more on the toshiba laptop

Just like the previous posts - this time D brought it to solder in the replacement jack. Unfortunately now the ribbon cables are getting a bit ragged due to open-close-open-close so many times. So, first the track-pad didn't work. The disable switch on the Toshiba is Fn-F9 - toggling it didn't work, so D had to open it again and fiddle with the ribbon cable. Then the speaker didn't work. Again opened, tried fiddling with the ribbon cable, but this time the speakers stayed dead. So returned the laptop in that condition instead of risking opening it again and making something more critical go bad.

AW4416 down

Unfortunately, the Yamaha AW4416 is now "retired hurt", gone to Chennai for treatment. Symptoms: four sliders showed funny values on Thursday but worked normally on Fri and Sat, Sun morning the LED display did not light up and the output waveform was clipped with only the top half appearing and not the bottom half, with slider values also out.

Stopgap arrangement - Aux outs of the Soundcraft mixer into the Tascam US-1641, moving sliders in software using the mouse.

added streams to Nokia Internet Radio

Nokia Internet Radio directory makes it easy for supported Nokia handset owners to listen to internet radio streams. They sent us an invite, so I've added the five SGH streams to the directory.

Tascam US-1641 digital in problem and solution

The Tascam US-1641 suddenly developed a strange illness - the digital in (SPDIF) was not working. It happened when I tried a different "boot order" instead of my usual Tascam->Yamaha AW4416->Laptop order. Tried many things including changing the cable, checking settings for SPDIF/AES etc, no go.

Finally, today, tried connecting the digital out from the Tascam to the Yamaha's digital in - then the Yamaha started complaining, Dig-St-in Sync Error! Aha! So changed the setting in Clock settings in the Tascam's control panel from "Internal" to "Automatic" - then tried digital input - working! Again closed and opened Cubase, the setting was reverting to the non-working "Internal" setting. Rooting through the help file, went to Transport -> Sync Setup and changed the sync from "Internal" to "ASIO device". Now works fine even after reboots. But the power-up order seems to be important. Probably booting up the computer without the Tascam being powered on changes the Sync option to internal in Cubase.

configuring a phone for BSNL's GPRS service

Yesterday, NNR asked for help in configuring web browsing on a Samsung SGH X-600 phone - the BSNL sms with the settings had been saved, but the browsing was not going through. Sat and went through the settings using the guide at BSNL and found that the settings sent by sms had the wrong IP Port - 9401 instead of 9201. Changed to 9201, it started working. Still the home page at http://localhost/home.wml shows "Unsupported content type" on the phone, tho' google, rediff etc websites work fine. Just for reference, the settings are:

For general internet:

-> Profile name – BSNL GPRS
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: wapsouth.cellone.in
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Homepage URL - http://localhost/home.wml
-> Bearer - GPRS only

select Current proxy -> BSNL GPRS and then browsing will work.

For BSNL's portal - rintones etc:

-> Profile name – BSNL PORTAL
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: portalsouth.cellone.in
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Homepage URL - http://wap.cellone.in
-> Bearer - GPRS only
select Current proxy -> BSNL PORTAL and then at the WWW service menu, click home to go to BSNL portal.

For MMS:

Under MMS Profiles setting,

- Profile Name: BSNL MMS
- Server URL: http://10.31.53.18/mms/
Select GPRS Setting and key in the following:
-> Gateway IP address - 10.31.54.2
-> Gateway IP port - 9201
-> APN GPRS: bsnlmms
-> Login ID - ppp
-> Password – ppp123
-> Bearer - GPRS only

Now you can go to Message Menu, and then selecting Multimedia Message, send a multimedia message to another number.

More on the Tascam US-1641 and the bundled Cubase

A follow-up to my previous post - got DJ to put in 10k ohm resistors in series and make cables to run from the Spirit 4² to the Tascam - the Direct-Outs were +4 dBu and maybe even a little more with headroom, while the XLR inputs for the Tascam maxed out at +2 dBu. Anyway, even with the resistors, found that the Direct outs were being saturated by KV/BR's practice of increasing input trim till the overload indicator is almost continuously on. So, have reverted to recording with the aux inputs to the Yamaha AW4416: at least 3 inputs are pre-fade, so those at least are less over-driven.

From the AW4416, I can export 8 tracks at once to Cubase LE running on the laptop using the Tascam US-1641 - 4 tracks on omni outs, 2 tracks on stereo outs and 2 tracks on digital stereo outs - any bus can be routed anywhere.

