local support groups

I'm testing ways to publish our Texas homeschool support groups.

It's from taffie's info on support groups.
 taffie http://www.jsoft.com/archive/taffie/index.html
 support groups http://www.jsoft.com/archive/taffie/localgroups.html
 map on taffie http://www.jsoft.com/archive/taffie/texasmap.html

 pages I am testing (subject to change)

 http://www.jsoft.com/archive/taffie/newmaps/sg.html
 http://www.jsoft.com/archive/taffie/newmaps/lsg.html

 a mapplet (subject to lots of change)
 http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://dev.jsoft.com/~ggf/maps/lsgmapplet02.xml





Here is a Google doc published as a web page

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgzqtfqh_208fkn79nsp


Here is a url to see the

converting .m2ts/avchd from a Sony HDR UX1 to .mp4

We are testing the HTML 5 video tag. Some of the video we are trying come from a Sony HDR UX1 camcorder which records HD into .m2ts/avchd files. That give us nice, high resolution video, but it can not be played on web browsers out of the box. Current versions of three of the most popular browsers, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome support the standard H.264 media codec. So we looked for ways to convert those videos to mp4/H.264. There are various ways to convert .m2ts files to other formats, we are currently using ffmpeg on a mature ubuntu workstation.

I'm documenting info about the camcorder in a Google Doc. The doc's currently here http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgzqtfqh_178dpxjtmfr


I installed the latest ffmpeg and the codecs it needed then used the following commands to convert from .m2ts to .mp4

1. ffmpeg -deinterlace -i 00000.m2ts -an -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -vpre fastfirstpass -b 15000000 -bt 15000000 -threads 0 -f mp4 -y /dev/null
2. ffmpeg -deinterlace -i 00000.m2ts -ac 2 -ar 48000 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -pass 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -b 15000000 -bt 15000000 -threads 0 test07c.mp4

It's not fast on my more mature pc. it took almost an hour to convert a short video. The commands above work but could be slowing it down.

I uploaded the resulting video to YouTube and it became a HD video there. I'll test with mobile, both on YouTube and our web pages and see what works best for us.

browsers

Check out an article about browsers I'm working on. It has some info about current browsers and points you to Wikipedia's info on browsers, their history and numbers on usage.

I'm interested in finding out why folks are using what they use. Add a comment and let us know what are you using and why.

chat with webcams - gtalk

this post was not done, I got them up and we moved on

Setting up gtalk

Go to gmail and click on the person you want to chat with
mine is on the left, below the folders

callingId

at the bottom of the chat window, click on 'Video and more'









































Answer if someone called you to video chat




























settings































aaa

using facebook to comment on cnet

I was reading an article on cnet (PSP Go! and PS3 Slim: Latest rumors | Crave - CNET) and felt the urge to comment. I usually surpress the urge because I would have to register or remember what I put in if I had already registered. Life is not better if I register on a bunch of sites...

I had almost surpressed the urge to comment...

when I saw that I could log into CNET using my Facebook account.














I have an account on Facebook so I gave it a try















I added my comment

















and added a bit more to go on my Facebook page


















here is what folks see on Facebook
















and something to follow up on if you are interested

CNET app on Facebook

switching to AT&T uVerse

We recently got AT&T's uVerse, their tv, phone, internet service. U-verse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We had cable and AT&T for both phone and internet (DSL). The internet offered us faster speeds and we saved a bit with getting everything in a bundle. I mostly wanted the faster internet. We are planning on getting more active with our classes and faster internet makes that... well faster.

We have static ips IP address - Wikipedia for our servers and up till a month ago AT&T told us we could not have static ips with uVerse. One bright and sunny day a rep came to our door and said they just upgraded with more fibre and that static ips were available. woo hoo!!!

The install went well, mostly. It went well, until the installer was ready to go. She tested one last time and the signal was not good enough. She tried replacing the coax and ended up replacing the router. Setting that up was not smooth, but she stuck with it and did a great job.

So by the end of the day we had 200 glorious digital tv channels, a cool phone, fast internet and I had to configure the static ip addresses to the new ones. Then it went down hill...

