Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
The unfortunate but sometimes hilarious side-effect of having the last name “Hacker” — occasional emails like this one.
Email: queen5050pil@ymail.com
Message:
pls are you a hacker, if yes pls can you get for me cc with the balance and ATM pin visa and master cards or can you hack into any bank system mostly nigerian banks, pls reply asap thanks.
Srsly.
No reason… just wonderful.
At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Knight Digital Media Center, we’ve used Quicktime Streaming Server successfully for years. We mostly love it, but recently I’ve been banging my head against something that’s driving me nuts.
First, understand that .mov files on QTSS need to have a “hint” track added in order to enable genuine streaming. We run live webcasts with something called Wirecast Pro which lets us interleave titles, images, and output from a presenter’s desktop directly into live streams. It also records .mov files of those streams to disk for our webcast archives. After a conference ends, all I had to do was use QuickTime to add hint tracks to the recorded files and put them on our streaming server.
Recently we found that .mov files created with Wirecast would completely crash (hard!) QuickTime player when served from the streaming server into the browser. After much discussion on the QTSS mailing list, I was able to positively identify the problem as a bug in Apple’s hinting routine. Until the bug gets fixed, a developer at Apple recommended that I use the Penguin MP4 Encoder to add the hint tracks, rather than Apple tools.
That worked perfectly, but raised a separate problem – while the files will stream, they can no longer be played directly from the desktop (we offer a separate Download link). Attempting to play them results in an unhelpful “This movie file is apparently corrupt” message.
Thought I would go back to the drawing board and try to remove the hint tracks added by Penguin, so I could try a different approach. Can’t remove them in QuickTime since I can’t open them in QuickTime. Can’t remove them with the qtmedia command line binary that comes with OS X Server. Fortunately Penguin’s command-line tool does provide an “-unhint” option… but attempting to use that crashes Penguin.
So I’m stuck with a set of .mov files that play fine from QTSS but not locally, due to weirdo hint tracks. And I can’t find a tool to remove the hint tracks without crashing.
That’s my day so far. How’s yours?
Late last year, our house was broken into and a bunch of electronics were stolen, including the MiniDV video camera we had had since our wedding (fortunately the thief didn’t take all of our saved tapes). My video workflow over the past decade has consisted of shooting (judiciously), occassionally making a short web video, and putting the tape away in a cabinet for the archives.
When the camera was stolen, I replaced it with an HD camera that stores video data on SD cards. The usual workflow for SD-based cameras is that you extract what you need to disk when the card is full, then erase and re-use it. But I don’t always have time to do the reviewing and capturing every time, and don’t always feel comfortable erasing the card and starting over to shoot more footage. The question becomes, what is the best way to store this data long term?
I could of course buy another external hard drive dedicated to the task. They’re cheap enough, but experience teaches that disks are fallible, so then you get into the problem of having to back up what could quickly become terabytes of data.
Another solution would be to buy archival grade DVDs and copy data to them as cards fill up.
A final option would be to NOT reuse SD cards, but to replace them when full instead, and stack them in the cabinet for archival purposes just as I used to do with MiniDV tapes.
Doing some comparison shopping, it looks like the price ratio between using archival DVDs and buying new SD cards is similar enough to be neglible. The question then becomes, how do the shelf lives of these two media compare? If you search for information on the longevity of SD cards, you find lots of information about how they’re only good for a limited number of read/write operations before they start to fail… but that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m talking about writing to them once, only reading them a few times max, but storing them for years or decades. It’s surprisingly difficult to find information on how long data on an SD card will last if NOT used.
I’m confident they’d be fine for a few years. But what about 20? What about 50? (yes, I want my kid to be able to access this data when he’s grown up, hopefully without going through the hoops I recently did dealing with my dad’s 60-year-old 8- and 16-mm film stock.
Archival DVDs claim to be good for 100 years, and I’d be willing to trust that figure, or something like it, even though none of them have been around long enough for the estimate to be verified. But for convenience, I’d love to be able to skip the transfer step and just store SD cards long-term. Without information on that, I’m skittish about it.
Anyone have info on long-term shelf-life of unsed SD cards?
It’s been ages since I’ve promoted Birdhouse Hosting customer sites here on the blog — but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped taking on new users! Here’s a quick list of some of the best new sites to join Birdhouse in the past six months (full list here).
backyardmedia.org
As a writer and multimedia journalist, Wroth brings subjects to life with fresh and media-appropriate use of photography, audio, video and the written word. She earned a Masters from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2008. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she focuses on food and agriculture, health, and urban renewal.
Hilobrow
“Middlebrow is not the solution.” A Josh Glenn project site.
ktgkids.com
Kid-friendly version of the classic Archive of Misheard Lyrics.
jaimegross.com
Jaime Gross is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco, California. She writes about culture, design, art, architecture and travel—and the places where they overlap—for the New York Times; T, the New York Times Style Magazine; Travel + Leisure; Dwell; and Town and Country, among others.
swisswatching.com
Jackie and Seth are spending a couple years in Switzerland, living just outside of Lausanne in Renens VD.
haomama.us
“Raising Children in Mandarin and English. This site is part of my never-ending quest to find and share resources that make learning Chinese a fun and organic part of our children’s lives.”
