Sun, 16 Dec 2007

Arrived in Germany

The flight was OK - take-off was about an hour late, but due to favourable wind we landed almost in time. Sitting on a plane for more than 11 hours is never nice, and being surrounded by some rather primitive young men didn't exactly help. The movies were OK, the service was OK, we even found the Twix box before it was empty. By the time of our arrival at Schiphol both of us had migraine. We spent some more time stuck in a traffic jam in the car with my parents, who had picked us up, but that wasn't really bad: we were home, we were together with my parents (and their dog), there was good food and drink ... After arriving in my hometown we had a good night's sleep.

Germany is chilly and dark. The winter sun is very nice, though. I find my hometown idyllic in an almost Dutch way: distances are short, everything is small and close, there are few people, hardly any traffic in the streets, it's very quiet, no noises at all in the night. The air is fresh. It's a great relief after Hong Kong.

We're now in the middle of preparing everything for A.'s christening, which will take place tomorrow.

Posted on 16 Dec 2007 at 00:18 in /life. -- Permalink

Wed, 12 Dec 2007

Burning a DVD under Linux (3)

I tried to fix the problem with the menu on my DVD - made some changes to the xml configuration file for dvdauthor, and used dvdauthor on the command line instead of QDVDauthor. What I got was a DVD+RW and a DVD-R which our DVD player refused to play: both discs were ejected automatically.

When I checked the first DVD I had burned (using QDVDauthor, no manual changes to any files), I found that the first video clip does have audio. It's just not played by our DVD player. Oh well ...

In the meantime, I've made several more MPEG files from raw digital video files with Kino. I'm now trying once more to produce a nice DVD.

Posted on 12 Dec 2007 at 11:25 in /technology. -- Permalink

Tue, 11 Dec 2007

Burning a DVD under Linux (2)

I found QDVDauthor very easy to use (it comes with a nice "quick start guide") - added my MPEG files to the project and created a menu with a background image, then created the DVD ... and that was it. Only then did I realise that, of course, this program doesn't do the burning, it just provides all the stuff which you then burn onto a DVD with whatever program you have.

So for burning I used growisofs (growisofs -Z dev/dvd hk_videos_dec2007* -dvd-compat), which worked like a breeze:

Executing 'genisoimage hk_videos_dec2007/AUDIO_TS hk_videos_dec2007/VIDEO_TS | builtin_dd of=/dev/dvd obs=32k seek=0'
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
/dev/dvd: "Current Write Speed" is 4.1x1352KBps.

Then a lot of progress messages and finally:

Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used 0
\1726418 extents written (3371 MB)
builtin_dd: 1726432*2KB out @ average 4.0x1352KBps
/dev/dvd: flushing cache
/dev/dvd: updating RMA
/dev/dvd: closing disc

With much trepidation, I inserted the disc into the DVD player - and it worked! What doesn't work, though, is the menu. It lives a kind of half-life as a video clip a few seconds long, so it's there but it's not a menu. When the player has loaded the disc, the contents of the root folder are displayed instead: a file named "VIDEO*TS" and 4 files named "VTS*01*1" through "VTS*01*4". "VIDEO*TS" is the menu; "VTS*01*1" contains the first four-and-a-half of altogether 9 video clips (the first of which is without any audio), "VTS*01*2" contains the rest of the 4th clip, the 5th and part of the 6th, "VTS*01*3" the rest of the 6th, the 7th and part of the 8th, "VTS*01*4" the rest of the 8th clip. Obviously there's no need to have an individual file for each clip - they're supposed to be accessible from the menu.

In other words, everything is fine, except that the menu doesn't work and somehow the sound of the 1st video got lost. Now I'm racking my brains trying to understand what exactly went wrong.

Posted on 11 Dec 2007 at 12:28 in /technology. -- Permalink

Mon, 10 Dec 2007

Burning a DVD under Linux (1)

Now I've got enough stuff to fill a DVD, I'd like to burn a disc which our DVD player (for the TV set) will accept. I thought this was easy to do on a Mac, but B's computer keeps trying to persuade me that my .mpeg and .vob files, which my Ubuntu box can play without any problem, aren't video files. Sure they are, stupid OS X! Yet they're obviously not supported by Quicktime, iDVD and what have you. Hmm ...

I'm now trying dvdauthor - and, because I know so little about MPEG, DVD, burning etc., I'm going for the GUI (qdvdauthor), too. I'm not sure if Brasero can burn DVDs which will play in a DVD player. The catchily named growisofs looks promising: I love command-line software! But first of all, I want a DVD which I can actually use. And time is running out - two more days before we leave for Germany.

