My little corner of this place called the World Wide Web
I found this really cool moon photo at the AstroMeeting.
I love all the detail that he goes into about taking the photo.
A nice post on Amazing Filtered Things shows a whole bunch of photos of nuclear blasts.
My favorite is the one with the observers in the foreground.
Google Maps has a cool shot of an SR-71 Blackbird on the deck of the USS Intrepid at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.
After my recent iPad acquisition, I realized that now I need a new bag to carry it in. Normally I use a large Healthy Back Bag, produced and sold by AmeriBag. Unfortunately, the iPad’s shape doesn’t lend itself to being carried in the teardrop-shaped bag. I have narrowed down my choices, and there are oh so many of them, but now I need some help from you, gentle reader. Each of the images below are linked to the product information page on the bag.
Tonight’s feature is a video of one of my favorite artists, Diana Krall. This particular performance is from the live concert at the Paris Olympia Theatre in 2002.
Julie London’s performance of this Arthur Hamilton torch song was my favorite until I heard the sultry tones of Diana Krall performing it.
Quite some time ago I used to do a fairly regular Friday post of music videos. It’s time to start that over, but this time I going to post one every Monday night.
Tonight’s video is She Talks to Angels by The Black Crowes. The song was released in 1990 on the album Shake Your Money Maker.
Last week my friend Lindsay and I were making the rounds of the various thrift stores and used furniture stores in Valdosta. It is quite interesting to see what people get rid of and to think of ways to use some of it.
At one of the thrift shops we found three VSU glasses. One of them is a glass that was given out to the VSU student employees at the Student Awards banquet last year. Another one was from the Faculty and Staff Campaign from 2002. There were tons of promo glassware from all kinds of companies, restaurants and schools. I wonder just how much of that kind of stuff is bought and given out only to end up in some landfill or thrift shop.
Fringe, a new series on the Fox network that is using a new format Fox dubs Remote-Free TV.
The episodes are longer than your average sitcom. The Wikipedia entry on the show states that this series will have less commercials and promos.
While this is true, one of the interesting bits is that before each commercial they tell you how many seconds should pass before the next segment starts.
Another interesting aspect of the series is how they identify each location during the episode. Often shows just print plain text on the screen, however in Fringe they use 3D text on the screen and it is oriented differently depending on the scene.
Music
by Walter de la Mare
When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovely things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees
Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.
Today is the birthday of Lord Byron, an English poet born in 1788 in Scotland. He was born George Gordon Noel.
His first success was the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage written in 1812, which is based around his journeys from England to the eastern Mediterranean.
Check out today’s daily poem for another of his more recognizable poems, She Walks in Beauty.
This particular poem is one of my favorites, and it was featured in the television series Beauty and the Beast that ran on the CBS network in the US from 1987 until 1990. The first season of this show has recently been released on DVD.
When trying to sort my cthub XML file recently I found out that my code from the post on sorting the role listing had stopped working.
Turns out that there was an error introduced into the format of this file when upgrading from Contribute 3.11.
As you are no doubt aware, when at least one admin upgrades to Contribute 4 or Contribute CS3 (aka 4.1) all the admins have to since there are upgrades made to the XML files that control the site. Well it appears that this upgrade makes the cthub file non-valid XML.
Take a look at this file and look for the tag font_use_css inside the group_list_item child node of the group_list node. In a copy of the cthub file that was upgraded you will find that this standalone tag is missing the appropriate closing slash. If you compare this against a copy of the cthub file from before the upgrade, assuming you made a backup, you will find that the tag is properly closed.
Since this file is the master file with all of the role information for the site, I wonder if this XML error is causing unknown instability in the system somewhere.
While this is an easy fix, I will be posting some code that you can run to fix this, since editing a file like this by hand can be a real pain.
When you setup a website to be managed by Contribute, the name that shows up in the client for the connection description is generated from the text of the title tag of the index page of the website.
For setups where you are only managing a single site, this may not matter, but if you have a system where you use a development server and a production server, you may want the connection string to depict which server the user is editing and publishing to.
In order to change the text of the description you have to alter some text in a few files on the CPS management server.
In the installation directory of CPS, there is a database directory. This is the location of the files that are specific to the individual websites that are being managed.
The files in each site being managed are in a directory that is “numbered”, the number relates to the numerical order in which they were set up. If you remove a particular site, the numbers are not reused.
In each of the site directories there is a file named: connection_key.stc
This file, in XML format, contains a localinfo tag. The attribute sitename is the text that shows up in the Contribute client on the start page.
Once this is updated and a user logs into the Contribute server, the client connections are updated.
While this may be enough on it’s own to effect the change desired, the original name is still referenced in the cthub file for each individual site. I changed the name in both locations for completeness.
At VSU, we are implementing the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Contribute Publishing Server and CMS.
This is a two-piece system that involves a client-side component (Contribute) and a server-side component (CPS).
We are running this on a Linux server, so we needed an easy way to start the service up should a system reboot occur.
Now Macromedia included a very simple shell script that made a call the included OEM Jrun binary to start the server. The only problem is that it had no facility to plugin to the chkconfig tool that can be used to manage services in the various runlevels.
