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  11  <div class="title">
  12   <h1>
  13        <a href="../../">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  14
  15   </h1>
  16
  17  </div>
  18
  19  <p>Entries tagged "english".</p>
  20
  21
  22
  23
  24 <div class="entry">
  25  <div class="title">
  26  <a href="../../The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
  27  </div>
  28  <div class="date">
  29   2008-11-25 00:10
  30  </div>
  31
  32  <div class="body">
  33
  34 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
  35 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
  36 default in Debian Edu.  We need an embedded video playing plugin with
  37 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
  38 all the multimedia content available on the web.  The test results and
  39 notes are available on
  40 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
  41 Debian wiki</a>.  I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
  42 fill this need.  My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
  43 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages.  A lot of the MIME
  44 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
  45 video/ogg), just do not work.  And simple formats like the
  46 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
  47 totem and vlc plugins.  I hope the situation will improve soon.  No
  48 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
  49
  50 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin.  It seem to
  51 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
  52
  53  </div>
  54  <div class="tags">
  55
  56
  57
  58   Tags: <a href="../../tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="../../tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="../../tags/web">web</a>.
  59
  60  </div>
  61 </div>
  62 <div class="padding"></div>
  63
  64 <div class="entry">
  65  <div class="title">
  66  <a href="../../Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
  67  </div>
  68  <div class="date">
  69   2008-12-07 12:00
  70  </div>
  71
  72  <div class="body">
  73
  74 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
  75 Oslo.  Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
  76 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
  77 LTSP installation.  LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
  78 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
  79 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box.  Was working on getting the
  80 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
  81 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
  82
  83 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
  84 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
  85 development gathering.  Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
  86 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
  87 of these cards.</p>
  88
  89  </div>
  90  <div class="tags">
  91
  92
  93
  94   Tags: <a href="../../tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="../../tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
  95
  96  </div>
  97 </div>
  98 <div class="padding"></div>
  99
 100 <div class="entry">
 101  <div class="title">
 102  <a href="../../Software_video_mixer_on_a_USB_stick.html">Software video mixer on a USB stick</a>
 103  </div>
 104  <div class="date">
 105   2008-12-28 15:40
 106  </div>
 107
 108  <div class="body">
 109
 110 <p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> is
 111 recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have
 112 worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides
 113 directly with the video stream.  For this, we use the
 114 <a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/">dvswitch</a> package from