The AT&T DSL router used something called a pinhole to route one of our static ip addresses to the correct machine. I configured the server to use a static ip with an internal ip address, connect the external ip with the internal and all is good. The new uVerse router has the machine you want to connect to the static ip use the actual address. I set the static ip on the server and made sure the router was set to know about that address and smiled. It did not work. I hammered and finally called AT&T support. The issue (problem?) was the router insists on the machine have the static ip to be in a range of addresses they pick AND that the machine use dhcp to get the address. I could not get the server to switch from using a static ip to a dynamic ip. Much time passed.

I called tech support. One tech suggested we do some debugging on another server,which worked as expected...

I eventually told support I would continue working on the issue and he hung up. I found everyone to be supportive and the info they gave me was useful, but I was gettin nowhere so I went to bed for a few hours and started working out what was wrong with a clear(er) head.

It turned out that that server did not have dhcp software and big surprise I could not get it to use dhcp. I installed dhcp software and I had a nice shiny uVerse provided static ip going to my server.

Email started to flow and we soon saw something was not right. Email would come in but not go out. I looked around and found this
AT&T Yahoo! Help - Why am I unable to send email via other university, company or mail hosting provider mail servers (Port 25 block)

which told me ...
"The SMTP Port 25 filter does not affect Members using Web mail to any mail provider, VPN connections to a private company or university mail server, dedicated (e.g. T1/T3 or Frame-Relay) or "static" IP addresses."

phew, I had "static" IP addresses so I started debugging.

at some point I got a message about using a non-verified e-mail address from AT&T.
AT&T Yahoo! Help - Web Mail - Why am I receiving an error when I send mail from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc.?

I was willing to try anything so I verified some addresses. That helped a bit, but things were still not right and even the verified email seemed slow. AND I could not verify the addresses for the mailing lists. AT&T seems to think most people just use Outlook. I could not think of a way to verify the mailing lists so I finally called support again. He did not help but talking with him got me to thinking and I decided to try authenticating with port 587, assuming their comment about the port 25 filter not affect my static ip addresses was not the whole story.

Note: I also had an issue with their limits documented with their saying
"Every primary and secondary AT&T Mail ID can verify up to 10 alternate email addresses each."
We paid for static ip addresses so we could have our own server without that limit.

anyhow, that support call did not give me any support but I did realize I could authenticate and told him I would give that a shot.

At some point in time port 25 was unblocked - I think. Their support people did not say a lot about what they were doing on their end to my account. I kept hammering and not sleeping and finally realized that one problem was with dns and nameservers. The dynamic ip addresses their router forced me to use kept resetting the nameservers to point to itself. Things worked a bit better when I finally started setting the server to use their nameservers, 68.94.156.1 and 68.94.157.1. I found those addresses by looking at the configuration of the router and did not find clear documentation that I was doing the right thing. But it worked ... somewhat better.

Things were still not right, so I went back to authenticating my server with their server. That was the final hurdle and things are now flowing and appear to be doing well.

Soooo

If you are running postfix and mailman on ubuntu and have static ip addresses with uVerse:

1. use their nameservers - 68.94.156.1 and 68.94.157.1
2. authenticate your server with theirs

easy...
right...

How I set up postfix to authenticate

List what you have in case you break something:
postconf relayhost smtp_sasl_auth_enable smtp_sasl_password_maps smtp_sasl_security_options

set up a password file:
sudo vi /etc/postfix/password

[smtp.att.yahoo.com]:submission attuverseusername:password

and hash it:
sudo postmap hash:/etc/postfix/password

make sure only root can read/write the password file

then set the relayhost and the smtp_sasl parameters:

sudo postconf -e "relayhost = [smtp.att.yahoo.com]:submission"
sudo postconf -e "smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes"
sudo postconf -e "smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/password"
sudo postconf -e "smtp_sasl_security_options ="

and then reload and smile smile smile:
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix reload

Postfix SASL Howto
postfix docs
Postfix relayhost - Freelock Knowledge Base
nice short article

I set relayhost to NOT check DNS and to use port 587. The password file is set up using the same info. I removed info from smtp_sasl_security_options and will look into adding what it was back but empty works.



We have a vps with godaddy and were planning on migrating our servers there. If uVerse+static ip works out, we will drop that and have the servers here. A vps is nice because it is fast and we do not go down when the next hurricane knocks power off (which seems to be about every few years - sigh) But, if this works, it costs less and I really like having the servers here. It's easier to play with them and try new configurations. We will see what makes sense for us.


