Thoughts

Yet Another Ubuntu Upgrade

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 14:14:32 -0700

So Ubuntu 11.04 was release a few weeks ago and I decided to upgrade this weekend. In prep for the upgrade, I backed up my laptop onto my external portable hard drive that I may need (my home dir, and a few other things in /etc, some cronjobs, etc.). I then did a clean re-install from CD. In the past the ugrade-in-place has taken a long time, and was not completely problem free. Whereas the last time I did a clean re-install it was pretty much problem free- except getting all my personal files/configuration/settings the way I like them all back took some time. So that is the same approach I decided to take with this upgrade.

Its only been 2 days since I upgraded on Friday and I just remembered that the little LED on my laptop for wireless networking blinks now as the default behavior. Ugh!!! So stupid. I remember going bonkers about this last time. However, the solution I used last time isn't going to work now since things have changed in the new version of Ubuntu.

So... this is how I fixed it this time. I created a file in /etc/modprob.d/ called wlan.conf and added this one line to the file:

root@spencer-laptop:~# cat /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf 
options iwlcore led_mode=1

And then I rebooted, and BINGO! No more flashing light for wireless! Yay! And the was much rejoicing.

Saw Paul Simon in Concert in Seattle

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 10:35:59 -0700

My wife and I flew to Seattle April 14-17 so we could go to a concert. :-) We went to see Paul Simon as he kicked off a new tour, and we went to the first concert of the tour. It was at the WAMU theater, which is part of Qwest Field in Seattle (Qwest Field is where the football team Seattle Seahawks play).

The concert was soooo good. We really enjoyed it. I wanted to remember what he played so with the help of my wife, we wrote down the songs from memory. Here's the playlist from the concert, although- we may have missed a song or two and it is not in order:

songs from the concert:
crazy love
afterlife
rewrite
love is eternal sacred light
so beautiful or so what
only living boy in new york
I know what I know
that was your mother
father and daughter
50 ways to leave your lover
kodachrome
diamonds on the souls of her shoes
slip slide and away
hearts and bones
the obvious child
train in the distance (? not sure)
gone at last
love and hard times

encore 1:
sounds of silence
(? can't remember)

encore 2:
here comes the sun (beatles cover)
late in the evening

Raising Money for a Film the New Way

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:08:41 -0700

The old way of raising money to make a film consisted of one or a combination of all of the following:

Use your credit cards, max them out, apply for more and max them out. repeat until deeply deeply depressingly in debt.
Beg family members, close friends for money for you project.
Lower everyone's expectations of getting paid, if they had any to begin with.
Search for and pitch like crazy to investors. This requires connections to those with money.
Apply for some art grants. This may be difficult unless you or your project fit into the requirements for the grant.
Mortgage your home.
Sell plasma at the blood bank.

None of those are really easy. Financing a film is not easy unless your budget doesn't require raising money (like if you think it may cost $400 to make and you already have that in the bank, and can spare it). But if your budget is more like $400,000 and you certainly don't have that lying around to spare, then it's time to get serious about raising money the old fashioned way, right?

Maybe not any more....

filmmaking things to think about

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:41:14 -0700

Yesterday I decided to search for a filmmaking community. I know there are several out there and I know of several people that are involved in them, but I haven't really felt a part of any of them myself. So I did a search on google for 'filmmaker'. That was it. One of the first places I went to is http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/ which had several interesting things going for it right away. Having recently been part of Sundance, I recognized a few of the movies that were being talked about.

I then stumbled on a very interesting article about the value or purpose of film festivals. http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/02/the-microbudget-conversation-what-are-festivals-good-for/ I was sucked in and had to read the whole thing.

It mentioned a rant from filmmaker Kevin Smith at Sundance which I had not heard about yet, and so followed the link and watched the whole thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90pcHCF2h44

It sure made me think. He has some interesting points and the article also brings up some interesting points about marketing a film at a film festival.

To boil down the ideas to bullet points to mull over:

film festivals rarely serve the filmmakers or films as a gateway to getting your film seen across the country in normal theaters, nor getting the filmmakers a deal for a future project.
getting into festivals costs money and is a gamble
film festivals still do allow for networking with other filmmakers and industry insiders
film festivals still provide a means to "get noticed"
financing a film is hard in the first place, making the film is also hard, trying to market the film to get your money back is really really hard
distributors only deal in big money- they almost never waste their time on low cost stuff. not enough profit, or potential profit to spend their time.
Studios are distributors. That is how they make their money. They don't make it from making movies, they make it from selling movies.
Self distribution is hard because there is not much known or available to support it.
Self promotion is hard unless you already have huge network of followers on social network sites and email lists, or have access to those that do.
What Kevin Smith talks about ("road show" approach to marketing/exhibiting) has been done by may other people already- some successes and some failures. Warren Miller does this very thing, and has for 40+ years. Success. Some independent Mormon cinema tried this 5 years ago- flopped and lost money (Handcart).