 115 the Debian video team.  As this require quite one computer per video
 116 source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to
 117 borrow laptops.  And to avoid having to install extra software on
 118 these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a
 119 bootable USB stick.  The software required is dvswitch with assosiated
 120 source, sink and mixer applications and
 121 <a href="http://www.kinodv.org/">dvgrab</a>.  To allow this setup to
 122 work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use
 123 <a href="http://www.avahi.org/">avahi</a> to connect the various parts
 124 together.  And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I
 125 upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work
 126 with USB sources.  We have not yet tested this setup in a production
 127 setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a
 128 video mixer in a very short time frame.  We will need it for
 129 <a href="http://www.goopen.no/">Go Open 2009</a>.</p>
 130
 131 <p><a href="http://www.nuug.no/pub/video/bin/usbstick-dvswitch.img.gz">The
 132 USB image</a> is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any
 133 larger stick as well.</p>
 134
 135  </div>
 136  <div class="tags">
 137
 138
 139
 140   Tags: <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="../../tags/video">video</a>.
 141
 142  </div>
 143 </div>
 144 <div class="padding"></div>
 145
 146 <div class="entry">
 147  <div class="title">
 148  <a href="../../When_web_browser_developers_make_a_video_player___.html">When web browser developers make a video player...</a>
 149  </div>
 150  <div class="date">
 151   2009-01-17 18:50
 152  </div>
 153
 154  <div class="body">
 155
 156 <p>As part of the work we do in <a href="http://www.nuug.no">NUUG</a>
 157 to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
 158 page with embedded video for easy access to the recording.  Putting a
 159 good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
 160 browsers and across all operating systems is not easy.  I hope this
 161 will become easier when the &lt;video&gt; tag is implemented in all
 162 browsers, but I am not sure.  We provide the recordings in several
 163 formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
 164 browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
 165 recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
 166 There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
 167 &lt;video&gt; tag, the &lt;object&gt; tag, the &lt;embed&gt; tag and
 168 the &lt;applet&gt; tag.  All of these take a lot of options, and
 169 finding the best options is a major challenge.</p>
 170
 171 <p>I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from <a
 172 href="http://labs.opera.com">labs.opera.com</a>, to see how it handled
 173 a &lt;video&gt; tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
 174 I was not very impressed.  The browser start by fetching a picture
 175 from the video stream.  Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
 176 definitely very early in the recording.  So far, so good. Next,
 177 instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
 178 of it, but do not start to play the video.  This mean I have to wait
 179 for several minutes for the downloading to finish.  When the download
 180 is done, the playing of the video do not start!  Waiting for the
 181 download, but I do not get to see the video?  Some testing later, I
 182 discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
 183 to get a play button to pres to start the video.  Adding
 184 autoplay="true" did not help.  I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
 185 test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
 186 &lt;video&gt; tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
 187 playing when the download is done.</p>
 188
 189 <p>The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
 190 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20090113-foredrag-om-foredrag/">available
 191 from the nuug site</a>.  Will have to test it with the new Firefox
 192 too.</p>
 193
 194 <p>In the test process, I discovered a missing feature.  I was unable
 195 to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
 196 am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video.  I
 197 sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)</p>
 198
 199  </div>
 200  <div class="tags">
 201
 202
 203
 204   Tags: <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="../../tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="../../tags/video">video</a>, <a href="../../tags/web">web</a>.
 205
 206  </div>
 207 </div>
 208 <div class="padding"></div>
 209
 210 <div class="entry">
 211  <div class="title">
 212  <a href="../../Using_bar_codes_at_a_computing_center.html">Using bar codes at a computing center</a>
 213  </div>
 214  <div class="date">
 215   2009-02-20 08:50
 216  </div>
 217
 218  <div class="body">
 219
 220 <p>At work with the University of Oslo, we have several hundred computers
 221 in our computing center.  This give us a challenge in tracking the
 222 location and cabling of the computers, when they are added, moved and
 223 removed.  Some times the location register is not updated when a
 224 computer is inserted or moved and we then have to search the room for
 225 the "missing" computer.</p>
 226
 227 <p>In the last issue of Linux Journal, I came across a project
 228 <a href="http://www.libdmtx.org/">libdmtx</a> to write and read bar
 229 code blocks as defined in the
 230 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix">The Data Matrix
 231 Standard</a>.  This is bar codes that can be read with a normal
 232 digital camera, for example that on a cell phone, and several such bar
 233 codes can be read by libdmtx from one picture.  The bar code standard
 234 allow up to 2 KiB to be written in the tag.  There is another project
 235 with <a href="http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/">a bar code
 236 writer written in postscript</a> capable of creating such bar codes,
 237 but this was the first time I found a tool to read these bar
 238 codes.</p>
 239
 240 <p>It occurred to me that this could be used to tag and track the
 241 machines in our computing center.  If both racks and computers are
 242 tagged this way, we can use a picture of the rack and all its
 243 computers to detect the rack location of any computer in that rack.
 244 If we do this regularly for the entire room, we will find all
 245 locations, and can detect movements and removals.</p>
 246
 247 <p>I decided to test if this would work in practice, and picked a
 248 random rack and tagged all the machines with their names.  Next, I
 249 took pictures with my digital camera, and gave the dmtxread program
 250 these JPEG pictures to see how many tags it could read.  This worked
 251 fairly well.  If the pictures was well focused and not taken from the
 252 side, all tags in the image could be read.  Because of limited space
 253 between the racks, I was unable to get a good picture of the entire
 254 rack, but could without problem read all tags from a picture covering
 255 about half the rack.  I had to limit the search time used by dmtxread
 256 to 60000 ms to make sure it terminated in a reasonable time frame.</p>
 257
 258 <p>My conclusion is that this could work, and we should probably look
 259 at adjusting our computer tagging procedures to use bar codes for
 260 easier automatic tracking of computers.</p>
 261
 262  </div>
 263  <div class="tags">
 264
 265
 266
 267   Tags: <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 268
 269  </div>
 270 </div>
 271 <div class="padding"></div>
 272
 273 <div class="entry">
 274  <div class="title">
 275  <a href="../../Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">Checking server hardware support status for Dell, HP and IBM servers</a>
 276  </div>
 277  <div class="date">
 278   2009-02-28 23:50
 279  </div>
 280
 281  <div class="body">
 282
 283 <p>At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount
 284 of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support
 285 contract expire for each server.  We have a machine (and service)
 286 register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the
 287 machine room location and contact information for the system owner for
 288 each machine.  To make it easier for us to track support contract
 289 status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to
 290 include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag
 291 machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such
 292 machines.  I extended a perl script already being used to import
 293 information about machines into the register, to also do some screen
 294 scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines
 295 are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status
 296 for the relevant machines.  This make the support status information
 297 easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer
 298 owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract.
