mysql db table repair for phplist

As a follow-up to this earlier post on table repair, PB suggested the following:
He found that the following one line command checks, repairs and optimizes all the databases.

 mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair -c -o --all-databases

This could be used  in situations where we are not sure of which tables have crashed or needs repair.....

easily importing Nokia contacts into other apps with vcf support

Guest post from V:

Create a back up of contacts using application on the Nokia phone. By default it will be saved as Backup000.NBF. The extension looks strange, but the file is similar to an archived file like .zip

Open Backup000.NBF using any archive manager and navigate to /predefhiddenfolder/backup/WIP/32/contacts Extract the folder containing all contacts as .vcf files to another location

Open Terminal and navigate to the folder containing the .vcf files. [Alternate method: sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal adds a right-click “Open Terminal” option into the Nautilus File Manager in Ubuntu.]

Once inside the folder on Terminal, use: cat *.vcf > combined.vcf to combine all .vcf files into a single file.

This file can now be easily imported into Google Contacts or any other application that accepts .vcf files

Edit: There is one more elaborate method of VCF multiple contact import given at http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?p=488142

sharing audio links - sharethis custom link

One of the requests from our listeners was an easy way to share audio links. Exploring the different ways to share, found that sharethis.com does support custom urls and custom text, as given in their documentation. But directly plugging this into the Download.php page would make it a bit ugly, with a separate email for each download link. Something better needs to be designed.

More Seeker bugs

Seeker Theater Edition, Build 828 as per the startup splash screen - The items under Help menu don't seem to be working - Help -> Manual... , Help -> Support... , Help -> About Seeker don't have any effect.

Also, the 'Solar System Map' doesn't seem to be working. When it is enabled, the Sun and planets (if they were visible) disappear. But the map as such does not appear.

Edit: The About Seeker and Solar System Map work when not in "Fulldome" mode, and when the flat screen version of "None" is selected in Settings -> Dome Projection. More info in the post on further experiments with Seeker. 

Software Bisque Theater Suite trials

Trying out the Seeker Theater Edition, found that my machine is not capable enough to do realtime rendering of hi-res - 1920x0180 or more - accelerated video. Frame rates hover around 5 fps. Offline rendering is good, though. Offline rendering of the "Grand Tour" into warped 1920x1080 movies averaged around
5.5 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov
4 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
2 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)
2 fps for H.264 codec mov (slowed down by compression)

and so on.

JPG frame export fails - the files are written as 0 kB files.

Offline rendering of 2K movies averaged
3 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov

2 fps for targa frames (slowed down by hard disk)
1 fps for PNG frames (slowed down by compression)

Offline rendering of 4K went at around 1 fps for MJPEG / Photo-JPEG codec mov.

Noted that the anti-aliasing option under Settings -> Graphics setup don't seem to affect the offline rendering. The offline rendering seems to be done without anti-aliasing. Sample parts of the 4K frame, zoomed in and cropped,

But the whole frame by itself looks good,

Interestingly, the stars render much smaller in relative size in the 4K frame as compared to a 1K frame, as below:

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any setting option to control the size of the stars. They seem to render the same size whatever be the size of the entire frame, so in a lower resolution frame, the stars are too clunky. So, if the stars look too big, I have to render as large fisheye masters - 3K or 4K - and then warp them down to our 1920x1080 warped files.

Now, all this was about Seeker. The Theater Suite also has Mojo, Syzygy and SkyX Theater Edition. Mojo doesn't seem to do realtime warping - just makes a timeline of multiple video files. Syzygy launches all the components of the Theater Suite in a multi-monitor configuration. SkyX has similar capabilities to Stellarium and accepts map files for warping. Probably I'll be using only Seeker, and doing offline renders.

Edit: More Seeker bugs are reported here, as well as on bisque.com (login required). Also, documentation is lacking on script commands like WAYPOINT2.

bug fixes to audio search

V had come over for Gurupoornima, and kindly helped bug-fix the radiosai audio search results page.