I'm going to mull these over in my head for a bit and hav a followup post on some other things I've recently found that are related to the money/business side of filmmaking.

Sundance 2011 review

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:06:30 -0700

Sundance 2011 is now over. I took the week of Jan 24 - Jan 28 off work so I could volunteer, and was at the Broadway theater in SLC for the week. It was a great week and I had a lot of fun.

Here are the films that I got to see at this year's festival:

The Last Mountain
The Bengali Detective
Margin Call
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
An African Election
Prairie Love

And here are films that I saw only in part:

Becoming Chaz (first 15min)
The Nine Muses (about 20 minutes, somewhere in the first half of the film)
How to Die in Oregon (first 20 min)
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (first 40min)
Hell and Back Again (first 40 min)

Reading again

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:04:27 -0700

I'm reading LOTR trilogy again. It's been a few years since I read them. I had forgotten how much detail there is in the history and background of everything. The story and characters really come alive due to all the rich history developed behind it.

Finally Finished Editing Vacation Video from 6 Years Ago

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:26:58 -0700

6 years ago my wife and I went on a great vacation to New Zealand. I took my video camera (a Canon GL-1), and shot lots of video footage- about 3-4 hours of raw footage. We were there for 10 days. It was great.

While in film school I was taught video editing on three different software products: Adobe Primier, Final Cut Pro, and Avid. Out of all of them I liked Final Cut Pro the best, and felt most comfortable in it. So, back in 2004 (the same year that we went to New Zealand) I purchased a Mac Pro tower and Final Cut Pro (academic version). And I imported the footage and began editing it near the end of that year. Since then I've gotten rid of that tower and now have a 20" iMac and have the latest version of Final Cut Express (it is better than my old version of FCP from 6 years ago).

I just "finished" editing it this summer 2010! Whew! I put finished in quotes because there are things that could still be improved, but I'm not going to worry about them any more. It is time to move on to another project. Now that the editing is done, I need to put the DVD together for it.

One of the main reasons it has taken me so long is simply that it hasn't been a top priority for me. And I also find that when I'm editing, I want the final result to look professional. When editing my own vacation I try to imaging someone else who is not familiar with me or my wife watching it and edit it so that it would be interesting to them. I mean, at some point I expect my children to see these videos and I hope the videos stand on their own without needing to be explained. Is that over kill? Perhaps. But it means that I'm not ashamed to show off my work to any one. Even if I look ridiculous in parts of the video, the video itself tells a story in an structured way.

So lessons learned? I'd say, when editing vacation videos, make it a higher priority to finish them within a year of the trip. Next time. :-) What else? Definitely I learned a lot about audio levels. Things sound totally different when on the computer versus on the tv. Any music on the sound track needs to peak somewhere around -17db and dialog captured from the camera should be between 0db and +7db depending. Audio was a big time consumer for me. I hate to have to adjust volume on the tv when watching something, so you need to do all the normalizing when editing. But it pays off if you can hear everything when watching it on the tv and don't need to touch the remote at all during it. Any other lessons? Perhaps one more- migrating a video project from one computer to another, and from one version of video editing software to another can be risky. There was a time when I nearly had to start all over again when I got my new iMac. The lesson learned- it is better to complete a project on one platform than to let it languish and have to be migrated onto another. The risk of something going wrong and chances for headaches are pretty high.

Recent Ubuntu kernel upgrade made my wi-fi led blink; drives me crazy

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:10:32 -0700

Recently, I got a normal update popup from my Ubuntu Update manager. The update included a new kernel as well as other items. I usually wait a few days on kernel updates because they can make some things break (like virtual box) and I'll need to do some manual fix-up work afterwards.

So I did the upgrade and after I noticed something new and very annoying. I use an HP laptop- Compaq 8510w, which has two led indicators for wi-fi. They have always simply been on when my wireless is on, or off when it is off. Never more than that. Well, after the upgrade those leds started blinking according to my wireless usage. At first I was like, "what the heck? What did I do to make that happen?" What ever it was, I was not pleased. It was so distracting that I was thinking of covering up those leds with black tape.

I then searched on google for any one else with a similar problem and I found one. Unfortunately I can't find it again right now, but the post I found mentioned the same latop and a similar problem but on Fedora.

Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:22:17 -0700

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.

First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.

So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.

Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.

ideas for blog posts

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 01:25:09 -0700

I haven't written for a while, but I have gathered several ideas to write about. Here are a few of them:

My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
Controltier. This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software. It is a bit complex but can be very powerful. I use this at work.
My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins". This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).