Posted on 10 Dec 2007 at 18:57 in /technology. -- Permalink

Completing a Hong Kong tax return

Completing a tax return is easy to learn and easy to remember:

• Fill in your personal details.
• Fill in your income.
• Fill in how much rent you paid.
• Sign the form and get your spouse to sign it, too.

I still managed to mess up my form completely - after filling in all the fields, I realised that the tax year runs from 1 April to 31 March, not from 1 January to 31 December. Also, it was only when I found it strange that we've managed to survive for 8 months on HK$ 20,000 or so that I realised there's a difference between HK$ and euro ...

The Inland Revenue Department doesn't even want to see your documents, you just have to keep them for 6 years in case they want to check at some point in the future.

Just like escalator safety ...

Posted on 10 Dec 2007 at 11:52 in /life. -- Permalink

Sun, 09 Dec 2007

Video editing: Kino (2)

I've used Kino a lot these last few days - it's an excellent program. In contrast to Cinelerra, everything is available in one window, which in my view makes it easier to use. The window has several tabs, they provide functions such as editing, trimming, exporting etc. When you change between editing (where you see your whole project) and trimming (where you can work on an individual snippet and cut out whatever doesn't quite please you), your position in the project doesn't change: switching back and forth between these two views/functions is seamless.

Kino has crashed on me once but I could restart it without a hitch and it automatically restored the project I'd been working on, including all changes I had made - even the last one, which had somehow caused the crash.

The only thing I find a bit awkward in Kino is that you can't add several files to your project at once. You have to click "Insert" and then pick a file for every single piece of video you want to include. (Or maybe I just haven't found out how to add more than one piece at a time?)

(My earlier post.)

Posted on 09 Dec 2007 at 11:39 in /technology. -- Permalink

Sat, 08 Dec 2007

Third Hong Kong Studienstiftung Round Table

On 7 December, the Round Table met again - this time at a Thai/Indian restaurant in Jordan. Unfortunately Mr. Z. was unable to attend.

The 2 professors treated the audience to stories about life at HK universities. There were fascinating tales of corruption and infiltration, blackmailing and sheer incompetence: people from the mainland, who are step by step taking control of this city, bring with them the customs and traditions of the beloved "motherland", lowering standards all over. Most Hong Kongers seem happy to accomodate them, or maybe they just don't give a shit about anything.

Tales from the architectural front were just as fascinating, even though in a different, less gory way.

On the first day of our holidays, we were just too tired to tell any stories of our own. Listening was just fine.

Posted on 08 Dec 2007 at 11:10 in /life. -- Permalink

FTP preserving file attributes

In order to preserve files attributes when downloading them over FTP, simply tar them, then download the tar file. It seems you can't do anything interesting without shell access ...

Posted on 08 Dec 2007 at 10:54 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 07 Dec 2007

Relative links in Blosxom (4): fixed

The version of the rename command on my remote server is from 2000 or so and doesn't understand perl expressions. Instead, it works like "from to file".
So I had to change the last line of my script to:

rename txt.new txt *.new

I then ran the script in each directory. Now everything seems OK. Good-bye, relative paths!

Posted on 07 Dec 2007 at 16:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Copying while preserving file attributes

cp -p will do the trick - will preserve file attributes, including timestamps, when copying files. So much for low-level copying. I love man pages ... Obviously this is not a solution for FTP, but I can make a copy of my Blosxom blog on the remote server before I start changing files with my script.

Posted on 07 Dec 2007 at 14:34 in /technology. -- Permalink

Relative links in Blosxom (3)

The final version of my little shell script is here ... I had to keep the original files in order to set the timestamps of the corrected files back. This is why the original files couldn't simply be overwritten with the corrected ones. In the end, however, obviously the original files had to be discarded and the corrected files had to be given the same names as the original ones.

#/bin/bash
for i in *.txt;
do sed 's/href="blosxom\.cgi/href="http://\/\/tstigers\.net\/cgi-bin\/blosxom\.cgi/g' $i > $i.new;
touch -r $i $i.new;
done;
rm *.txt;
rename 's/\.new//' *.new

This works fine locally. If anything goes wrong when I run it on my remote server, I'll have wrecked my whole Blosxom blog. But what's the alternative? Blosxom's dependence on file timestamps makes it difficult to create backups. I guess I should have a look at low-level copying.

But maybe it's enough to write a script which copies all files and folders of the Blosxom blog and sets the timestamp of each copied file according to the timestamp of the original file. Such a script wouldn't change anything in the original place - no writing there, only reading.

