I’d been bemoaning the lack of IPv6 enablement in Debian, because I want to learn more about IPv6, and today I finally noticed the Debian IPv6 project. Somewhat annoyingly, ping doesn’t do the right thing with IPv6 addresses, there’s a separate ping6, and for reasons I don’t grok yet about the Debian package system, I don’t even have that; I’ve got fping6, which is slightly different.

Either way, I now have IPv6 goodness to play with. Apache, ssh, sshd, and mozilla all seem happily v6 enabled, and those are my major TCP/IP applications. Conveniently, tcpdump is also, although the debian version of netcat is not.

For those of you who were wondering, literal IPv6 addresses in URLs are to be enclosed in square-brackets like: http://[::1]/blog/, according to RFC 2732.

At work we have a product called eRoom, which is a collaboration tool/knowledge management system. It’s quite slick, in my opinion.

As an open source guy, I can’t help looking at things and saying "hey, I bet you could do this as free software." And as mentioned elsewhere in my blog, I have this ongoing interest in building a web engine in perl. Why a web engine, of all possible projects? Well, it’s an enabling technology for lots of other projects. Why perl, of all programming languages? Well, I just like it.

So what’s wrong with the zillion existing web engines, many of which are already in perl? None of the ones I’ve played with are particularly satisfying.

There’s a few projects pending that could use a web engine to run on. One of these days I intend to make a better version of Reviews Of This Book. And I built a prototype a webmail engine, but I never finished it. I promised my wife I’d build a web-based playlist editor for my mp3 archive, which is tied into her hi-fi rig. And my blog itself is not finished, in terms of the code behind it; it should have images and discussion forums and whatnot. Megan’s web site is hand coded currently, and could really use some automation. There are probably some additional half-finished or half-conceived projects waiting in the wings, that I’ve forgotten about.

I’m somewhat inspired by Quixote, which seems to focus on web development more as programming than publishing.  That is to say, I’m looking for a framework where I can build software applications that happen to use HTTP and HTML as the user interface, rather than writing web content that happens to have some dynamic elements.

The biggest roadblock, of course, continues to be my lack of free time.  I do have full-time employment, and also have a wife and 6 month old daughter, all of which seem to take a fair amount of time to maintain.  The easiest thing I could do to free up some time is to allocate some of the hours when I’m at work, and consider any such time as self-directed training, which would not be far from the truth.  As a computer professional, most of the skills that I have are largely self-taught, and many are a direct result of working with free software.  (usually both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer)

I’m trying to get Kupu to work, but so far with only limited success.  I can edit text with IE now, which is good, but I can’t change the title property.  It looks like it works in the editor, but when the data is posted back to the webserver, the title property is not changed by Kupu.

This was intended to be an entry about my thoughts on a Perl Web Engine (revisited for the nth time).  But that will have to wait until some other occasion.

I note in passing that superscripts, font colors, and background colors work in the editor, but are apparently not posted back to the server.

I discovered this morning that Epoz is now Kupu.
Great. One more thing to update.

Actually, I’m happy to see work on it, since it works well for me from Mozilla, but I can’t get it to work from IE at all.

I started this story from the emergency room, using the hospital’s wireless network and my handheld computer(a Sharp Zaurus).

I had woken up in the middle of the night, with a strange feeling in my ear, and when I touched it, my finger became wet.

That’s strange, I thought. So I go look in the mirror, and I had all sorts of blood running out of my ear. Quite unexpectedly, mind you. I’ve never had an experience like this before.

I cleaned up as much as I could and went to research this on the net to see how serious it was. Long-story-short, I went back to bed, and went to the hospital in the morning. At the hospital, they decided that I had not ruptured my eardrum, but instead had some other site where I was bleeding. By the time the doctor looked at it, the bleeding had stopped, so he wrote me a Rx for anti-biotic ear drops and I went home.

Alas, I couldn’t actually write this story at the time, because my handheld computer doesn’t have a robust enough javascript engine to drive Epoz.

I’ve done some significant work on the blog-engine, to incorporate a management page for myself, and to integrate Epoz.

While this is working (I’m using it now.), there are some serious debugging issues to be done. Also I need to build authentication and authorization modules.

But this should make it much easier for me to actual add stories. And to format them.

One of our neighbors wasn’t home when she had an arrangement of flowers delivered, and the delivery guy didn’t want to leave them outside, so he dropped them off at our house, and left a note for the recipient saying that she should come by our house to pick them up.

We have a rosemary plant in the shape of a small christmas tree on our front step which is completely dead. It’s just dried sticks. We were waiting patiently that night for the neighbor to show up and claim her flowers – eventually we got impatient, and Suzette tried to deliver them.

To their mutual bewhilderment, the neighbor asserted "But I already got the delivery!" And Zette saw she had taken our completely dead rosemary bush, thinking it was hers.

I’m going to have to add images to the blog just so readers can appreciate the humor of this. You have to see this dessicated stump of a rosemary bush to appreciate how funny it is that someone would think it was a gift.

I have a newborn, which means I have a burning need to take video that no one wants to look at. I have a digital video camera that make it possible to fulfill this fetish.

Like most digital video cameras, the one that I own has a firewire (ieee1394) port on it. I have an Apple Powerbook that also has said port. I have a DVD burner attached to my Linux server.

So I’m figuring that I can use iMovie on the Mac, capture my home movies, edit them, and make DVDs to torture my family with. Alas, not so easy!

