Billix | Rails | Gumstix | Zenoss | Wiimote | BUG | Quantum GIS LINUX JOURNAL ™ REVIEWED: COOL PROJECTS Neuros OSD and Cradlepoint PHS300 Since 1994: The Original Magazine of the Linux Community AUGUST 2008 | ISSUE 172 WE’VE GOT Billix | Rails | Gumstix | Zenoss | Wiimote | BUG | Quantum GIS | MythTV BUGs AND OTHER COOL PROJECTS TOO E-Ink + Gumstix Perfect Match? AUGUST 2008 ISSUE 172 How To: 16 Terabytes in One Case Billix Kiss Install CDs Goodbye w w w. l i n u x j o u rn a l . c o m $5.99US $5.
CONTENTS FEATURES 48 THE BUG: A LINUX-BASED HARDWARE MASHUP With the BUG, you get a GPS, camera, motion detector and accelerometer all in one hand-sized unit, and it’s completely programmable. Mike Diehl 52 BILLIX: A SYSADMIN’S SWISS ARMY KNIFE Build a toolbox in your pocket by installing Billix on that spare USB key. Bill Childers 56 FUN WITH E-INK, X AND GUMSTIX Find out how to make standard X11 apps run on an E-Ink display using a Gumstix embedded device. Jaya Kumar 62 ONE BOX.
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CONTENTS COLUMNS INDEPTH 8 68 SHAWN POWER’S CURRENT_ISSUE.TAR.GZ REUVEN M. LERNER’S AT THE FORGE Profiling Rails Applications 26 LINUX FOR THE LONG HAUL Checking in with the Greater Houlton Christian Academy’s switch to Linux. Linux: the Root of All Coolness 22 AUGUST 2008 Issue 172 Michael Surran 72 ZENOSS AND THE ART OF ENTERPRISE MONITORING MARCEL GAGNÉ’S COOKING WITH LINUX Stay on top of your network with an enterprise-class monitoring tool.
Executive Editor Associate Editor Senior Editor Art Director Products Editor Editor Emeritus Technical Editor Senior Columnist Chef Français Security Editor Jill Franklin jill@linuxjournal.com Shawn Powers shawn@linuxjournal.com Doc Searls doc@linuxjournal.com Garrick Antikajian garrick@linuxjournal.com James Gray newproducts@linuxjournal.com Don Marti dmarti@linuxjournal.com Michael Baxter mab@cruzio.com Reuven Lerner reuven@lerner.co.il Marcel Gagné mggagne@salmar.com Mick Bauer mick@visi.
Current_Issue.tar.gz Linux: the Root of All Coolness SHAWN POWERS I f you are a regular visitor to the LinuxJournal.com Web site, you might recognize me as the goofy video Gadget Guy, or possibly as the Web author with a penchant for controversy. While the latter is largely coincidental, the former is just the way I am (my wife can grudgingly attest to that). This month marks the first issue that I’m the Associate Editor of the print magazine as well.
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letters working hard on moving up the search engine ladder. -Mike Paradis Comments on the OLPC XO Dave Phillips is effusive in his praise of the OLPC XO [LJ, June 2008], and most of it is well deserved, indeed. But it must be conceded that the keyboard is a piece of absolute trash. After just a few hours of use, mine developed keys that stick or fail to actuate or actuate with Alt applied unpredictably. This got worse until it was completely unusable.
[ LETTERS ] Keep up the good work. Hopefully I will send some converts your way soon! -Dean Anderson Sony I’m happy to see the coverage of Sony’s use of Linux in the June 2008 issue. There is actually an even bigger list of Sony products running Linux at www.sony.net/Products/Linux. Myself, I was surprised to find my new digital camera on that list. Now if only we could turn this into some sort of quality label instead of a hidden feature. (Disclaimer: I am a UNIX sysadmin working for Sony.
