HD Video Test
Finally got myself a video camera. Been looking at them critically for about 8 years now...ever since my Hi8 cam broke in 2000. I loved making movies back then, and even lately have been doing various time-lapse type videos...not really 'movies' since they were shot with a SLR. A few years ago I got interested in video again with the advent of consumer level HD cameras. Canon came out with the HF10 and HF100, soda-can sized cameras that record 1080p HD to SDHC flash cards...no moving parts, great for strapping to cars/motorcycles, etc. When the price finally fell to a range I could deal with, I pulled the trigger. It's so cool...and little! This is my first test. Video quality is great! I hope to be posting more mischief and fun events in the coming months.
Is Vimeo the best place to host HD video? Anyone? Bueller? Anyway, enjoy some test shots from the backyard...
changing your server over to GMT
Funny how it's kind of hard to find documentation on this fairly simple task. The host I'm working with is CentOS 5, a variant of Redhat Enterprise 5. I use the following commands:
cat /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT > /etc/localtime
That is actually what sets the time. It's a binary file and is what our system tools and libraries look at.
vi /etc/sysconfig/clock
Edit the ZONE to be GMT. Mine looks like this:
ZONE="GMT"
UTC=true
ARC=false
Verify it looks right with these commands.
date ; date -u ; /sbin/hwclock --show
Reboot, done!
Statistics, Charts and R
R is an open source environment for statistical computing. It can do some pretty neat breakdowns of your data and has a lot of built in functions for doing so. One of it's great strengths is generating production quality graphics and charts. This is what I needed it for and what I'll be explaining here in a moment. I learned R by watching a video introduction to R created by Decision Science News. There were 2 actually. But not very long and it got me to a base level. I then installed R on my Mac, it was cake. Go to the R site, download the DMG, run the R executable and you're ready to go. That got me up and running so I could start playing around on my own and using other examples from the web. YMMV on other platforms.
Now for the example. Let's set the stage. Say you have some data in a table, for example, a race my girlfriend competed in, the 2006 San Diego 10K race. I copied, pasted that data into a file, scrubbed it down, did some math with perl to get me the # of seconds, and ended up with a CSV file. Download the file, save it locally, read that file in with R:
race<-read.csv("race.csv")
You are reading that CSV file in as a table into a variable called 'race'. Because that CSV has a header as the first line, it automatically assigns variables based on those column names. To reference those columns, use race$CITY, to check out the 'CITY' column. So to check out what you've just done, type "race</span>" on the console. Typing the variable name will spit it all back out. To see a breakdown of what that variable contains, type:
summary(race)
To see stats on the racers ages, type in:
summary(race$AGE)
Which spits out:
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
10.00 28.00 35.00 37.06 44.00 81.00
Minimum age of a runner was 10, oldest was 81. Average age was 37.06 years old. Doing this for race$SEX shows us there were 411 women and 474 men. Neat! Now for the visuals:
Below is a script I used to generate the graph above. You can see how I am plotting the dots, and drawing both lines:
race<-read.csv("race.csv")
Main Plot.
plot(race$SECONDS/60,race$AGE,
col="#5fae27",
main="",
xlab="Minutes",
ylab="Age",
cex=0.5,
type="p")
Set the Title
title(main="Age vs Time")
Draw the Red Line
lines(stats::lowess(race$SECONDS/60,race$AGE,f=0.1),
col="red",
lwd=2)
Draw the Blue Line
lines(stats::lowess(race$SECONDS/60,race$AGE,f=0.3),
col="blue",
lwd=3)
Not too hard, not too much code...pretty easy in fact! One of the great things about R is the built in help. Any of those functions, just type: ?function ..and you'll have immediate help. I encourage you to do that for the example above, to better understand it. It will describe far better than I can how each one of those functions works.
Let's generate another one, a histogram. That's easy:
hist(race$AGE,col="RED",xlab="Age",breaks=100,main="Histogram of
Racers Age"
To generate this:
So, what did I learn from the creation of this plot? My initial suspicion was that younger people would do better in the race...the data shows that is's almost average across the board. The average age is in the late 30's, but the histogram shows the biggest group was mid-late 20's. Hardly anyone in their early 20's even entered the race...too busy drinking? Also, there is a neat little cluster at the bottom left of the plot that shows a group of young kids in their teens that did well.
