this Asus box for around 6k. What you have to look for in products which allow you to listen to Internet radio stations is: do they allow you to enter custom stations - if yes, then you are safe. Otherwise, do they use the Reciva online database - if yes, then also it is safe, since Sai Global Harmony all streams are listed in Reciva. If the player uses a custom database and does not allow you to enter your own stations, then you may not be able to listen to SGH with such a player.

buffering on server

Was listening to radiosai on my mobile today with wifi for long periods while lying on bed, made the following interesting observations.

1. The changeover actually happened at around 6.32 as heard on the stream, but the shoutcast server went into the interruption music for more than ten minutes more, till the signature tune finally came, around 6.44. Meaning the stream is buffered by 14 minutes due to the two servers?

2. By afternoon, the delay was around 7 minutes - The dd which was supposed to get over at 2.41 was heard to end at 2.48. So somehow the buffering delay was reduced ?!

BSNL online directory enquiry

BSNL online directory enquiry has become centralized, has changed location and needs City to be entered. For Puttaparthi, City needs to be Penukonda. Not too intuitive!

adjustments for mirrordome

We had some minor adjustments done to improve the looks of our fulldome projection.

• Moving the mirror up by a few inches more now allows us to bring the horizon a bit lower in the front area of the tilted dome of the theatre.


• Moving the projector laterally left-right corrected the tilt in the reflected image, where earlier the left side of the reflected image was around a foot higher than the right side - for this, we moved the projector physically to the right.


• Moving the projector towards and away from the mirror, and adjusting the zoom setting allowed us to reduce the shadow area right above the mirror. Covering a larger area on the mirror makes the shadow smaller and vice-versa.


• Using the Bright mode instead of Custom mode in the projector, the colours are a bit better though the brightness levels are quite lower. This has to be further tuned.

couple of queries of email migration

Today, V had a question: if he deletes a group in Google Apps, will it take 5 days for him to create a user id with the same name. It turns out the answer is no.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=31213ea23239c903&hl=en

When you delete the group, you should be able to recreate a user of the same name immediately. The 5 day wait period only occurs when you delete a user and try to recreate a user of the same name. Deleting a group or email alias does not lock out that address for 5 days like it does when deleting a user.

Also, Google Apps seemed to have removed the online IMAP migration tool from within the Domain control panel. So the email migration has to be done using the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange utility .

Once you install it, the setup is like the screenshot for migration from gmail:



In case it asks you for changing the consumer key, you have to log in to google apps as webmaster and copy-paste the new key.

The users csv file should be of the form
user1@domain.in#user1password_of_domain.in, google_apps_user1

(Please note that the @google.apps.domain is not required for the second field.)

Unfortunately, this tool takes a lot of bandwidth, needs the computer to be on all the time it runs, and is much slower for gmail to gapps migrations than the online IMAP migration tool. A sample run is:

Info:Start local time is: 2011:06:01 13:56:12
Info:Migration start local time is: 2011:06:01 13:56:12
Start: Now migrating user=**********
Start: Migrating Email for store=**********
Start: Migrating 105 messages from Folder [Gmail]/All Mail for store=**********
In progress: Migrated 100 out of 105 messages from folder [Gmail]/All Mail for user.
Success: Migrated 105 messages from folder [Gmail]/All Mail for store=

snip....

Info:Migration end local time is: 2011:06:01 14:25:19
Info:End local time is: 2011:06:01 14:25:19

So it took half an hour for 100 mails.

upload problems persist

As noted at the end of this previous post, upload problems persist with sftp. When using GUI tools like filezilla and gftp, we can see that sometimes the server drops the connection, then the tool reconnects and resumes the upload. filezilla is much faster than gftp, but has support for key-based auth under Settings only in later versions which are not available for the particular OS on saiwaves. Runs OK on WinXP.