About the recordings on Cubase: one nifty trick is "Bounce selected" in the Audio menu. Supposing I have multiple tracks which have different in and out points. The individual recorded wav files will be Audio01_01.wav, Audio02_01.wav etc which will not be in sync if directly imported into another audio sw since their in/out points are different. But if I select (using the marquee tool) an area with these tracks included, and choose the Bounce selected option, it asks whether to replace existing material, if you choose No, it creates new files like Audio01.wav, Audio02.wav and so on, padded with silence at beginning and end so that all of them are of the same length, can be imported to other sw easily.

BT site in SaiUniti

Finally BT site is in SaiUniti. Some hiccups faced due to A wanting CNAME instead of A record even for the domain record, not possible with most (or all?) DNS control panels.

on freedns.afraid.org - this type of thing is not possible:

2 errors
# You can't mix CNAME/MX records together using the same hostname.
# Domain root's cannot be CNAME's, however you can web-forward this record to www.sssbpt.org instead for the same effect.

I could have reverted to frame forwarding at nettigritty.

Result:
all saved bookmarks etc with http://sssbpt.org/etc bookmarks will return error 404.

Only if someone directly tries http://sssbpt.org will it go through to the correct site. There, clicking on links will show on the address bar as the same http://sssbpt.org/etc which had earlier returned error 404!

So A allowed A records for the time being, plans to make an ISAPI filter!

Adventures with the Tascam US-1641

SS gave us a Tascam US-1641 for use in the Mandir. Interfacing it with the Yamaha AW4416 using the midi interface for controlling the bundled Cubase LE4 was quite an adventure.

Getting the digital SPDIF input and other analogue inputs was no problem, though currently the analogue inputs from the Spirit Live 4² direct outs are too hot - they are going up to + 10 dB on the Spirit's sliders! Will need some sort of attenuator.

Midi: the AW4416 is supposed to have a MIDI Remote facility in firmware Ver2. There is a separate tab inside the MIDI screen for MIDI Remote functionality. Got the relevant manual from Yamaha, but somehow the way I did the MIDI Bulk dump was wrong. So, had to change the Hex values of the MIDI messages sent by the AW4416 manually. The readme says that bidirectional control is not implemented - so changing the controls on the computer are not going to move the motorized faders or anything like that.

Changes made: Loaded the AW4416 xml file from Yamaha in the Device Setup Dialog, found one of the faders was working, then made similar changes to midi messages sent by the other faders and switches to get them to work:
faders:

b0 00 fad end
b0 01 fad end
...
etc,

all midi channel 1

switches:

b0 20 sw end
b0 21 sw end
....
etc

works!

20 in hex = 32 = address in cubase. And so on. b0 seems to be some sort of preface. sw must be switch.

The "learn" button inside cubase was displaying the address, channel, etc for faders, did not show up initially for switches. Maybe because the initial setting for the switches was just to send

end

without address or prefix or anything like that.

more domains - Media foundation

sssmf.com .net and .org registered with rediff, instead of making more virtual domains, for now hosted the dns with freedns.afraid.org and set up url forwarding. Will think of a more permanent solution, probably more virtual domains on fs1 or somewhere, once the SaiUniti servers confusion is sorted out.

online text formatter, GutenMark and other stuff

Browsing the Mobileread forums again, found a tutorial and a wiki on BookDesigner, a link to a nice online text formatter and a link to GutenMark, which is supposed to make Gutenberg etexts prettier with formatting.

Also found a link to pielrf, for quick conversions! Kovid Goyal's libprs500 has also made tremendous strides - the screenshots look great.

domains from godaddy

V has sent us a dozen domains like sai-inspires.org which he has purchased from godaddy. Logged on to godaddy, used the invite he gave, under domains -> AccountExec domains, hitting the + icon shows up our folder with the 12 domains. Did domain forwarding for all of them to http://media.radiosai.org/journals . Added the subdomain www for all of them too, forwarding to the same url. Also, for the forwarding to work, had to change the nameservers to "Default parked nameservers".

lots of action, very few posts!

Once again a long backlog of stuff I should have posted long back:

1. Recording morning and evening bhajans, so lots of time goes in recording and editing. Editing too, since otherwise hard disk would run out, and also PB want more bhajans asap for BhajanStream!
   


2. heart2heart.in domain - purchased through rediff, a virtual server is made on fs1 for hosting this, and it's forwarded to http://media.radiosai.org/journals
   


3. PB completed php-based scheduler internal web-app, beta-testing on.
   


4. BV completed audio search page, open to public. This is really useful for me, when people ask for specific requests!
   


5. Contemplating a sort of corporate blog or official blog - SP wanted to host a video on need for documentation, I read Eric Sink's book based on his blog, "The Business of Software", etc. Using blogger it should be straightforward, I hope...
   