I have been making more of these, mostly around sysadmin type stuff. I'll post those as I get more time.
I got Joe Jobbed!
In case you've never heard of this, getting 'Joe Jobbed' is when a spammer uses your e-mail address as the 'From:' in their spam and you get all the billion bounces. It rendered my Blackberry useless all afternoon, and I thought I'd finally be screwed on this one. Alas, SpamAssassin 3.2.0 and above (I'm running 3.2.4) comes with rules to block this. Unknown to me, most of the bounces were already going to my spam folder, but any that didn't have the spam body were getting to me. I followed the instructions on this page: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/VBounceRuleset to make sure it was all set up and wouldn't classify bounces from my own server as bad. Then I set up the following procmail rule to put bounces in their own folder that I can review and run stats on:
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status:.*ANY_BOUNCE_MESSAGE.*
bounces
Done!
More good reading on this: http://www.sitepoint.com/print/sabotage-coping-joe-job
UNIX paste, sed and nl commands
3 highly useful commands you will find as part of your standard UNIX toolbox. I'll give an example situation for relevance:
I quite often find myself needing to merge 2 files together for some reason or another. My latest awesomeness consists of ripping/encoding favorite seasons of DVD's I own so my MediaCenter can have an easily accessed library (that I can also stream to my iPod Touch). When the encoding is done, I get files based on the name of the DVD Media and the track number. Like this:
Blah Season 1 Disc 1-1.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 1-2.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 1-3.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 1-4.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 2-1.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 2-2.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 2-3.mp4
Blah Season 1 Disc 2-4.mp4
I can go to a place like Wikipedia or Amazon and find a list of the track names, that should look like this:
Pilot
The Fat Man
Little John
Howard
The Reconing
Half Way
Blah
Blah Pt 2
What I want to end up with is files named something like this:
Blah - S01E01 - Pilot.mp4
Blah - S01E02 - The Fat Man.mp4
It'd be so much easier to rename these on the command line if I could at least partly automate it. Re-typing is a PITA. So, here is how I do it to save a lot of time...
If I assume that they were ripped in order, I can get a listing of the order of the episode files based on the time stamps (ls) and add a " to the front and end of the line (sed commands):
# ls -tr *.mp4 \\
| sed 's/^/"/g' \\
| sed 's/$/"/g' > tracklist.txt
Next I go to Amazon, Wikipedia, whatever. Find a list of episodes that is represented with tables (which cut-n-pastes as individual lines with tabs as the delimiter) and paste it into a vi edit session:
# vi episodes.txt
In general, edit this file down to a point that the only thing that exists are the track names, one per line. Let's pretend the first column contained the name of the track, 2nd column the Writer, etc. We only care about the first column, so you can execute this command in vi:
:%s/\\t.*//g
You can do other various cleanup like removing the " character:
:%s/"//g
Clean up other stuff like invalid shell characters, extra spaces, etc. This is the least automated part, but a hell of a lot faster/easier than re-typing. Especially if you are a vi whiz. If you use some other text editor, I'm sure this can be accomplished in a similar fashion.
Now we have 1 file that is the list of mp4 files, in order, and another that is the episode names, in order. What we now need is to make a file with what we actually want the files to be named. I accomplish this with the following command-line awesomeness:
nl -n rz -w 2 -s " - " episodes.txt \\
| sed "s/^/\\"Blah - S01E/g" \\
| sed "s/$/.mp4\\"/g" \\
> newnames.txt
To break that down, this is what is happening:
The nl command adds numbered lines...the -n means "right justified,
padded zeros" and the -w means "padded with 2 characters" and the -s
means "separate the columns with what's in the quotes".
The 2 sed commands add a " to the beginning and end of the lines.
The > sends the output to a file.