Sometimes, when using sftp and it stalls, if we kill the process, then the file at stream.radiosai.org becomes orphaned or something like that. If we delete the file, then also the file appears in ls. After a day or two it disappears on its own - probably when the process times out or something like that.

ftp disc quota full

There was some issue with uploading to sssorg3 ftp. Most probably it was due to over-quota.

Removed more than 5 GB of material, restarted vsftpd - now able to upload files to sssorg3.

setting up headless mac mini server

PB got a Mac Mini server for installing Apple Remote Desktop and remotely administering studio machines. But he did not get a monitor with it, and it had only HDMI and Apple mini display ports, along with HDMI to DVI-D. So, the plan was to use remote login to the server also.

Did initial installation using a borrowed Apple Cinema Display from the video studio, which had an Apple mini display port cable. Apparently Apple's "Allow Remote Management" opens up a vnc server. So, standard VNC clients can be used to connect. On Developer, installed tightvnc since it has the nice option of scaling Desktop to fit window.

Can log in with ssh or vnc. For vnc, two passwords - a vnc password, and then the user password on the server. The former similar to saiwaves, the latter similar to the router.

For using the Remote Desktop tool, I believe each client needs to have the Remote Management Enabled, under System Preferences -> Sharing.
http://www.ehow.com/how_7192487_enable-apple-remote-desktop.html

Later, registered some of the studio machines' Applecare Protection Plans: googling "Register Applecare Protection Plan" gets this registration page, where once you have an Apple Id, you only need the Applecare serial number, which is inside the product box, and the serial number of the hardware. For the Macs, this is under Apple menu -> About this Mac -> More info -> Serial number (Hardware).

Logmein possible conflict with RealPlayer

R had a funny problem - his video was not playing in full-screen mode any more. He said the only change to his system was to install Logmein. Anyway, he did a system restore to uninstall Logmein, and the full screen videos also got restored.

backups

Cleaned up the backup scripts on saiwaves and krishna, made them functional.

1. Corrected db pw on the script on krishna's cron
2. Corrected IP address on the script on saiwaves's cron
3. Added scp with -r option to copy over the krishna backups to saiwaves.

Krishna takes around 5 minutes to do the backup with gz option. Saiwaves takes around 20 seconds to do its backup. File copying takes around the same times. SI db backup file after gz is around 1 GB. Uncompressed sgh db is around 200 MB.

problems with disc full on web server

Media.radiosai.org (and other websites on fs1 ) web services stopped - on logging in with remote desktop, found D: was full. Emptying recycle bin got 1 GB freed. Wanted to free up more (by moving and archiving old log files) after a restart.

After initiating a restart, the machine did not cleanly restart even after 20 minutes. Checking, found it was pinging. Logged in to fs1 using Computer Management console from fs3 using Action -> Connect to another computer, found that some services were running, like file sharing, but some were not, like remote desktop, IIS and so on. Checked the Eventlog - there was an extra shutdown initiation, after I had initiated the shutdown:

4:34 - I initiated shutdown.
4:39 - The process svchost.exe has initiated a shutdown etc. No title for this reason could be found. Reason code 0x80070020

this was the last entry. So, I moved out some more log files from D: to make 4 GB free, then did
shutdown /r /m \\sea-fs1 /d 1:1
(as given at this technet article)

This time it worked, after restart things seem to be working.

some graphic card drivers allow custom resolutions

Changed the desktop resolution on Developer to match the native resolution of the Viewsonic 1937 which is 1440 x 900.

Since it was not listed, I went to NVidia Control Panel -> Change Resolution -> Customize and added this resolution.

remote desktops on the mac

Microsoft Remote Desktop client is directly available for Mac, installed it. Preferences are saved using the File -> Edit a Connection setting.

For tunnelled VNC, ssh provides multiple tunnels using the -L option, with the syntax
ssh -L 10000:localhost:8080 -L 10001:localhost:8081 name@hostname.com
where 10000 and 10001 are the local ports and 8080 and 8081 the ports on the remote machine.

