Cognitive Atrophy

Search html files on your (unix) Webserver for a specific string of text

2006-07-18T15:48:00.000-05:00

$ find -name '*htm*' -exec grep 'string to find' {} \; -print

Simple shell script to remove spaces from file names

2006-07-18T14:54:00.000-05:00

#! /usr/bin/bash
for file in *\ *;
do
mv "$file" "${file// /_}"
done

comes in handy for prepping pdf docs for the Web

Once upon a childhood

2006-05-06T08:43:00.000-05:00

Canon 30D

2006-04-03T20:37:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure a picking up a Canon 30D for work. Here are a few test shots of my favorite subjects. This is a real pleasure to use. The autofocus is extremely fast and accurate. This shot is taken without flash with a shutter spped of 1/80 and an apeture of f1.8 using a fixed Canon 50mm lense at ISO 400.

In this shot I focused on the subject in the distance and the camera responded immediately. Notice how my older son the foreground is out of focus, my younger son is in focus, and the background is blurred. This is impossible to do with a point and shoot as far as I can tell. My puny Canon Powershot A70 compact camera seems woefully inadequate now.

iLife '06 First Impressions

2006-01-17T14:49:00.000-06:00

I received my iLife '06 upgrade yesterday and here are my initial impressions after a few hours of use:

I. Installation
took a good 20-30 minutes on my 12 " Powerbook G4. All said a little more than 7 gb of disc space are needed. I presume much of this space is needed for new iDVD, iWeb and iMovie themes. I didn't see a way to install these support files on another disc. Starting last fall I moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to a firewire drive because I was running out of space. If I hadn't done this, I wouldn't have had enough space to install iLife.

Update:
Some of the support files (roughly half of the 7 gb) can be installed elsewhere by choosing Custom Install and choosing another location for iDVD, Imovie and Garage Band support files

II. iPhoto
A. Upon launch iPhoto, as in previous upgrades, needs to update photo the iphoto library and update thumbnails. This takes several minutes (depending on the size of the library). The wait is worth it. The speed increases are as advertised. My 3,800 plus photo library scrolls "like butter".

B. Full screen editing is also a great addition. The first two times I tried it I couldn't get the Adjust panel to appear but that seems to have solved itself after a few relaunches. I don't why I like this feature so much, I just do. Maybe it allows a more emotional response to the photo. The compare feature is wonderful. It allows you to look at up to eight similar photos at once. This is a sorely needed feature for any digital photography work flow. After downloading images, you need to toss the bad ones and keep the better ones. This helps save time and disc space.

C. Photocasting
More bad news than good here. First the good. It's easy with dotmac. I don't however see a way to do this without dotmac. More good news: you can subscribe to Flickr or other photo rss feeds under File- Subscribe to Photocast. The bad news here (and it's really bad) is that Apples RSS for photocasts is non standard and most RSS readers won't even accept your feed. So people on the other end need to have iPhoto 6 or the Latest version of Safari to view the photos. This was such a great idea and such a terrible implementation. So much for sharing with Windows users (most of my friends and several family members). Here is my rss feed: http://photocast.mac.com/geoffhankerson/iPhoto/calendar2006/index.rss.
I tried it in two aggregators: Bloglines and RSS OWL and no love. Bad RSS the apps say.

Update:
http://web.mac.com/geoffhankerson/iPhoto/calendar2006/index.rss actually does work with Bloglines, My Yahoo and RSS Owl (these are the only ones I tested). So you can make this work with other RSS readers. The announcement email Apple provides doesn't state this in the most precise way, so you may want to edit the announcement email to say:

iPhoto '06 users use this URL: http://photocast.mac.com/geoffhankerson/iPhoto/calendar2006/index.rss

All others add this url to your RSS Reader:
http://web.mac.com/geoffhankerson/iPhoto/calendar2006/index.rss

D. Calendars
I threw together a calendar and saved it as a pdf. Works essentially the same as book publishing. Nice addition. I've been wanting to do calendars in iPhoto since version 1.

III. GarageBand
A. The podcasting features are as good as advertised. When starting a new GarageBand project you have the option to create a podcast. There is a dropbox for your id3 tag image, a track for chapter marker photos, presets for your voice, and dozens of high quality jingles, stingers and sound effects for intros, outros and transitions. I was able to put together a podcast intro in about 10-15 minutes much of which was trying out different sound effects.

The ducking feature (reducing music volume while speaking occurs) works well and is on by default in podcast mode.