The first bug was displayed when searching for Discourses: if the description is exactly the same, in the search result, only one of the DDs is displayed, even though there are two different versions in different languages. Solution was simple - changed line

$dataQuery.= " group by description ";
to
$dataQuery.= " group by description, language ";

The next bug was harder. If the search result had a very large number of files within a single line, i.e. with the same description, clicking the download button used to fail, or give a truncated list. Checking out the database calls one by one by giving echo statements, V found that the truncation was happening at the group_concat sql command. Apparently mysql has a group_concat default size limit of 1 kB. The blob returned is truncated to 1024 bytes. Googling found the answer. Since we don't have system-wide access on that server, we had to change the size limit for the particular session. Just adding the line

$inc_result= mysql_query("SET @@group_concat_max_len = 512000;");

just before the relevant queries were fired did the trick. The @@ means for this session.

online buying of physical products from overseas

Found out the hard way about Indian customs laws when we ordered the Theater Suite from Software Bisque. The package, sent via UPS, was detained at customs, and the Indian UPS partner asked us for IEC code. Luckily in our case the University has import licence (and duty exemption) so we got the package cleared, even the process took a month. But other institutions may not be so lucky.

Google Reader shutdown - Google player widget no longer up

HMHV blog had all player code hot-linked to the google audio player at
http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf

 Google Reader shut down on the 1st of July 2013 and along with it all its allied services. So I was asked for a simple solution. I suggested:

https://sites.google.com/site/mori79/html-gadgets/media-players/google-reader-player

Where it says upload on your own site, you could use sites.google.com or something like that.

The solution preferred was a direct HTML5 embed, like
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_audio.asp

But of course this has mp3 embeds, which did not work on Firefox. But the latest versions of FF on Windows do support this.

HDMI to VGA convertor

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for his presentations. Since the projector did not have a HDMI port, he had to convert to VGA. We ordered this product, and tried it out. First testing with the Blu-ray player, did not work. Probably the Blu-ray player does not supply enough power via HDMI. Tried with the AC-100, worked fine. Default output is 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz. Saw the output both with the LG Studioworks 221U monitor as well as with the Optoma TX1080 projector.

catalogue of astronomy software

Some of these would be useful for those interested in hands-on astronomy, and there are some for PC-based simulations also. But the list is a bit old, some of the links have to be looked up on archive.org's wayback machine. But very interesting and very long list of astronomy software, many of them freeware to do particular tasks - listed at www.pierpaoloricci.it/download/downloadsoftware_eng.htm

Categories like 3D Simulation, Planetarium, Astrophotography, Atlases, Ephemeris, Planets, Satellites and so on.

multiple videos on dome

Checking out different ways to do multiple videos on the dome.

1. Tried making a three-video wide panel, and using DMProjector to warp it for the dome. Using avisynth overlay, something like
video1=Audiodub(Overlay(bg1, top, 834, 771), audio)
video2=Audiodub(Overlay(video1, top2, 234, 771), audio2)
video3=Audiodub(Overlay(video2, top3, 1434, 771), audio3)

resulted in a clip like this after appropriate cropping: 

Using DMProjector to show it onscreen with 40 degrees vertical field of view starting with the horizon (altitude of 20 deg) resulted in a dome master like this,

As you can see, the side videos have been squished. When I used gimp and duplicated the middle video, rotating it and pasting it on the two sides to get

Although the videos are supposed to be identical, on the dome the side videos came out much bigger than the centre video. That's all for now, probably I'll revisit this theme later.

some limitations of certain tools

While doing some renders, found the following:

1. Virtualdub (at least my version, 1.8.8) does not work well with 24 bit wav files  when a wav file needs to be added to the video. Needs to be converted to 16 bit to avoid extreme noise in the avi.

2. DMProjector (version 1.05) does not work with tga input files with alpha channel. So, while exporting the clip for use with DMProjector from After Effects, had to choose "Millions of colours" instead of "Millions of colours +" in the advanced settings.

3. For 1920x1080 input files, DMProjector takes around 3 seconds per frame.

note about restoring Android to Toshiba AC-100

V wanted to use the Toshiba AC-100 smartbook for projecting with its HDMI out. The Ubuntu 12.04 which I had loaded for him did not work with the Nvidia driver. Tried Lubuntu 12.10, with the proprietary driver. But system would hang when I used arandr to set output to HDMI only, no display on the projector. So tried restoring back to Android.

As noted earlier, used the technique and the files as given earlier, and went back to Andoid. At first, I tried restoring only partitions 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 and 12 - the first few, and the biggest ones. But when the AC100 booted up, it went back to Lubuntu. Then I saw that in my previous post I mentioned partition 6 is the boot partition. So I restored partition 6, and hey presto, Android booted up.