Checking out VNC clients, Chicken of the VNC and Chicken are recommended by many, but did not work for me, probably because they don't support the tight option? Finally opted for using the browser based client, by going to
http://localhost:58xx for display xx. For this, ports 58xx and 59xx should both be tunnelled.

live broadcast from the Mac

CPU power is abundant on the Macbook Pro, so exploring ways of delivering live broadcast stream directly from the same machine being used for mixing. The Shoutcast DSP is available, but appears to need an input from a file - live streaming disabled? Streaming directly from Reaper is possible only on Windows, since it uses a dll file and there is no Mac port. Then found this thread of posts about BUTT (Broadcast Using This Tool) and Soundflower.

In my initial trials, I was not able to get the hang of it, how exactly to use Soundflower to route the audio to both the US-1641 hardware outs as well as the virtual out to BUTT. Trying to create an Aggregate Device as suggested in Applications -> Utilities -> Audio Midi Setup.app - found that the US-1641 cannot be aggregated with other devices due to latency and driver issues. Thought about putting a physical cable from one of the Tascam US-1641 outputs to the built-in input of the Mac, and then googled virtual cable mac audio to come across Jack OS X.

With Jack's virtual inserts, I don't even need to use up an extra physical output. Jack is configured with 16 in and 4 out, mapped to the physical interfaces on the US-1641. Reaper uses the Jack Router as audio device, everything comes in automatically in the correct tracks. Had to restart Reaper once when it was first set up, that's all. Unmapped the physical inputs from BUTT's virtual inputs so that it receives only from the Insert from Reaper.

Edit: Just some caveats:

1. Tascam US-1641 control panel needs to have inputs 3-4 made digital outs manually every time after booting.
2. Order of startup is important. JackPilot - Jack - Butt - Reaper - Routing window - Load Saved routing setup is the order that seems to work fine.

uploads problems hopefully solved now

My previous post about a checklist to solve the upload problems was just a stab in the dark. And turns out it did not work - even when there was no network traffic, uploads would stall and stop. Then I thought there might be some problem with DHCP server assigning IPs which are supposed to be static to random machines. Checked out the DHCP pool, that was all right.

Then, Googling found this post about MTUs. Did sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0 mtu 1490 on our local machine. Trying an upload, still the same problem. Then tried setting mtu on Colinux with ifconfig eth0 mtu 1490 and that seemed to help Colinux.

This page has a ping test, for seeing what MTU you need, and for the Windows machine, even ping krishna.radiosai.org -f -l 1480

gave fragmentation - so thought 1400 would be a safe number.

But the Windows machine needed a reboot after setting MTU - set with regedit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/900926 for finding which id is which network adapter, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314053 After doing this, and the reboot, made the changes on Colinux permanent by adding mtu 1400 to /etc/network/interfaces for eth0. And now things seem to be fine, with 2 minute uploads for 10 MB files.

This page has more about the possible reason for this: Path MTU discovery defeated by ICMP packet blocking, and fragmentation also being not allowed.

Edit: Unfortunately the problem persists. So, have to think about other solutions.

using google transliterate for Hindi when not installed

Got copy-paste to work even on a machine where 'complex fonts' were not installed, using the tips given at this forum post:

This is happenning because applications such as "Google Indic Transliteration" use hindi font mangal. Though windows xp comes preinstalled with Mangal Hindi font, one need to ENABLE Hindi (asian layout) support through Control Panel to able to edit documents in Unicode Hindi font like Mangal. Legacy Hindi fonts like Krutidev do not need this configuration.

Editing a word doc using mangal font won't be possible until asian language support is configured.

You can overcome this problem through one of the following way:

1. Use WORDPAD instead of MS WORD.

2. copy hindi text from "Google Indic Transliteration" and paste it on the word doc now change the font of pasted text to "Arial Unicode MS" if you have one installed.

