Now let me go back to one other thing…it’s comfortable!  Being so small and light is of course a major plus but it’s only one part of it.  The fact that is has the angled lens lets your hand sit comfortably without the annoying strain on your wrist.  Those 3 factors – small, light and the comfortable position of the wrist – made filming during labor and the hours after tolerable.  No doubt I wouldn’t be able to do it with any other camera without a tripod.

I bought it to have an easy way of doing the video and then just playing straight onto my ps3.  The problem with that is that it looks like it’s having a problem deinterlacing the video so you get this jitter look on the video.  There are lines on the screen when the cam moves or if something moves on screen.  Kinda defeats the purpose.

I found a workaround though.  I converted the file using winff and that fixed the issue.  It seems that the container they encode the video to on the camcorder is at 60 frames per minute while the actual video is only 30.  If I use winff to reencode the video to 30 fps, the jitters go away.  Ffmpeg reports the error as “Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 59.94 -> 29.97″.  This really isn’t a big deal for me since I can convert the file to other formats and get rid of the error.  My only issue was that I really wanted to skip any unwanted conversions.  Having our old handycam and using software to “watch” and then encode the video took the time to view it plus time to encode it.  Granted we are nowhere near that time here and with my 16GB card I can save almost 400 minutes of video before having to dump anything.  Combine that with the fact that winff can do a batch convert, I can convert a full day’s worth of video while I sleep.

The videos are pretty hefty too.  An 8 minute video was about 600MB.  Don’t go cheap on the memory card.  Granted, the battery will run out before the space does but you’ll want the space for that week long vacation.

Converting videos generally take longer than the run time of the video…I averaged processing about 27 fps of the original 30 fps on my pentium dual-core @ 2.4GHz.

Overall I’m really happy with the camcorder.  I have no intention of going back to get another one.  For all of the ones within the same price range or more, they were heavier and generally only offered the ability to zoom in farther and take photos.  I haven’t found a reason to zoom in any closer than 10x yet and I already have a point and shoot.

For a little while I have been wanting to do a changeover.  I liked the ease of use of our Windows server but not the reliability of it.  Since I have used Ubuntu over the past few years, I’ve grown fond of it.  I really wanted to move to a samba server due to the reliability of linux.  My only issue was our Windows file server needed to be running Windows to host certain files.  That situation changed this year due to a little restructuring.

So while working the other day I noticed something.  Our old file server running Windows 2000 server was rebooting at random.  A previous history of the server was this.  The server was originally installed with a dual P2-400 and Windows NT4.  This worked well for a few years but eventually we had issues with the server rebooting/locking without warning almost daily.  After looking at it for a while, we decided that it was the operating system and we replaced it with Windows 2000 server.  This seemed to fix the problem for a while so the server needed to reboot anywhere between once a week and once a month.  That was a scheduled reboot and not a “oh crap the server is down” reboot.  Pretty impressive at the time from what I remember.

This went on for a few years and I was happy with the situation.  Then something happened and the server just started rebooting again more frequently or services would just fail requiring a reboot.  I figured since nothing had really changed that I would replace the hardware this time around and that would fix it.  I went for overkill and put in an Opteron with a huge amount of RAM, 400GB drives and really, compared to what it was replacing, it was awesome.  All seemed well for quite some time.

Over the next few years I had to purchase a server for an unrelated project that actually never took off…more on that in a bit.

This brings us back to now.  I found out from logs and people that the server was back to rebooting at random.  This frustrated me since the server was set up to be a sound server.  It wasn’t supposed to be rebooting and unreliable.  I decided that this was it.  I was done with Windows to provide something as simple as a file server.  I decided to drag that old server (which happened to be newer than the Windows server) out and start messing with it.

First thing I did was download the ubuntu 9.04 x64 server cd and install it on the new machine.  Nothing special here, a dual core Opteron with 1GB ram and a 200GB seagate SATA drive.  I installed with the defaults and once I was up in my system I got to work.

First thing we need to do is load the gnome desktop:

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Just load the defaults.

Once we reboot, the next thing was to change the network interface to static by doing the following:

I needed to edit the interfaces file to show the correct data.  Here we assume your local network is with 192.168.1.xxx and you want the server to have an ip of 192.168.1.100 and the gateway 192.168.1.254.  Change accordingly.  Open your terminal and type:

$ sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Comment out where it talks about your interface, in this case eth0 and insert the following in its place:

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.254
gateway 192.168.0.1

Restart your networking to have the changes take effect…

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Access your sources.list file to have the server search all files:

$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Delete any “#” in the file to allow all repositories. Save the file and run:

$ sudo apt-get update

Now to make our lives easier, we need to install webmin.

Open firefox to http://sourceforge.net/projects/webadmin/files/webmin/1.490/webmin_1.490_all.deb/download and download the file. Open and install using the debian package installer. Once finished open your browser to https://localhost:10000 or from remote by using the ip address (in our case above, https://192.168.1.100:10000)

Username/password to login is what you used when setting up the system.