Call the business office to get the static ips. They are $15 a month. More than I want to pay but less than some other options.

Let me know how things work for you.

Gary

taking Windows 7 RC for a spin

I got the Windows 7 Release Candidate Customer Preview Program.

One of the reasons I am interested is because it supports Blu-ray and avchd video files. I also look forward to seeing how it works with netbooks, but that's a project for the future at the moment.

I downloaded the DVD iso and burned with no problem. I used Firefox to d/l and burned on my ubuntu 8.04 workstation. It went smooth.

The instructions say you need a PC with these system requirements:

1. 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
2. 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
3. 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
4. DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

I fought with the install, it was not as easy as a I find Linux. I'll document the issues in a comment below or in anouther post. The PC I installed on had 512Mb. It is running but it rebooted every 10-20 minutes or so at first. I'll bump the memory up to 1GB and see if that helps. I'm currently using the Windows Media Center it comes with to a Sony PS3 and that is working well. I like what I see.

The desktop is pretty. I have not done a lot with it yet, but look forward to getting some hands on once my copy is more stable.

Now to install more memory. :-)

Gary

shindig on local ubuntu server

I installed shindig on a server running locally. It would have went as smoothly as my install on our virtual server (shindig on godaddy virtual dedicated server) but for a few small oops.

I want to have a way to play with OpenSocial and gadgets on a local machine. I have a small Ubuntu 8.04 server that is not visible to the world that I use for that sort of thing. I thought it would be easy to install and I was mostly correct.

Shindig is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification. http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/ It comes in Java and PHP flavors. I went for the PHP version for now http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/#php.

My server is a pretty much out of the box Ubuntu Server Edition (8.04). I checked if PHP was PHP 5.2.x and added the extensions I was missing.

Check if the web server has a current PHP with phpinfo (PHP: phpinfo - Manual )
  http://test.jsoft.com/phpinfo.php
  returned that I had PHP 5.2.4 - good

I did not have the command line for PHP installed, so I installed that and checked the version again.
  $ sudo apt-get install php5-cli
  $ php -version
and no surprise it gave me the same answer. I then added curl and mcrypt.

  $ sudo apt-get install php5-curl
  $ sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt
  $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I downloaded shindig, set up a new virtual host and was up and running (almost).

in /etc/apache2/sites-available
  $ sudo cp default shindig
to get a new virtual site and
  $ sudo vi shindig

Here are the important parts:

<virtualhost *>
ServerName shindig.jsoft.com
DocumentRoot /home/gary/public_html/shindig/php/
<directory>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All
</directory>
<directory>
Allow from All
AllowOverride All
</directory>
... other settings for vhosts
</virtualhost>

I installed into a public_html directory. You may want to install into the directory suggested in the shindig installation instructions.

I then enabled the site and reloaded apache

  $ sudo a2ensite shindig
  $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

and found I did not have mod_rewrite enabled
  $ sudo a2enmod rewrite
  $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

and then updated the file /home/gary/public_html/shindig/php/config/container.php

----- my copy -----
// The URL Prefix under which shindig lives ie if you have http://myhost.com/shindig/php set web_prefix to /shindig/php
'web_prefix' => '/shindig/php',
// If you changed the web prefix, add the prefix to these too
'default_js_prefix' => '/shindig/php/gadgets/js/',
'default_iframe_prefix' => '/shindig/php/gadgets/ifr?',
-----

tested and it was all good!

-----
It took me a while to decide to update container.php. I was lost till I read Chris Chabot's article PHP Shindig and mod_rewrite at chabotc.com. It has some great info on how things are set up and was what I needed to get shindig running.

I was looking at Google Friend Connect and the GFC demo The Chow Down when I decided to install shindig locally. We have tested a simple gadget or two with GFC on one of our sites and I look forward to getting more social.

Gary

shindig on godaddy virtual dedicated server

I installed Apache's shindig on one of our sites running on godaddy's virtual dedicated servers. Shindig - an Apache incubator project for OpenSocial and gadgets lets me test social networking software on my own container server. I am just starting to dig into all the cool OpenSocial/ OpenId/ OAuth stuff. I tried Google Friend Connect and did some simple hello world gadgets that worked on GFC and iGoogle. I am looking at adding social networking to some of our sites and shindig should let me explore what I need to do to get even more social.

