malware and more

Once again, malware hit some of our websites. Had to do stuff from this earlier post. These were coming in via ftp from remote hosts. So, ftp logs showing logins from Poland, Bulgaria, etc were red flags. All sorts of stuff, like iframes and links to various sites which were themselves hacked, and so on. Some examples of malicious links, do not visit these!!!
videointerviewtips.com/pdf/free-resources-old.php

and in iframes

jL.chura.pl/rc/

Luckily Google and stopbadware.org have filters in place, warning us. But some sort of pro-active thing should be done, instead of reactive, like this time.

pdf to text

Foxit reader has "Save as text", but only for the pro version. Doubtless there are easier ways to do this, but for the quick and dirty fix without having to install any software, pdftextonline.com does the job. Of course, only those pdfs which have text in them (and not just images) will be useful with this text extraction.

testing Tata Indicom photon plus usb wireless connection

First I tried the McAfee speed test like in my previous Airtel test and it showed 200 kbps.



But then I tried connecting to our studio ftp server, and it started serving at 1500 kbps! This sustained for quite some time, not some caching effect. So, their international ports are probably slow. Again, their speeds seem to fluctuate. Tata Indicom's own test showed Your current download speed is: 695.50kbps

It was able to connect to our colinux machine, so no problems with ssh or rdp being blocked or anything like that. Latency-wise, it seemed even better than our leased line Tata internet port! 186 ms on pinging google.com, versus 256 ms with the leased line. Similar results to tracert as given here.

My tests were on Windows XP, so the built-in drivers could be used. The USB device has the drivers on in-built memory which is recognised as a CD drive. Autorun.exe and all that. For Linux, these people seem to have it worked out. Basically using wvdial, copy into /etc/wvdial.conf

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Phone = #777
Username = internet
Password = internet
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = 1

then sudo wvdial

Edit: Some more info. The device gets a bit hot like a mobile phone during talk-time! Bittorrent speed tested with an Ubuntu CD download, was around 1.5 Mbps again. So, that seems to be the fastest it can deliver. Upload speeds were slightly slower - 800 kbps for the local ftp server. This product is a USB-based one, Tata also has a router configuration. Tariff is somewhat higher than BSNL's wireline ones.

mixer glitches

The Tascam TM-D4000 I'm currently using after the Yamaha 4416 went back to Chennai for repairs, showed its temperamental nature a couple of days back on Tuesday, when it "hung" with blank display and saturated output - all inputs set to +10 dB or something like that. This happened 10 minutes after switching it on around 4 pm. So, the reason S used to report this in the Studio is probably not water condensation. Turning it off and on does not work, have to wait an hour or so. After an hour, turning it on - worked, again hanging after 7 minutes. Turned it off till Wednesday, then it worked fine. No problems yesterday and this morning, either. But must be ready with a backup plan, since this sort of failure is a possibility.

trying out Java streaming radio apps

Tried out various Java apps listed on the radiosai website on my Windows Mobile 5 phone which has a Java environment also, but all of them failed to play. At least VirtualRadio gave an error message:
creating player:
javax.microedition.media.MediaException
NULL
I suppose that is because the Java environment does not have access to an mp3 decoder.

gprs counter for mobile - WM5

Tried out the built-in gprs data counter in HomeScreen PlusPlus, the settings for which which can be accessed via Start -> Settings -> Personal -> Today -> Items -> HomeScreen PlusPlus and clicking the Options button. Or by pressing and holding near the cpu icon.



But for some reason it did not work on my phone. Maybe I should have tried rebooting the phone after setting it or something. But anyway, it showed 0 incoming 0 outgoing even after using nearly an MB - Rs 5.40 worth - by just seeing half a page of slashdot in skyfire!

some fixes for windows media encoding

Some of the VOB files to be encoded showed some audio delay when processed through VirtualdubMod even though they played perfectly well with KMPlayer. Then found this page which explains how to do it with Virtualdub, and this one for VirtualdubMod. Basically,
Streams -> Stream List -> Right-click the audio -> Interleaving -> Delay audio track by xxx ms.
500 ms worked well for me. Virtualdub has the same thing under
Audio -> Interleaving

Then trying to do WME batch encoding as given in this post, finally ended up making a batch file with
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\2.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\3.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\4.wme"
cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs -wme "E:\wmv\5.wme"
and so on, with each wme file having a separate input and output file specified. The input file is in two places in the wme file, for audio and video. The wme files are xml files, so a text editor can be used to generate them by modifying older wme files.

