more on typing in Hindi on Mac

In August, I'd passed on the following info to A, when he wanted an alternative to copy-pasting Hindi text from google transliterate for use in Google Docs and other apps:

Looking further for typing Devanagari on Mac, found this discussion,

Accordingly, there seems to be phonetic Hindi typing built-in on the Mac. It says,

activate the Devanagari Qwerty keyboard in system prefs/international/input menu and then select it in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder and type away.

The Mac Devanagari Qwerty keyboard is similar to the transliterate, but a little different, as described at this link.

To generate default conjuncts, type the first character followed by the Halant (also called Virama) key, then the next character. To generate explicit half-forms for alternative conjuncts, or independent half-forms, type the character followed by the Halant key and the Nukta key. To generate an "eyelash RA," type RA plus Nukta plus Halant. To generate a Nukta consonant, type the character plus Nukta. To prevent conjuncts, type two Halants.

Note that the Halant/Virama key is the D key on Devanagari keyboards and the F key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards. The Nukta key is the ] key on Devanagari keyboards and the Shift-F key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards. RA is the J key on Devanagari keyboards and the R key on Devanagari-QWERTY keyboards.

A tried it out, and used the "Show Keyboard layout" option to actually see all the keys. Pressing modifier keys like Alt, Command, Control and Shift and also combinations like Shift-Command etc are used for some of the letters. A bit more clunky than google transliterate, but more reproducible and accurate.

Later, A had a problem - the documents he produces in this manner were not compatible with CorelDraw which was being used by Ag on a Windows machine. So, A has to type on iLeap on a Windows machine for Ag's use. The issue seemed to be that of Unicode versus ISCII encoding. So I told hime the following:

The type of font used by google transliterate (and typing with Mac Hindi Qwerty keyboard selection) is called Unicode.

The type of font used by ileap and Coreldraw etc is called Type 1 font, or 8 bit Ascii font, or in the case of Indian letters, ISCII.

What you need is conversion of unicode to type 1 for Hindi fonts.

Such a tool seems to be available at this link where if you scroll down, you find a tool called Unidev which seems to do this Unicode to Ascii conversion. There also seems to be this php code, which could possibly be used to do something like the same conversion. There is also a quick and dirty fix, which probably may not work correctly for Hindi, which is suggested here, simply to use, in the Windows command prompt,
type unicode-file-name > ASCII-text-file-name

live video streaming options

Looking for options for streaming live video for more concurrent viewers than currently supported by our single dedicated server, found a nice guide to setting up wowza on AWS at
http://churchm.ag/how-to-build-a-live-stream-for-online-church-on-the-cheap/   Google Hangouts on Air had the problem that it did not work with firewire video inputs on MacOS.   We don't have Youtube live streaming partner status yet.   P wanted a way in which we could push the stream to our server using multiple connections for fail-safe operation. Did not find any such option which would work with our Wowza server.   Other options:

1. Hire from utream.tv
https://www.ustream.tv/ustream-pro/pricing

By paying $500, we can get 4000 viewer hours, which will be enough for 22/23 Nov.

2. Hire from justin.tv
http://www.justin.tv/payments/premium/

$400 for 3000 viewer hours.

3. Hire from livestream.com
http://new.livestream.com/broadcast-live/original-pricing-plans

$350 for 3000 viewer hours.

4. We can hire one more server from Voxel,

$180, and get 4000 GB of traffic. We will still be limited to around 1000 simulaneous viewers with this option.

5. We can hire from dacast.com,
http://www.dacast.com/streaming-pricing-plans.html

$170 and get 1000 GB traffic, or maybe even $100 for 500 GB traffic, with unlimited simultaneous viewers.

This seems a good option, since 22/23 Nov traffic is expected be < 1000 GB for video. Also, no hassles of setting up.

6. We can hire from Amazon Web Services,
http://www.wowza.com/pricing/ec2-streaming
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing//184-5034279-7838454/

with bandwidth charged at $0.12 per GB = $120 for 1000 GB. But we have to do some setup ourselves, and if traffic is high, set up additional instances etc. Difficult, in my opinion, since we will all be busy at that time.

