dcraw speeds

It would be useful to be able to edit the dcraw code to make it convert only a region of interest - conversion times are quite long.

On Windows 8, running on an i7, 7.8 sec per image for 14 megapixel CR2 file from a Canon 1100D.
On Macbook i7 with Linux Mint 18, 4.4sec
On Windows XP, running on a 1.9 GHz Athlon, 12 sec.

Converted using

dcraw -v -4 -H 0 -W -w -q 3 -T

removing adware from Intex Aqua 4G Strong mobile phone

The Intex Aqua 4G Strong mobile phone running Android 5.1 which I had purchased to try out Reliance Jio had annoying adware and bloatware in the firmware. I uninstalled as many as I could, but some of them could not be uninstalled. I tried preventing notifications from them by long press on the notification to pull up the app's notification settings, and unchecking notifications from those apps. But still, on every restart, some app would try to install UCNews etc from outside Google Play store, and would be blocked by the security setting to Not Allow Apps from outside the Play store.

Finally thought I should get rid of this malware / adware.

1. Installed and ran Malwarebytes Anti-Malware app.
2. It identified the Malware as two apps, with the path to the apks being in the /system/ folder.
   
3. Since the apps were masquerading as System apps, they could not be uninstalled except as Root. So, installed Kingroot via the XDA developers forum to root the device. 
4. Ran Root Checker Basic to check for root - done. 
5. Installed Root Browser.
6. When running Root Browser, it asks if it can install some utilities. Said yes, it installed busybox tools. These are necessary to remount the volume as rw, and remove from system folder.
7. Navigated to /system/apps and removed the folders containing malware.
8. Ran Malwarebytes again to check that those were removed.
9. Removed Kingroot through its uninstall option.
10. Checked that root is now disabled.
11. Removed Root Checker.
12. Checked again with Malwarebytes that all is well. Done. 

Edit - this saga continues in another post here. 

GPT partition - issues with re-partitioning new hard disk

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207837en?language=en_US

described my issues with partitioning a new hard disk. Solution, as given there, was to use the command prompt,
diskpart
list disk
select disk
clean
exit

and then initialize the disk with Disk Management. 

configuring a DLink DCS-942L camera

In May, I had struggled with port-forwarding, virtual server on router etc while setting up a DLink DCS-942L home network camera. Now, re-configuring it to use a JioFi 4G router, just had to remove the static ip using the Windows setup wizard, then WPS to connect to the wifi network, and that was it. No manual port-forwarding was needed. 

some notes on download speeds

There was a planetarium show which was offered for a free download as a single 150 GB file from an FTP server. Some notes on my experience trying to download it.

I tested the download and found that FTP download is limited to 1 Mbps for us per connection over Tata internet 14 Mbps line.

With CuteFTP, max 4 connections = 4 Mbps.

With our server in the US, single connection on 1 Gbps line to backbone, 80 Mbps.

Downloading from our US server to Studio / Planetarium over SFTP - 8 Mbps, maybe will go up to the rated 14 Mbps at night.

So, if similar speeds are experienced, probably the best way would be to download to our US server, and then download to Studio/Planetarium in batches.

ode45 on octave

Trying the gnlse numerical solution for SCG from the Dudley book using GNU Octave - the Matlab clone. The Octave "port" needed some modifications.

1. The report function doesn't work properly, so probably can be omitted. Instead of outputting a percentage for every step, it outputs at the end. Maybe it is a difference in the flags returned by the ode45 function.
2. Had to add 'InitialStep', 0.001 to the odeset parameters - or else the error becomes too large and ode45 exits.
3. Instead of Z which was linspace(0, flength, nsaves), gave [0, flength] as the parameter to ode45 - or else the ode45 in Octave ignores RelTol and AbsTol. 
4. Then, spline to create a linearly spaced array of our desired spacing.

