site outage

Our web-hosting provider had a looong outage - "corruption in Plesk and SQL server". Finally they reset and reloaded the server with backups circa Dec 2006! Last night uploaded newer files when ftp access was finally restored. This morning, set MX and other DNS records and set pls MIME type (without which IIS returns 404 for pls files!). Now we have to wait for the day-long DNS TTL for the changes to propagate. Email, other sites etc all affected...

Fujitsu Stylistic LT Tablet PC

Trying out the old Fujitsu Stylistic LT Tablet PC lying around at PDS. Unfortunately, either HDD or HDD controller is bad, so it freezes at random and sometimes doesn't boot. Win98 without generic drivers for USB mass storage - at least, it didn't recognize a 32 MB USB mem key I put in. Couldn't get the IR wireless keyboard to work either - probably because the AAA cells were dead. Won't spend any more time on it since frequent random freezing is just too aggravating.

spikes in traffic on festival days

Taking a look at Google Analytics graphs for saicast, spikes are seen for the Ati Rudra Maha Yagnam's Poornahuti, Birthday and Shivarathri. So, maybe we should put content on the site so that on festival days people can see previous years' festivals on the home page?

Wikipedia SOS CD - finally made for Sony Reader

As mentioned in my previous post, things are not so easy since the Sony Reader doesn't understand html, and also doesn't follow links to external files. Final solution chosen was HTML2LRF, with each alphabet as a separate file. Each article then gets listed in the Table of Contents of that file.

Nitty-gritty of making the files:
1. cd L:\wpcd\wp\b
2. dir /B > l:\direct.txt.html
3. Open direct.txt.html in Mozilla and copy / paste to wordpad - this removes the carriage-returns.
4. Find/Replace .htm with .htm l:\wpcd\wp\b\
5. Copy / Paste into command prompt which is already in the bin directory of HTML2RTF (otherwise doesn't work) with the suitable -o -t and so on.

Finally uploading to esnips public folder - http://esnips.com/web/Wikipedialrf

And as a single zip file with at badongo.com
Edit: The single zip file no longer available there, will post a new link if and when I get hold of the original file.

First Generation Airport Base station (Graphite) with Windows

As noted in my earlier post the Airport Base station needs a Mac for configuration. Even after that, tho it is set up to do DHCP, it doesn't give IP addresses to a WinXp client. May be a bug with this particular Base Station. Anyway, manually giving an ip in the client works well enough. Range, when Airport is in PDS server room, covering both studios and reaching nearly, but not quite, to front of R1.

spam from our forms

Preventing spam from our forms - validating all fields which go into the headers, removing \n and \r as suggested in http://www.twologs.com/en/services/test/spamrelay.asp
and then testing with http://www.twologs.com/en/services/test/formtest.asp

Airport 4.2 for Windows

Airport 4.2 for Windows doesn't seem to work with the old (graphite?) Airport Base Station. After resetting the base station, ping to 192.42.249.13 works, but the admin utility doesn't recognize the base station. Using the "Other" button and giving the ip + pwd => An error occurred... Error Code -6753

Edit: Apple's site says Airport Admin Utility 3.2 for Windows "does not work with the original AirPort Base Station (Graphite)."

and also confirmed by a compatibility chart.

Will try with the Mac @studio.

where does all the time go?

08.40 Seeing if there are urgent emails
08.50 Finding 2 tonne AC gone bad, starting CDs import
09.30 SGHM0156 has already been entered.
09.35 realized I don't need to import to db, since my db is out of date
09.40 directly deleting the "sent" files checking CDs.
10.10 shutdown - power failure at 10.
10.12 power returned, restarting everything.
10.25 finished deleting. Checking leftover files in "sent" folder...
10.35 found most of them in SGHM0149 in db
10.36 clearing some space in audio directory - no - all Telugu already deleted.
10.38 checking if all streams are on schedule - yes
10.45 checking the complaint about out of schedule stream
10.51 found it to be outdated. Finishing subscription mails.
11.00 adding "maxlength" to all fields in Subscribe.htm and Feedback.htm
11.50 lunch
12.30 googling form injection email spam asp code - TB says he'll try for an hour.
13.00 2 Telugu prg normalize
13.15 uploading them to playout servers from krishna
13.25 updating Description and annlink on saiwaves after importing to db
13.50 AC - condenser change may solve fan problem
13.50 address book additions to google address book
14.10 Cover story of H2h new issue
14.30 To Mandir for recording after tea.
18.00 @ studio installing XP Volume Licence key edition on Acer Laptop
18.30 Microsoft's key change tool does not work with Volume Licenses.
18.45 Running an "upgrade" install over existing install to get the VLKey in place.
19.45 searching for wifi driver on driverguide.com etc, not found
19.50 Acer's ftp site not responding
20.00 Installed wifi driver from Acer CD, trying to connect with Airport base station
21.00 Installed Airport for Windows from Apple site.
22.50 Various ip address/pw combos not working to configure Airport, will try tomorrow.

downloading windows media stream

I'd done this a long time back, just verified that it worked with the "latest" site too - using Ethereal, got the rtsp url, fed it to Net Transport.

update on X forwarding with Putty

Update to my previous post. Now the X forwarding jumping over two hosts is working, when I changed the "Remote X auth protocol" in Putty from XDM to MIT Magic Cookie.

miscellaneous

Various miscellaneous jobs.