UPFRONT NEWS + FUN Having to reboot production systems to incorporate WHAT’S NEW security patches is a pain. How much IN KERNEL DEVELOPMENT better would it be simply to graft the patch onto an already running kernel, and let it keep running? This is exactly what Jeff Arnold has been working on. He calls it KSplice, and at least for the moment, it supports any kernel that can load a module. The kernel itself doesn’t have to support the feature explicitly.
[ LJ Index, August 2008 1. Number of new toys the average child gets per year: 70 2. Size of the “baby industry”, in trillions of dollars: 1.7 3. Number of computers donated to the World Computer Exchange: 26,695 4. Schools, orphanages and libraries served by the World Computer Exchange: 2,543 5. Youth connected per year by the World Computer Exchange: 1,079,110 6. Number of languages other than English among contributors to DistroWatch: 42 7.
[ UPFRONT ] One Tale of Two Scientific Distros A few weeks ago, I was flying west past Chicago, watching the ground slide by below, when I spotted the signature figure eight of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, better known as Fermilab. I shot some pictures, which I put up at the Linux Journal Flickr site (www.flickr.com/ groups/linuxjournal/pool, which runs on Linux too). I figured Fermilab naturally would use Linux, and found that Fermilab has its own distro: Fermi Linux.
[ want to get into legal trouble, please convince me that this is legal.” The A says: What we are doing is getting the source rpm of each Red Hat Enterprise package from a publicly available area. Each of these packages, except for a few, have the GPL license. This license states that we can freely distribute that package. We are recompiling those packages without any change. Hence, we can freely distribute those rpms that were built....
[ UPFRONT ] They Said It I predict an odd period in history, where famous quotes from techies will all be 140 characters or less. —Keith Hopper, twitter.com/khopper/statuses/ 801585685 Here’s to “Now” for as long as it lasts. —Shelora Fitzgerald, quoted in an e-mail to Doc Searls Productivity is up 99% because nothing is failing.
Customizable system solutions since 1989 Tel: 1-800-875-8590 What They’re Using Fax: 408-736-4151 1U Supermicro 6015B-TV Geoffrey Goodell Geoff Goodell has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard and is currently researching Internet surveillance and network neutrality.
COLUMNS AT THE FORGE Profiling Rails Applications REUVEN M. LERNER Wondering if your Rails application is running at peak efficiency? Before optimizing, profile your application to see which parts are slow. I am writing this article in mid-May 2008, several weeks after Twitter was rumored to be moving to a platform other than Ruby on Rails.
on your system; on mine, it was put into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gem. Next, you need to add the following to one or more of your environment configuration files (either environment.rb or one or more files in environments/*.rb) for your Rails system: require 'syslog_logger' RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER = SyslogLogger.new This, of course, loads the syslog_logger gem and sets the default logger to a new instance of SyslogLogger.
COLUMNS AT THE FORGE If you prefer to have the results sent to you via e-mail, rather than stored to a disk file, use the -e option: pl_analyze /var/log/production_log -e ¯reuven@lerner.co.il This option is particularly useful when you invoke pl_analyze from a cron job, for example. The output file from pl_analyze is divided into three parts: Once that is installed, you need to create a simple integration test script.
This means there were 608,720 calls to Buffer#read during the test, which took a total of 38.13 seconds, or 13.75% of the execution time. Because this is a built-in method, you can’t optimize it. However, you can try to reduce the number of times it is called, so that it will take even less time.
COLUMNS COOKING WITH LINUX Cool as Ice! MARCEL GAGNÉ No one will argue that there are different levels of cool. But nothing, and I mean nothing, says cool like a penguin. And some snow. And some ice. Oh, and the Antarctic. That’s as cool as it gets. Mon Dieu, François! I realize it’s a warm day outside, but it is positively freezing in here. Our guests will need coats, in August, no less.