So, instead of 

[Z, AW]=ode45( @rhs, Z, ifft(A), options .... etc

called it as

[Zoctave, AWoctave]=ode45( @rhs, [0, flength], ifft(A), options .... etc

and then

Z     = linspace(0,flength, nsaves);

AW = spline(Zoctave, AWoctave,Z);

Then, running time - 

Octave modified ugnlse = 166 sec on i7

Matlab  = 281 sec on Athlon

Since python code got 9x speedup on the i7, I guess the Octave ode45 + spline is slower than the Matlab ode45. Still, running on the i7 gets the advantage of more RAM. Doesn't give the out of memory error so easily. 

pynlo on Linux Mint running on i7 Macbook Pro 4GB

Got a Macbook for doing some tests, computations etc.
OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8
Intel Core i7
2.66 GHz
2 cores
4GB RAM

Made it dual boot with Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon using rEFInd, installed Anaconda 2.7 for pyNLO.

Anaconda installed with no issues. But pip install needed
apt-get install python-pip
apt-get install python-setuptools
apt-get install python-dev

pip install pyfftw
gave permission errors, so did
pip install pyfftw --user
needed
apt-get install libfftw3-dev

python SCG.py did not work - no module named matplotlib
pip install matplotlib --user

Then needed
apt-get install python-tk

Finally working. But colours were different in the pcolor plot.

Changed colormap of pcolor using
cmap=plt.get_cmap('viridis') inside pcolor function call.

On my Athlon 32 bit Windows XP laptop - SCG-Head-sc.py - runs for 15:33 = 933 sec and Mem Error
On the i7 - the same script runs for 1:42 = 102 sec, no Mem Error

So, more than 9x faster.

status page from uptimerobot

Uptimerobot.com have created status pages now, which can be made public also. Our status page is at
radiosai.org/status

Had to make the custom url a redirect, could not make it a subdomain, since Cloudflare complained that two separate accounts cannot CNAME each other. 

trying vlc-warp build and other warping on Macbook

The vlc-warp code, when directly tried a build on Linux Mint 18.1 running on an i7 Macbook Pro, gave the error that
configure: error: libavcodec versions 56 and later are not supported yet.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18559322/configure-error-libavcodec-versions-55-and-later-are-not-s

When compiling on a Live DVD of Ubuntu 12.04, compiles OK. But that build will not run on the Linux Mint 18.1 with accelerated graphics. And the Live DVD will not boot with accelerated graphics! So, as of now, am pausing these efforts.

Trying the recommended way to compile on Mac OS - that needs the latest version of Xcode, and our Mac is running 10.8 Snow Leopard.

Tried the Quartz Composer patch from Paul Bourke - that also had some version compatibility issues, I guess, did not work on first few attempts.

Then directly tried the compiled warp-player from Paul Bourke - that itself was skipping frames when trying to warp and play a 50 Mbps 2K fulldome movie. So, pausing these efforts to make a realtime warping player work on this machine. 

Airtel SIM language selection loop

An occasional problem with Xiaomi Mi3 phone - Airtel sim language selection menu comes up again and again - seen for example after a change of SIM.

Solution seems to be to shut down the phone and start it again.

problem logging on to Nettigritty phpMyAdmin - likely cyberoam issue

PB reported, "I am not able to access phpMyAdmin through Nettigritty Plesk. Any specific steps I need to do to get access to it?"

hn: "What happens when you click on the databases tab on the left, and then on phpmyadmin?"

PB: "Had tried this. It does not give access to phpMyAdmin page. It takes me to the login prompt.
Tested this on Firefox 43.0.4 and Safari 9.0.3"

hn: "If you are in "incognito mode" or something like that, the authentication may not work? It is working fine for me. Or it may be some javascript problem? Maybe try after clearing cache? or is it a cyberoam caching issue?"

PB: "It worked on my home computer. So cyberoam could be the cause of this issue."

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Fisheye to Equirectangular

Jason Fletcher has a post about converting footage from Fisheye to Equirectangular in After Effects. Similar to my Photoshop conversions to fisheye, but the other way around. Would be a useful reference for my conversions - by seeing where the images appear.

Friday, January 13, 2017

free SSL certificates and more

A cost-effective option to encrypt website connections and more -
https://letsencrypt.org/about/

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Airtel 3G speeds

To add to my Jio speed test posts, here are Airtel 3G speeds 3-4 pm at Puttaparthi - the times are visible in the top left corner. Not too shabby :) and definitely better than Jio during peak times.