I have a pretty basic setup, CentOS 5.2 with not much more than what comes out of the box. Installing shindig was not hard, here are my notes:

I used the instructions for installing the php version of shindig from the Apache Foundation
http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/#php
It works as advertised! The only thing I had to do was to update to PHP 5.2.x. I followed the instructions in this blog Install PHP 5.2 on CentOS 5.2 Using Yum | Fresh Blurbs

I used the Centos testing repo using Irakli's comment at the bottom.

So, all I had to do was: (YMMV)

1. set up the Centos testing repo
2. yum update php
3. svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/shindig/trunk/ .

and I was good to go.

Now to play with it a bit!!!

My site did not have subversion installed (it's really basic ;-). I downloaded a Subversion client from CollabNet, installed and used the subversion client to get shindig. I then removed svn. It would have been easier for me to get shindig on something that has subversion and copy the files to the server. Next time...

Gary

virus scan scam struck me this morning

I was looking at some news on the web this morning and suddenly my browser window was gone and I had a window that warned me that my PC could become infected but... I could download software to scan my PC and all would be good.

Right...

I was about to be tricked into installing something that would not be good for me or my PC. I did some poking around about Antivirus 2009. Here is what I found:

It is a nasty virus/Trojan/bad thing, real easy to get, not easy to remove. You can find out a lot about it by searching for 'Antivirus 2009'. Be careful if you look at some of the sites that come up, you can end up on a site that infects your PC if you click without being careful. Here is a page from cnet.com that has a lot of info that you may find useful.
Help with Antivirus 2009 virus - CNET Spyware, viruses, & security Forums

Again, be careful, the info on the cnet site may be ok, and the fact that there are over 150 messages may... be a clue if you want to follow up on what others did.

I am using Linux/Ubuntu and I start out a lot safer than those of you that are using Windows/Mac computers. Here are some messages in response to a question about the virus on a PS3 running Linux.
[ubuntu] do i have the antivirus 2009 virus on my linux ps3 - Ubuntu Forums
Message #20 has something from someone's host support staff. Others claim that there are no real threats to linux PCs. However, it is better to be careful.

We tend to use Linux. It cuts way down on the dangers that are out there. I do not assume it eliminates them, just makes it harder for the bad guys to do something to you.

We tend to use Firefox to browse the web. I think that any of you that are using IE6 should stop doing anything and get Firefox NOW!

OK? Actually we use several browsers. I have used Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome and I do use Microsoft's IE 7 if I really need that browser. I plan on trying IE 8 when it has some mileage from others. Switching to Firefox or other browsers will not make you safe, I was on Linux using Firefox when I got attacked. It will make it a bit harder for the bad guys and that alone makes it worth switching to something safer.

and, let me say what I did. I knew that something was wrong when my browser window disappeared and the oh so innocent window popped up. I stopped and took a breath and looked at what was happening. My task bar showed Firefox running but I had that window that was not the usual browser window. The bar at the top told me
'The page at http://live-antiviruspc-scan.com says:' (do not click!!!)
And I did not remember going there. hmmm?

I tried to close the window by right clicking firefox in my task bar and selecting 'Close' and it would not go away. hmmm?

I found that if I moved the window my browser window was actually under it but very small. That was enough for me so I restarted my PC. That was probably overkill, and if I had already messed up and was infected, I could have made things worse.

Anyhow, I did some looking around when I was back up and decided to poke the bad page. I clicked on the link that got me into the mess the first time and sure enough it did so again. I wanted to find out what would happen if I clicked the Cancel button and was amazed when it started to spit out messages about files I know I did not have. I should have tried the close button on the top right, or killed it some other way.

It did not cause me more than some concern and took a little time. I was lucky.

I am glad I am using Linux.

My personal choice when using Linux is Chrome then Firefox.

A stop and look at what's going on as soon as something odd happens.

And I am only a bit safer. sigh

Gary

Mozilla | Firefox web browser & Thunderbird email client
Apple - Safari
Google Chrome - Download a new browser