iPod Video Research

Posted on October 18, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Off and on research during last week, tracking RSS feeds, getting latest news and gossip regarding release of, accessories for, and early test results of iPod video

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Met with Tina

Posted on October 18, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Met with Tina F. Escaja to discuss my most recent findings. As expected, she was thrilled and amazed, and exclaimed that I was a genius.

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Dspace Ddied, resurrected

Posted on October 17, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Still tracking down the Dspace/Tomcat problems.

Frank told me about the lsof command, which lists files opened by a process. trying that on badger gave no results. trying it on my Mac gave instant results. Hmmm…

I did a ps auxww | grep dsspace to see what was running, so I could get the right process name to feed to lsof. Found lots of dangling java processes, dating way back, plus some stuck cron jobs. tried to kill them, byt some wouldn’t die. Hmmm….

Then noticed that the latest active Dspace process was eating 99% of the CPU. Tried shutdown -r now. It shut down, but it didn’t restart. Frank had to go up and toggle the power.

After restart, needed to restart  services that apparently still don’t restart manually:

  • /etc/init.d/postgres start
  • /etc/init.d/tomcat start
  • /dspace/bin/start-handle-server

Odd — dspace continued to tell me that postgres wasn’t accepting connnections. Found postgres data in /var/lib/pgsql/data and /usr/local/pgsql/data, the latter being the real dspace data. Looks like an up2date in March created a new /etc/init.d/postgres , which I had to edit to reflect the old locations.

Finally, Dspace was back, and so far looks well-behaved.

Need to treat this server with kid gloves over the next couple of weeks until I see what is what. Meanwhile, Dspace 1.3.2 is out….

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Vermont Monitoring Cooperative Annual Meeting

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Attended the meeting, presented a poster, made some contacts

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Scan them barcodes

Posted on October 12, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Spent a fun day making my Mac speak barcodes.

This relates back to the Tina art project. I did a number of targeted searches onn the web and managed to find a low-cost software tool that scans barcodes using an iSight camera, name of  EvoBarcode.

So, I finished up an AppleScript that allows you to drop an ASCII text file on the applet icon and generate a foder full of barcode EPS files

I figured out how to make EvoBarcode work

I wrote another appplescript that would use mac text-to-speach to speakl the scanned barcodes

I recorded a bunch of sound files of me speaking the words

I modified the above applescript to play the files if the scanned word=filename. This uses another freebie application, playsoundfile 1.6.2

Getting together with Tina Tuesday to discuss results.

Need to see how well EvoBarCode does with color images

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Davis Construction cam

Posted on October 11, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Two meetings with Allen Josey to discuss forthcoming Davis Center construction web cam.

  • Met him along with Jerry Thorton and Randy Spooner and Ray Lavigne to discuss siting and network/power requirements
  • met him individually to figure out why his PC wouldn’t show existing UVM cameras (IE security settings were not allowing download/install of Active-X controls)

camera should be in by next week: need to get disk space, account on chipmunk from TSG

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Dspace Ddied another death

Posted on October 11, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Dspace died again. Same problem

This time, I tried a different fix: in the tomcat startup script, I added

    ulimit -n 4096

to set the number of allowed open filehandles way above the default of 1024

We’ll see what happens

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GLCP=>Dspace Conversion

Posted on October 10, 2005 by Wesley Wright

SLow going as i wade through the metadata in the dtaatbase and figure out where it goes in Dspace Dublin Core implimentation. Think I fiannly have it down now, so onto the coding I go, when I realizie that there is another major disconnect between current GLCP practices and Dspace implimentation.

You see, Glcp has one record for each image (although this gets muddied by the contents of the LONGDESC field). Related records are associated via the "LS #", with an attached suffix indicating which image in the series.

My original though was to map the data in the lowest sequence number within an LS number group to one item record in dspace, and then match each bitstream associated with that record to bitsstreams associated with teh item record.

But then all images in an item would have the same metadata, when clearly they should have different dates, resolutions, photgraphers and such

So afte rmuch consternation, I’ve decided that one Dspace item per picture is probably the best way to go, and associate related records using the relation.ispartofseries element.

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Art Lab Update

Posted on October 7, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Rebuilt local user directories; updated permisions on an Adobe folder to allow PhotoShop "Browse" to work; system updates applied to all 12 machines

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GLCP => Dspace

Posted on October 6, 2005 by Wesley Wright

Mapping Geology Landscape Change Program dtabase fields to Dublin Core metadata elements in anticipation of  insert a subset of GLCP records in Dspace. Not an easy roadmap, needed to consult many references and :best practices" This one especially helpful, as was this Dspace memo.

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