With Android also, the HDMI out was not displaying on the Optoma projector. Suspecting the cable and order of switching on of devices, got the working HDMI cable from upstairs, switched off and disconnected both devices, connected the cable, powered on the projector and booted Android. Then the display came on flawlessly. Hopefully Documents to go will serve V's projection needs.

review of DMProjector from pineappleware

Pineappleware.com has a set of fulldome tools. Trial versions are available for download, unfortunately the contact email for pricing info and purchase elicited no reply. The trial versions are limited to 1K resolution. Passable for our dome, not optimal. The tools save Alpha channel, so stitching together multiple frames with different images on them easier.

DMPanorama has nice features like fill upward, for filling the "sky" part of the panorama automatically.

DMProjector exports a single image (or an image sequence) to a specific part of the dome. Perhaps I can try it for video sequences - doing this would be faster than rendering in blender.

Field of view in DMProjector can be specified either vertically or horizontally. Giving a  vertical field of view double the altitude makes the image just touch the horizon at the bottom, since the altitude is defined at the centre of the image. Anti-Aliasing with a sample level of 3 gave good results for me.

Choosing a panoramic image and a 120 degree field of view gave similar results from DMProjector as with DMPanorama, except without the "fill upward". But DMProjector doesn't seem to do panoramas bigger than that properly.

filing income tax return online in 2013

My previous posts on filing the Indian IT return online dealt with the gotchas for Assessment year 2012-13. For this Assessment year 2013-14, the technical issues regarding email attachments of last year are solved, but there was a new issue.

I had downloaded the excel utility from the IT efiling website and started the process of filling it in May. It had the feature of importing previous year's return, so I could avoid typing in lots of info. There was a small confusion regarding salary income, since at first we had been issued only part A of Form-16 - employer's TDS form and salary certificate. Once part B was issued, my queries were answered.

Then the excel utility was used to generate the xml file which we upload. But after uploading, got an error, complaining of wrong country code.

Tried generating the xml with another version of MS Office, still the same issue. Finally called their tollfree helpline, immediately got the answer, that an updated excel utility has been uploaded, I can download that and use it to generate the xml, since the country code for India had been changed from 11 to 91. OK, tried a shortcut of just editing the xml file to make that change, it worked. :)

probable reason for live broadcast problems

Once or twice, while starting the live broadcast in a hurry, BUTT has shown no input. Restarting the system had been the solution. Today also I experienced the issue, but instead of restarting the machine, tried restarting BUTT and then reloading the JackPilot saved session - no go. Restarted Reaper and reloaded JackPilot saved session - that worked.

So I surmise that the problem is caused when BUTT starts to broadcast before Reaper has focus, when Reaper is in the background. At that time, the Reaper output to Jack is probably not available, and later when Reaper gets focus, it does not connect to Jack for some reason. So the solution is to restart Reaper and reload the Jack session.

Edit Dec 2013: One more possible reason: if Reaper is paused - audio does not come out even from live mics through the insert send! Either REC or STOP or PLAY is needed.

updated Twitter widget

Our schedule page and on-demand audio page Twitter widgets stopped working a couple of days ago. Apparently Twitter API changed. Updated with their new widget. Unfortunately font size is a bit too big, and is not configurable.

frame blending for low frame-rate clips with avisynth

Finally got a solution for frame blending with avisynth. Using Convertfps after importing the clip at the required low framerate, when no "zone" parameter is added, frames are automatically blended.

Imagesource("Sequence_%05d.png", 00163, 00251, 5)

#This is at 5 fps

Convertfps(30)

distorting video using After Effects instead of Blender

Checking out if I can use After Effects to distort flat videos to be projected onto the dome (wihout buying the Fulldome plugin, of course :) - found this tutorial which does a bezier warp, which is probably what I need. Unfortunately this effect is not available in AE 4.2 which I have. AE 4.2 does have a "Basic 3D" effect, which can make the video trapezoidal.

I can make do with that for some videos at some locations, I suppose. Will explore using a "Cosmic Colors" frame as a reference.

moving the Sun and Moon against the fixed stars in Stellarium

Wanted to mimic the "Annular motion" of the planetarium instrument, where the stars remain fixed, but the Sun and Moon move across the Zodiac along the ecliptic. Googled Stellarium move sun moon fixed stars and so on, finally hit upon the setDate("+1 days sidereal")

function, which moves the time ahead by one sidereal day, i.e. stars will be at the same spot. Keyboard shortcut Alt + + and Alt + -

Trying it out, found that my Stellarium version 0.10.2 is quite finicky. If a function call is wrong, the script just doesn't run. setDate is case sensitive, and can be in the format
core.setDate("1926:11:23T04:21:01");

as also "2008-03-24T13:21:01" as given in the documentation. But got it working, finally, copying the syntax from the working landscapes.ssc script.