1. Processing Moments of Oneness - 8 episodes in one hour.

2. Installed Skype, Xming (X server) and Yahoo messenger on Windows because now onwards most of my time I'll be doing audio work. Installing Skype with the default options in the installer works ok, but changing the install folder to a different drive, for example, was causing skype to crash. Another problem is that saiwaves X apps don't work on Windows. Incorrect X authentication, it seems.

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
annlink: Fatal IO error: client killed

3. Writing backup CDs of various stuff and removing from HDD - wmv, SW, audio, etc.

4. AfriStar had some playout skipping at 0515 GMT - wonder why. BOC operators report some restarts over the last 2-3 days, too. 0530 changeover seemed to have solved the problem. Later, didn't connect - as suspected, the DHCP had changed the IP, waited for the next dns update at changeip.com, and two minutes later, connected as usual.

5. Strange problem with Cool Edit Pro on saispace2 similar to earlier problem on dharma - saving wav files with some sort of header info so that the file appears to be a RIFF file to SF. Saving as au files as a workaround. Solution was to toggle on and off the setting Options -> Settings -> Data -> Auto-convert all data to 32-bit on opening restarting Cool Edit Pro after the change. Also changed Multitrack premixes at Options -> Settings -> Multitrack to 16-bit Premixes

ssh problem resolved

I'd been unable to log into another account with ssh on krishna, using the method I'd mentioned before, RSA Auth. The problem was with directory permissions on the .ssh directory in that user's home directory - needs to be 700 - 600 is not enough. Changed, now it works.

Huawei SmartAX MT882 ADSL Router

Configuring the Huawei SmartAX MT882 ADSL Router is very similar to the earlier configuration steps I'd written for the MT 841 earlier. Until PPP is clicked in the WAN settings, the username/password boxes don't appear.

Flying Air Deccan

I've got some more posts backlogged. Will catch up in due course. Meanwhile, here's a howto on flying sans frills.

Check on their website and/or call-centre to verify that flight is on time, just before going to the airport. Go to the airport to arrive an hour before the flight. Check-in begins upto 2 hours before the flight, but since we're talking of a 70 seater ATR 72, the crowd is not much, and one can afford to be casual.

Walk into the departures lounge. The security guard may want to see your ticket since visitors are not allowed inside. Then he'll wave you through. If the check-in time has begun - can be seen from the flight status notice boards too - you can go to the Air Deccan counter and show your ticket to be issued the boarding pass. You'll need to check in extra luggage for baggage handling now. "Photo identification" is required now, but just a formality - xerox of PAN card etc should be fine. Probably won't even ask you. Even the CISF people for the security check were quite relaxed and smiling. Due to the small number of passengers, maybe.

Air Deccan ground staff seemed to take being on time seriously - they probably want to retain their statistics lead or whatever - so they were in quite a hurry to make up for the ten minutes delayed arrival of the flight. Walk out to the aircraft waiting just outside the terminus... or take a bus there if your airport is bigger.

Free seating - I've heard of people "rushing for seats" and so on, but none of that on this flight, since it was only half full. Leg room is of city bus variety, just like on Indian Airlines A320 last year, but the seats here recline only 2 inches. Anyway, it's only an hour in the plane, so it's all right. After all, can't expect to recline in a no-frills airline. No free food either, of course - not even toffees. The noise level inside was lower than the Airbus - the turbo-props are quieter. And the ride was quite smooth - no different from a large jet - may be different in bad weather, I suppose. But overall, the experience is OK for an hour's commute.

The air-hostesses came up with coffee for Rs. 20 and sandwiches for Rs. 40 and so on. Cookies for Rs. 10 were the hot items which "ran out" by the time they were half-way up the aisle. And the comments about air hostesses on Indian Airlines being more human than the rest are probably right - these ones, maybe because they were young and nervous, were finding it difficult to smile. And totally stumped by my question, "Is this a Dornier or an Avro?" (It was an ATR, of course). The Indian Airlines lady was quite confident of her reply, "26,000 feet" or something like that, for my question last year on how high we were flying.

Touchdown, walk out if you have no baggage to claim. At Bangalore airport, penny-pinching travellers like me can just walk out of the Airport, 10 minutes of brisk walking gets you to the bus stop where there are buses to the city centre ("Majestic") every 10 minutes or so.