3. install indic from XP Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages (including thai). For editing you need to goto Details... and add Hindi (or other indian language) keyboard layout.

adding a domain to phplist

Added the top-level domain mobi to phplist as given at this post, in the admin/commonlib/lib/userlib.php file.

bounce processing cleanup

Once again, bounce processing had stopped on phplist. My hunch is that this happens due to mails sent at times when bounce processing is supposed to take place - if the processing fails during the batch, then the next time the spool file is left in a way that processing fails again. So, as usual, the mitigation is to do the following as root:

rm /var/mail/the_relevant_spool_file touch /var/mail/the_relevant_spool_file
chown the_relevant_account:mail /var/mail/the_relevant_spool_file
chmod 660 /var/mail/the_relevant_spool_file

Once this is done, bounces are processed - if checking is necessary, can run the commandline process if a cron scheduled bounce process is at least half an hour away.

google multiple sign-in

Finally enabled multiple sign-in for my gmail account, so I can now blog in Firefox instead of shifting to IE as before. But as of now it works with these services only:

Code

Calendar

Finance

Gmail

Profiles

Reader

Sites

Voice

Docs (Google Apps accounts only)

So turned it off again, since blogger and groups are not supported, and it disables offline gmail.

small gotcha with blogger's compose mode

I had noted this before, but not documented it - copy-paste into the compose window does not work with (at least my installation of) IE8. Copy-paste only works into the Edit HTML section, but that strips out all links. So, for copy-pasting long posts with links like this one, I used Firefox. Why do I not use Firefox all the time for blogger? Because I have multiple google accounts for different blogs, and as of it seems easier to open one in a different browser than go through google's hoops for multiple login (if at all it is possible).

Logic gotchas and finally Reaper to the rescue!

The Studio got a Macbook Pro for Mandir recordings along with Logic Express for multi-tracking. According to the Wikipedia, the only differences for me between Logic Pro and Logic Express are the lack of 5.1 mastering and extra content - so Logic Pro is not required for my use. Anyway, when I tried to use it with the Tascam US-1641 and the Korg NanoKontrol and chronicled my adventures.

Initially when I created multiple inputs and tried to record-enable (arm) only one of them, all of them were being armed! This turned out to be a problem with the control mapping (I think) where the control was set to "arm selected track" instead of "arm track 1", and by creating multiple tracks simultaneously Logic had also selected all the tracks. Later, using the Deselect all menu item, this was resolved.

One of the most important things was a control room mix - doing an AFL (After-Fade Listen). Googling gave this google books link which confirmed my hunch that the only way to do an independent AFL would be to make sends to duplicate tracks (Buses in Logic) which are routed to a different output and mute those buses which I don't want to listen to. All right, I did that.

Then, the mapping of the NanoKontrol buttons and faders. Logic too has a "Learn Mode", but it is somewhat less user-friendly than the Reaper one, at least in my opinion. Click Learn Mode (it is difficult to see if it is enabled or not - this is a general problem with the MacOS buttons) and move a fader or button, then click on the onscreen control you wish it to be mapped to. Logic does the mapping without any success dialog box, and silently waits for the next fader or button. This caused some initial confusion till I got the hang of it. Also, Logic goes the route of allowing multiple actions per button press (or fader move) on the control surface, instead of Reaper's more elegant 'Actions'. So, for my requirement of muting 13 (out of 14) Aux Buses for AFL of one channel, I needed to map that button 13 times to 13 channel mutes. Makes a big mess on the MIDI mapping page. But at least it works.

Then another small gotcha - Logic by default trims any send to -inf dB! Tried buses, couldn't hear any output, till I figured out that the sends needed to be manually set to 0 dB or whatever using the dinky rotary control next to the send!

More Reaper features which I missed were: no customization of filenames of recorded files, un-intuitive LED graphs where -20 dB shows up as only a sliver of light! and far less complete realtime updating of recorded track. Also, probably it does not have the ability to add markers directly to the recorded wav file as in Reaper, though I did not test for this.

