Get Evocam live feed to publish to iPhone

August 2nd, 2008

If you are using Evocam on OSX for a webcam, you can change the Built-in Web Server setting

Display stream using: Server Push

This allows the live web video feed to be accessed via Safari on an iPod Touch or iPhone. Using the Java Applet works just fine on desktop browsers, but due to the lack of iPhone Java support, you have to go this route. Very slick. We use Evocam with an old iSight camera to check in on the dog from time to time and it is great to be able to do this via the iPhone. Evocam is the best webcam product out there on the Mac (nothing even comes close) and very much worth the license charge. 

 

Old Natus Medical Evening Magazine TV Segment

June 24th, 2008




Going through some old, old, old hard drives, clearing out data, and erasing many zip disks, I found some old multimedia from my days at Natus Medical Inc. Just about everyone in the segment is long gone from Natus with a few exceptions. Enjoy!

Alternative Formats
EveningMagSeg-Natus.AVI

EvengingMagSeg-Natus.MP4

Changing your user name in Office 2008

June 22nd, 2008

Since this doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere and wherever it is posted, it seems incorrect or overkill to reinstall Office 2008 entirely. In my case, there was a typo that was just an annoyance that needed to be corrected. I could see though if the Office Suite was installed for a previous user / employee and was not set to a generic name, it could be annoying as well.

Many sites tell you to go and remove the

/Users//Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist

Which is great, unless you do not have it.

There are many hacks out there to help with Windows and Office on Windows registration information correction, but nothing out there for OS X and Office 2008 which is a hassle. I didn’t want to reinstall everything just to fix my typo, so after some investigation I found

/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

1. Copy/backup the OfficePID.plist file (in case you mess it up).

2. Quit out of all MS Office 2008 applications.

3. Open OfficePID.plist in Property List Editor (comes with XCode Development Tools)

4. Under the Property List Root/1000 is the entry for the user name. Fix it.

5. Save.

After that, open up Word and other Office 2008 applications and see the corrected name.

Galleon for Tivo on Ubuntu Hardy

June 16th, 2008

I had a lot of issues with getting a recent install of Galleon operational on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I was running Galleon off and on for years on OS X, but seemed like it was time to get it going on Ubuntu.

Not Easy.

It seems they really gear Galleon on the linux-side to be most workable with RedHat / Fedora flavors of linux. I had a multitude of issues getting it operational and if you are trying to get this going, I hope this helps.

1. Disable IPv6. I know, it is the future, but again, we have to disable it to get better performance and/or have something we need just work. In Ubuntu Hardy, you

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

Change:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6

to

alias net-pf-10 off ipv6

Then

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

or reboot the computer.

2. Download the galleon distribution. Unzip it somewhere, and vi the Makefile to comment out or delete the lines referring to ‘chkconfig’ in the install and uninstall parts. It is a RH deal not a Ubuntu deal.

3. Perform the

sudo make install

4. It should put everything in /usr/share/galleon . Go there and vi galleon in the bin directory and comment out the line towards the top referreing to /init.d/functions. Again, a reference to a RH deal.

5. Then, vi the run.sh script in the /usr/share/galleo/bin directory to get rid of the extra stuff and just go with

#!/bin/bash
#
# Run the Galleon server
#
/usr/share/galleon/bin/galleon console

After doing the above, things actually started to work for Galleon and Hardy Heron!

Good luck!

Get rid of the U3 Launchpad on Your Sandisk Cruzer

May 27th, 2008

I love the Sandisk USB flash memory sticks. They are the best. The fact that they are made retractable and without the need for a cap of any kind makes them the best. Unfortunately, they bundle/format them with the annoying U3 Launchpad application for Windows which I have no use for. So, the first thing I do is remove it. Initially, I was doing low-level formats on the device on OS X, then Linux, but nothing worked unless you get this.

http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1415

Download the Launchpad Removal Tool and run it in Windows to nuke the U3 garbage. It gets rid of the CD emulation stuff, and the separate partition and just makes it a nice USB memory stick.