Figure 2. If the game seems too easy, you can increase the difficulty. Figure 3. Snowball is a combination jump-and-run and puzzle-solving game. right of the screen, and a pop-up menu appears (Figure 2). Not only can you change the difficulty here, but you also can turn sound effects on or off, check high scores and run the game in full-screen mode. KBounce A similar game called KBounce exists as part of the KDE games package, minus the cute penguins bouncing around.
COLUMNS COOKING WITH LINUX Figure 5. Pingus is the coolest Lemmings clone, ever! ately. The story of the Pingus (of which I’ve given you a short version) and why these poor penguins are on their perilous quest, is shown automatically only when you first play. If you want to reacquaint yourself with the tale, click the Show story check box at the top left.
Figure 8. Hundreds of additional levels, including the Hellmouth, await you, if you dare to explore. interesting directories are there, including one for your Halloween adventures. Perhaps the most interesting ones are the wip (work in progress) directory and the playable directory. Do an ls in either of those directories, and you’ll find a couple hundred other levels—not all of them playable, granted, but still fun to try.
COLUMNS WORK THE SHELL Movie Trivia and Fun with Random Numbers DAVE TAYLOR Use the shell to manipulate a list of movies from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
So, the line ends up as follows: newvalue=$(expr $1 - $delta ) fi sed -n ${pickline}p That does the trick, and in an application like this, sed is lightning fast too. At this point, we have a data file of This script can be tested easily by dropping it into a simple script, which I’ll call random-years.sh. The result of applying this to the starting year 2000 is Just like with the SAT and GMAT, it’s important to avoid any possible patterns in answers.
COLUMNS HACK AND / Wiimote Control KYLE RANKIN Why let your Wii have all the fun? Find out how to connect your Wiimote to your computer and use it as a mouse or an input device for any number of popular gaming emulators. If you think about it, there are almost as many Install wminput ways to interface with your computer as there are Debian-based distributions—and that’s a lot.
Wiimote down or up, the mouse will move down or up, respectively, and if you roll the Wiimote to the left or right, the mouse will move left or right, respectively. If you look at /etc/cwiid/wminput/buttons, you can see the default mappings: mappings to work with either nestra or fceu NES emulators. Both programs use slightly different mappings, so I created files called buttons-fceu and buttons-nestra and placed them in ~/.cwiid/wminput. First, buttons-nestra: Wiimote.A Wiimote.B Wiimote.Up Wiimote.
COLUMNS HACK AND / keys to the Nunchuck and Classic Controller attachments, so all I had to do for it to work with snes9x was create a new configuration file that mapped all the keys. Here is my buttons-snes9x file: Wiimote.A Wiimote.B Wiimote.Up Wiimote.Down Wiimote.Left Wiimote.Right Wiimote.Minus Wiimote.Plus Wiimote.Home Wiimote.1 Wiimote.2 = = = = = = = KEY_X = KEY_S = KEY_LEFT KEY_RIGHT KEY_DOWN KEY_UP KEY_TAB KEY_ENTER KEY_ESC = KEY_C = KEY_D Nunchuk.C Nunchuk.Z Classic.Up Classic.Down Classic.
WHY LPI CERTIFICATION? RELEVANCE • #1 Linux certification worldwide and growing • Program framework created from industry needs and input • Professional “Job Task Analysis” www.lpi.
NEW PRODUCTS Linux Game Publishing and Ascaron Entertainment’s Sacred Gold Our team is truly tickled at how many high-end Linux-based games are now at our disposal. One of the latest is Ascaron Entertainment’s Sacred Gold, which includes Sacred and its expansion, Sacred: Underworld. Linux Game Publishing is responsible for the Linux port. The companies plug Sacred as an action-filled role-playing game that “combines an exciting story line with great gameplay”.
NEW PRODUCTS Syuzi Pakhchyan’s Fashioning Technology (O’Reilly) Geeks, start your...sewing machines! Such is the wish of Syuzi Pakhchyan, author of the new O’Reilly book Fashioning Technology that explores the integration of traditional sewing and assembly techniques with electronics and other new materials. The book is a guide to inventing creative clothing, housewares and toys that are fun, interactive, quirky and useful.
