Billy Fire LLC

I have just posted a new article in the resources section of Billy Fire LLC that discusses the product lifecycle and its marketing implications.

Most of my browsing is done using Firefox. Apart from the obvious advantage that it is not a Microsoft product, I very much like the ability to easily add plugins. I also like the tabs (although, of course, Explorer 7 has tabs.)

One thing I really like about Explorer 7 though, is the way you can zoom in and out of Web sites. Press CTRL - and the site gets smaller (all to scale), press CTRL + and you zoom in. Do the same thing with Firefox and the text starts changing size, something that eventually screws up even the most beautifully designed site.

The main reason I like this capability is because it means I can include a greater vertical size of Web sites I am trying to capture for inclusion in written materials or as an image on a Web site. Perhaps there is a Firefox plugin that creates a similar behavior, but for now its easy to fire up Explorer.

I just bought the full version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I can confirm that, just like trial version mentioned previously, it seems to be able to use the AVCHD files from my Canon HG10 camcorder.

I purchased it from Amazon, opting for the CDs and box version, rather than the download, and it was considerably cheaper than going though Sony.

I decided to go for the CDs because on many occasions I have had computer troubles and have lost software that I had downloaded from the Web. For example, I had an excellent little ico editor which was useful for creating favicons. Unfortunately it was on another machine and is gone forever. I can’t remember its name, so if anyone knows of a good favicon.ico editor, please let me know.

One of the strongest features of Wordpress is that care that has been taken to make upgrading to a new version as easy as possible. I have never had anything but the most minor problems, compared to some CMS software that I tried that failed miserably and I had to abandon.

This time I used subversion to upgrade. I has already setup my installations to enable subversion upgrades, by following clear and simple instructions on the Wordpress site. So when it was time to upgrade it was very easy. Firstly I performed a backup (using a backup plugin). I then logged into my server using Putty, navigated to my Wordpress directory, ran one command, which ran seamlessly and then did the usual wp-admin/upgrade.php. Everything worked wonderfully.

I hope your upgrade is so smooth!

A client of mine has started a series of podcasts. Thus far I have recorded the podcasts using the Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone discussed in a previous blog posting. We had always planned that my client would ultimately be able to create his own podcasts and he asked me to get him a suitable microphone. Having read a few reviews I decided that the Blue Snowball microphone would be the best option.

At first I was surprised by the size of the microphone. It has a diameter of about 4 inches. The Blue Snowball was extremely easy to set up. I simply plugged it in and it was available for recording. It comes with a sturdy little desktop stand. The instructions suggest using a pop filter, which I have used in the recordings included below.

There are 3 settings on the back of the Snowball:

1. Activates cardoid capsule
2. Activates cardoid capsule with 10dB reduction
3. Activates omni capsule

Option 1 is best for making recording directly in front of the microphone. Option 2 reduces the input signal and option 3 is useful for recording sound more generally. The instruction manual that comes with the microphone also suggest different orientations of the microphone depending on the sort of sound you want to achieve, e.g. tilt the microphone slightly upwards for “more projection and head tone,” straight at the mouth for “maximum brightness and intelligibility” and towards the chest for “robust full lows and smoother highs.”

I thought it would be interesting to record something with each of the microphones I have tested to give an idea of the quality of each microphone as far as podcasting is concerned.

In each case I recorded a poem by Thomas Hardy using Audacity to capture the sound. Capture settings were 44,100Hz at 16bit. Having made a recording I exported the MP3 at a bit rate setting of 64.

Recording made using the Blue Snowball

Recording of Blue Snowball microphone

Recording made using Samson CO1U

Recording made using Logitech USB headset

Recording made using Beyer M58 microphone (the microphone was connected to Presonus TubePre. The Beyer M58 is a professional microphone used by newscasters. It is characterized by its length which is useful for adding TV station logos)

Recording made using Beyer M58 connected to Canon HG10 HD camcorder

The poem is:

In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half-asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

I recently took another look at the current state of play for AVCHD video editors. Things are definitely improving. I downloaded a trial of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I have been VERY pleasantly surprised.