In my case I needed more than a 200GB file system since the old server was running dangerously low on space with a 350GB partition on the 400GB drives.  I shut the server down and installed 3 Hitachi 1TB SATA drives and once I booted back up, executed the following:

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

This installed the program to configure linux to handle my raid 5 configuration of the 3 drives.  This step isn’t needed if you aren’t going to setup a server using RAID.

Now going back into webmin, I can configure them.  Open the hardware section and choose linux RAID(sometimes in the unused section).  We are going to choose “create linux raid device of level: Raid 5″.  The next screen will ask you what hard drives to use.  Don’t bother formatting them.  It didn’t work in my case.  Once the drive /dev/md0 has been created, you can go up to “system – disk and network filesystems” and tell it to create a new mounting point for your newly created drive.  Choose “add mount” with type of “ext3″.  The next area should be self explanatory.  I chose to name my mount point /ntshare since I was sharing to my old NT network.  I will refer to that from here on out as my share point.

Once everything seemed to be working and set to remount at boot we can move on.  Next step is to install smb.

$ sudo apt-get install smb

The config of smb for a simple setup was really easy but I had a real issue trying to find documentation to recreate the ease of using Windows groups to configure shares.  I didn’t want to specify each user a directory they could/couldn’t access.  I just wanted them to have a user account and put them in a group.  Then the groups have the settings needed to grant or limit access to files/folders.

Go back into webmin and click on Servers.  You should have a “Samba Windows File Sharing” link now.  Under that you will have all sorts of buttons.  First off we want to scroll down to tell it to migrate users and groups from linux.   Click the Configure automatic linux to samba user/group icons and just choose the defaults.

I wanted to have my new system act as a wins server (netbios names on the network).  Once you’re back to the main Samba page, click “Windows Networking“.  Input your workgroup name and click “be a wins server“.  Now in order for this to work, your DHCP server will have to be told the IP address of the server for it to work so keep that in mind.

Now let’s setup some users for our server.  I went to the nav link of “System” and clicked “Users and Groups“.  Here I started setting up my users and creating the appropriate groups.  I made a group of “everyone” that all users were a part of and then individual groups for accounting, graphics, etc.  I added each user to their group and then added the secondary groups everyone and whatever else needed to be added.

Now we want to go back to our Samba Windows File Sharing link in webmin.  We are going to start creating shares.  First thing we will do is setup file share defaults.  We want to make sure that users have access to files and anyone who shouldn’t won’t.  Click file share defaults, then File permission defaults.  Change all file permissions to 770.  This will allow the appropriate users/groups to view and execute the files accordingly.  Each group can be customized to do things differently on the actual shares, but we want to setup the defaults first.  Click save and return to share list.

Accounting -

Let’s create a share now.  Click “create a new file share” and name the share.  We will name it Accounting.  Share folder is /ntshare/Accounting.  Create with defaults but use file permission 770 and group accounting.  Click create.  Once it’s been created, click on “Accounting” on the page and choose “Security and Access Control“.  Under the “Read/Write” groups, add your accounting group.  Save.  Now your users in group Accounting should be able to browse and view the Accounting folder on the network.  All other users will not be able to read, write or execute anything from the Accounting folder.

Graphics -

My second example is created very similar to the first.  This time I want to give everyone access to view the files, but have only my graphics department do any changes to the files.  This way they can feel safe about sharing live files to the network without someone deleting their work.  So, same steps as above but this time we are going to put graphics in as the group and then under Security and Access Control we will add graphics to Read/Write and add group “everyone” to Read only group.  So now everyone on the system can view the shared folder “Graphics” but only users assigned to the graphics group can change the files.

Any new users can now simply be added to the appropriate group.  You won’t have to go through the agony of adding each user to a specific share whenever someone new comes along.

If you have any issues connecting, most of the time it will tell the user from their machine the error…like “invalid group” or “no file permissions”.  Additional information can be retrieved under /var/log/samba and each machine connecting to the share will create its own log file.  I had issues at the beginning that wound up only being an issue with file permissions.  Check that first with a ls -al in the /ntshare directory.

• Using personal instant message clients that I had no control over (skype being the worst)
• A file transfer method for employees to use that was more efficient than email

Sending files thru email, sure that’s quick…kinda.  If you compare creating a new email document, finding your file, attaching, entering in contact/subject/body and clicking send verses dragging and dropping the file onto the contact on your Spark app…Jabber wins.  Add in the fact that our email server is hosted offsite…makes sense to use Jabber since it moves the files as fast as the source and destination machines can handle.  1000Mb/s vs 4.5Mb/s twice.  No brainer there.

So all of these are great and really that’s why I installed the server and had everyone setup with clients.  Then you get into the plugins.  The one I am going to focus on in particular is called fastpath.  Fastpath allows you to setup queues for your employees, insert a bit of code on your website and viola!  You now have live chat enabled on your website.  Here are some things it will do:

• Queue requests based on user input
• Multiple queues
• Canned responses allow a generic/draft to be built for all employees within a workgroup to have a standard response.
• Reporting on average hold time and time taken with a customer
• Observing features for management and transcripts of conversations
• Customer emailed transcripts of the conversation
• Automatic prescience adjusted icons depending on the status of your employees in queue (online/offline/idle) and automatic changing from online chat to sending an email to us

We went live about a week ago and I have had nothing but good responses from our employees, preferring it over email for communication with customers.