6. Stupid mistake of trying to make a minor change in number of pixels in TFD page, but without updating my local copy! Outage for 15 hours or so while I tried to replicate PB's changes... Funny part is that commenting out

   if recordset.RecordCount > 0

   makes the page work!
   


7. Following up on sssbpt.org migration to saiuniti servers - I'm not so good at HR! Too blunt!
   


8. Installed Filezilla server, firewall yet to be opened.
   


9. KR(M) is following up on the generator radiator issue, the generator batteries and the cooling tower fan-blades - as instructed by KVR.
   


10. Doing saicast encodes on a borrowed HDD from PB, since my machine is FULL!
    


11. Did some routine log analysis on fs1, transferring old log files to local for archiving.

Virtualdubmod to directly convert mpeg2 to avi

In my earlier post, I'd described using autogk to convert mpeg2 to avi, then virtualdub to add the logo / watermark. Then an aha moment - autogk uses virtualdubmod, so why not use virtualdubmod directly do the watermarking etc? Used this method for Xmas 2007 videos.

BSNL name servers hate google

www.google.com has been unavailable from my location (AP) using BSNL's notorious name servers. So, using the post at Jason's blog, changed to the OpenDNS servers mentioned there, 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 - accessed it through gmail on krishna, vnc over ssh....

So now I can access blogger, youtube and gmail again!

Bonus - learnt about OpenDNS's adult filtering capabilities too.

schedule page and mysql too many connections

Found this morning that mysql daemon had died on our hosting provider for radiosai.org , nettigritty. Contacted them, they said too many connections from radiosai user. They said

> 1. Do not use persisternt connections (pconnect)
> 2. Ensure you are correctly closing connections after use.

We're not using pconnect. For non-persistent connects, they are supposed to
automatically disconnect after the script executes, but still we have added

<?php
mysql_close($dbcon);
?>

to the end of our scripts, just to be safe.

But two possible reasons could be

1. Too much traffic on our site

2. The times when our page fails to load properly giving the error
Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded
( log file is at http://www.radiosai.org/program/inerror.log )
every time it fails, maybe the connection remains open.

Reason (1) - http://www.radiosai.org/plesk%2Dstat/webstat/ shows us that the
index.php gets 1000+ hits per day. That should be OK for mysql to handle, I suppose.

About Reason (2) - Another possibility I thought of was: the index.php also
has links to images and flash files, which also have to load before the 30
second timeout. If this can be delinked from the php part of the code - maybe
using div elements or something? - perhaps the timeout issue can be mitigated
to a large extent? For the time being, I've removed the links to the images and flash files and we'll see if this improves matters.

a typical day

Once again I've to find more time in the allocated 24 hours - where is all the time going? Let's see. From Dec 16, this has been my schedule:

Before 8.15 am - finish morning routines including washing, cycling and exercise if any, and breakfast too.
8.15 to 10.15 - Morning bhajan recording at Mandir.
10.15 to 12.45 - Fight fires if any, or process the recorded audio
12.45 Lunch
1.45 to 2.30 - Make playlist or continue processing audio or if any videos ready for saicast, process them...
2.30 to 6.30 - Tea, then goto Mandir for programme or Bhajan recording
6.30 to 7.30 - Complete playlist making
7.30 Dinner
8.30 to 10.30 - @ S3, R&R, which quite often means updating the "voluntary" webpages!

The 2.30 to 6.30 slot is one where some optimization can be done. Maybe I can think of going to Mandir a little later, saving half an hour or so. Need to find time to do things like data backup, clearing up space on hard disks and so on.

ssh tunnelling command-line

The commandline for ssh tunnelling, taken from http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/ssh_tunnelling.html

ssh -f -N -L 1234:localhost:80 user@Remote_Machine

for web-server.

SHA1 sum check

Just like the MD5 checksum, SHA1 checksum can be done with

sha1sum filename

Used with Fedora iso downloads, for example.

combating spam from feedback forms

One more technique to supplement the one I've described earlier - check for the string http:// and don't email the form if present! In asp, that translates to

if Instr(strString,"http://") then
Response.Write " -- "
else
Mail.Send 
end if

firefox doesn't play nice with tunnels

Created a tunnel over ssh from my remote machine to use the studio server's internal webserver, similar to tunneling TightVNC. Got a firefox error when trying to access the tunnel using http://localhost:6000 -

This address is restricted: This address uses a network port which is normally used for purposes other than Web browsing. Firefox has canceled the request for your protection.

Found the solution at http://www.purple.dropbear.id.au/node/139 by googling.

• Go to about:config in your Firefox browser.
• Right click somewhere, and choose "New => String"
• In the setting Name box type "network.security.ports.banned.override"
• In the Setting Value box, type "1-65535" or whatever port-range you want to allow.
  
• Click OK