 299 The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the
 300 registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find
 301 them.  27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us
 302 using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract
 303 last, to have test machines and a platform for less important
 304 services.  After all, the machines without a contract are working fine
 305 at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of
 306 them break down.  When that happen, we can either fix it using spare
 307 parts from other machines or move the service to another old
 308 machine.</p>
 309
 310 <p>I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally
 311 written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten
 312 Werner Forsbring.  The HP scraping was written by me after reading a
 313 nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM
 314 scraping was written by me based on the Dell code.  I know the HTML
 315 parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to
 316 introduce more dependencies.  This is the current incarnation:</p>
 317
 318 <pre>
 319 use LWP::Simple;
 320 use POSIX;
 321 use WWW::Mechanize;
 322 use Date::Parse;
 323 [...]
 324 sub get_support_info {
 325     my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
 326     my $str;
 327
 328     if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
 329         # fetch website from Dell support
 330         my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&amp;cs=nodhs1&amp;l=no&amp;s=dhs&amp;ServiceTag=$serial";
 331         my $webpage = get($url);
 332         return undef unless ($webpage);
 333
 334         my $daysleft = -1;
 335         my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
 336         foreach my $line (@lines) {
 337             next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
 338             $line =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 339             $line =~ s/^.+?;(Beskrivelse;)/$1/;
 340
 341             my @f = split(/\;/, $line);
 342             @f = @f[13 .. $#f];
 343             my $lastend = "";
 344             while ($f[3] eq "DELL") {
 345                 my ($type, $startstr, $endstr, $days) = @f[0, 5, 7, 10];
 346
 347                 my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 348                                             localtime(str2time($startstr)));
 349                 my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 350                                           localtime(str2time($endstr)));
 351                 $str .= "$type $start -> $end ";
 352                 @f = @f[14 .. $#f];
 353                 $lastend = $end if ($end gt $lastend);
 354             }
 355             my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 356             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 357                 if ($lastend lt $today);
 358         }
 359     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
 360         my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
 361         my $url =
 362             'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
 363         $mech->get($url);
 364         my $fields = {
 365             'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
 366             'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
 367             'country' => 'NO',
 368             'productNumber' => $productnumber,
 369             'serialNumber1' => $serial,
 370         };
 371         $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
 372                             fields      => $fields );
 373         # Next step is screen scraping
 374         my $content = $mech->content();
 375
 376         $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 377         $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 378         $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 379         $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 380
 381         my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 382
 383         while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
 384             my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
 385                 m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
 386             $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
 387             my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 388                                         localtime(str2time($startstr)));
 389             my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
 390                                       localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
 391
 392             $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
 393
 394             tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 395                 if ($end lt $today);
 396         }
 397     } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
 398         # This code ignore extended support contracts.
 399         my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
 400         if ($producttype &amp;&amp; $serial) {
 401             my $content =
 402                 get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&amp;brandind=5000008&amp;Submit=Submit&amp;type=$producttype&amp;serial=$serial");
 403             if ($content) {
 404                 $content =~ s/&lt;[^>]+?>/;/gm;
 405                 $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
 406                 $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
 407                 $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
 408
 409                 $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
 410                 my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
 411
 412                 $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
 413
 414                 my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
 415                 tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
 416                     if ($end lt $today);
 417             }
 418         }
 419     }
 420     return $str;
 421 }
 422 </pre>
 423
 424 <p>Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake
 425 serial numbers.  The information passed in as arguments are fetched
 426 from dmidecode.</p>
 427
 428 <pre>
 429 print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
 430                        "447707-B21");
 431 print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
 432 print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
 433                        "1234567");
 434 </pre>
 435
 436 <p>I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for
 437 everyone with more than a few computers to administer. :)</p>
 438
 439 <p>Update 2009-03-06: The IBM page do not include extended support
 440 contracts, so it is useless in that case.  The original Dell code do
 441 not handle extended support contracts either, but has been updated to
 442 do so.</p>
 443
 444  </div>
 445  <div class="tags">
 446
 447
 448
 449   Tags: <a href="../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
 450
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 453 <div class="padding"></div>
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 462 <h2>Archive</h2>
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 464
 465 <li>2009
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 468 <li><a href="../../archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
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