An interesting footnote. In the plane, the airhostesses were hawking some wares, passing on some coupons which the passengers tick for buying some items. In the APSTRC bus, later, an enterprising pair of guys were carrying out an auction of various cloth material, shawls and so on, with free gifts of combs and so on to anyone who participates in the auction. I suspect the latter had more sales volumes.

war stories of migration

1. PB added a module to SGH.mdb named "ImportCSV"... it had a line "Am*.csv" - unfortunately this was somehow matching with not only AmerStream.csv, but also AsiaStream.csv and AfriStream.csv! This was causing AmeriStream schedule to have 114 items instead of 38, for example. Changing it to Amer*.csv solved the issue!

2. maillist and shoutstats have issues with PHP5. shoutstats updated to new version 0.8.4, solved issue of not displaying multiple servers. automailer.php is currently not taking the args supplied as a GET request. Current workaround is to supply the date by hard-coding in the php file by find-replace!

3. afristream dies when ameristream or asiastream changes playlist. Don't know why, current workaround is to run auto_africa.sh just after the changeover.

4. saiwaves audio directory has only 2 GB left. So, currently krishna's audio directory (which has 24 kbps files) is mounted with smbmount on saiwaves

5. radiosai.asp has some code-changes to reflect the three change-over times instead of a hard-coded single change-over time. The date calculation for the page displayed when visited for the first time has to be fine-tuned - if cookie exists, must take appropriate changeover time instead of the hard-coded one to calculate date.

6. running main_ftp.sh etc on saiwaves - not working initially, since SEQUENCES were not existing. PB manually created them with psql:

CREATE SEQUENCE file_id_fileid_seq  START 16279;

and so on.

certificate renewal

Got an email The certificate for localhost.oT5171 will expire in 27 days

Ran the latter prg as per email's recommendation

The certificate needs to be renewed; this can be done using the '/usr/bin/openssl' or the '/usr/lib/ssl/apache-mod_ssl/gentestcrt.sh' programs supplied with Mandrakelinux.

Hope it worked, tho probably something more than just running that script is required.... like maybe copying and pasting the generated cert and so on.

Edit: Probably the last few lines of the tutorial here: http://www.unix-tutorials.com/go.php?id=472

Edit:
Was quite simple - the mail said that the file /etc/ssl/apache/server.crt was causing the error.

Ran '/usr/lib/ssl/apache-mod_ssl/gentestcrt.sh'

This generated server.crt and server.key in pwd

mv server.crt /etc/ssl/apache/server.crt
mv server.key /etc/ssl/apache/server.key

service httpd restart

Adding a new broadcast centre

1. Added code to scripts/playlist_import.sh copy-pasting from orig code for other centres.

2. Created sub-folder in playlist folder, like
/home/sgh/playlist/ASIASTREAM


3. Created entry in broadcast_centers tables in sgh pgsql database.

That's it!

Then, of course, other things have to be updated - like the schedule page and playlist email subscription page on the website.

And then the php scripts for generating the csv files and automatically emailing the schedules. Ah! That's where the sphagetti code resides!

Mandir microphones

There are the products I believe are currently used in Mandir:

Swami's mic - ATM Gooseneck Model 857 - AT857QMLa

And most important, the Wind Shield (pop filter) for Swami's mic is the High Performance one from Shure - A99WS Microphone Windscreen.

The mic used at the Indoor Stadium was tied to the edge of the glass teapoy like structure used as Swami's podium - the Shure EasyFlex mics 18 inches.

Shoutcast server quirks

One of the methods suggested for starting Shoutcast server(s) automatically on Windows is to create a "Scheduled Task". But as far as my experiments go, this works only if
1. you have auto-login enabled
2. you are starting only one instance of shoutcast.

If not, then srvany is the way to go.

And another thing is the way Shoutcast handles "Backup file". It will play a looped file for currently connected listeners if the source drops connection. But:
1. the path to the file should not have spaces, you can't put quotes in the ini file either
2. a source must connect and then disconnect for this functionality to work.
3. the source cannot be a relay - it has to be a conventional source, and this shoutcast server must not be configured as a relay. the server can be a relay also - but....
4. new listeners will only get "Service Unavailable" - only those who connected before the source disconnected will get the loop.
5. enabling intro files does not modify this behaviour - new listeners will still get "Service Unavailable" if the source disconnects.

creating our own services in Windows

The method of using srvany to create our own services: with download link from here. But Microsoft site says this doesn't work for batch files. But the included srvany.wri file says

OPTIONAL: under the above key, create an 'AppParameters' value of type REG_SZ and specify the parameters for your app.

So that should solve our problem. It says on installing a service,

Make sure that you go into the Control Panel and use the Services applet to change the Account Name and Password that this newly installed service will use for its Security Context.

Default being Local System account. The default seems to be OK for us. But in the procedure given, one inconsistency found by trial and error: It does not matter if the filename given in 'Application' value has spaces in the path, no quotes are required. But if the 'AppParameters' has a path with spaces, it needs to be enclosed in quotes. AppDirectory behaves similarly, and also requires that it should NOT end with a \ - so, our value in AppDirectory should be "C:\Program Files\Shoutcast" - not "C:\Program Files\Shoutcast\".