So the problem of recursively entering directories comes up again. Well, I guess it's still easier to run such a script in every single directory and pass it the correct path to the original files every time.

Posted on 07 Dec 2007 at 14:08 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Relative links in Blosxom (2)

I found writing a script which changes relative to absolute paths less trivial than I had anticipated.

Editing multiple files in vim ("argdo") is OK - but what happens when your command doesn't apply to all open files (e.g. because you want to substitute something which in some of these files just isn't there)? vim doesn't just skip them but refuses to do anything in any file.

Regarding sed, at first I didn't realise that by default all output is written to standard output, so you have to pipe the output into a file if you want your substitutions to be permanent. Now I've got a simple shell script which loops through all file names in a directory, substitutes relative links with absolute ones and writes the result in a new file:

#/bin/bash
for i in *.txt;
do sed 's/href="blosxom\.cgi/href="http://\/\/tstigers\.net\/cgi-bin\/blosxom\.cgi/g' $i > $i.new;
done

I'm sure that this is not the most elegant solution - but it works. It would be nicer to have a script which does the trick recursively for all directories; but with the handful of directories I have, entering every directory by hand and running the script there is probably easier than writing and testing such a fully automatic script.

Next step: reading the timestamp of each original file and setting the timestamp of each new file to the timestamp of the corresponding original file. It shouldn't be too difficult to do this by incorporating a "touch" command into my script. Finally, I'll need to run this script on my server: downloading all Blosxom text files to my local machine changes the timestamps, of course.

Posted on 07 Dec 2007 at 13:19 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Thu, 06 Dec 2007

Bad Behavior - no solution - oh yes, a solution!

Acting on instructions I found on the Bad Behavior website, I accessed the databases of my two websites and searched the Bad Behavior table for my (workplace) IP address. On one of the websites, I found one completely innocent entry - in the other website, nothing at all.

Am I looking in the wrong place? "bad_behavior_log table" it says on the Bad Behavior website, and this table should have a "denied_reason" field. I can't see either.

Oh well. Found something after all. I had to look through other users' comments to the instructions I mentioned. Some of them had the same problem as I. One of them, however, mentioned another post on the same website, which I then found. Well, that's convenient ... :-(

Apparently, the creator of Bad Behavior ruined his own plugin by mistake yesterday and, as a result, found himself locked out of his blog, too. Now he's made a new version available for download. However, only his latest post provides a download link to the updated version.

I mean, this guy offers a great WP plugin for free and I'm obviously very grateful for that. However, a link or just a few words on the page where most people will probably start looking for help when they find themselves blocked by Bad Behavior - this would have saved me, and presumably a lot of other people, hours of googling, reading, searching their databases, trying this and that ...

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 15:50 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

FreeBSD on my laptop?

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop there is a jungle out there. That doesn't sound too good ... Even though I'm adventurous (well, I think trying new things on my computer is fun), running Ubuntu on my ThinkPad is so much fun, I really don't see myself risking to lose that.

My old Toshiba laptop is no doubt too old for such an experiment. I mean, if even on a ThinkPad X60s there's kernel panic after kernel panic ...

I find even less optimistic information on running OpenSolaris on my box.

So - how about buying another computer? :-/

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 14:30 in /technology. -- Permalink

Relative links in Blosxom

I realised I made a stupid mistake - I used relative paths instead of absolute ones for the internal links on this blog. The relative links work fine when you click on them from the main page; they lead to nirvana when you're on a different page, e.g. after clicking on a category path. The reason is that Blosxom creates a pseudo-path for such a page, appending stuff to the name of the Blosxom script file (blosxom.cgi).

Fixing this will be quite a hassle: editing the relevant files (using sed or just vim) is easy enough but resetting the timestamp individually for each file will be cumbersome. Can I do this automatically with a script?

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 13:02 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior problem

When I tried to log onto my "entries" blog this morning, I found myself locked out. I got a 403 message and was told that my IP address was "associated with malicious behaviour", or something like that. The "fix this problem yourself" link didn't get me anywhere; and of course I could have contacted the site administrator (= myself) by e-mail, quoting the "technical support code" I found on the error page - but I couldn't log onto my administrator account either. So what the heck?

The problem was caused by the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress, and deleting the relevant directory over FTP solved the problem. Apparently, Bad Behavior had gathered so much incriminating information on me in its log file that it decided to block me.

Interestingly, I was also blocked from accessing the Amity website. It ran Bad Behavior, too - until I deleted it this morning, too. How come that the plugin on both websites came to the conclusion that my IP address was part of the axis of evil?