Output looks like this:
"Blah - S01E01 - Pilot.mp4"
"Blah - S01E02 - The Fat Man.mp4"
"Blah - S01E03 - Little John.mp4"
"Blah - S01E04 - Howard.mp4"
"Blah - S01E05 - The Reconing.mp4"
"Blah - S01E06 - Half Way.mp4"
"Blah - S01E07 - Blah.mp4"
"Blah - S01E08 - Blah Pt 2.mp4"
Now we merge the 2 files and prepend the 'mv' command to get a script we can run:
paste tracklist.txt newname.txt \\
| sed 's/^/mv /g' \\
> script.sh
Which looks like this:
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 1-1.mp4" "Blah - S01E01 - Pilot.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 1-2.mp4" "Blah - S01E02 - The Fat Man.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 1-3.mp4" "Blah - S01E03 - Little John.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 1-4.mp4" "Blah - S01E04 - Howard.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 2-1.mp4" "Blah - S01E05 - The Reconing.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 2-2.mp4" "Blah - S01E06 - Half Way.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 2-3.mp4" "Blah - S01E07 - Blah.mp4"
mv "Blah Season 1 Disc 2-4.mp4" "Blah - S01E08 - Blah Pt 2.mp4"
Check the script for sanity, then run it!
bash -x script.sh
w00t!
If you want the shell script I use to automate this somewhat:
#! /bin/sh
ls -tr *.mp4 \\
| sed 's/^/"/g' \\
| sed 's/$/"/g' \\
> tracklist.txt
nl -n rz -w 2 -s " - " episodes.txt \\
| sed "s/^/\\"$1 - $2E/g" \\
| sed "s/$/.mp4\\"/g" \\
> newnames.txt
paste tracklist.txt newnames.txt \\
| sed 's/^/mv /g' \\
> script.sh
The arguments are the name of the series and the season, like this:
bash ./rename.sh Blah S01
P.S. If you're trying to guess the show by the track names, I made them up. :)
My Synergy Setup
Synergy rules. I've been talking about it for a few weeks now, expounding on it's virtues over other options like x2vnc. A friend asked that I document my setup...here ya go Eddy: :)
My current install of synergy runs on on my Mac Pro, my linux box (centos5) and my MacBook Pro laptop. The Mac Pro is the controlling keyboard and reaches across both of the other computers. The monitor layout is the Mac Pro in front (2 monitors), the Linux box directly to the left and the laptop below the linux box.
After I downloaded synergy, I placed the 2 binaries (synergys,synergyc) in /usr/local/bin on my Mac. If the dir doesen't exist, create it. I also created /usr/local/etc for the config files.
Config on the Mac Pro:
n8pro:bin nathan$ cd /usr/local/bin
n8pro:bin nathan$ ls
jhead jpegtran synergyc synergys xv
The config file on the Mac Pro:
n8pro:~ nathan$ cd /usr/local/etc/
n8pro:etc nathan$ cat synergy.conf
section: screens
n8pro.local:
n8bookpro.local:
homelinux:
end
section: links
n8pro.local:
left = homelinux
homelinux:
right = n8pro.local
down = n8bookpro.local
n8bookpro.local:
up = homelinux
end
Commands I run on the Mac Pro (server):
# synergys -f -c /usr/local/etc/synergy.conf
Commands I run on the Linux Box (client):
# synergyc -f n8pro
Commands I run on the MacBook Pro (client):
# synergyc -f n8pro
Extra credit:
I also use this at work. A Linux box is the control. Synergyc will re-try connections every 30 sec or so, which means I can launch synergyc clients and let them fail when I'm not on the network. This means I can run it once and connect/disconnect from work/home networks and have seamless mouse sharing with very little work required. To set this up on the Linux box, i had a config similar to the one above for the Mac Pro. On the laptop I have one script that I run that fires off both synergyc clients at the same time. They stay running until a reboot. After reboot, I run it again and I'm set. This is the script:
cat /usr/local/bin/setup_synergy.sh
#! /bin/bash
killall synergyc
sleep 2
synergyc -f n8pro &
synergyc -f n8linuxbox &
Restoring lost screen sockets
Do your screen sockets get nuked and you can't connect to your screen sessions? If something auto-cleans the /tmp dir, you may have seen this before. If you're like me, you end up with 10 or so shells with various programs running that you then have to follow the process tree to kill off. This is my only real (huge) frustration with screen. Well, here's ya go:
ps -x | grep SCREEN | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -CHLD
Enjoy!
Christmas tree decorating at high speed
If you watch closely, you can see some sillyness at the beginning. Hehe. Good stuff!
Spiders on Drugs
I guess everyone has seen this but me:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
In the 1960s, Dr. Peter Witt gave drugs to spiders and observed their effects on web building. This short film about the results of the experiment was created by First Church Of Christ, Filmmaker.