B. I haven't yet tried the editing of iMovie soundtracks but I am excited about this feature as well.

C. The performance of Garageband is much peppier even on my 2.5 year old hardware. It was a bit of a dog before performance wise.

D. As a drawback - I can't see how to a podcast out of Garageband as an mp3 or aiff. I may be missing something, but it appears you are stuck publishing as mpeg 4 audio. This isn't the end of the world, but some mp3 players may not support mpeg 4 audio.

IV. iWeb
I am the least familar with iWeb because it is new and I have only used it for a few minutes. I looks like Page/Keynote for Website. Basically, you drag in photos, audio and video from the media browser (which look for in your iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes libraries). Then you type up your text, save and publish. You can publish to dotmac, or a folder on your Mac that can be ftp'd anywhere for hosting. Blogging and podcasting are supported.

As someone who does Web development, I appreciate an app like this because it makes everything quicker and easier albeit at the loss of some control (no html source editing). I tend not to work on a personal site because building it from scratch is time consuming.

You won't however be able to publish to an existing Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress or Drupal blog via the xml-rpc interface a la and app like Ecto. Bloggers and podcasters with an account with one of these services won't be able to use pages as far as I can tell.

V. I have yet to spend more than a few minutes with iDVD or iMovie yet.

VI. Conclusion
A solid upgrade even if you paid $79 last year. Remember to take advantage of educational pricing if you can ($59 via the online Apple Store). For me, the iPhoto speed ups, full-screen editing, and comparisons are almost worth the upgrade since I use iPhoto so much. If you've been itching to try podcasting GarageBand 3 makes this easy as well. iWeb makes web-publishing easier as well for those not familiar with the complexities of Web-publishing.

iLife '06 is not without its drawbacks. iPhoto Photocasting uses non-standard RSS so the claim that anyone with an RSS reader can view your photocast is false at this point. Garageband can't export as an mp3 file. iWeb lacks the ability to publish to exisiting blog services like Wordpress, Blogger. Typepad or Drupal.

ilife
apple
mac

Apple's iLife

2006-01-10T19:01:00.000-06:00

I am a big fan of Apple's iLife software (iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, iDVD, iTunes). They make working with digital media much much easier, easier than any other software program I have tried. The integration between the apps is wonderful too. You can add photos from iPhoto and music from iTuens to your iMovie edited movie very easily.

Apple announced iLife 06 today which has some great looking features: podcast studio in Garage band, photocasting in iPhoto and several others.

There is one thing that dissapoints me in the iLife 06 package: all the automatic web publishing features require Apple's .Mac services at $99 per year. It's not a bad package and I am tempted, but I have 3 or 4 places I can publish to the web now via ftp, or otherwise including Flickr and the Internet Archive. So I am wondering if there is a hack or workaround to make iLife publish elsewhere.

Here is an article called Homemade Dot Mac from Oreilly's Macdevcenter site. This is a tutorial on how to set up your computer as a Web server with Web Dav as a stand in replacement for .Mac. This is close to what I am looking for but I don't want to run a server at home. Hope someone has a suggestion.

Flock Browser

2005-12-05T15:32:00.000-06:00

I am really impressed with the Flock browser. It is a firefox-based browser with built in blogging, flickr and del.icio.us tagging support. This is the most exciting browser in a long time. Maybe ever. It's think of a two-way web (read and write) instead of a consumer model

technorati tags: flock, del.icio.us

Batch convert PhotoCD Images

2005-11-11T11:21:00.000-06:00

ImageMagick a wonder command line program to batch convert photos from one format to another.

The syntax is very easy:
$ convert myImage.tif myImage.jpg

This convert the myImage file from tiff to jpeg.

I recently had to convert 90 Photo CD images to a more usable format. Her is a short script to do this in a batch:

#!/bin/bash
for pcdfile in *.PCD
do
base=`basename $pcdfile .PCD`
convert -normalize $base.PCD[5] $base.tif
done

this converts all the PCD files in the current directory to level 5 resolution tiff files (3072 by 2048 at 72 dpi)
The normalize paramater does somethin akin to AutoLevels in photoshop. I chose to do this because Photo CD images are heaily oversaturated in magenta, red and orange. This 5 line script saved me from cnverting one by one in another application

Copy your music off your iPod to another computer

2005-09-09T08:46:00.000-05:00

Apple obscures the mp3 and aac files on your iPod to make it difficult to copy them. They actually rename the fils and folders to things like AVKH.m4b instead of whatever you have the file named on your computer. I suppose Apple does this due to pressure from the RIAA - I don't know. All I know is my music that I bought legally is being held hostage.