So I wrote a very simple one:
#!/bin/bash # # CPS Startup script for the Macromedia Contribute Publishing Server # # chkconfig: 2345 80 20 # description: The CPS is the backend to manage the Macromedia Contribute CMS. # processname: jrun -nohup -start contribute-wps # pidfile: none noticed # Source function library. . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions jrun=${JRUN-/usr/Macromedia_CPS/jrun4/bin/jrun} prog=CPS lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/macromedia_cps} RETVAL=0 start() { echo -n $"Starting $prog: " $jrun -nohup -start contribute-wps RETVAL=$? echo [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile} return $RETVAL } stop() { echo -n $"Stopping $prog: " $jrun -stop contribute-wps RETVAL=$? echo [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile} } # See how we were called. case "$1" in start) start ;; stop) stop ;; status) $jrun status ;; restart) stop start ;; *) echo $"Usage: $prog {start|stop|restart|status|}" exit 1 esac exit $RETVAL
Note that the lockfile referenced was an invention on my part, since the standard startup of jrun included with CPS doesn’t appear to create either a standard lockfile or pidfile.
After creating the file in /etc/init.d directory, you will need to run the following command: chkconfig --add CPS
This will add your new script to the service list maintained for use with chkconfig. At this point all the standard chkconfig commands can be used to manage this.
For more on chkconfig check out the chkconfig online man page at LinuxCommand .
In the process of troubleshooting the LDAP user problems I was experiencing I found that by default the logging of info and debug messages is turned off by default for the OEM jrun install that is part of Contribute Publishing Server 3.11.
In order to enable these logging levels you have to edit the sevrer configuration xml file. This file should be located in the configuration directory of your jrun4 server’s WEB-INF folder.
The name of the file is: ckm.xml
Open this file in your favorite editor and look for the following section:
/usr/Macromedia_CPS/logs/out.log /usr/Macromedia_CPS/logs/err.log true true true
By default the logger is only set to show error messages. This section also shows the location of the error logs and the output logs.
Note, that enabling this you will get larger log files, since this will log all connections to the LDAP server by the Contribute client(s) that you have installed. You may find it necessary to open the admin console and set a max log file size to control this.
One of the annoyances I have found with the Contribute Client is that in the Administration interface section, when adding a user, the menu of roles is not sorted for you. The list that appears when you reassign a user or when you create a new role, is sorted for you.
Each time that a new role is added, the client updates the hub file, adding the new role to the end of the list.
In investigating this I found that the hub file is just an XML file. This file is stored in the root _mm folder of the website that you are managing. Note that this file is connection specific, so if you are managing multiple websites, the location of this control file will vary. And if you are managing a large deployment by having multiple sites with a single directory structure, you will have a different _mm folder and hub file for each site, even though they are physically on the same server they are treated differently by the logic of the software.
Like many people, I went out into the great choas known as Black Friday after a deal.
In my case I was focused on obtaining an Olevia 237T 37″ LCD television being sold at Target for the low, low price of $549.00.
After getting it home and plugging it all into my MythTV system, I ran into problems. First of all, since the tv had a vga input, I used the vga output of my video card instead of the svideo output. Initially I got no video, but then I realized I needed to undo some of my xorg.conf changes since I had changed the output.
After fixing the xorg.conf problem to not use the svideo port (thank you SSH!), I ran into other small problems.
Getting the resolution output right
The 237T has a native resolution of 1366×768, which according to an article at CNET.com is the most common resolution, yielding an output of 768p.
It turns out that I needed a particular video modeline in order to make the tv work properly. This required a great deal of research since manually calculating a modeline is not something that I really wanted to undertake. After finding a few online calculators, I found that I could not use them since the Dot Clock Frequency was not something that was included in the manual for the tv. So I diligently searched on the Internet to see if I could run across someone else who had this model tv (or the slightly improved 537 series) that had solved the problem. On the MythTV wiki, I ran across two entries for the 537h. I tried them both, but unfortunately the source display on the tv still reported a resolution of 1024×768. After trolling the xorg.conf logs, this turned out to be due to a failure of either modeline to be validated.
Digging ever deeper into the realms of HDTV screen resolutions and the xorg.conf options, I found that the binary, proprietary Nvidia drivers give you something that can help out a lot here, Appendix J. Programming Modes. This enables one to specify a series of validated modes and the driver will automatically validate them and use the correct output settings for the first mode that is found to be valid.
Here is what I ended up using in my xorg.conf file:
Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Videocard0" Monitor "OleviaHDTV" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Modes "1360x768_60" "1280x720_60" EndSubSection EndSection
Getting the right TV output
The next hurdle was to make sure that I got the right output of each of the MythTV applications.
Xine
In the configuration of the DVD player or the Video player, make sure that you launch xine with the following command:
xine -pfhq -D -r anamorphic
In theory xine should automatically display the video output exactly as is on the media, but using the command above will ensure that your get a fullscreen display. (Thanks to a posting in the Freevo-users list by John Molohan for this)
Mplayer
In the DVD or Video playback configuration you can use the following command to launch mplayer to use the correct aspect ratio (Thanks to Jarod Wilson for this tip):
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo xv %sYou can also set these same configuration options in your mplayer configuration file (~/.mplayer/config):
## Audio Output ao="alsa"
ac="hwac3,"
## Verbosity
really-quiet="1"
## Video Out
vo="xv"
## Scaling fs="yes" zoom="yes" monitoraspect="4:3"
double="yes"
## Misc
nojoystick="yes"Internal DVD player
The MythTV built-in dvd player should display the video correctly by default.
Live TV output
When watching live television, you have a few options:
Each of these has it’s own drawbacks, but I have gotten the best results using 16:9. This setting is in the Playback options of the TV section of the MythTV setup.
References