Maybe Bad Behavior was correct after all? Maybe terrible stuff is being sent out from my IP address all the time because my computer was infected by a Trojan or something? I'm kind of worried, even though it seems very unlikely that anything is wrong with my computer. Maybe I should have had a close look at the log files instead of deleting the plugin directories on both websites right away.

Posted on 06 Dec 2007 at 11:22 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Wed, 05 Dec 2007

OpenSolaris

What is Solaris anyway? And haven't I long wanted to find out about BSD, too? OpenSolaris.org - FreeBSD.org.

Posted on 05 Dec 2007 at 17:46 in /technology. -- Permalink

Amity website "Newsroom"

We created a "Newsroom" page on the Amity website - a collection of links to our "press releases" (which we release to anybody but the press ...). So far, we have released 4 such texts: 3 in October and November 2006, one today. Our press work is a quixotic fight, with virtually everybody saying yes and doing no.

Posted on 05 Dec 2007 at 15:23 in /work. -- Permalink

Dictators of Wikiland

Wikipedia is devoted to democratic consensus and the free exchange of ideas - right? Wrong! Apparently, it is run by an evil junta, whose members use a secret e-mail list to destroy anyone questioning their dictatorial rule. (Kerim twittered about this.)

Posted on 05 Dec 2007 at 14:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Gnome Blogs

I've been looking at a few of the blogs listed on the Gnome Blogs site. Most of the 98 blogs do seem rather dead, but there's some pretty good stuff, too.

Posted on 05 Dec 2007 at 14:13 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Lynx under Windoze

I have these periods when I love using text-based browsers. Lynx works under Windoze, sort of. Chinese characters are a big problem. - I prefer Links, but this I'd need to compile myself: fine in Linux, of course; way too much hassle in Windows.

Posted on 05 Dec 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 04 Dec 2007

Will SpamFree make our website spam-free?

In addition to Akismet and Bad Behavior, I also installed WP-SpamFree on the Amity website. I'm curious to see if this plugin will really "virtually eliminate automated comment spam" as promised.

Posted on 04 Dec 2007 at 14:27 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

ZoneAlarm woes

I spent one and a half hours this morning trying to install and run a "ZoneAlarm Security Suite" update. The problem is, it simply doesn't run - the only thing it did is make my computer hang. The "Windows Task Manager" displayed CPU load constantly at 100%. Finally I uninstalled it and went back to the previous version. Also, I disabled the anti-virus function - I'm using Avira AntiVir now, a free and (in my experience) reliable program.

I had to reboot 4 times in the process. Under Linux, normally you needn't even shut down any program while updates are being installed.

I wonder why I fell into the trap again ... It's not the first time that ZoneAlarm publishes an update which wreaks havoc on my computer. Well, thank you ZoneLabs, and thank you Windows in the first place.

Posted on 04 Dec 2007 at 11:18 in /technology. -- Permalink

Mon, 03 Dec 2007

People don't convert other people ...

In mediaeval typology, the dog can symbolise a new believer, who picks up the Christian faith only to "backslide" after a short time - just as a dog will often eat something and soon spew it out again. I've always liked this association.

On the one hand, "for us there is only the trying" and "the rest is not our business". One the other hand, the trying is something we're most definitely asked to do; we're asked to try our best, but what precisely is "our best"?

Posted on 03 Dec 2007 at 14:02 in /life. -- Permalink

Granule vocabulary flashcard program

That's a fine little piece of software! It makes it so much more convenient for me to memorise and revise my Chinese words, and it's so much better to have everything in one place, neat, clean, searchable, than to use paper flashcards (which I'm still using in addition to Granule).

(My earlier blog entry has links to the program and a related Wikipedia entry.)

Posted on 03 Dec 2007 at 13:09 in /technology. -- Permalink

Christmas preparations (1)

We're still working this week - 3 days - and that will be it. Leaving for Germany in 10 days. Christmas preparations have started: a lot of things have to be organised, especially since a christening and a 90th birthday are coming up, too. Above all, presents need to be taken care of. It's not just about buying stuff: somehow, everything has to get to Germany.

Posted on 03 Dec 2007 at 11:45 in /life. -- Permalink

Sun, 02 Dec 2007

Video editing under Linux: Kino

Kino, a less complex, less powerful video editor, works fine. Loading/inserting files which you want to use is a rather painful process though - that's definitely better in Cinelerra, where you simply select all the files you want, then wait until they've all been loaded. In Kino, you have to go through the "load file" dialogue individually for every single snippet.