As you can see, I actually do have things to write about, now if I could only make the time.....

Music covers are interesting

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:27:05 -0700

For some reason I'm drawn to music covers. I like to hear new versions of the same song be different artists and compare styles and interpretations. I have another blog post from a long time ago that mentions an idea for a mp3 player plugin that would connect to SecondHandSongs to query their database of song covers and provide information on the current song and related covers if any.

Well, I actually have renewed the desire for such a plugin and have a few links of resources to help be get started on this:

http://www.secondhandcongs.com (of course)
http://code.google.com/p/rhythmtoweb/
http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/ThirdParty
http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/WritingGuide
http://www.grooveshark.com
http://apidocs.tinysong.com/

My current idea is to ping SecondHandSongs with the song info and retrieve:
1. if this is a cover
2. if this is an original, with other artists covering it
3. if this is not found at all in their database

for 1 and 2, I'll get the list of all covers and artists, and then query TinySong.com to see if they have that song in their database. If so, they will provide a URL to listen to that song in a browser.

So you can listen to a song and say, "Hmm, I wonder if anyone has redone this song...", then right click on it, or something, and choose "Find Song Cover Info...", and then a list of songs and artists get displayed, and when you click on any one of them, it pauses your current music player, launches a web browser with the URL for that song cover and you get to listen to it right there.

Coolness.

Blogging is hard if you don't do it

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:24:31 -0700

I've found that is it hard to keep up your blog if you don't keep up your blog. Sounds silly when I write it out like that, but it's true. If you don't make time for something, then it probably won't happen on its own. Enough said.

learning something new

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:44:57 -0700

So I'm spending a little time to learn something new. I've been working on www.todocycle.net for a while now (actual hours spent are still pretty low, but with the little free time I have it's been a long time)... any hoo. I purposely chose to use some technologies with this site that I have never used before but had heard about and wanted to learn.

I started out with a few things that I am very familiar with, so that this project wouldn't take for freaking ever to get off the ground as I learn. I only spend about 3-4 hours a month on it, so my time better be well spent in order to see any visible progress. I started out with Postgres for the database, perl as the coding language, and CGI::Application as the MVC framework. All of which I'm quite comfotable with.

Then I chose a few things to work with to force me to learn. Template Toolkit for templating (I've been using HTML::Template for most other things), DBIx::Class for ORM (I've never really given and ORM a chance), and jQuery for a Javascript toolkit.

So far things have been a mixed bag. Picking up Template Toolkit was no problem at all and I am quite impressed by it. DBIx::Class has been another story. It has been a struggle for me to embrace it, and another one to try to get it to do what I want. I'm not giving up on it yet though. I want to give it a fair shot, but it was not a "learn it in one sitting and go to town" sort of thing like Template Toolkit was.

And then there's jQuery. I actually have been putting that one off becuase I was so focussed on the backend of things until now. I just started reading the docs on jQuery and have to say I am mightily impressed. I used Prototype before and disliked it. At my work, they use Yahoo's YUI toolkit, which seems big and bloated to me. jQuery is tiight, lightweight, and very easy to pick up.

So far:
   jQuery    A
DBIx::Class    B-
Template Toolkit   A

How to: Set up a few virtual servers on your desktop

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:22:34 -0700

This is an attempt at a how-to for getting a few servers up and running that can talk to each other as well as with your host desktop machine all with vitrtualization. This has been a personal desire for some time and I have read documentation about how to do this and have tried multiple times, and every time it seems that the job is complex and error prone. So this how-to will describe how I finally was able to get it working with almost no effort! Yeah!

First of all, let's set the scene and give ourselves a goal: We want to have a VM web server and a VM database server running on our desktop that runs a simple web application. The two machines need to talk to each other. And we want to be able to open our desktop web browser and access the web application running on these VMs. And do all that without any complex configuration or breaking your desktop's network settings.

The first thing we will use in this setup is VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/)

Time management

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:02:29 -0700

For a long time I've suffered under the illusion that I was doing ok in managing my time and all that I was working on. I assumed that all other programmers, software engineers, system administrators, etc. all had lives similar to mine and that we all barely keep our heads above water and at any moment we could drown.

Well the truth is different from that, and it took a book to help me understand that. Please, please, please- if you are at all in the IT industry and work with code, or systems, or networks, or stuff like that- then please buy and read "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas A. Limonecelli (O'Reilley). This book is not magic, don't get me wrong- but if you feel that being burried by tasks and projects is normal and that you have to work more hours a week than a "normal person" becuase your job is just that demanding- then you need this book to help you see differently!