NEW PROJECTS Fresh from the Labs Hilbert II base could be built. Any proof of a theorem in this “mathematical web” could be drilled down to the very elementary rules and axioms. Think of an incredible number of mathematical textbooks with hyperlinks, and each of its proofs could be verified by Hilbert II. For each theorem, the dependency of other theorems, definitions and axioms could be easily derived. (www.qedeq.org) Here’s one for the mind-bending category.
some sort of decent gaming distraction? Well, you have a lot of options, such as adventure text games and moon-buggy, but my favorite discovery is vitetris, a Tetris clone with full color and many options. According to the vitetris Web site: vitetris is a terminal-based Tetris clone by Victor Nilsson. Gameplay is much like the early Tetris games by Nintendo.
NEW PROJECTS Projects at a Glance joyevmouse (welz.org.za/projects/joyevmouse) I realise this crayon drawing itself doesn’t show off Tetuhi’s capabilities, but imagine that the hills and trees are pulsating in front of you and you are driving the sun....No, I’m not on mushrooms! Library. Once you’ve installed those, head to the Tetuhi Web site and grab either the latest tarball or the latest code from the GIT repository.
REVIEWS hardware Hot and Bothered at Starbucks Reviewing the Cradlepoint PHS300 double-thick checkbook. It has three indicator lights: one tracks battery status, one lights up when a Wi-Fi cloud is established, and the final one indicates connectivity with the phone and/or EVDO modem when plugged in to the single USB port. DAN SAWYER Setting It Up Cruising for hotspots on a Linux Inside the Box Laptop can be a royal pain.
REVIEWS marketplace. The other minor quibble has to do with the battery light—namely, there isn’t one. In fact, there’s no way to know how much battery life you have left until the power light flashes red, which loosely translates to “this router will commit suicide in two minutes unless you plug it in to something from which it can draw power”. Still, in the grand segment for diagnostic techs on a wired network.
REVIEWS hardware The Neuros OSD Connects Your TV to the Internet Play digital video, view photos and listen to audio from memory cards or hard disks, or browse YouTube and record TV shows in MP4 with this small Linux-based box. Oh, and you can hack it too—it’s open source. MARCO FIORETTI The Neuros OSD is a very small and energy-efficient box that can play digital video, photos and music from several sources, including the Internet, on any TV or home theater system.
Firmware Upgrade Because the first thing you see when you open the box is a big, red sheet of paper saying, “Please upgrade firmware immediately”, that’s what I did. The procedure is simple, requiring just a bit of attention. Depending on how old the firmware loaded in your own OSD is with respect to the latest upgrade, some steps I cover here may be different, and some upgrading methods may not apply. Figure 5. Waiting While the Firmware Upgrades, 1980s Style Figure 3.
REVIEWS Once everything was up and running, I finally started using the OSD. I’ve played MP3 files, recorded and played TV shows and YouTube clips and browsed digital pictures. After testing, I can say that the OSD works as advertised. Some parts of the user interface could be more efficient, but all in all, it is simple to use. A French language pack is already available, and Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch and Portuguese should follow soon.
Conclusion Figure 7. Browsing NFS Partitions from the TV Screen this limitation and interact with the OSD over LAN. For more information, check out the Neuros Developer Web site (see Resources). OSD in the Family and on the Road Besides the main scenarios listed in the Neuros ads, I plan mostly to use the OSD in three other ways that are more interesting to me.
The BUG: a Linux-Based Hardware Mashup It runs Linux, has a GPS, camera, motion detector and color touchscreen—and it’s completely hackable! Mike Diehl T inker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Legos—I think I had just about every building toy there was when I was a child. Now that I’m all grown up, I still like to play with toys, and I still like to build things and connect them together. Only now, my toys are much more sophisticated, and some of them are even practical.