Here is a geek way to deal with it:

1. open up the terminal and change to the root drectory of the iPod. It will be at /Volumes/the_name_of_our_iPod. Mine is called Geoff's iPod. So I issued this command:
$ cd /Volumes/Geoff\'s\ iPod

2. Next make a folder callled mp3s (or whatever you want) on your Desktop

3. Run this command from the Terminal:
$ find . -name *mp3 -exec cp {} /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/ghank/Desktop/mp3s/ \;

substitute your username for ghank and the name of the folder you made in step for mp3s.

The files will still be renamed to things like QUCD.mp3 but at least you have them.

Excellent poster making tip for iLife and OSX Tiger

2005-07-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

See Jim Heid's iLife site
for an excellent tip on how to make a poster from about 100 of your digital photographs

Mine is above

Better Low Light No Flash Digital Photographs

2005-07-09T10:25:00.000-05:00

Taking photos with a digital camera in low light settings is hard. On the advice of my sister (a pro) and the Tips from the Top Floor podcast, I tired using a higher ISO setting (ISO 400 as opposed to the default 100 ISO setting). This increases the sensitivity of the lens to light. Normally, in low light, you have to increase exposure time (or slow the shutter speed) to get enough light. In fact if you leave your camera on automatic this is what it will do in low-light settings. The usually results a blurry photo unless you use a tripod and your subject stays really still. So bumping up the ISO helps at the cost of a grainer-looking picture.

Here a a few samples:

1. This one is with a point and shoot Canon Powershot A70 at ISO 400

2. This one is with a Canon Digital Rebel. This shot is less grainy presumably because this camera has a better lense. The only light source in this photo is a bedside lamp.

Note to self

2005-06-21T15:13:00.000-05:00

If you install linux on a windows machine on a seperate partition and then decide to just fromat it and blow it away to have more drive space for windows - you will render windows senseless because that master boot record will be hosed.

To fix this use your windows boot CD and run the fix master boot record command from the recovery console.

If you don't have a Windows boot CD because your IT deparment controls this, download and install knoppix (www.knoppix.net) - the excellent linux live cd distrubution and run this command from a shell:

sudo install-mbr /dev/hda

Hope I don't have to remember this trick.

Backup large amounts of data on muliple CDs

2005-06-17T08:39:00.000-05:00

mypixbackad mypixbackad At work I am getting a computer upgrade next month and I have about 8gb of data (mostly digital images) I need to move over to my new machine. Plus I have been lazy about making a backup. So I started to wonder how to back this all up on CD. I had hoped my CD burning software would take care of it (Nero 5.5) but it doesn't seem to do this).

Here is what I came up with as a solution (Unix to the rescue or more specifically cygwin on Windows):
1. Use tar to make the whole tree of files and folders into one file:
$ tar -cvf /cygdrive/f/pix.tar My\ Documents/My\ Pictures
This creates a file called pix.tar and in my case it was over 6 gb.
2. Use bzip2 to compress the tar archive:
$ bzip2 pix.tar
This creates a file called pix.tar.bz2. I use bzip2 instead of gzip or jusr zip because I read it provides better compression and is more forgiving of being split apart and put back together. Bzip2 compressed it down to just over 4 gigs.
3. Use split to break the file into cd sized chunks. split takes a few arguments the first is the file to split, the second in this case is the number of bytes we want the files to be. Last, the prefix to the names of the files. So in this case I want 650 mb files. But how many bytes is 650 mb. I used the conversion calculator on this site: http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/. So in this case it's 681574400 bytes. The last argument is the prefix for the file names. So here is the command:
$ split pix.tar.bz2 -b 681574400 mypixback
This creates this listing of files:
mypixbackaa mypixbackab mypixbackac mypixbackad mypixbackae mypixbackaf mypixbackag
each 650mb except the last whci was 500+ mb.
4. At this point we have cd sized data chunks ready to burn.

Putting humpty dumpty together again
1. Copy all the files from the cds into one folder on a hard drive
2. Use the cat command to join the files:
$ cat mypixbacka* > pix.tar.bz2
3. use bunzip2 to uncompress the archive
$ bunzip2 pix.tar.bz2
4. Untar the tar archive:
$ tar -xvf pix.tar

Whoila!

Notes: To compress and split a 6gb file you need much more than 6gb of disk space available - probably twice as much.

