Open source

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Rest and other topics

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

After a 4 hour nap yesterday afternoon and a good 11 hours of sleep last night I’m feeling fit and feisty on this fine grey Sunday afternoon. It’s amazing what a good nights sleep can do for a young lad!

A couple of things:

Now for a nice relaxing afternoon with Skype, Scott, and some Xbox 360!

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Video blog how to

Monday, May 8th, 2006

Bre from I Make Things just asked me to write up a short post on my workflow for creating Flash video blog posts using only free tools available for Apple’s OS X for We Are The Media and as always I’m more than happy to share the knowledge wealth. After I finished this post I was informed that the ultimately awesome Jake had also posted a write up on the same topic on the same day. I need to give good credit to Jake for turning me on to some of the tools I use in this tutorial.

The only things ayou will need to create your video blog post (be it for a personal blog, political manifesto, or sharing your cool new technology hacks with the world) are a digital camera capable of capturing AVI’s, a Mac running OS 10.3.9 or higher, and a website or blog with FTP access to post your creation to. We are going to install a free open source tool called ffmpegX that will help us with converting the video into Flash’s FLV format. You can get ffmpegX here.

The first thing you will have to do is “capture your moment”. Use your digital camera or camcorder to record a video of whatever you want to post to the internet. I recommend using the highest quality settings possible for your video – 320×240 is a minimum resolution, but use a higher setting if you can. As with any digital camera or camcorder good lighting always helps – make sure your environment is brightly lit, and your background is not brighter than you are to ensure that your face is neither too dark or bleached out. You might want to experiment a bit with lighting to find a balance that looks good before you move on to the next steps of posting your video to the internet.

You can then use iPhoto or the finder to transfer your video to your Mac’s hard drive. If you use iPhoto to pull your video from the camera you will want to drag the file from iPhoto to your desktop or another location on your hard drive to make it easier to find for the next couple of steps. At this point you are free to use iMovie or other tools to edit your video if you want, but for this tutorial we are just going to assume you want to post your video just like it was when it came out of your camera.

Now that we have the video file open up ffmpegX. If you have not installed it yet click here to get it, and follow the instructions on the website to install this fantastic video file format conversion tool.

Once you have opened and installed ffmpegX drag your AVI video onto the window to select it as the source file. Then in the “Target format” pane of the window select “FLV” as the format to encode it to. Once your screen looks something like the below you should be good to go - click the “Encode” button to start the encoding process.

Summary

FfmepgX will generate a yourfile.flv that contains your video. The next step is to put this file and a Flash enclosure (a .sfw flash executable file) onto your website. Open up your FTP client and open a connection to your website. If you need a great free FTP client check out Cyberduck. I can recommend a great Flash standard Flash enclosure you can download this one (control click or right click on the link and select to save the target to your hard drive). Both this file and the .flv file will need to be on your website (and note the www accessible URL for the next step).

The final step in our tutorial is to put the HTML code on your website. Below is the code you will want to use:

<center><object width=”320″ height=”240″>

<param name=”movie” value=”YOUR WEBSITE HERE/flvplayer.swf?file=YOUR FILE PATH.flv&autoStart=false;”>

<embed src=”/videoblog/flvplayer.swf?file=YOUR WEBSITE HERE/flvplayer.swf?file=YOUR FILE PATH.flv&autoStart=false;” quality=”high” wmode=”transparent” width=”320″ height=”240″type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer”></embed>
</param>

</object></center>

You will need to change that code to reflect both the URL to the flash player and the filename for this particular video for each movie you want to post to your website. Once you save your file and view the page in a web browser you should see something like the following (although hopefully with a less haggard host):


There you have it!

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Mind Camp ROCKS!

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

All I have to say is Mind Camp 2.0 ROCKS! I’m here with more than 200 geeks, I have not slept in over 24 hours, and I’ve had some of the most cool and amazing conversations about every topic under the sun from real estate, to DSL, to video blogging (just wait - more on this in a moment), and social networking.

And now for the good news!

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

I’m very happy as I just sealed the deal on a new job. As many of my readers may know I’ve been quite unhappy with recruiting for quite some time. It’s a great career in some ways and really does have some plusses, but when it comes right down to it I’m just not the sales type and my passions lie more in the direction of hands on technology work.

I’m actually going to miss my old company quite a bit. As much as I didn’t like my job function I really did like the working environment, and have a lot of respect for the company. My new employer is quite a different beast - a much larger company, with very different goals in the marketplace.

Thankfully I’ll be back on the technical side of the house and be doing project management work for a web solutions team. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity to learn more about project management as well as a way that I can get some hands on experience leading and managing small software projects.