For decision-making, our past statistics at
http://stream.radiosai.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=wowza

would be useful. Especially the Feb (Shivaratri) & April (Samadhi day) stats.

Later, P added BitGravity which belongs to Tata as another option if we get good pricing, and also the unlimited new plan from livestream, for use all year round.

Korg nanokontrol problem - USB cable issue

The Korg NanoKontrol midi controller used for live recordings did not work at all despite many attempts at disconnecting and re-connecting. Had to use the mouse and trackpad. Some tips:

• Hovering over a track and using the scrollwheel of the mouse will move the corresponding fader. Rotating the wheel slowly makes small changes, rotating the wheel fast makes large changes.
• Clicking on a point on a fader causes the fader position to move to that point.
• Multi-touch on the trackpad - two-finger slide is similar to rotating scrollwheel.
  

Tried out another USB cable - thankfully that made it work.

exporting video as a frame sequence

KMPlayer has an option. But did not seem to be working.
http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8204
says that the latest version seems to do it.

Also
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-86818.html
says ffmpeg can do it.
From
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Main-options
the -y option means overwrite without asking.

But simplest is Virtualdub,
http://www.samuelpean.com/how-convert-video-file-image-sequence/
showed the way using File -> Export -> Image Sequence.

In Virtualdubmod, the menu item is File -> Save image sequence

For exporting the video as an image sequence for tgawarper, I need not bother about aspect ratio - tgawarper will warp it anyway in the correct manner if the frame contains a fisheye view with no black edges.

multiple calendars in iPhone Calendar App

A wanted to sync his calendar as well as the studio recording calendar on his iPhone, and asked me how this could be done. Googled it and found that apparently the procedure for multiple calendars is using Google Sync.
http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139206

The method for setting up Google Sync on an iPhone is given at
http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740   But we didn't follow through with it, since his phone took a very long time to sync over spotty GPRS.

javascript issues with 000webhost.com

Helping out someone on 000webhost.com which offers free web hosting, found that some javascript menus were just not working. The exact same page on another host was working. Then found that many people had trouble with 000webhost and javascript, as seen in this forum thread. Even disabling the analytics code did not help with the javascript menu, though other javascript code was running on that page. Finally worked around it by just not using the javascript part of the menu.

a post about not using Antivirus

This slashdot post seems to validate my stand about not using antivirus.

Best AV is almost as good as nothing at all
  The only thing AV provides is a false sense of security. With AV, you're waiting until AFTER an infection occurs and then HOPING the AV company you've chosen has A) seen the malware before, B) bothered to add a signature to their definitions list, and C) is actually capable of removing the virus.

Better ideas: Turning on AppLocker & running most of the time as an unprivileged user. Check out OSSEC for use as a File Integrity Monitor and Host-based Intrusion Detection System. Disable unnecessary services, remove unnecessary programs, use an ad-blocker, a "default deny all" firewall policy and get a 3rd party patch manager to keep all your non-MS bits up to date. Secunia PSI is a free patch manager/vuln scanner for home use - there are others.

For a detailed description of just how bad AV is at protecting systems, check out the blog post at computer-forensics.sans.org

revisiting awstats - streaming audio stats

Had earlier configured awstats for analysing the streaming video logs from the Wowza server and for the web-server statistics on media.radiosai.org. Now added configuration for streaming audio - icecast log analysis.

Also made a change in the media.radiosai.org analysis conf, changed LogFormat from 4 to 1 so that user agents can be parsed.

For the icecast logs, just copied the web server analysis conf, and changed the following parameters:
LogFile
LogType
LogFormat
SiteDomain

"Listen now" page needing compatibility mode in IE

Many Internet Explorer users had trouble with our "Listen Now" page.