Denyhosts is your friend to stop ssh login attempts

May 23rd, 2008

Denyhosts

If you have a few linux servers that for whatever reason you have to leave open to ssh into on the standard port 22, denyhosts is a great way to get rid of the annoying daily logwatch email logs showing some losers somewhere have been spending all day doing a denial of service trying to brute-force attack their way in to ssh. Better ways are just to not even let ssh be accessible to non-legit IPs as well as disable ssh logins except for a couple of valid users, but in the case of mobile devices, locations, etc. you just sometimes need to have the ability to ssh into servers anywhere and other services might be dependent on the default port number, so changing it to get it out of the range of the script-kiddie or russian mafia is just not an option. It is one thing to have secure passwords, keys, etc. but just the fact they continue to bang on your servers can really rack-up bandwidth and annoyance.

Denyhosts is written in python and works with your logs to (based on your settings) inhibit attempts once thresholds you configure are met on login attempts. Really cool.

http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net

I have tested on ubuntu and centos and works great. The default configs are basically ready for centos/fedora/redhat out of the rpm or from source.

Moving Ubuntu Linux from PATA drive to SATA drive

May 20th, 2008

 Sata drivePata drive

I had mergy.org running on a very old laptop on a small ide 2.5″ drive. It was slow, but it was working. It got very tedious to work on though when anything went wrong and the webserver was really starting to get slow so I finally bit decided to move to newer hardware. But, the problem was that the drives on anything modern are serial ATA.

Here is what I did

1. Installed the same flavor and version of linux  on the new server and hard drive mimicing the partitions numbering on the old server. You could just get away with partitioning the drive in step 3 using one of the many RIPLinux bundled utils or fdisk, gparted, etc.

2. Took the drive out of the old laptop and put it in a usb external case and connected to the new server.

3. Booted on a RIPLinux CD - but any live CD would do really.

4. Blew away all files on the various partitions on the new server/drive

5. copied the files and directories over from the old drive with cp -prv

6. Changed the grub config in /boot to point to /dev/sda1 as opposed to /dev/hda1

7. Checked /etc/fstab to make sure mount points are OK

8. Edited the boot grub menu to make sure that point to the root directory

And it worked!

Recovery is Possible linux —> http://ftp.leg.uct.ac.za/pub/linux/rip/

Nice GUI LDAP Browser Application –> LUMA

April 18th, 2008

luma_browse

I have recently been doing a lot with LDAP and really needed a nice, flexible LDAP browser tool to run on Ubuntu Hardy.

Luma is great.  Very configurable and easy to work with. Has a plug-in architecture and just really slick from what else is out there now.

Check it out @

http://luma.sourceforge.net

Get Airport Extreme and WPA on an old TiBook or PowerBook

February 18th, 2008

Dynex Wireless G Notebook card

We have an old TiBook 800 that was sitting around after I moved the network from WEP to WPA encryption. The Airport card built-in the old Titanium Powerbook did not support WPA or higher encryption. So, I went looking on the net and found a lot of old information on cards that would work with OSX but most of those PC cards were no longer available and all the posts across the net were pretty old.

So, I went down to Besy Buy and got a couple to try hoping I would find one with a Broadcom chipset. Good news is that I did find one and OSX sees it natively as Airport Extreme. The card is a Dynex Wireless G Notebook card. It was $60 or so. The TiBook is running Tiger and is a great laptop outside of the networking limitation because of the orginal Airport card. I plugged in the card to the PowerBook and went the network control panel and it recognized it as a new Airport connection. I rebooted and it took over as the Airport Card.

More information on it @ http://www.dynexproducts.com

It is a great solution to give the older PowerBook a new life.

Ubuntu Wifi Management With WICD

February 2nd, 2008

Ubuntu Logo

Wifi

After running Ubuntu for quite a while now, most of the system is great and extremely functional. The real mess is with the lack of wireless management tools to handle multiple wireless networks. That is, until I have been working with WICD. WICD is the best manager I have used at it is great at storing keys, etc. This is really a must have for a desktop/laptop WIFI user. Installing it requires you remove the built-in ‘Network Manager’ that Gnome/Ubuntu installs, but you want to - trust me. It also handles toggling wired ethernet as well.

You should check it out -> wicd.sourceforge.net

wicd screenshot