I’m quite excited about this opportunity and suddenly can’t wait until the 24th when I get to start my new job.

No need to reinvent the wheel

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

I just saw a nifty article online about a guy who (on a bet) decided to develop a computer game in a week. Mind you - it’s no Halo 2 or anything, but nonetheless it looks to be a fun little game.

The big point here is that we really have gotten to the point in technology where the general public can take advantage of the work and knowledge base of those that came before them. The developer (Jay Barnson) had development budget, and used only open source tools. In a mere 40 man hours (two weeks of part time work) he was able to make a game that 10 years ago would have passed for commercial grade.

I’m glad to see open source getting wider and wider approval and acceptance. As technology moves forward hopefully more and more types of applications will be developed by passionate “new comers to the technical age”

Three cheers for Wired and crypto

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006

I’m almost ashamed to admit that I still subscribe to some paper magazines. I realize that in this digital age it’s a waste of trees, and makes the information hard to consume, but for a few magazines I still dive right in. Most notable among these are National Geographic, and Wired Magazine.

National Geographic I get for obvious reasons: their online version is intended to supplement not replace their print edition. The beautiful photographs and explorations of far away places will always earn my yellow-spined friend a place on my bookshelf.

Wired on the other hand has a great offering online, and in fact provides more content online than in their print version. I subscribe to them simply to support the organization and ensure that they will be around to provide technical insight for years to come.

Of late I’ve been particularly impressed with Wired. They have been covering a lot of cryptography issues, and really exploring consumers rights concerning privacy, DRM, and fair use.

In the past week alone there have been two very interesting articles, one about Sun’s Open-Source DRM project, and the other about Zfone, a PGP-powered truly secure VOIP protocol. Obviously I’m against DRM in just about any form, but if it’s going to stick I hope that Sun’s DReaM is it, it seems friendly to consumers and to have all the right fair use provisions included.

Zfone on the other hand seems to be a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak big-brother view of the future. Hopefully secure cryptography will become an integrated part of our society and prevent tomorrows governments or terrorist organizations from spying on our day to day lives.

MenuMeters where have you been all my life

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

I just discovered a kick-ass little utility for OS X called MenuMeters. Up until now I had always been running Activity Monitor and iStat Pro. I used iStat for detailed information, and the “floating CPU utilization” feature of Activity Monitor tucked away in the corner to keep an eye on my processor.

I’m a big graphs geek and always like to feel like I have my finger “on the pulse” of whatever machine I’m currently using. MenuMeters manages to elegantly answer all of my at a glance wants, and does so with not only a small memory footprint, but also minimal processor utilization.

Menumetersmenubar

It’s quite configurable, and as you can see it gives all sorts of information about your CPU, disks, network utilization and more. I’m sold! MenuMeters is free, open source, OS X only.

Of HFS+ and optimization

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Recently at work we had a project come through that dealt with writing device drivers for flash memory devices. I had a chance to review some of the design documents and learned a great deal about some of the differences between NAND flash and traditional disk magnetic disk drives in both the way they store and retrieve data.

This and the recent /. linked article on OS X’s system optimization techniques has spurred me into learning more and more about HFS+ and the way that it stores and optimizes data on the hard drive in my powerbook. Of particular note is some of the new technologies that have been included to reduce the number of extents that files operate, and the way that it automatically de-fragments files that meet certain requirements on the fly.

While most magnetic disk drives employ a similar hierarchical file system and try to preserve a file as a contiguous block on the hard drive, flash memory (such as NAND flash) does not need to do this. Flash memory is able to look at a drive as a circular device and loop data around on it due to the fact that accessing any one part of the volume in particular does not require moving a physical head.

While this does provide certain performance advantages during normal operation most flash based file systems such as JFFS and JFFS2 do take a significant performance hit when mounted because they lack a true file descriptor table so the entire volume must be scanned for information pertaining to the files it contains. While this is a quick process for a 128MB flash drive in the future as portable computers become more and more likely to include a flash drive rather than a hard disk drive we are likely to see problems with this as a computer tries to boot and has to scan through a multi-gigabyte or terabyte volume before mounting it.

Happy Birthday OS X

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Today mark’s the fifth birthday of my beloved OS X. Happy Birthday! Ars Technica is helping to celebrate with a write-up about OS X and it’s history - check it out. They give a good history of OS X, and bring up a few points to show how much it’s changed from 10.1 to 10.4.

I personally can attest to the change. I would not have been a happy user of 10.1, but once Tiger came out it really showed the Windows world (and then Windows users like me) what a modern operating system can do!

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