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FEATURE The BUG connected to my network wasn’t hard at all. The device’s base unit doesn’t have Ethernet or Wi-Fi capability; it connects to the network via USB. This meant that I had to upgrade the kernel on my workstation to enable USB networking, which presents itself as usb0 and acts just like any other network device. Note that, like most USB devices, the usb0 device won’t be available until the BUG is connected and has finished booting up. Once the BUG is booted, it runs the TWM window manager.
site. They tend to be well written and serve as good example programs from which to learn. There is sample code available on the Bug Labs Web site to exercise each of the available modules as well as the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) that comes with the BUG. Bug Labs has a remarkable outlook when it comes to the openness of its products. To borrow a term from the CEO, Bug Labs embraces “Radical Openness”.
Billix A SYSADMIN’S SWISS ARMY KNIFE Turn that spare USB stick into a sysadmin’s dream with Billix. BILL CHILDERS Does anyone remember Linuxcare? Founded in 1998, Linuxcare was a company that provided support services for Linux users in corporate environments. I remember seeing Linuxcare at the first ever LinuxWorld conference in San Jose, and the thing I took away from that LinuxWorld was the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card (BBC).
After reading through the DSL Web site, I discovered that it was possible to run DSL off of a bootable USB key, and that old love for the Bootable Business Card was rekindled in a new way. It wasn’t until I had a conversation with fellow sysadmin Kyle Rankin about the PXE boot environment he’d implemented, that I realized it might be possible to set up a USB key to do more than merely boot a recovery environment. Before long, I had added the CentOS and Ubuntu netinstalls to my little USB key.
FEATURE Billix or you run the risk of messing up the MBR on your system’s boot device. The -p1 option tells install-mbr to set the first partition as active (that’s the one that will contain the bootsector). Next, the bootsector needs to be installed within the first partition. Run syslinux -s (where is the Figure 1.
mount a corrupted Windows filesystem, and I was able to save some of the data. DSL is fairly full-featured for its size, and it comes with two window managers (JWM or Fluxbox). It can be configured to save its data back to the USB disk in a persistent fashion, so you always can be sure you have your critical files with you and that it’s easily accessible. All the Linux distribution installations have one thing in common: they are all network-based installs.
Fun with E-Ink, X and Gumstix How to get X running on a Gumstix embedded device with an E-Ink display and run all your favorite X11 applications. Jaya Kumar I ’m excited by E-paper and the promise it holds. You’ve probably already heard about E-Ink’s E-Paper Display (EPD) and seen it in recent E-book reader products. The E-Ink display media needs no power to hold an image, and it reflects light just like real paper.
Figure 1. Firefox Displaying Linux Journal on an E-Ink Display E-paper devices have been on the market since around 2006 or so. The good news is that Linux has become the de facto standard operating system for almost all of these devices. The two major products, Amazon Kindle and Sony PRS series, both utilize embedded Linux to achieve their functionality. Those products are great, but it also is fun to build your own device and use your own applications.
FEATURE Fun with E-Ink, X and Gumstix The new software building block that we’ll add to this system is something called deferred IO. Deferred IO is a recently added hack in the Linux kernel that allows nonmemorymappable devices to pretend to be memory-mappable. It also allows us to hide the latency associated with the E-Ink display. This hack is what makes it possible to run X with various E-Ink controllers on Linux.
# git pull git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ ¯kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git # cd linux-2.6 # cp arch/arm/configs/am200epdkit_defconfig .config # make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux- ARCH=arm oldconfig # make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux- ARCH=arm menuconfig Then, select Device Drivers→Graphics support→Support for framebuffer devices, and make sure to turn on the module option for AM200 E-Ink EPD devkit support.
