Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Tag: tech

  • frozen

    Here at the college, we used to have a streaming media server running Windows Server 2003 for the purpose of broadcasting our athletic events. At some point, it broke, and it became apparent that it would be necessary to rebuild said media server. Being the fan of Microsoft that I am, I decided to go a different route, and try my hand at running Icecast on Linux. Originally, I intended to use ogg for audio encoding, but given our user-base, I decided to do mp3 instead. I didn’t want the headaches of dealing with plugins, and weird file associations on Windows, and making the user jump through twenty hoops to listen to our games. My initial concerns were with licensing, since mp3 is a proprietary format, and typically looked down upon with scorn by the linux community. So I went to the source. The licensing for mp3 explicity permits using the mp3 format without licensing fees if you are a non-profit, and are making absolutely no money from your use of the mp3 format. If you aren’t sure about that, see http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html.

    So now for the fun stuff. Ices2 doesn’t support mp3, so it was off to find an encoder that supported mp3 and would talk to Icecast2. In case you’re not too familiar with Icecast or Ices, you must have 2 parts to stream audio. A front end (Icecast) to serve the comressed audio to clients, and a back end encoder (Ices, darkice, liveice, etc.) to compress the audio from whatever source you are using.

    We are running on actual server hardware, which doesn’t have any built-in audio capability. It also only has one available PCI slot, which is used by the RAID card, because it is a 1U rackmount chassis. So we bought a Startech USB Audio Adapter from newegg.com for our input source. We’re using Ubuntu 9.04, although 9.10 is coming out in several days.

    (more…)

  • speed

    A couple weeks ago, my site was super slow, and wouldn’t load properly. I did some investigating, and found it was getting hammered by a Chinese search engine. I kept tabs on it throughout that day, and there were either different search engines indexing various portions of my site within 24 hours. Yikes. So I set about to enhance the performance a bit. Finally, I think I’ve pretty well nailed it. I’ve moved everything from Gallery to ZenPhoto (except photo descriptions), disabled some extra plugins, and implemented various other tweaks. Enjoy.

  • hat trick

    A couple days ago, the Fedora project released their latest effort, Fedora 11. The IT guy from the high school had been giving me a hard time about not trying harder to like Fedora. I had been hearing good things about Fedora 11, so I figured I’d give it a try. I should mention first that I’m doing this on an older laptop, so I won’t be too concerned with speed, except as it relates to performance of other linux distributions on this same laptop.

    After letting the Live CD load up (not sure why you can’t have a ‘just install it for me’ option like Ubuntu), I started the installer. I wasn’t interested in playing around with a Live CD on this old laptop. It’s just too painful, and I was getting kernel failures like mad. Once I started the installer, things were going well, it even detected the computer name from the previous Ubuntu install. Then we got to the partitioning step. This is the place where we tell the installer how we want to use our hard drive (or let it do it’s own thing).

    Being the optimist that I am, I let it do it’s own thing. It failed. The best part about this is, if the partitioner fails, it exits setup, and you have to start the installer again. That’s not quite as painful as it sounds, but still frustrating. I tried it again. Fail. Ok, I’ll do it myself. I created a swap partition, and then went to do my root partition. Hmm, no reiserfs, so I’ll stick with tried and true ext3. Fail. The install image on the CD was created from an ext4 filesystem, and somehow it’s impossible to use anything but ext4 on your root partition. Ok, whatever, I’m trying to give this a serious try, so I won’t let that stop me. Recreate the partition with ext4. Fail. You can’t boot from an ext4 formatted partition. From other reading, this is ridiculous, since Ubuntu (released a couple months ago) can boot from ext4 file systems just fine. Ok, so we’ll create a small ext2 formatted partition for /boot. Oddly enough, it recommended ext3, which is stupid, since the journal will eat up a good portion of your partition, and waste precious disk space. Some other fun things I noticed along the way. If you press the escape key while creating a partition, it actually creates the partition, instead of cancelling like it should. The arrow keys also cycle through the partition size options backwards as well. Finally, let’s do this install thingy. And it worked. One other item of note that I liked (because I’m an ntp nerd and run two of my own servers), is that it let you setup network clock synchronization during the installation process.