But in typical Microsoft fashion, the resultant output files are not exactly the same as the files generated using the WME gui. Because, WMVAppendGui cannot join these files with files produced earlier with the WME gui! Have to re-create those files also with the wmcmd.vbs commandline technique.

BleachBit

From this slashdot story about tracking, went on to EFF's Panopticlick and bleachbit. Bleachbit - removes cache/temp/cookies etc from a variety of programs and plugins including Flash cookies and Java cache - seems quite impressive, a portable version too, along with Windows and Linux versions. Saves space on C drive for the space-constrained, too.

delay in streams and jitter

Today, I sat down to quantify the amount of delay in our stream which is being aired now on AsiaStar also. I noticed that most programs on AsiaStar were starting a few minutes after the hour - like 1.05 instead of 1.00 etc. Checked if the time on the server was correct, yes, it is set to automatically keep the correct time using updates from time.windows.com

Then checked the log to see when files are being played:
tail /home/sgh/ices/asiastream/ices.log
This does not have any timestamps. But
ls -l /home/sgh/ices/asiastream/ices.log
gives last write timestamp, saw this was 13:04

Checked the playlist on xmms, according to the xmms duration listing, it should have been 13:03. So, this adds some jitter.

Next, there is the buffering time in the ShoutCast server, and also buffering in the client. This probably adds a few more seconds. Checked the time gap from the time on the log and the time I heard it on AsiaStar - 13:20 on log for next file, I heard it at 13:23. This is probably the buffering on the server + client.

Client buffering probably changes with time. For example: I played AsiaStream on my machine, it was approx 10 seconds later than AsiaStar which is AsiaStream coming after going up and down from the satellite. The satellite round-trip takes approx 2 seconds, so my machine was 12 sec behind the Melbourne machine.

permission error

My colleague got this error from the webserver:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Excel Driver] Operation must use an updateable query.

Googling found these possible causes, and changing permissions for the folder seems to have solved the issue. Allowed the user called IUSR_WEB_SERVER_NAME (the web server) to write in that folder.

Windows media encoding and virtualdubmod batch jobs

Investigating batch converstion with Windows media encoder, found this resource which includes info on the command-line encoder. This page has the info in a more readable form - just
cscript.exe c:\path\to\wmcmd.vbs -loadprofile encoding-profile.prx -input "F:\input-folder" -output "F:\output-folder"
This page explains how to get the prx files from the WMEncoder, Properties -> Compression -> Edit -> Export button. But of course, it did not work for me,
.Error occurred in transcoding: Error Code = 0xC00D002F
since my WME does not work with Xvid encoded files, needs a nominal crop of a couple of pixels before it works. Probably then it uses a different input codec or whatever.

But checking out cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs /? found that it supports WMEncode wme session files too! So next time I can try that.

Virtualdubmod also has a batch encoding option with input and output folders, as given at this page and I used it this time: File -> Job Control, and Edit -> Process Directory from the Job control window.

machine translation of Indian languages

This IIT-built automatic translation engine is interesting, pointed out to me by BK. If you don't prefer the Hindi keyboard, you can use other tools like gmail's or google's or others like writeka, then copy-paste into the duur sampark page. The attached sentence took nearly a minute to translate, and it seems to be highly Hyderabadi Telugu! (Click on the picture below for larger image).

voddler

Voddler seemed a good service, for watching ad-supported movies. But it really needed a 2.5 Mbps connection, so not suitable for us - too much time spent buffering. The interface is a bit quirky too, since they have made it "remote-friendly" for people running media center PCs or whatever, but PC unfriendly, not allowing mouse-clicks! And officially only open for people in Sweden, of course.