FEATURE Fun with E-Ink, X and Gumstix Figure 4. Xfbdev Running on Gumstix E-Ink Figure 5. Ubuntu Desktop VNC-Viewed on a Gumstix E-Ink your Gumstix’s root filesystem. At this point, Xfbdev finally is on the system. We’re almost at the finish line. On your Gumstix console, load the drivers we copied earlier: The Future # cd /mnt/mmc # insmod drivers/video/syscopyarea.ko && ¯insmod drivers/video/sysfillrect.ko && ¯insmod drivers/video/sysimgblt.ko && ¯insmod drivers/video/fb_sys_fops.
One Box. SIXTEEN TRILLION BYTES. Build your own 16-Terabyte file server with hardware RAID. Eric Pearce 62 | august 2008 w w w. l i n u x j o u r n a l . c o m I recently had the need for a lot of disk space, and I decided to build a 16TB server on my own from off-the-shelf parts. This turned out to be a rewarding project, as it involved many interesting topics, including hardware RAID, XFS, SATA and system management issues involved with large filesystems.
Project Goals I wanted to consolidate several Linux file servers that I use for disk-to-disk backups. These were all in the 3–4TB range and were constantly running out of space, requiring me either to adjust which systems were being backed up to which server or to reduce the number of previous backups that I could keep on hand. My overall goal for this project was to create a system with a large amount of cheap, fast and reliable disk space.
FEATURE One Box. Sixteen Trillion Bytes. Table 1. Parts List QUANTITY DESCRIPTION SOURCE PRICE PER UNIT TOTAL PRICE 1 Intel Xeon 5110 Woodcrest 1.
cable was labeled with the first port at 0 (and ending at 3), and the other three had the first port at 1 (and ending at 4), while the backplane ports were numbered starting at 0 (and ending at 15), with the lowest numbered port at the bottom left (as viewed from the front). This seems to be a chassisspecific scheme, as other Supermicro chassis models number the ports from the top left down. SATA ports are numbered starting at 0 within the 3ware administrative interfaces.
FEATURE One Box. Sixteen Trillion Bytes. experience involves Red Hat’s Linux Enterprise distribution, but I had trouble finding information on adding XFS support. I specifically wanted to avoid anything difficult or complicated to reproduce. CentOS seemed like the best OS choice, as it leveraged my Red Hat experience and had a trivial process for adding XFS support. For the project system, I installed the OS using Kickstart.
4) RAID card settings: Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is supposed to offer better performance by letting the drive electronics reorder commands for optimized disk access. I have found that NCQ is not always enabled by default on the 3ware controllers.
INDEPTH Linux for the Long Haul Linux proves its worth more and more as you use it. Five years ago, I made one of the greatest life-changing decisions in my career—I switched my organization to the GNU/Linux operating system and supporting applications.
INDEPTH Speed Gives Life Now, pay close attention, not only has Linux dramatically increased in usability and features during the last five years, but on the same hardware, it also has increased in speed. In other words, an upgrade really feels like an upgrade! In retrospect, try this with Windows. Our current base of computer hardware, which was modern in 2002, would not even run Vista, let alone run it faster than XP.
INDEPTH Figure 3. Stellarium is an example of the quality programs available in open source. The Real Customers Now, let’s talk about the users of our Linux desktops. I’m a teacher as well, so I have to use Linux in the same way our teachers and students use it. That said, I’m a geek, and sometimes we geeks need to see the world through the eyes of a typical user. Personally, I love using Linux! I’m using it right now to type this article, and never do I think, “Oh, how I miss Microsoft Word.
Figure 4. When I couldn’t find an open-source program that met our needs, I wrote my own. to those who do. Something I find as irritating as the giant Maine mosquito is the use of proprietary protocols, standards and codecs that exclude Linux users from certain parts of the Internet. The Internet was built on open protocols, and it probably wouldn’t exist in any meaningful way today if it had been locked up with proprietary standards owned by individual companies.