Then came the slow realization of the vital missing feature - without which Logic would be almost useless for me - cannot enable or disable EQ, effects etc on the fly onscreen while a recording is going on! (except maybe with mapped MIDI commands). So I went on a lookup and saw this DAW comparison wikipedia page, which mentions that Reaper has a MacOS version. Immediately downloaded, so now I can put my license in it due to Reaper's generous license terms,

Your license allows you to use REAPER on one computer at a time. Multiple REAPER installs for use by the same person are fine (home/studio/laptop, Win32/x64/OSX).

and get going.

sharing files between Windows7 and XP

N got a Lenovo with Windows 7 pre-loaded. S wanted to be able to share files between his Windows XP machine and this one. I googled and found this technet forum link which basically says these steps:

1. Make sure both are in the same Workgroup


2. Verify in Advanced Sharing settings on Win7 that Network Discovery, File and Printer Sharing, and Public Folder Sharing are all set to “on” and Password Protected Sharing is set to “off”.


3. Right-click and share a folder.


4. Right-click and change security settings on the folder, to allow Everyone access. Type Everyone in the Security box and click the Add button, giving appropriate read write permissions.


5. Make firewall changes if required, not applicable for us.

Using that, I made an entire drive (I:) on the win7 pc shared, and visible from the xp machine. But that share does not allow writing, for some reason. But other folder shares we made allow write from the XP machine. So, probably we can share folders but not entire drives in Win7.

I think it also requires identical usernames and passwords. Since my account on both machines is exactly the same, I am not asked for a pw when I use my account. But with the admin account, it asks me for username & password. When I give the Win7 administrator username and password (Both Case sensitive!) then it allowed read and write. Probably it might have worked with any other credentials on the Win7 machine too, since Everyone had permissions on that folder.

upload issues with the new internet connection

Sometimes, the upload script was timing out. My hunch was that this was during times when there was intense network activity from others on the network - mostly http uploads. So this was my checklist to mitigate:

1. Check if the router lights are blinking madly. If not, then you have no problem, you can upload.
2. One more check may be to check in cyberoam if traffic has been dropped in the IDS - in the dashboard. If yes, you could restart management services. (If traffic is being dropped, DNS may fail and you may not be able to connect to outside servers.)
   
3. If lights blinking madly, you can put the 512 kbps speed limit for http in cyberoam. For this, the procedure is as follows.
   (a) In cyberoam, go to Firewall -> Manage Firewall -> LAN to WAN
   (b) There you have to edit rules 1 and 2 - both of them are duplicates. You need to go to bandwidth policy and choose 512 kbps and save changes.
   
   This will limit outgoing traffic to 512 kbps, so incoming ssh will not be timed out.

This checklist is yet to be tested, but I hope this will solve the issue.

adventures with PING

A guest post from S:

The task I wanted to accomplish : Increase the space in C:\ partition (primary) by shrinking other partitions. I had D & E as Logical partitions. Cleared E to make it empty. It was a 60 GB ATA HDD. C was 12 GB, D & E sharing the rest in an extended partition.
I had :
a. PING 3.0 CD for backup. (I had used it earlier to restore primary partitions to identical machines/partitions with success. )
b. Lucid Puppy Live CD for useful tools like Gparted, Batch Renamer etc.
c. Ultimate Boot CD, just in case required.

Backed up C & D using ping to ping-images named PingC and PingD, just in case required. This would come in handy as things went wrong. During backup, C was seen by Ping as hda1 and D was seen as hda5. The backup image folders were written to USB External HDD.

Booted with Puppy for Gparted. It so happened, E being empty, wasn't reason enough for C to expand. Deleted D, thinking I would be able to restore later. C had all the space it needed to expand, yet it didn't. (??)
Deleted C, too and re-did the partitioning, thinking backups were handy anyway. Turned out, I would run into restoration problems.

Tried to restore C, from the image, to the now expanded C partition. Hmm, it failed. Apparently, as noted here, resizing of the partitions may be a problem ?