Poor Babies
Life is Tough for the Rich and Powerful. Another Dan Gillmor project.
mediactive.com
From journalist/technologist Dan Gillmor comes Mediactive: A Users’ Guide to Media in a Networked Age. “My goal is to help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage.”
tomabate.com
Tom Abate is a former small-press publisher turned newspaper reporter who lives in Castro Valley.
Update: This entry has been updated for Snow Leopard.
In all of Mac-dom, there are few experiences more painful than trying to get Python tools to talk to a MySQL database. Installing MySQL itself is easy enough – Sun provides a binary package installer. Python 2.5 comes with Mac OS X. If you enable Apache and PHP, your PHP scripts will talk to your installed MySQL databases just fine, since PHP comes bundled with a MySQL database connector. But try to get up and running with Django, TurboGears, or any other Python package where MySQL database access could be useful (or needed), and you’re in for a world of hurt.
Update: I finally did manage to get Python and MySQL playing nice together, but it took a few more contortions beyond what’s described in the recipes found scattered around the interwebs. I’ve added my solution at the end of this post.
Why having a 6-year-old around the house is the greatest experience in the world:
That’s not our house, but minute-to-minute life isn’t far off from this girl’s wonderful stream of consciousness existence.
I don’t generally “do” Facebook or chain letters, but lately a meme has been floating around — write a note including 25 random facts or observations about your life, and tag some people you know or used to know (that’s the viral part). Seems silly on the surface, but it’s actually a really neat little vehicle for an hour or two of life review. Finally took the plunge and wrote one of my own. Excerpts:
– In high school, made a good living cleaning boat bottoms, scuba diving upside down in water so dense with algae and brine shrimp you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Sea monkeys creeping under the mask and up your nose, scraping knuckles on barnacles. Loved that job, but would never do it today.
– God, I love Fritos.
– My 6-year-old son is one of the two most important people in my life (the other is my wife, of course). I relish every moment with him, can’t wait to see him in the evenings. We rock the weekends together, try to always have at least one adventure. He’s shaping up to be an amazing human being. I could drown in his laughter and die happy.
… More …
In a case with far-reaching implications for the widespread practice of automated aggregation of headlines and ledes via RSS, GateHouse Media has, for the most part, won its case against the New York Times, who owns Boston.com, who in turn run a handful of community web sites. Those community sites were providing added value to their readers in the form of linked headlines, pointing to resources at community publications run by GateHouse. The practice of linked headline exchange is healthy for the web, useful for readers, and helpful for resource-starved community publications. However, for reasons that are still not clear (to me), GateHouse felt that the practice amounted to theft, even though the Boston.com sites were publishing the RSS feeds to begin with.
Trouble is, RSS feeds don’t come with Terms of Use. Is a publicly available feed meant purely for consumption by an individual, and not by other sites? After all, the web site you’re reading now is publicly available, but that doesn’t mean you’re free to reproduce it elsewhere. The common assumption is that a site wouldn’t publish an RSS feed if it didn’t want that feed to be re-used elsewhere. And that’s the assumption GateHouse is challenging.
Let’s be clear – this is not a scraping case (scraping is the process of writing tools to grab content from web pages automatically when an RSS feed is not available). Boston.com was simply utilizing the content GateHouse provided as a feed. I would agree that scraping is “theft-like” in a way that RSS is not, but that’s not relevant here.
In a weird footnote to all of this, GateHouse initially claimed that Boston.com was trying to work around technical measures they had put in place to prevent copying of their material. Those “technical measures” amounted to JavaScript in its web pages, but boston.com was of course not scraping the site — they were merely taking advantage of the RSS feeds freely provided by GateHouse. In other words, they were putting their “technical measures” in their web pages, not in their feed distribution mechanism, missing the point entirely.
GateHouse seems primarily concerned with the distinction between automated insertion of headlines and ledes (e.g. via RSS embeds) vs. the “human effort” required to quote a few grafs in a story body. Personally, I don’t see how the two are materially different, or how one method would affect GateHouse publications more negatively or positively than the other. If anything, now that GateHouse has gotten its way, they’re sure to receive less traffic.
The result is that Boston.com has been forced to stop using GateHouse RSS feeds to automatically populate community sites with local content. If cases like this hold sway, there will soon be a burden on every site interested in embedding external RSS feeds to find out whether it’s OK with each publisher first.
PlagiarismToday sums up the case:
It was a compromise settlement, as most are, but one can not help but feel that GateHouse just managed to bully one of the largest and most prestigious new organizations in the world.
Also:
The frustrating thing about settlements, such as this one, is that they do not become case law and have no bearing on future cases. If and when this kind of dispute arises again, we will be starting over from square one.
I’m trying to figure out who benefits from this decision… and I honestly can’t. GateHouse loses. Boston.com loses. Community web sites with limited resources lose. And readers lose. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.
With four million people crowded into D.C. for today’s inauguration, open house at the White House is out of the question — but it wasn’t always. SF Chronicle summarizes highlights from inaugurations past, including Andrew Jackson’s 1829 public melee’ :
1829: Andrew Jackson, “the People’s President,” holds an open house. About 20,000 people trample mud and horse manure into the White House, destroy rugs, break satin-covered chairs, smash crystal and china, and spill liquor. Fights break out, women faint and Jackson has to escape through a window. Order is restored when barrels of whiskey are placed on the South Lawn, drawing the crowd outside.
I bet barrels of free gubmint whiskey would still be effective as a crowd control technique. And more fun than rubber bullets.