    After completing the install, the display resolution on my laptop was not right, so I started trying to figure out how to fix that. I found a way, and had to install system-config-display. And then I remembered why I disliked Fedora before (and Red Hat, and Suse). RPM’s are the devil. After all that fun, what I really wanted to know, was how the speed compared to Ubuntu and Xubuntu on this laptop. So naturally, I have to go back and install them too. I timed the Fedora boot time: 1 minute and 20 seconds. It’s a far cry from the 20 seconds they mention as their target for this release, but I’m on slow hardware, and 1:20 is actually pretty good. I installed Xubuntu, and remembered that it wasn’t just Fedora that had issues with my display. In Ubuntu (and thus Xubuntu), I have to create the config file that sets the refresh rate for my monitor, and then it works at the right resolution. I timed Xubuntu. Ouch. It came in at over 1 minute and 45 seconds. My Ubuntu CD was apparently busted, so I burned a new one at work the next day. I had heard rumours that Xubuntu was kind of inefficient, but this just confirmed it. It seemed a tiny bit faster on loading menus and other trivial tasks, but nothing that would convince me to stick with it. I installed Ubuntu the next day, expecting something above 2 minutes for a boot time, and was pleasantly surprised. It booted almost identical to Fedora. So, thought I, I’ll go back to Fedora and just try living with it for a while to see how I like it (other than the RPMs).

    Then the nightmare began. I had thought all the partitioning errors were behind me, but the Fedora installer was just getting started. I tried the same partitioning setup as before, and it went all the way to the end of copying the install image to the hard drive. Fail. It claimed it couldn’t load my /boot partition. I tried again, and it wouldn’t even load the partitioner. Then I got it to load if I told it I wanted a custom layout. It went all the way to the end again, and failed. After several more failures, of different types, I went to Google. It turns out that the partitioner for Anaconda (the Fedora installer) had been completely rewritten for this release. It was also completely in a broken state, and some people recommended using fdisk to partition your disks, instead of the installer. Hmm, yup, that’s going to be a great option for people that want to try out Linux. For the record, it does work, although I actually recommend cfdisk instead of fdisk.

    Anyway, it’s installed now, and the fun will ensue shortly. I’ll have another post about that in a month or so.

  • phonic

    A while back, Ubuntu released their latest update, Jaunty Jackalope. Yes, a Jackalope… Anyway, I usually wait a while to update my home computer because our internet connection is slower there (than at work). A couple nights ago, I decided the time was right, so I started the download and let it run overnight. The next day, I finished the upgrade, and rebooted. While I was at work, I got a call from my wife. We had no sound on the computer. Nothing was muted, and the speaker volume was fine. Great…

    When I got home, I started troubleshooting, trying various audio settings, and changing volume levels on pretty much everything. I finally had some success when I switched the audio engine to OSS. I’ve been using Linux long enough to know that it wasn’t the solution I wanted. OSS is an old, deprecated sound system that is only kept around because some applications haven’t been updated in ages.

    This at least gave me a starting point in my search on the Ubuntu forums, which are always super helpful. But audio issues on Linux are a dime a dozen, so it took me a while before I stumbled upon this post. I tried a couple of the things they mentioned, but nothing was working. Finally, there was mention of another post, which includes some information from one of the lead PulseAudio developers. As it turns out, the original implementation of PulseAudio by Ubuntu was very poorly done, and if you were upgrading, you still had all those broken settings lying around now that they’ve fixed things in Jaunty Jackalope. I followed the instructions for removing all the broken stuff, and tada, I had sound again. I celebrated by watching Hancock, and cranking the volume.

  • multiply

    A bunch of my family members use Multiply for posting blogs, book reviews, photos, and links. It’s kind of like Facebook or Myspace, but slimmed down, and geared more towards blogging. Several of them have recently joined Facebook, and yesterday, my aunt asked me an interesting question. Is there any way to integrate the two sites? I knew there had to be, but it took me a while to think of how to do it.

    So, here it is: On facebook, go to your Profile, and make sure you are on your Wall. Right below the ‘Write something…’ box, there is a Settings button. Click that, and the top section will say ‘Stories Posted by You’. As you can see, Multiply isn’t listed, but there is one called ‘Blog/RSS’. Click this, and it will ask you for the Public URL of your blog. For my Multiply site, it would be nosilver4u.multiply.com. Fill in yours, and click the Import button. Now it will automatically post anything from Multiply on your Facebook page. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to go the other direction. This will also work for any other blogging site like blogspot, livejournal, or wordpress.com.