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition is from the Sony stable of editing software and falls between their entry level Vegas Movie Studio and Sony Vegas. All of which are available for trial downloads. The Studio Platinum Edition trial lasts for 30 days.

The description on the Sony Web site says: “you can import and edit video in nearly any format including high-definition HDV and Sony AVCHD.” With this in mind I was not totally confident that the software would import my M2TS files from a Canon HG10 camera - but it did so flawlessly. I hope that this is not some sort of fluke that only works in the trial version - we shall see.

Having imported the clips I was nervous that the software might falter because of the massive size of the project but it worked without a problem. Having completed a project, Studio Platinum offers a multitude of formats in which to save the completed video, including Quicktime (MOV), AVI, WMV, RM and Sony AVC. These can be saved a various frame rates and dimensions. It appears that if you do have an HD camera or a Sony AVC camera that you can record back to the camera.

My computer is not super powerful (Core Due 1.83MHz with 2 Gb of RAM) and rendering took some time, but worked very well.

I’ve been struggling for the last couple of days to get password-less ssh to work between two linux machines running Ubuntu 8.04 on my local network.

I went through the correct procedures, i.e. ssh-keygen -t rsa, copied the public key to authorized_keys and used scp to copy it over to the .ssh directory of the user account for my other machine. Each time I did this I tried to ssh to my other machine (ssh -vvv billyfire3) and each time it asked for a password - which was not what I expected to happen. I deinstalled and reinstalled SSH to not avail. I even did a fresh install of Ubuntu on one of the machines - but still had the same problem.

I did a search for the problem and discovered that I was not alone in having difficulty getting passwordless SSH to work. I finally found a post (I can’t remember where, unfortunately) that suggested looking at /var/log/auth.log. I attempted a password-less login (which asked for a password) and then looked at the auth.log on the machine (billyfire3) that I was trying to connect to.

Sure enough, the log included:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /nutch-0.9/home/.ssh

I looked at the .ssh directory and found that the owner of .ssh was set to root and not the name of my user (nutch). I corrected this by removing the .ssh directory and recreating it when logged in as the nutch user. I tried again. This time I received this message:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /nutch-0.9/home

I checked the /nutch-0.9/home directory on billyfire3 and noticed that permissions were set to 777. I changed them to 0700 and tried again. Success!

The log said:

Accepted publickey for nutch from 192.168.0.102 ……………

I have recently written an introductory article describing some of the options available for authenticating e-mail, including Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID and DomainKeys. I also include instructions on setting up DomainKeys on a cPanel based system where SSH access is available.

I mentioned previously that my Canon HG10 replaced a ZR, whose firewire port had ceased to function. I realized a few weeks ago that the ZR replaced another Canon, but not a video camera, a Super 8 film camera, the Canon 318M.

I’ve had this camera in my cupboard for over 25 years and I hadn’t though much about it. I was recently surprised to see that some wedding videographers were actually offering Super 8 footage as part of their wedding packages. The idea being that film has a special quality which is difficult to achieve with video. I also imagine that 8mm film conveys a nostalgic feeling to those of us who used to sit through silent family home movies.

I got the camera out and it is in great condition. The design looks very contemporary. I also realized that there was a film in my camera that was half used. I cannot remember the last time I used the camera exactly, but I suspect it was when I was about 18. A lot has changed since then.

I decided to use the other 25 feet as my (very large) children were enjoying their Easter Egg hunt. I bought some some new batteries, put them in the camera and it worked first time (after I remembered to switch it on).

I searched for where I could get the film developed. It seems that developing the Kodachrome is exceedingly rare and Dwayne’s Photo claim to be the only people that develop it. I sent them the cartridge (see below) and in a very short time it was returned.

I think I receognize my sister in the first few frames, but don;t have a projector and so the next stage is to have the film telecined.

MyMovieTransfer.com appear to have some top notch equipment and so I will be sending it there for transfer to DVD.

One the huge benefits of a hard drive video camera is the ability to find and playback any clip within a matter of seconds. On the Canon HG10, when you change the mode to play, up to six clips are displayed on the screen. You can easily navigate between the clips using the control to the left of the screena and play the clip by pressing the middle button (see the image below). It sure beats rewinding tape, stopping, playing, rewinding etc.