This link works with browsers which have flash plugin installed and javascript enabled, or with browsers which have HTML5 mp3 support like Safari on iPad/iPhone. But this link has problems with Internet Explorer on Win7 and above. Or perhaps the issue is with IE7 and above. On some machines, the page needs compatibility mode enabled in order for the audio to play. On some machines, the player does not display until the page is refreshed, even though the audio is heard.

We had not made much headway in solving this bug for the last one year. Then we sent this to a volunteer, who suggested the following links,

http://jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#jPlayer-option-ready

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8661469/issue-with-multiple-instances-of-jplayer-in-ff-and-ie

The second link  refers to multiple instances, probably that is not our issue.


The first link  seems to be addressing our issue at the bottom of that page:

Internet Explorer 9 Beta (Win)
The Flash is disabled in jPlayer by default due to bugs with Flash's ExternalInterface in this browser.

The IE9 bugs listed there, and at places like here , here, and here seem to be the issue. We tried one of the workarounds mentioned on one of the posts, ie adding

!DOCTYPE html (within angle brackets)
to the top of the php page. That was not enough. Then our volunteer pointed us to this page, and accordingly we added the meta tag
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"
to the top of the php page.

And that seemed to solve both the issues in IE, by forcing IE to use compatibility mode.

finding large attachments in gmail

P sent me this labnol link for using findbigmail to find and delete large attachments in gmail accounts. It uses IMAP and a temporary token to connect.

Edit: Jan 2021 - An easy way would be to use GMail's search - examples - 
has:attachment larger:10MB

has:attachment larger:10M

size:10M

etc.

side load apps on android

A sent me this makeuseof link, for downloading and installing apps on android devices which don't have the Google Play Store. The useful part of that article is the mention of the apk downloader chrome extension - a useful tool, though it breaks Google's terms of use.

PHPlist - issues with spaces into words

Our Sai Inspires emails has had this problem for years - some random word(s) will have spaces introduced in them. Instead of 'message', for eg, it would be seen as 'mes sage' or something like that. Apparently this was due to the long message string, the MTA seems to put in a newline by itself. This problem was discussed here, but we did not implement it in our setup since PA thought copy-pasting the text separately would solve the issue. But of course, it did not, so PB implemented this solution now.
$htmlmessage = wordwrap($htmlmessage, 60, "\r\n");
in admin/sendemaillib.php @ line 634

connection issues and workaround - more notes

In my earlier post, I had mentioned restarting management services on Cyberoam as a workaround for connection issues with BUTT live audio streaming. This is of course a very crude kludge, P tried to make a better solution using Firewall rules a couple of days later, giving the TCP packets to the relevant ports to the relevant ip address a higher priority and guaranteed bandwith.

Unfortunately the problem persisted. A couple of weeks later, I had problems. Got disconnected many times in the evening during live. Reconnected within 10-15 seconds every time. My guess is that other usage was dropping the connection due to congestion - it was getting disconnected when Cyberoam shows the peak usage, upload.

I tried making some more firewall rules, by putting in a Bandwidth policy, Other_Usage, and putting it to the rule number 1 on cyberoam firewall rules, ie Any host to Any host all services accept. This bandwidth policy allows 100 kbps guaranteed, 4 Mbps burstable, but with priority 2. The live streaming rules have priority 0 as P had created.

Even this did not solve the problem, sometimes even now there are connection issues when there is a lot of video streaming (youtube etc) traffic from Studio. Probably using only essential services and not doing bandwidth hungry tasks during the live times would be the solution.

projectors in Mandir

Today the permanently installed projectors in Mandir were inaugurated. They are 17000 lumen Panasonic projectors, PT-DW17KU. Unfortunately, due to suspected ground loops in the signal, the live mix could not be displayed during the evening program. Long cable run and lack of isolation from the audio console which uses a different line for AC power might be possible causes.