disabling TRACK and TRACE

Testing our web servers with the OpenVAS tool (fork of Nessus) at hackertarget.com, it pointed out that TRACK/TRACE need to be disabled. On IIS, it turned out that actually TRACK and TRACE are disabled, verified with telnet as given here.

telnet media.radiosai.org 80
Trying 66.249.27.178...
Connected to media.radiosai.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
TRACK / HTTP/1.0
Host: foo
A: b
C: d

HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
Content-Length: 0
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:30:44 GMT
Connection: close

telnet media.radiosai.org 80
Trying 66.249.27.178...
Connected to media.radiosai.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
TRACE / HTTP/1.0
Host: foo
A: b
C: d

HTTP/1.1 501 Not Implemented
Content-Length: 0
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:30:44 GMT
Connection: close


On krishna, had to disable TRACE - for doing this, googled a bit, finally howtoforge showed the simple way of just adding
TraceEnable Off
to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and restarting the web server.

PS. Initially I had tried with the code for re-write as given at many places, like here
# disable TRACE and TRACK in the main scope of httpd.conf
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE
RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACK
RewriteRule .* - [F]
But this did not seem to work. For enabling mod rewrite, had to do sudo a2enmod rewrite as given here.

Tips for clean audio

A "request for sermon" about tips on getting cleaner audio, and I obliged.

While recording,

1. Record with minimum ambient noise - switch off a/c etc. Don't use mics like wireless mics which give a hiss.

2. Have both shotgun mics and lapel mics for both guest and host in case of video interviews, or have dynamic mics close to speakers' mouths in case of audio-only interviews.

The rest of the stuff has to be done in the post-processing.

1. For each track recorded, do noise reduction using Adobe audition or cool edit pro or whatever, my settings in CEP 2.0 are as shown below, after doing a "Get Profile from Selection" using a section with only noise.



2. After the NR, doing a suitable noise gate, like the one below, is recommended.



3. Only after these steps, if the different tracks (interviewer and interviewee) are merged, and then normalized, we can have best results.

RAID failure on mp3server

The Melbourne uplink had a couple of RAID failures this week. My first suspect is of course the power supply for the external RAID enclosure...

duplicate entries in search results

A listener pointed out the duplicate entries which were being thrown up in the search results, which we knew about, but had not yet fixed. The initial entries to the files table had white-space before the filename, this was making them "distinct" from the newer entries of the same files without the whitespace. Trying to find them using this technique,

select c1.fileid, c2.fileid, c1.filename
from `radiosai_file_master` c1, `radiosai_file_master` c2
where c1.fileid < filename =" c2.filename 

did not work, since the filenames were actually not exactly the same: this was throwing up filenames which had .mp3 and .MP3 extensions. Then tried with a wildcard before the filename, found it matched. Then, making queries of the form

 SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE
 `fileName` LIKE CONVERT(_utf8 '__SPECIAL%' USING latin1) COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci 

(note the two underscores - meaning two characters) found that there are two white-space chars before the filename. CR and LF is my guess. Couldn't find the way to properly search with an SQL Like statement for "Like 'CR+LF+%', since

 SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE
 `fileName` LIKE CONVERT(_utf8 '__%' USING latin1) COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci 

returned

SELECT *  FROM `radiosai_file_master` WHERE 1

(ha ha!). So, did individual searches for __BV%, __TALK% and so on and deleted those files. Hopefully all are covered now.

withdrawing from some activities

Have stopped day-to-day involvement with some of the sites given on the left-hand side. Slowly other people are taking up various responsibilities. All for the best. The college website sssu.edu.in has a new CMS-based site, and the alumni site saistudents.org has also been relaunched...

application framework on javascript

Interesting project on freshmeat - WAJAF
Demos seen on left-hand side links work, including drag and drop, animation etc.

mounting remote volume over ssh

Briefly thought about remote mounting, googling found this link, but did not implement for video encoding of remote files etc it since my fiber media convertor frequently breaks the connection.