INDEPTH Zenoss and the Art of Network Monitoring If a server goes down, do you want to hear it? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This the classic query designed to place your mind into the Zen-like state known as the silent mind. Whether or not you want to hear a tree fall, if you run a network, you probably want to hear a server when it goes down.
another, they must have matching community names/strings. In many deployments, administrators use the default community name of public (and/or private), which creates a security risk. I recommend changing these strings and making them into a short phrase. You can add numbers and characters to make the community name more complex to guess/crack, but I find phrases easier to remember. Click on the Devices link on the navigation menu on the left, so that /Devices is listed near the top of the page.
INDEPTH Figure 1. Adding a Device into Zenoss Figure 3. Performance data is collected almost immediately after discovery. Figure 2. The Zenoss Dashboard Figure 4. Creating an Alert Rule list and selecting Manage→Change Class. If all has gone well, so far we have a functional SNMP monitoring system that is able to monitor heartbeat/availability (Figure 2) and performance information (Figure 3) on our systems.
M Pl an Ca Yo ark W l u al l S Th Now end r tre is a et Fo to A rs. IT cus tte Co ed n d nf er en Roosevelt Hotel, New York, NY ce Madison Ave at East 45th St. next to Grand Central Station 2008 HIGH PERFORMANCE ON WALL STREET 5th Annual September 22, Monday High Performance Computing, Grid, Blade, Virtualization, Low Latency, Linux systems will all be there. The 2008 High Performance on Wall Street will return to the Roosevelt Hotel, New York by popular demand.
INDEPTH no schedule is specified (the default), the rule runs all the time. In our rule, only one user will be notified. You also can create groups of users from the Settings page, so that multiple people are alerted, or you could use a group e-mail address in your user properties. Lock from deletion. This protects the process from being overwritten if Zenoss remodels the server. Services in Zenoss are defined by active network ports instead of running dæmons.
INDEPTH type the letters. Select TCP as the protocol, and click OK. Click Save on the resulting page. As with the OSProcess procedure, return to the OS tab of the server and lock the new IPService. Zenoss is now monitoring HTTP availability on the server (Figure 7).
INDEPTH How to Fake a UFO Landing The magic of Voodoo. DAN SAWYER A flying saucer descends onto an open field and lands, kicking up dust all around it. If this happened in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still nobody would blink. But imagine that instead of a big beautiful image executed with the precision and care of a big-budget feature, what you’re watching looks like it fell on the cutting-room floor of The Blair Witch Project.
Advertiser Index 2-D motion tracking is the technology used in compositors to affix a new element to a specific point in the frame. A user generally will select one or two feature points, and the computer then will follow the points around the frame as the objects move within it. When the tracker slides off the selected point, the artist gently will correct it to keep the track from drifting.
INDEPTH data—camera settings and movement, as well as the “point cloud”—to various 3-D programs, and it is in the 3-D program where the magic happens. The 3-D program also gives an extra measure of control and refinement beyond what the tracker itself allows, as you can tweak the camera animation curves. I said earlier that the 1990s saw a lot of funding into creating software like this. Well, as every tech-junkie knows, where thy research funding is, there thy grad students also will be.
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INDEPTH particularly the motion path of the different points. If you can’t see any drift, you’re golden—you can skip ahead to the export step. If the track is lacking, there are a number of ways to tweak it. You can refine by adjusting the tracking algorithms in the View→Controls menu, and rerun the track, selecting refine instead of discard in the dialog that presents itself to augment the track you’ve already created.
OCTOBER 27-30, 2008 | HYNES CONVENTION CENTER | BOSTON, MA Over 175 classes and tutorials Plus: TOPICS INCLUDE: :: Languages & Implementation :: Expo :: Advanced Algorithms :: People, Projects & Teams :: Case Studies :: Agile Processes & Methods :: Requirements & Analysis :: Birds-of-a-Feathers :: C++ :: Testing & Quality :: Roundtables :: Design & Architecture :: Web Services/SOA :: Parties :: Special Events And Much More! Register today at www.sdbestpractices.