Radiosai Playlist emails

P made a change to the accessdb2/display_playlist.php file to make it show an editable text file - he now edits the AsiaStream playlist email before sending in the case of Thursday, to accommodate the live broadcast during the day.

filing income tax return online - extra notes

In my earlier post, I had outlined how I filed my income tax return online. After uploading the xml file, I got the pdf file as expected, in my radiosai.org email id which is hosted using Google Apps for Domains. This was from donotreply@incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in and was a zipped pdf file. After mailing it by ordinary post, I got an acknowledgement email after 10 days or so, from intimations@cpc.gov.in with a password protected pdf file as an attachment. Unfortunately, the pdf was corrupted, and was not readable using Foxit Reader 3.0 or the latest Adobe Reader. I dashed off an email to ask@incometaxindia.gov.in and they replied asking me to "please contact us at 0124-2438000 or 1800-180-1961 (Toll Free)." Tried calling the tollfree number, they redirected me to the CPC (Centralised Processing Centre), a Bangalore number with 080 STD code. Since the website incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in had a section showing this acknowledgement, I thought perhaps I need not have a copy of the pdf, so I did not follow up.

A month or so later, now, I have received "Intimation U/S 143(1)" from the same intimations@cpc.gov.in - again a password protected pdf as an attachment, again corrupted. This time I contacted CPC using their new tollfree number 1800 425 2229. The agent told me that their system had problems with some mail servers, and that yahoo and rediffmail accounts are known to work. He said that if I changed my email on the website at My Account -> Update Phone/Email and then call back after 4 days, they can resend the email. After changing to my rediffmail account, called them back, and this time the password-protected pdf mail attachment opens fine. So they have some issues with the mail server at cpc.gov.in, my guess is that with the digitally signed pdf, something non-standard is happening with the MIME encoding.

TCP/IP stack repair

P had a laptop brought to him for troubleshooting, it was not connecting to the LAN or the internet using either the ethernet port or Wifi. Suggested that he try with a Linux live CD to rule out hardware problems, and that if hardware issues were ruled out, it might be some sort of driver issue with Windows. The next day, he got back to me with the solution.

Your guess was right. Had to do a TCP/IP stack repair to resolve the connection issue.


Followed the steps given here :
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-7/1037173-unable-connect-internet-identifying-network.html

TCP/IP stack repair options for use with Vista or 7.

Start - All Programs - Accessories and right click on Command Prompt, select "Run as Administrator" to open a command prompt.

Reset WINSOCK entries to installation defaults: netsh winsock reset catalog


Reset IPv4 TCP/IP stack to installation defaults: netsh int ipv4 reset reset.log

Reset IPv6 TCP/IP stack to installation defaults: netsh int ipv6 reset reset.log

Reboot the machine.

cost effective planetarium mirrordome projection

Tried out a Blu-Ray player, Sony BDP S 190 for projection for our mirror-dome. Got more clarity on the dome over our earlier VGA output method. Most probably the improvement is due to the blurring in the earlier VGA signal due to the cable length, while the Blu Ray player uses HDMI, and hence an all-digital signal path.

In case someone is interested in using this technique for "pre-warped" mirrordome projection, it is extremely cost-effective. Create the shows, warp as desired, put them on Blu-Ray or USB mem stick, no computer needed for playout.

removing background from drawing or line art

I was requested to put in some drawings onto a website in such a way that the background image of the website showed through. At first I thought I needed to make jpgs with similar region of background, but this led to seams being visible at the edges of the jpg since the background was complex and not a single colour. Finally settled on png files with transparency.

For getting the line drawings to that state, first I thought about converting to vector format. Explored vectormagic.com but found that the free online version was too low res for my needs. Then came across this post - I needn't go the vector way, since the images I had were higher resolution than what I needed for the website. So, just used Select -> Color Range in Gimp, was able to select the line art alone without the white background, was able to paste it into a new transparent layer in Gimp, and could proceed from there.

sms spam on Airtel

I've started getting some SMS spam on my Airtel number. As pointed out by Prasanto, I've logged a complaint with Airtel, (or the last link at this page)  after getting my DND registration number by smsing MY DND to 1909.