Also using tar, bzip, cat and the like on such big files takes quite a while. Don't expect a 6gb tarbal to show up in a few seconds or even minutes

Microsoft Word Save as HTML sucks

2005-05-04T15:26:00.000-05:00

In general a lot of tools do a terrible job of converting to html. I'm picking on Word because it is popular (and in the outside chance Scoble or someone like him sees this and asks the Office team to fix it).

In general html is simple. Want to make a paragraph? OK open paragraph tag <p>. Then Type your paragraph text. Then close your paragraph tag </p>. That's the essence of html. Now if you want to make it fancier you can add a style sheet. This isn't good enough for word though. I opened up the first word Doc I could find on my drive and did save as web page. A typical paragraph looks like this:
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'>

Well first there is a reference to a class MSONormal which uses a general margin of zero, bottom margin of 0.0001pt (I guess zero isn't good enough), and sets the the default font to Times-New Roman and font-size to 12 point. Why is this so bad? First, The creator the Word document didn't intend to use any special font formatting - they wanted the default. Word should produce an unformatted paragraph in this case <p>.

Second, the above is just one of many heinous examples for the document in question. It's so bad that tools like Dreamweaver and HTML Tidy have commands to clean up Word html. Here is what Dreamweaver MX 2004 reports after running the clean word html command:

Cleanup Word HTML Results:
1 metatag removed
166 empty paragraphs removed
103 margin defines removed
78 instances of unneeded inline CSS removed
4 instances of unused CSS style definitions removed
Source Formatting applied

I think the results speak for themselves and even after this cleanup there is still a lot of junk left over to clean up.

Last, why doesn't Microsoft make Word more useful. For example, instead of only having a Word processor for letters - it would be nice to have a word processor for different environments (letters, email, blog post, html document, etc...). Then it would be really nice if Word could create clean output for each type of writing. It might even make the next version of MS Office worth buying. It would certainly be a better feature than the animated paper clip.

In the meantime here is some reg ex to help combat the problem:

Here is the reg ex to strip out all html tag attributes starting from the current directory traversing downward from a unix command prompt:

$ find . -name '*htm*' -exec perl -i.bak -p -e 's#</?([a-zA-Z]+)\s+[^>]*>#<$1>#g' {} \;

Line #
1. Start with unix find command on current directory and below to find all html documents
2. exec a perl one liner that backs up the file as myfile.html.bak
3. run perl from the command line
4. regex to search for any alpha character inside <> that is followed by a space and replace with those alpha characters inside of <> - {} matches each file from the find command

In a tool like jEdit (www.jedit.org), you can put this in the find field: </?([a-zA-Z]+)\s+[^>]*>

And this in the replace field: <$1>

At least you are on your way to having clean html now.
Only problem is making it match html tags that span multiple lines. Hopefully someone else can advise me on how to do that. I though adding ms to the end of 's#</?([a-zA-Z]+)\s+[^>]*>#<$1>#g' would do it but no dice

Quicktime 7 a Watershed for Digital Media

2005-05-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

There has been some hype by Apple about Quicktime 7 and the new H.264 codec. Well the proof is in the pudding and IMHO the hype is justified. If you can download and install QT 7 (caution: requires purchasing a new Pro key if you have QT Pro 6.x) and view the HD wildlife video: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/wildlifehdreel.html. It is breathtaking and of a quality you would expect to see in showroom Hi-def Tvs at Best Buy compressed so much that it works as a downloadable web video - this is not a progressive download so you have to wait for the whole thing to download.

The video mentioned above is foramatted like so:
Audio: AAC, Stereo (L R), 44.100 kHz
Video: H.264, 960 x 540, Millions
Frames Per Second: 30
Data Rate: 2126.73 kbits/sec
File size: 35.73 MB

Amazing stuff. The bad news is my 700mhz G4 eMac and my Dad's 800mhz g4 iMac can't play the video mentioned above without dropping frames. Both have 640 mb RAM .

What I found just as exciting is the H.264 and AAC codecs are avaliable via iMovie (and presumably Final Cut Pro and Express)! I wanted to see what I could do with a H.264 encoded video. I had a 34.5 minute video of my Great Uncle recounting his World War II experiences as a Doctor in India.

I compressed it at these settings with a lot of trial and error:
Audio: AAC, Mono, 32.000 kHz
Video: H.264, 320 x 240, Millions
Frames Per Second: 30
Data Rate: 110.86 kbits/sec
File size: 27.6 MB!
Quality very good - sharp looking.