INDEPTH Quantum GIS: the Open-Source Geographic Information System Exploring Quantum GIS (QGIS) using an example of real-estate planning. If you’ve ever zoomed around the globe with Google Earth, you know how much fun it can be to work with geospatial data. When I need a diversion, I often fire up Google Earth and float above the skyscrapers of Manhattan or revisit former stomping grounds.
is add the requisite repository to your favorite package manager. If you must install from source, there are plenty of on-line guides explaining the process. See Figure 1 for a look at QGIS’s GUI. GIS is a complex application requiring knowledge about data formats, how a GIS functions and general cartography. Let’s rip through a quick, need-to-know primer on GIS. A GIS Needs Geospatial Data As mentioned previously, using a GIS is essentially mapping on a computer.
INDEPTH Vector-Based Data Formats in GIS As you splash around in the world of GIS, you also will encounter a plethora of vector-based spatial file formats. If you have ever used the application ArcGIS from ESRI, you probably are familiar with geodatabases and coverages, two of the most common spatial file formats in proprietary GIS. Of these two more-advanced spatial data formats, only coverages are usable in QGIS, but not geodatabases.
(the name says it all) and Washtenaw_nlcd_1992.shp (land use). Making Things Look Right Unfortunately, upon loading the shapefiles, the sum total map that’s displayed on the right in the Map View window looks like a big rectangle covered with random black and green blobs and no lines. Where are the roads, lakes and rivers I loaded? One reason for the odd display and missing elements is that the layers I added first are buried under the county-wide land-use layer, which sits on top of everything else.
INDEPTH Figure 3. After modifying the properties of each layer and changing the layer names in the Legend, the Map View is readable and ready for analysis. Map View more useful, such as making the colors of the other layers more intuitive (for example, blue lakes) and thickening the lines designating the roads and rivers. I can carry these out also with the Layer Properties dialog (right-click on layer name→Properties).
graphic data, satellite and aerial-photo imagery, other natural and man-made features and more. Although cramming on GIS concepts and conventions was required, working with QGIS and other GIS applications, although a bit challenging at first, is extremely useful, rewarding and fun.I James Gray is Linux Journal Products Editor and a graduate student in environmental science and management at Michigan State University.
INDEPTH Build a MythTV Box without Breaking the Bank How to turn your old PC from a dust magnet into a state-of-the-art media center. P. SURDAS MOHIT At my wedding, I received an important piece of advice from a couple whose wedding we had attended a couple years earlier: get a second TV. The idea is that while she’s watching America’s Next Top Model, I can watch hockey or mud wrestling or something.
doing this unless you’re familiar with XFS. I’ve had some issues with it—for example, it tends to become unmounted pretty frequently, requiring me to remount it, which is pretty annoying when you’re trying to watch TV. The ext3 filesystem works just fine, but you should enable slow delete in the back-end settings (under General). The next issue is connecting your MythTV box to the TV. If you have a new TV (particularly an LCD TV), you may have a VGA port in the back.
INDEPTH indicate where you want to store recordings. The latest version of MythTV allows you to specify multiple directories, which can be useful if you have multiple hard drives (and do not use a logical volume manager). Figure 4. My IR Blaster Setup Figure 3. The Tuner Card Setup Screen Now you should be ready to start watching and recording TV.
consider upgrading if necessary. Another problem I experienced early on was that playing recordings or DVDs consumed such a large fraction of CPU time (70%–80%), that running other processes tended to cause the playback to become jerky. In particular, commercial flagging and database accesses at the beginning and end of recording a program produced annoying jerkiness. I resolved this problem entirely by replacing my ATI video card, which does not have a proprietary Linux driver, with an NVIDIA card.
EOF Mixing Up a Generative Mobile Feast Why chase the iPhone, when we can free the world with open mobile things? DOC SEARLS I’ve been writing, one way or another, for Linux Journal since 1996. Through that whole time, we’ve focused more aspirational attention on one receding goal than on any other: the desktop. Our progress has been asymptotic, on a curve that approaches but never arrives.
rackspace.