Firstly, PING would ask "where your images are stored" (the source of restoration), but at no point, it would ask "where do you want to restore to" (destination for restore). I had noticed this in my earlier experiences with PING, but in those case, didn't bother and it still worked because the backup and restoration environs were identical in size, order of partitions and hardware. This time I had re-done the partitioning. This problem has been noted by other PING users in forums, and I guess, by default, PING attempts to restore to the identical partition which you backed up from. This was noted at one of the forum posts, but not in PING's documentation.

Secondly, towards the last step ( just when you expect it to kick off the restoration), PING would ask something like "We found additional space in the partition you are trying to restore. Do you want us to extend the partition for you after restoration ? " . This problem too has been noted by other users. Here, either way you are caught, because I had tried both in different attempts (every time clearing up and redoing the partitioning). Either way it failed saying "Partitioning failed. May be, you have to do it yourself". If you didn't have a backup, the strange behaviour here can sometimes lead to catastrophic results, like here. btw, PING's errors and notifications are strange, they are in first person/second person in conversational lang (Some exasperation on this, here) . Like, after identifying drives, it would say "So, everybody is here". :) :)

Thirdly, during one of my many attempts with various combinations of answers to PING's questions, it "accidentally" restored the C partition successfully. This problem is also noted by a PING user in the forum. If you press the Cancel Button at one point in time, it would go ahead and kick off the restoration and finish it. (Natan acknowledges in the forum post that all is not well with the Cancel button behaviour).

However, after the above restoration, Gparted showed weird partition info. It showed the entire drive as unallocated. Pmount (in Puppy) failed to mount the partition giving an error. But Windows booted, hahaha. But it showed only C parition at 12 GB. I had had some Program Files in D, because C had run out of space. Since D hadn't been restored, I had a strange situation like IE works but Firefox doesn't, KM Player works but VLC doesn't and so on, because those other software were installed in D.

Windows XP's Disk Manager had even weird things to show. It showed drives as huge as 800GB with unallocated free space (where did she get that) and also a 23 GB unallocated space and another 230 GB unallocated space. When I tried Windows to create partitions in unalloacted free space, it failed. This problem of weird partitions sizes after a PING restoration attempt is also noted by other users in the forum. ( Can't dig the link now, don't remember).

In other attempts, I also tried PartImage from the UBCD to do the restorations. (PING is built around PartImage, I guess). That too failed.

In the meanwhile, my room-mate [Edit: me :)] suggested, 'Can't you mount D's ping image and copy files from there and worry only about C's restoration'.
Part of this suggestion would come in handy. Looked up on ways to mount a PING image. Unfortunately, this is not possible with PING, but while confirming this, Natan had suggested in an earlier forum post, that you could restore it to some other partition/machine and copy files from there.

Finally, after many rounds of trial, with every time re-partitioning from scratch, and I was about to give up, I bumped into the forum post, where Natan had suggested a solution for a similar situation of problems with restoring extended partitions. I took a clue from there and did the following.

Restoring only D :

1. In the PingD image folder, renamed hda5.001 to hda1.001, hda5.002 to hda1.002 and so on for all the zip files. Effectively, fooling PING as if it was an image of C.
2. Deleted the "hda" file created by PING.
3. Created a blank text file, called hda.
4. Deleted the "hda5-first sectors.txt" file created by PING.
5. Re-did the partition table, to create one big 55GB primary partition.
6. Tried now to restore PingD to hda1 as identified by PING. Strange, isn't it, since it is the D partition files that are getting restored to the primary partition.
7. When asked "whether you want PING to extend the additional space", say Yes.
8. PING completes restoration.
9. Boot with Puppy, mounted the partition and saw the D files in it.
10. Remembered my room-mate's suggestion and copied the D-partition files from HDD to USB External hard disk.

Restoring only C :

1. Deleted partitions, Re-did the partitioning, to create one big 55 GB primary partition.
2. In the PingC image folder, Deleted the "hda" file created by PING.
3. Created a blank text file, called hda.
4. Deleted the "hda5-first sectors.txt" file created by PING. (Strange, but it worked only after I did this deletion and creation of blank stuff).
5. Restored C successfuly, similar to steps 6 to 9 above.