Under 0ne mb per minute at 30 frames per second at 320 x 240 which is about half the dimensions of standard broadcast video! Compare this to what was previously avaliable in Quicktime and you'll see why this is so impressive:
See: http://www.hamline.edu/~ghankerson01/mov/Uncle_Doc.mov - this is not a progressive download so you have to wait for the whole thing to download.

A previous video I did in Quicktime was much larger and lower quality
See: http://www.hamline.edu/~ghankerson01/mov/movies.html
112.3 mb 23 minutes
Video: Mpeg 4, millions of colors, 24 fps
Audio: Mpeg 4 Mono 22050 hz
Size: 320 by 240 pixels

So the H.264 is longer, higher quality and much lower in file size 75% lower!

The bad news: it takes some serious CPU power. When I tried to compress this movie at 640 x 480, it first said it would take 54 minutes and the time it would take kept increasing until at one point after about an hour of processing this 34.5 minute video would take more than 7 hours to complete and every time I checked the time was increasing. After several attempts I had to choose single-pass encoding and 320x240 size and then iMovie was able to process this in about an hour or so on my 867 mhz G4 12 inch Powerbook .

I'll try a 640x480 version later if I can and update this post with a link.

I'm not sure how Quicktime 7 compares to Real and Windows Media current offerings. If you do, please leave a comment.

One more comment,
one has to think the ability to move video of this quality over the Web has to have implications for the TV/Movie industry.

A photo from Flickr

2005-04-01T16:23:00.000-06:00

IMG_1164
Originally uploaded by ghankstef.

My boys are the best

SXSW Festval Music Review the A's

2005-03-12T13:42:00.000-06:00

So as I mentioned in the last post the SXSW Festival is offering 758 mp3s as a bittorent download. It took 2 1/2 days to download on my connection (Comcast cable Internet). There were usually about 30 people downloading it at a time.

Anyways 758 songs is well a lot. At 10 songs per this would be 75 CDs. I own maybe 50 CDs (and I started buying them in the late 80s). They're in alphabetical order which is of limited usefullness because you don't know the style of each song. I decided to sample the songs and see which ones were worth keeping. I laso thought I post my review here.

First of all, a note on my musical biases. I like a good melody. My favorite genres are blues and jazz as well as jazz or blues-influenced pop. I'm not much for metal, country or rap although there is always an exception.

My methodology was to listen to or sample each song for at least 20 seconds or so and keep the ones I thought I could stand hearing again. The rest were tossed. THis is the first cut.

By the way it seems everyone wants to sound like Sarah Mclaughlin or the Spin Doctors these days.

Anyways, here are the ones that made the first cut.

Pop-Folk-Rock
Name	Artist
2/3	Album
Primitive	Ambulance Ltd
The Shore and Stars	Austin Hartley-Leonard
Arms of a Woman	Amos Lee
Coney Island, USA	Amy Correia
105 Feet High	Amy Smith
So it Goes	Anders Parker
Riding To New Orleans	Andi Hoffmann & B-Goes
I Want You Back	Anne McCue
I Was On The Moon	Apollo Sunshine
Folkloric Feel	Apostle Of Hustle
Saved Your Life	Army Of Me
Walk on the Moon	Asobi Seksu

Jazz-Pop Jazz
Name	Artist
Transformation	Alex Skolnick trio
105 Feet High	Amy Smith

Favorite so are: 105 Feet Hight - Amy Smith

So it will probably take me month to do the all 758 but here are the A's.

SXSW Festival uses Bittorent to promote bands

2005-03-08T18:48:00.000-06:00

Url: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66819,00.html

Perhaps a glimpse of the future by looking at the present. South By Southwest has decided to promote the bands at the festival by compiling over 750 sonds in one 2.6 gb.

I believe this is another step towards a music ecosystem where more musicians make some money instead of a few musicians making a lot of money. Most of the musicians in the SXSW festival agreed to contribute a song (758 of 1350 bands offered a mp3). It's a lot easier to promote your band this way than trying to get a contract with a label and played on a Clear Channel station (IMHO).

I could be wrong. It wouldn't be ther first time.