And, a few days ago at 8.15 pm, with Airtel dongle,

Monday, January 02, 2017

offline fulldome option on Macbook pro - Gaia Sky

Since I had trouble compiling Stellarium360 to run on the Macbook Pro I have got as a loaner, tried out other options - Gaia Sky has a planetarium mode. But fisheye only, no support for mirror-dome. At high resolutions, my machine is unable to keep up refresh rates with Gaia Sky. But it could be used for offline rendering.

stellarium360 on Linux Mint 18.1

Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon works fine, dual booting with Mac OS 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, on an i7 Macbook Pro. Mageia Linux, the recommended option for Stellarium360, blanks the screen and / or crashes the system while trying to boot. So, tried compiling Stellarium360 on Linux Mint 18.1. But ran into problems.

ran the install dependencies for Ubuntu script, and ran ./configure. Configure complains that
checking for SDL2/SDL_image.h... yes
checking GL/glew.h usability... yes
checking GL/glew.h presence... yes
checking for GL/glew.h... yes
checking for ptrdiff_t... yes
checking for GraphicsMagick++-config... yes
checking for sdl2-config... yes
checking whether byte ordering is bigendian... no
checking for dirent.h that defines DIR... yes
checking for library containing opendir... no
checking for fabs in -lm... no
math library not found
checking for Mix_OpenAudio in -lSDL2_mixer... no
configure: error: *** SDL2_mixer library not found -  ***

But
libsdl2-mixer-dev is already the newest version (2.0.1+dfsg1-1).

I believe this has something to do with changing
-lSDL2_mixer to -lSDL2 or something like that at some point in the configure script, because the API call MixOpenAudio has shifted from one header to another or something? Not sure, just a guess.

But meanwhile, I thought Stellarium360 would work with spherical mirror systems also. Since it won't, then I will pause and rethink my efforts :)

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

setting up SPF and DKIM with CPanel and WHM

CPanel and WHM make the process of setting up SPF and DKIM fairly straightforward.

To open the CPanel of a particular user from WHM, typing Account in the top left search box shows "List Accounts" - Home -> Account Information -> List Accounts. There, clicking on the CPanel icon opens up CPanel for that user account.

Within CPanel of the relevant domain, typing DKIM brings up the required link - Home -> Email -> Authentication

A single click on that page enables or disables DKIM and or SPF.

(Actually I had run the certificate creation etc using scripts under cpanel running as root user and so on, but most probably all that was not necessary.) 

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

problem with BuTT overwriting recordings

I had entered the wildcard for index as filename%n - but then BuTT was saving a file called filename%n.mp3 and was prompting to overwrite old recordings. 

The correct wildcard for index is %i - and for timestamp, it is %H%M%S - have now changed to %i as given at
http://butt.sourceforge.net/manual.html

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

raw 14-bit images with Canon 1100D

According to wikipedia, our Canon EOS 1100D camera is capable of saving to RAW 14 bit CR2 format!

To convert linearly,

http://www.mit.edu/~kimo/blog/linear.html

suggests dcraw with the following commandline - 

dcraw -v -4 -H 0 -W -w -q 3 file.nef




Using this post as the basis,
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138497/iterate-all-files-in-a-directory-using-a-for-loop

below is a command which can be saved as a batch file (filename.bat) which works on Windows XP for linear conversion to tiff, for all files in the folder. Tested working on Windows 8.1 also. 




for /r %%i in (*.CR2) do dcraw -v -4 -H 0 -W -w -q 3 -T %%~nxi

A similar shell script on Linux / Mac would have the following form, adapted from

http://www.tuxradar.com/answers/484

for f in ~/path/*.CR2

do

dcraw -v -4 -H 0 -W -w -q 3 -T "$f"

done  

The -T makes dcraw output a TIFF file instead of the default Portable Pixmap PPM file. 

Sunday, December 11, 2016

upgrade to live broadcast system

After five years, the live audio broadcast method at mandir has changed. There were a couple of unexplained random shutdowns of the Macbook Pro, so PB decided to upgrade hardware and software. Current setup uses physical cables instead of JackOSX, and upgraded versions of Reaper and BuTT on a Mac mini running Mac OS Yosemite. Compressor is also hardware - our trusty Behringer MDX2200. Settings were adjusted for fast attack and slow release (1.5 sec). Lots of gain to compensate the compression. Level set to +4dBu and not -10 dBV.

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