Capturing video from the camera with the Powerbook was very easy. Hook up the camera, and OS X automatically offers to start iMovie, which has a friendly button on the display labeled "import" or somesuch. Boom. Trivial. I was pleased to note that it even automatically divides the project into clips where there is a break in the footage.

I then spent many hours with iMovie editing my masterpiece: adjusting brightness/contrast, fixing colors, adding effects/transitions, cropping out the boring parts, creating a soundtrack, etc. It was great. Eventually, I declare success, and am ready to master the DVD image… Except that iMovie doesn’t do that, it only offers to export to iDVD. Which I don’t have installed.

So I turn to my trusty aide, the IN TAR NET, and summon a copy of iDVD. Of course, now that I’ve got a zillion gigabytes of video on the laptop, I don’t have room to install it, so I set up an NFS server just so I can run iDVD from the Linux box.

iDVD, however, refuses to run without a DVD burner installed. Apparently it’s not designed to create ISO images. I had expected to be able to create an ISO image, which I would then go burn to DVD on the Linux box where the burner is installed. No such luck.

But I really want to be able to make my own home-movie DVDs, so I wasn’t deterred at that point. I then bought an external firewire enclosure, and a firewire card for the Linux server. Once these things arrived, I was able to easily swap the DVD burner between the Linux server and the Apple Powerbook G4.

Except that iDVD still wouldn’t start up, again claiming that the appropriate hardware wasn’t installed. A little more research on the IN TAR NET, and I determined that iDVD only works with the Apple Superdrive; my third-party device will not work with the software. Apple sells a product called DVD Studio Pro that would work but for big bucks. Sure, I could probably find a copy "somewhere" but I’m don’t approve of pirating software, which is one of the reasons that I run open source software in the first place.

So… after a week or so of gnashing my teeth and swearing at Apple, I start looking into Linux based software. After all, I bought an ieee1394 card for the Linux machine when I bought the external enclosure. This should allow me, I reckoned, to connect the camera and the DVD burner to the Linux machine and to Hell with the Powerbook. With hardy any effort I installed Kino which pretty happily captured the video from the camera, and gave me some minimal editing capability. It’s not iMovie, that’s for sure – it has only the bare essentials, but it imports DV (Digital Video), and provides a GUI to export into MPEG files suitable for DVD authoring.

Annoyingly, there apparently is not currently an easy Debian package for mjpegtools, which is a project that Kino uses to do the MPEG encoding. I found a debian package, but it was dependent on some other package, which I didn’t have either, and couldn’t find. I have years of experience building things from source, and that took no time at all.

MPEGs having been built, I used dvdauthor to covert the raw MPEG files to the DVD format, which is a great piece of software with a completely arcane interface. I then attempted to use dvdrecord to burn the DVD. This caused another world of pain, because the Linux ieee1394 implementation is somewhat unstable, and trying to send raw-SCSI commands to an ATA drive over an ieee1394 interface was just one transform too many, and I was able to lock up the operating system very repeatably. I posted the error to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, but like most lurkers with obscure bugs, was ignored.

There’s another program for Linux that will create DVDs called growisofs which worked. This program does not use raw-SCSI, but instead works through the kernel cdrom driver (sr_mod instead of sg).

As an aside, I also looked at Polidori which is a nice idea, but not ready for anything. I’m tempted to contribute to the project, but I know I don’t have time to do so.

I burned my movie to DVD+R media, and my set-top player rejected it as unreadable. I tried again with DVD-R media, and it worked! But the audio sounded somewhat like chipmunks gargling. As it turns out, mp2enc, the audio encoder from mjpegtools, defaults to CD-quality audio (44.1kHz), but DVD’s are recorded at 48kHz. So when played back, the audio on the DVD I created was about 10% too fast, but the video was playing back at normal speed. This caused everything to be higher in pitch, but to then stretch out the audio to maintain synchronization, there were tiny gaps inserted into the sound. Hence, gargling chipmunks.

This can be fixed by adding the ‘-r 48000’ option to mp2enc in the ‘export’ tab of Kino. At last, I have created a DVD that plays correctly.

This process really highlighted to me how far the user-interface problems with Linux have to go. On the other hand, at least I was empowered to do what I needed to do – the open source software made me spend hours figuring out how to make it work, but they were solveable problems. The proprietary solutions (iMovie and iDVD) are undoubtedly more powerful and easy to use, but they did not accomplish the task, because a business manager and a copyright lawyer don’t want to make things easy.

Given the choice, I’ll take the free software. I like freedom.

So, have I lost interest in my blog?

Apparently, since I haven’t made an entry in over a month. I’ve been busy and stressed. Megan has been sick, I have a new boss at work, etc. Not really though; I do think about adding things periodically. And I still want to build an engine to maintain it. Time is fleeting, however.

We went to visit my sister Tracy and her family yesterday. Zette will probably post pictures to Megan’s web site soon.

I think I’m getting sick. Which is why I’m awake at 0700 on a Sunday, and have been up for 3.5 hours.

17 Jan 2004 Many firsts today for Megan… first bus ride, first airplane ride, first time to leave Virginia (although not the first time outside Virginia, since she was born in the capital). First time meeting Aunt Mary Jane and Uncle Bill (actually great-aunt and great-uncle, to her).

18 Jan 2004 Took Megan to the beach. Saw dolphins and some terrific birds playing in the surf. Collected shark’s teeth. Saw Uncle Walter and Aunt Janet.

19 Jan 2004 Saw Uncle Walt’s house in Florida. Suzette christened Megan with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

A few pictures