Computer and Internet Law Terms and Definitions

2005-02-15T16:41:00.000-06:00

Deconstructing a Web transaction

What really happens when you go to a Website and look at a Webpage? Say you type http://www.google.com/index.html in to your browser. Basically you send a request to the computer (or computers) that host the website at http://www.google.com/ asking "Can you send me the file index.html?" Assuming all goes well, the server does just that. It sends your computer the file index.html. Where does the file go? Typically, it goes in to your web browser's cache folder. This transaction is called a client-server transactions. Your computer is the client. The computer running http://www.google.com is the server. The cache folder is a simple folder on your hard drive that stores the files from the sites you have visited. The intent of a cache is to prevent the need to go out to the web and re-request the same file that you have already received from http://www.google.com. This gives us a better user experience (especially if you are using a modem).

Here is a diagram of a typical client-server web transaction.
What does this have to do with the law? Good question. The first issue with potential legal implications is privacy. The sites you have visited on the Internet can be reconstructed from your cache or a proxy server. The files in your cache provide a "virtual paper trail" of the places you have been on the Internet.

The second issue with legal implications is one of copyright. When you receive a file from a Web sever you get a digital copy or a clone. The Internet is successful, in part, because it is based on open standards. We can all participate in this open network. Preventing someone from getting copies of pages from your site on their computer is very difficult. Even if I want to require that you pay a subscription for my Website and login with a password, you will still get a copy in your cache. It is nearly impossible to make a closed transaction in a system with an open architecture.

How is this different than purchasing a book? In a web transaction you get copies of the files from a Web site; when buying a book you receive a copy of a book. The difference is you are on a open system where you have not only the book, but the source material and the "printing press". There is nothing technically preventing you from copying entire Websites and republishing them on your own server.

Peer to Peer (P2p) File Sharing Systems
If you are the curious type, you may wonder what prevents you from making your computer a server on the open network called the Internet. The answer is not much. Go to the Apache group Website, download the most popular Web serving software in the world free of charge, install and start it up. Obviously I am oversimplifying this point (this does require some technical knowledge to configure properly), but it is basically true.

Peer to peer networks operate on the idea that every computer on its networks are clients and servers at the same time. In the peer to peer model you are simultaneously a consumer and a producer.

This diagram is a more accurate representation of peer to peer networks.

One of the more recent kinds of peer to peer networks is called Bittorrent. (See Wired article on Bittorent and it's creator Bram Cohen). Bittorent aims to solve the problem of bandwidth scarcity and network bottlenecks for distributing large audio and video files over the Internet by breaking large file into several smaller ones distributed between peer computers. If only one (or a handful) of servers are distributing large files, the servers quickly run out of network bandwidth capacity if several clients are requesting a popular file. In the Bittorent model, a large file is broken into smaller ones and each peer requesting the large file also distributes one or more smaller files. Once a peer receives all the smaller files they are stitched back together into one large file. The end result is more peers downloading a large file results in faster downloads because each peer adds network bandwidth to the pool. In the traditional client/server model each additional peer diminishes available bandwidth.

Unfortunately, Bittorent is often used to trade copywritten material. So the Motion Picture, Recording and Television Industries are able to cry foul and receive a lot of sympathy from politicians. I don't condone illegal trading of copywritten material, but piracy is used as an excuse to mask a more fundamental issue: control of content. Let me explain: the economic barrier to entry for producing radio (audio) has been reduced to the cost of a microphone for your PC and the cost of producing TV is now a $300 digital camcorder.

If this sounds far-fetched see podcasting (an Internet-based open radio network), John Stewart's appearance on CNN (watched by more people over the Web than on TV), moblogging, rebroadcast TV over Internet, etc ....

Hackers and Crackers
The term hacker has two connotations. The first is synonymous with cracker or someone with trying to illegally break into a computer information to steal something like credit card numbers or trade secrets. Here is a link to typical Hackers media story where the hackers are the bad guys.

The other connotation of hacker is similar to the person who likes to tinker with their car or "hotrod" their care. Many programmers call themselves hackers referring to creating or modifying source code for a computer program to modify or extend it's utility. This is particularly true of Open Source programmers for whom hacking means extending or changing.

Search Engines
The basic function of a search engine is to create a search index of the Web. Most search engines use a robot or crawler to do this. A robot in this case is simply a program, which follows all the links on a given Web page, updating an index as it goes. The robot repeats this process for every page it encounters on the Internet. Robots or bots can be used for simpler purposes as well. such as copying a Website to your hard drive to read offline.