Setup for the server was simple, Ubuntu has a .deb build that installs itself.  Just point your browser to the server afterwards to configure server name and users.

Plugins are simple as well.  Ignite-realtime keeps an updated list embedded in the server.  Just click the + sign next to the plugin you want to install, wait for it to finish and you’re set.

If you know what you’re doing and want an easy way to transfer files around…you’re still better off with FTP or just simple file sharing.  But what several of us were running into at the office was trying to copy 4gb files amongst ourselves and that can take a while.  This solved that and wound up being a very powerful tool.

Check out the source:  http://www.ignite-realtime.org

Photos come through beautifully and text is crisp and easy to read.

Not an exciting post, but one I thought was worth mentioning.

Well I have actually been working with the product, Magicjack, for a long time…I just never saw the need to want one until I really started looking at my phone bill.

With my internet service and my phone service, we were averaging around $88 per month…$45 of that alone wound up being my home phone.

I needed a home phone for 2 reasons:

• Our satellite system required a phone line to dial out (not really an issue but more about that in a minute).
• The wife’s family lives out of the country and we weren’t wanting to pay for the international cell charges or mess with “are the online” with products like msn messenger or skype.

Now about a year or so ago I had purchased a Magicjack, set it up and then sent it with my father-in-law for him to use while he was at home.  This would allow him to be wherever there was a computer with internet access and be able to make or receive a local call from the US.  So we were able to pick up any phone here and make a call out of the country as if it were a local call…so no long distance…all for $20 per year.  That was my first personal experience with the magicjack and while I was impressed with it, there was something keeping me from making the plunge to purchase one for my home.  What that was, I really don’t know but these are the main issues that I have with the magicjack and I think prolonged my purchase.

• The computer the magicjack is hooked up to has to remain on at all times for the magicjack to work.  All calls made while the magicjack is offline will go onto the magicjack’s voicemail system.
• The software required to run the magicjack is something that can’t just be tucked away in the background.  Sure you can hide it down to the taskbar, but whenever a call comes through or the phone is picked up to dial, the software takes focus.  Most people won’t even notice this…I do because it will close down whatever game I’m playing to focus on the magicjack.  Not very good when you’re deep in it playing Call of Duty or something similar.
• Can’t keep your old number.

Basically in the long run I did decide to make the switch and besides the software popping in and out while playing, I don’t have any REAL complaints.  My computer is always on and my old number just got calls from telemarketers all day long.  As for any issues with “well running your machine uses electricity”…true but it only equals to about $13 per month in electrical charges.  Remember I’ve reduced my $45 per month charge for phone service down to $1.67… so that’s not an issue.  As I said before, the computer was always on so it’s not a change.

Now, if you’re a person who calls international, Vonage has recently stated that they now offer free international calls to 60+ countries around the world with their $25 per month service.  That’s pretty tempting if you call international frequently and for long periods.  If not, the magicjack will also give you the option to prepay to call internationally.  From what I have seen, their pricing plans for most countries are pretty competative, ranging between 1.8 and 5 cents per minute.  Some more obscure countries calling to cell phones run closer to 18 cents. Even at that price point, it’d take you over 2 hours of calling to that place to warrant getting Vonage.  If you’re fortunate enough to have someone in a $0.02 per minute country, you have 20 hours of calling before you hit the Vonage limit.

When connecting the magicjack line in your home there are really two ways to do this.  Either purchase a cordless phone and base station with multiple phones connecting to the same base (common now) or disconnect your phone line where it comes in from the phone company (usually on the outside of the house) and plug the magicjack into the wall…now all of the jacks in your house will have dial tone.  Each person will do this differently, I opted for the first since I’ve always used the single base with multiple phones.

Bottom line, if you are looking for an alternative to your home phone service because you really can’t see yourself using it like you used to, I’d pick up a magicjack.  For the $40 price tag and with it getting you the first year of phone service included, that’s less than what I was paying for in a month.

I understand that there would be a bit of a learning curve and if I really invested the time in it I could probably learn it all.  But the thing that kills me is there isn’t really any good documentation on what you have at your disposal and what you can really do.

A perfect example of what should be included is what comes with autoit.  Autoit has excellent documentation and tools to make life simple for you.  Every possible step or execution you can do is also included as examples so you at least have somewhere to start AND each example will load directly from the help window.  Still can’t figure it out?  Hop online and check out their forums.  Plenty of people out there who know what they’re doing.  Plenty of homemade examples as well ranging from editing excel spreadsheets to beating minesweeper.

Ok so that’s enough about being off topic.  My point is that I consider myself to be an intelligent person and if I’m having to follow too many steps just to open an example…you’ve done something terribly wrong.

Palm Pre SDK = Terribly Wrong…