dz>0

I received a Canon Elura 100 mini-DV for Christmas. Very nice for the price! While I am able to transfer video from tape to my Apple G4 PB, I can not seem to get the camera to work as a webcam either for iChat, or for HackTV.

Answer: download QuickTime from Apple (7.1.3) and re-install. There seems to be a problem with the upgrade to 10.4.8 which causes the dreaded “Your camera is in use by another application.” error message.

I can see it on the FireWire Bus in System Profiler.

FireWire Bus:

  Maximum Speed:	Up to 800 Mb/sec

ELURA100:

  Manufacturer:	Canon
  Model:	0x2
  GUID:	0x85000113AA11
  Maximum Speed:	Up to 100 Mb/sec
  Connection Speed:	Unknown
  Sub-units:
ELURA100 Unit:
  Unit Software Version:	0x10001
  Unit Spec ID:	0xA02D

I should set up a blog page for Jim to see my program.

I realized recently that if I work until I am 65, then I will have at that point 50 years of professional software development to reflect on. I figured it would be good if I started writing down some of what the first half of that career looks like.

I’ve been using VNC to help my family members with computer problems. Since it works on all flavors of OS, I find it very pleasant. I use ChickenOftheVNC as a client.

Use RealVNC as the server.

Install the following
RealVNC for Windows

Need to open a port for https access.
Fix IPATABLES to allow port 443

[root]# /sbin/iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --destination-port 443 -j ACCEPT

Open access through other firewalls
Not shown for clarity.

Get Apache to listen to https.
This is the more interesting aspect, as I run virtual hosts, and that does not play well with https. I think I can do it if only one host needs https.

Good info here.
Ok, add the Listen 443 and I can connect to the server through port 443. I need to do a little more reading to get the certificate set up and usable.

I lost a Z key on a 12″ iBook G4 and need a replacement.

Tonight was the first class, and I very much enjoyed the lecture. Dr. Leonid Perlovsky is quite engaging, clearly enjoying and thinking about his topic while taking the measure of the audience and responding as his algorithms would - with emotional intelligence and dynamic modification.

A long description of the course is here.

The text is Neural Networks and Intellect: Using Model-Based Concepts

I’m trying to think up some project to play with the ideas presented.
A long loop back cognitive tape machine playing Pink Floyd comes to mind.

Some of my notes from the class-
Perlovsky considers culture to be strongly influenced by language. He specifically calls out the successes and problems of the US as being largely due to the English language.
At some point he wrote a paper on how the brain could use Quantum Mechanics in its operation, but it was not clear that he still considers this to be likely.
He considers evolvable ontologies to be a worthwhile current challenge.
Recommends Rhetoric for Alexander as good reading.

I’ve seen this claim before, that Eclipse is slow, but I had not experienced the issue quite so personally before. Most of my Eclipse development to date had been small components to other projects, or in one case a project that might have been about one thousand files. Now I am trying to turn a project that comprises some 40,000 files into an Eclipse project(s) and it is not going as I hoped. Subclipse takes tens of minutes in some operations, the Binary Search (CDT?) that gets started on Eclipse launch takes about 5 minutes. And for other reasons, the integrated gdb view does not seem to be working with the executable because of a time out during launch; though this could be a simple configuration problem. In any case, it looks like I’ll have to spend much more time breaking the project into small bits, which should be done anyway, I had just hoped to start building and debugging before I had to do house keeping.

I know that Subversion can handle the project size, and I know that make is suitable for the level of complexity involved in building everything, I just want to put it all in a nice integrated environment for those of us that would prefer not to use gdb from the command line, or who would like to use the refactoring tools in Eclipse rather than grep and sed!

I signed up for an IEEE short course because it sounded interesting, Bio-inspired and Cognitive Algorithms for Recognition, Data Mining, Tracking, Fusion, Prediction and Language Understanding.

Well see how much fun this turns out to be.

I had some trouble getting VNC to connect to my CentOS box. The firewall prevented the connection.

The fix is simple enough:
[root]#/sbin/iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --destination-port 5901 -j ACCEPT

Saving the fix so it remains on boot seems a little more challenging; naturally I am mixed between the command line and graphical. I would like to know why my VNC connection seems to hang sometimes.

[root@sv ~]# apropos vnc
Xvnc (1) - the X VNC server
vncconfig (1) - configure and control a VNC server
vncpasswd (1) - change a VNC password
vncserver (1) - start or stop a VNC server
x0vncserver (1) - VNC server which continuously polls an X display

Prefer vncserver to Xvnc

Seems like the desktop from my vnc server gets hosed after a few months. I assume it is gnome, but I would think I get a new gnome session with each login. vncserver -kill :1 did the trick.

vncserver :1 -name G5 -depth 16 -geometry 1400x1000