Metatags are information embedded into an the html source of a Web page. If going to view -> source a browser will show the underling html markup which will likely include metatags.
Here is an example:

<meta name="keyWords"> Hamline University School of Law, HUSL, Law,







Hamline, St. Paul, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Twin Cities, Minnesota, MN, USA, legal,







education, research, college, international, graduate, undergraduate, JD, LLM,







CLE</meta>

(from http://www.hamline.edu/law/school_of_law.html).
The purpose of metatags is to provide a search engine with information about the contents of a page. Site authors include metatags to in an attempt to achieve a higher ranking in search engines. Metatags alone, however, do not usually do enough to create a good ranking. Typically, the content on the page itself must contain extended information about the keywords and descriptions used in the metatags. Addtionally, a good search engine ranking requires other sites provide a number of links to your site. Links are the lifeline of the Internet. Without links there is no Web.

Spam and Spyware

Spam is unsolicited email. You probably have first-hand experience with spam.

If you use Microsoft Windows you probably have first-hand experience with Spyware as well (although you may not be aware of it). From Wikipedia:

Strictly defined, spyware consists of computer software that gathers and reports information about a computer user without the user's knowledge or consent. More broadly, the term spyware can refer to a wide range of related malware products which fall outside the strict definition of spyware. These products perform many different functions, including the delivery of unrequested advertising (pop-up ads in particular), harvesting private information, re-routing page requests to illegally claim commercial site referral fees, and installing stealth phone dialers.

Spyware as a category overlaps with adware. The more unethical forms of adware tend to coalesce with spyware. Malware uses spyware for explicitly illegal purposes. Exceptionally, many web browser toolbars may count as spyware.

Over 80% of Windows PCs have some form of Spyware. Running an Anti-Spyware program has become a necessity in the Internet age.
Links to Anti-Spyware software (all free)

In some cases it may be possible for users to benefit (or at least not be harmed) by software that sends usage information back to the software developer. This is controversial to say the least. Do you trust company X this much? If you trust them now, will you trust them in a year, 2 or 5?
Google Desktop Search is one example of this slippery slope.

My Boys

2005-02-10T14:07:00.000-06:00

IMG_0947
Originally uploaded by ghankstef.

Reason to get up in the morning. I can't put into words how much I love these guys

Stewart Copland interview on IT Conversations

2005-02-08T22:44:00.000-06:00

Former Police drummer talks about his career as a film composer and
how he uses technology for creating music for films.

It's an entertaining presentation. See
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail342.html

By the way if you haven't checked IT Conversations - I highly
recommend it. Great stuff I listen multiple times per week.

50 Gmail Invites

2005-02-08T22:38:00.000-06:00

I have a gmail (google email) account. They have given me a few invites to share in the past. When I invite someone they replenish the invite later with another invite or 2.

Now all of a sudden I have 50. If you would like one, please send me an email at ghankstef@nospamplease-gmail.com

remove nospampleasefrom the email address of course

Waste Time Even Faster

2005-02-01T22:08:00.000-06:00

Firefox tweek to speed up browsing the Web (broadband only -we're not talking miracles here).

1.Open Firefox and type about:config in the address location bar
2. Scroll down to network.http.pipelining double-click and change to true
3. Double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change the value to 10
4. Have fun wasting time faster than ever before!

I really found this speeds Firefox up for me. Your mileage may vary

Crisis in Copyright Lecture (audio)

2005-01-02T23:27:00.000-06:00

Suzanne Maine Lecture Series, First Lecture: Feudalism vs. Communism (Audio Only)

Suzanne Maine Lecture Series, Second Lecture: Automation and the Monadization of Power (Audio Only)

2004-12-30T10:34:00.000-06:00

Wired writes about bittorrent and its creator Bram Cohen.

Shell script to convert aiff file to mp3 and add id3 tags using lame and id3tool

2004-12-23T23:54:00.000-06:00

I am working on a shell script to help Michael Geoghegan of Reel Reviews podcast fame in his podcast production. I though I would post this as it may be of use to other podcasters. It is setup for OSX but should work on any *nix OS with minor changes. Windows version is possible but would probably have to be a vbscript or batch file or something of that order.

