Space Station captures the lights of Belgium and Holland from 250 miles up

A night-time view of a western European panorama from the International Space Station reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands



 

iTunes MAC & iTunes PC not equal to iTunes iPad

So the wonderfull world of "comliant to this & that" on the spec sheet vs. reality set in again. Now this might be down to lack of product knowledge as well but so you learn.

From the little Apple experience I gained so far I could really say in a "pure" Apple eco-system everything works brilliant and as planned, but trying to add 3rd party or other service to this ecosystem seem to be problematic.

iTunes for PC & MAC have a feature for "Shared" resources



 

whereas iPad/iPhone itunes does not let you choose your itunes library. You always need to connect to your Mac/PC (remote) itunes and sync with your ipad.

So the feature called iTunes Server does not mean you can assume it can stream to all Apple type devices.

So in my instance where I enabled the iTunes server on a QNAP NAS the Workaround:

Use the QMobile application provided by QNAP to remotely play the music library on the iPad.

QNAP iTunes Server dying

Testing a few mp3's on the NAS to iTunes PC worked 100%, after transferring my complete collection the iTunes server kept on dying via the web interface. So it was back to the old trusted CLI via ssh and fault finding:

Firstly to check if the iTunes server process is running or not:

ps | grep mt-daapd

And to find the command options:

mt-daapd --help

To start the process manually:

mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f 

with

-d 9 setting the debug level to 9

-c to use a spesific configuration file

-f to run it in teh foreground allowing you to see the debug messages in real time.

running this will halt on the reason for the iTunes server to fail.

if the error is with .m3u files

this can be fixed by changing a line the qnaps /etc/mt-daapd.conf

turing: process_m3u 1 => process_m3u 0

In my instance a single mp3 file caused the process to stop, I corrected the mp3 id tag 

Restarted the service and everything worked like a charm

Open Source speech recognition - help needed

Most acoustic models used by 'Open Source' speech recognition (or Speech-to-Text) engines are 'Closed Source'.  They do not give you access to the speech audio and transcriptions (i.e. the speech corpus) used to create the acoustic model.

The reason for this is that Free and Open Source ('FOSS') projects are required to purchase large speech corpora with restrictive licensing.  Although there are a few instances of small FOSS speech corpora that could be used to create acoustic models, the vast majority of corpora (especially large corpora best suited to building good acoustic models) must be purchased under restrictive licenses.

How can you help ?

Record yourself reading some text, and upload your recordings to VoxForge using: http://www.voxforge.org/home/read

 

QNAP NAS

So I took the plunge and migrated from an pc based NAS device (OpenFiler)  to a QNAP NAS TS-412.

I am very impressed with the device build, really a solid design and after upgrading to the latest firmware it detected a 3TB Western Digital drive without any problems.

The device is extremely silent - to compare: the DVD player playing a DVD is making more noise than the NAS :-)

So I guess the next few blog postings will have something to do with services and applications on the NAS as and when I enable them.

Current firmware version: 3.5.2 Build 1126T

MySQL - How to append to select statements

UNION [ALL] is the magic command;

At least 2 select commands are needed for a union.

select a as name from t1;

union all

select b as name from t2;

this will have a query result from both table 1 and 2 as a single result set.

Install LAMP server on Ubuntu in a single command

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

Music Maps

So I have been on a rant to identify new bands and music to listen to within a spesific genre. This led to me search for ways of finding "related bands" of known bands to me.
Although services like youtube an last.fm can do this I wanted an interactive map and found the following:


http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/
http://www.music-map.com/
http://liveplasma.com/

Syslog-ng server on Ubuntu

Well once you know what to do it is actually easy to get it going, however there is a few things you need to know:

• Remote logging needs to be enabled on the server


• Firewall needs to accept traffic for syslogs


• on the client logs need to be forwarded to the syslog server


• a log filter need to be created on the client

So a typical / basic setup that forwards everything to the servers default log destinations e.g. /var/log/syslog will look as follows:

Server side:
Basic config change to get the server accepting remote logs:
uncomment:
         udp();
Client side:
The most basic setup to forward all logs to the syslog-ng server:

destination server { udp("192.168.0.1" port (514)); };

log {
        source(s_all);
        destination(server);
};

I am also sending logs from my Mikrotik device to the syslog-ng server as follows:

[user@Mikrotik] > /system logging action print
Flags: * - default
 #   NAME                      TARGET REMOTE                                  
 0 * memory                    memory
 1 * disk                      disk 
 2 * echo                      echo 
 3 * remote                    remote 192.168.0.1:514                           
[user@Mikrotik] >

[user@Mikrotik] > /system logging print       
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid
 #   TOPICS                          ACTION                          PREFIX   
 0   info                            memory                                   
 1   error                           memory                                   
 2   warning                         memory                                   
 3   critical                        echo                                     
 4   warning                         remote                          mikrotik

Happy logging.

To test if a port is open on linux

Well I wanted to test if a linux box is ready to receive syslog log files remotely and used netcat / ccat / nc for the purpose.

It is a server/client application whereby you run the server in listen mode and then start the client on a different host and connect to the server, it can create both tcp and udp connections.

I had some trouble with the syntax on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and hence will post the commands that worked for me:

Server:

user@server:~$ sudo nc -l -u 514

-l : is for listen
-u : is for udp

Client:

user@client:~$ nc 192.168.0.1 -u 514

where 192.168.0.1 is the ip of the server
If it connects you can then type anything in the client and it will display in the server window confirming the port is available and no firewall is blocking teh traffic, hence you can move to the application layer.