Back to Puppy, Gparted showed a good C partition, was mountable.
Used Gparted to shrink C. Created the Extended partition, Logical partition and so on for D & E.
Copied the D-partition files from the USB external disk, including Program Files.

Windows XP now booted neatly. I now had enough space to provide for hibernation, additional space for the page file and 15% space for defragmentation.

At the end of two nights, all is well that ends well.

In retrospect, it's quite possible, some of these steps are silly and illogical and there are better simpler ways to do these things or to find the answers earlier on. Whatever, allow some crazy stuff for a novice like me in the open-source world. Also, there must be more sophisticated ways to do this from scratch from the Shell command prompt, as noted by Natan here.

Don't ask me whether I could have reinstalled Windows XP on Day 1. Haha, I could have. Had it ready, but I wanted to book something to adventurous exploration :) and open source problem-solving. Also, I had always relied on PING, it can't fail me now, so I have to find ways to make it work. :) :) It's a very useful piece of software and I love it. :)

speed tests

The new network is supposed to be 10 Mbps 1:1. The main requirement for this sort of speed would be uploads. Checking out Vimeo upload speed, got 0.27 MB/sec which is around 3 Mbps. 108 MB in around 8 minutes. Probably speed limited by vimeo server, I suppose.

In case vimeo upload is slower in the Studio, that will probably be due to filtering being done by cyberoam. We can disable cyberoam filtering for a particular user or machine to make it faster for vimeo uploads, or connect a machine directly to the public-ip subnet on the DLink.

After doing the speed tests, there was a false alarm when I found ftp transfer to my machine was going at only 25 Mbps when connected through a 100 Mbps link after the router. Later concluded that this was because of wifi being used at the last hop. Removed the wifi and connected by wired LAN and the transfer became 75 Mbps, no problems.

configuring the DFL-210 router without NAT

The studio got a bunch of IP addresses on a different subnet and a single IP address to connect to the ISP. Using the old DLink DFL-210 router to do the routing, steps to get it working were:

1. remove the firewall rules mentioning NAT.


2. add a single firewall rule with all services allow as below.





3. Add appropriate IP addresses at the LAN and WAN end in the 'address book'.


4. Routing is already enabled as below by default, so nothing else needs to be done.

(This means that all packets meant for ip addresses in lannet should go to the lan interface, all packets meant for the outside world - all-nets - should go to the wan interface and so on.) Even though "all services" are enabled, the router is intelligent enough not to allow access to its control panel from WAN port - accessing it gives an error 403.

ssh in from macbook pro to saiwaves and others

First I tried the default method given in my earlier post. The thing to remember is, how to navigate to hidden folders in Finder - use the Go Menu -> Go to Folder (Command+Shift+G)

Tried by copying the contents of the id_rsa.pub from a Windows machine into the ssh terminal there, to the authorized_keys file. Did not succeed. Permission denied (publickey)

Thought it might be some permissions problem, tried changing

chmod 755 .ssh - still no go. So changed it back to 700.

Some posts suggest using DSA instead of RSA on OS X. "Don't use RSA"! So, tried with DSA as given here, using ssh-keygen -d instead of ssh-keygen -t rsa and also not copy-pasting the key from Windows or Mac but instead doing a cat id_dsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys2 - this time it worked immediately.

migrating google sites to google apps

Googling showed that the procedure for migrating google sites from one account to another is given at this blog post. It has to be done by the "owner" of the site.

1. Share the site as owner with the new GApps account.


2. Log in with the new account, and after clicking on the notification email to go to the site, go to More Actions -> Manage Site -> General -> Copy this site.

lots of interesting online apps

A had sent me a link to a large collection of online apps from techsupportalert,
www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-online-applications-and-services.htm

I've not yet tested all of them, but I created a pan online with www.dermandar.com here.

Also tried out a one-page OCR with www.onlineocr.net - that also worked nicely.