Kino wasn't able to export ("render") anything as long as I didn't run it with root privileges. Apparently it needs a certain kernel module, which it can't load without these privileges. I wonder if this was the cause of my problems with Cinelerra. The beauty of Kino is that it actually lets you know if there's any problem, and what the problem is. With Cinelerra, I just couldn't figure it out. I don't think I'll install and try Cinelerra again - glad I finally found something which works OK; and Kino probably has all the functions I'll ever want to use.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 23:15 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (3)

OK - no difference to the status quo ante. No rendering.

Actually yes, there is a difference. Or did I just fail to notice this before? When I load files which I want to edit, I get the most horrible "audio block/sample failure" messages. A hopeless case, it seems.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:34 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (2)

OK, now CVS doesn't cause any problems anymore, but I get several "possibly undefined macro" errors as a result of creating a "configure" file (autoreconf -i --force). I'm reinstalling Cinelerra from the Ubuntu repository now, just to see what will happen.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:16 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (1)

As expected, svn worked like a breeze. Creating the "configure" file didn't work, however, because I didn't have CVS installed. Well, that can be helped.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:11 in /technology. -- Permalink

Going for the newest version of Cinelerra

I prefer installing software from the Ubuntu repositories but in this case, it just might help to compile the latest Cinelerra version from the subversion repository. First of all, I had to get tons of libraries and "dev" headers. Using subversion will be a pleasure, but I'm somewhat curious to see what problems will come up during the compilation process.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:05 in /technology. -- Permalink

Video editing: pleasures and pains of Cinelerra

It took me some time to find my way through Cinelerra but now it feels comfortable to select, cut and put together snippets of video. The software comes with lots of other functions, most of which are probably relatively easy to use, too. I haven't yet tried many.

The problem is, I just can't render video, even though the manual describes in some detail how to render video for a DVD. What I don't understand is that I don't even get any error messages (when I run Cinelerra from a terminal); it doesn't even crash, it just silently refuses to do anything. Audio rendering works fine. I guess the video rendering process needs something which I haven't installed - but as it is, I'm left without a clue as to what this could be.

Since video editing is pointless if you can't get an end product (to burn onto a DVD, upload to the web or just watch on a computer), I'm stuck here.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 18:06 in /technology. -- Permalink

Video editing under Linux

No, I'm not really trying to "Become a digital video editing guru using Linux tools" (a helpful article!) but, after I've learned how to grab digital video from tape and save it on my hard disk (using dvgrab), I'm now moving on to the actual editing.

sudo dvgrab --format raw -buffers 200 --autosplit --size 100 source_

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 11:00 in /technology. -- Permalink

Sat, 01 Dec 2007

IP addresses

Some basic information - useful for understanding what IP addresses are and how all this stuff works. Also, the relevant Wikipedia article.

Posted on 01 Dec 2007 at 14:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Les Untergunther

Apparently, these are the guys who restored the clock of the Paris Panthéon. More info; thanks to Kieran Healy.

Posted on 01 Dec 2007 at 13:31 in /media. -- Permalink

New Yorker podcasts

B. discovered the "New Yorker" magazine podcasts this morning, we listened to a few together.

Posted on 01 Dec 2007 at 13:01 in /media. -- Permalink

Christian Science Monitor Daily Article

The Christian Science Monitor is not a religious periodical, it's a "normal" newspaper published by a church. On request of its founder, however, one religious article is published in the paper every day. I've known this for a long time but, strangely, never bothered to read such a daily article. Today I stumbled on the 30 November article - pretty good stuff! Definitely worth reading on a (semi-)regular basis, and worth circulating among friends.

Posted on 01 Dec 2007 at 12:56 in /media. -- Permalink

Fri, 30 Nov 2007

Amity start page is online

Well, that took us quite a while ... Now the start page has a new look - and it works. Big improvement!

Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 15:57 in /work. -- Permalink

Plone for Belgium

Belgian local governments cooperate to develop Plone-based applications which manage documents, schedule appointments etc.: Networks effects: Plone for Belgium and beyond (a study by IDABC - European e-government services). I guess if it's good enough for Belgium, it'll work for us too ...

Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 15:48 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

An article about copyright

Schneier has linked to an article by University of Utah law professor John Tehranian: "Infringement Nation" (PDF), which I read with gusto. The author tells the story of a law professor named John, who, simply by doing everyday things like checking e-mails and singing a song, commits dozens of copyright infringements and exposes himself to millions of US$ in liabilities in just a single day. The story is hilarious, but of course very important issues are at stake.

Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 13:38 in /life. -- Permalink