1. it converts any aiff file dropped into a folder to a 64kbps mono mp3 file (scanned every 10 seconds)
2. Adds some of the id3 tags:
- name: Reel-(the date)
-author: Michael Geoghegan
- album: Reel Reviews
-Comments (note): www.mwgblog.com
-Year (the current year)
3. Moves the aiff files to an aiff subfolder
4. Moves the processed mp3 file to a mp3s subfolder

Here is the script source:

#! /bin/bash
while ((1));
do
for aifffile in *.aiff;
do
base=`basename $aifffile .aiff`
my_date=`date "+%m-%d-%Y"`
my_year=`date "+%Y"`
my_note1="www.mwgblog.com Michael@mwgblog.com"

lame -h -m m -b 64 $base.aiff $base.mp3
id3tool $base.mp3 -r "Michael Geoghegan" -y $my_year -t "Reel-$my_date" -a "Reel Reviews" -n "$my_note1"
mv $base.aiff aiffs
mv $base.mp3 mp3s
done
sleep 10;
done

There is a bit of setup to do. Setup assumes OSX 10.3, lame and id3tool are installed. I had to compile lame and id3tool. Suposedly you can install them with fink in OSX but I couldn't get it to work so I just downloaded the source for these 2 and did it myself.

so to use the script
-install lame and id3tool.
-create a bin folder in your home directory /Users/your-user-name/bin
-create subfolders in bin called aiffs and mp3s
-copy the attached file (podcast.bsh) to the bin folder
-change the permissions of the podcast.bsh so it can execute.
-To do this open the terminal in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
- Type cd bin (return)
- Then type chmod 755 podcast.bsh
- Last type ./podcast.bsh (you have to keep the terminal application and window open (but you can minimize it to the dock)

Now any aiff file dropped in the bin folder is converted, id3 tags added and moved to the mp3s subfolder.

Here is what is left to make it really work well.

1. Testing. I just tested this on one very short system beep aiff file. Need to make sure it works with bigger files - it should but need to be tested
2. Prompt you for the name of the film. The script already just grabs the date from the computer. This part may need to be done in applescript - which is ok for OSX bu how could this be done to make it portable to other OSes?
3. Do the artwork thing. How do you do this? Drag the photo file into the iTunes artwork window? Does the artwork thing work with other media apps besides iTunes?
4. The id3tool seem to only allow a short snippet of text in the comment (note) tag, I wasn't able to put in the line breaks either.
5. Seems to me it would be useful to have it automatically ftp the mp3 wherever it needs to go no?

Batch convert word docs to pdf (unix version)

2004-12-17T13:57:00.000-06:00

This is a Bash shell script to convert word docs into pdfs. It uses a command line tool called Antiword to read the Word document and output it to postscript.

Then it uses ghostscript to convert it to pdf. It also checks the folder every 60 seconds to see if a new file has been added and processes it.

It's not perfect but mostly works well. Obviously you need to install Antiword and Ghostscript and make sure they are in you Path variable. 100% Microsoft and Adobe free:

#! /bin/bash
while ((1));
do
for docfile in *.doc;
do
antiword -i O -p letter $docfile | pstopdf -i -o ${docfile%.+([!/])}.pdf;
rm $docfile
done
sleep 60;
done

Batch convert word documents to pdf (Windows Version)

2004-12-17T13:56:00.000-06:00

So I needed to convert 90 word documents to pdf today and the thought of opening up 90 documents and printing them really was really depressing so I made a small vbscript to do it. I was also frustrated by the fact I could not find a ready to use script by searching in google so I made one.

Even though I have Word 2004 and Acrobat Professional 6.0, I couldn't see a way to convert all of them to pdf without opening them individually.

So here is the script (in Word go to Tools->Macros->Visual Basic Editor) click "normal" on the left side tree and click Microsoft Word Object and then double click This Document

Paste in this code:

Sub main()
'** Change the my path variable to the path to your folder full of word docs
myPath = "U:\LAW\syllabi_SP05\docs-toprocess"
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set Files = fso.GetFolder(myPath).Files
Set app = New Word.Application
For Each file In Files
app.Visible = True
app.Documents.Open (file.Path)
app.ActiveDocument.PrintOut
app.ActiveDocument.Close

Next
app.Quit
Set app = Nothing
End Sub

Be sure to change the path as noted above.

Now the trick is to have a PDF Printer set up as your default printer to print (save) the files to the folder you want. So I hade to make a new printer and create a new port (Adobe PDF port)
set t save to the folder I wanted the files to go to.

Works great 90 word docs were converted in about 3 minutes (unfortunately it took me 2 hours to make the script - oh well next time I will save a lot of time).

You should be able to substitue ghostcript for Adobe Acrobat with a little tinkering.

I also tried to make a unix shell script to do this using a program called Antiword and ghostscript. It worked pretty well. I'll post that later if I can find it

Hello World

2004-12-08T15:39:00.000-06:00

Push button publishing huh? Sounds like my Dad might be able to do it.