iNODE

The weekend’s begun so I guess I can write about something that’s not exactly related to work—how to get video onto one of the new 5th generation iPods. Mine arrived last week and while I don’t imagine I’ll watch very much video on that little 2.5″ screen, I have already found myself sitting in the car waiting for an evening’s soccer practice to end—and watching the one music video I’ve purchased (Weapon of Choice) helped pass the time.

So, I tried the Export to iPod feature built into QuickTime Pro to convert a bit of video I shot in Montreal last Christmas. Worked great…but you know, I was beginning to think it might be Christmas again before the encoder finished. Too slow for anyone with a pulse…

Thank goodness I found HandBrake.

Originally coded for BeOS, this program has now been ported to Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. It is a multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. And it is fast!!!

If you want to put a video on your ipod, it’s actually pretty simple:

1. Fire up HandBrake with either a DVD in your drive or a VIDEO_TS folder on your disk
2. Select the input (disc or video_ts file)
3. Set File format to MP4 file
4. Set Codec to MPEG-4 Video / AAC
5. Set Average bitrate (kbps) to 400
6. Set Audio to 44100 sample rate and Bitrate to 128 kbps
7. Click the “Picture” button and set the size to 320 x 240
8. Double check what you’re calling the output file (defaults to Movie.mp4)
9. Select 2-pass encoding (takes longer but yields better quality and no increase in file size)
10. Click the RIP button

Before you know it (something less than the wall time you’d spend watching the film—computer speed being a major factor) you end up with an iPod viewable movie that looks great.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

I’ve used ssh to connect to various unix machines here in the office for years, but only today did I implement a method that eliminates the need for my password. Unix/Security gurus will assume I’m an idiot for taking so long to figure this out, but that’s the problem with teaching yourself everything—sometimes you just don’t know a good place to start so it takes a little longer. On the chance that there’s another soul out there who hasn’t yet stumbled upon this technique, I offer today’s tip:

How to enable public/private key authentication for ssh login

I’ll describe how it’s done from my desktop (a G5 running OS X 10.4) but it’s almost the same for a Linux or Solaris box—can also be done from Windows to Unix but I won’t get into that here.

Goal:
When at the $ prompt on my local machine, I want to type ssh mutex {return} and automatically log into mutex.gmu.edu without having to enter a password.

How?
On your desktop machine, open a terminal window. You want to run the ssh-keygen command which may reside in a variety of locations.

Mac OS X  /usr/bin/ssh-keygen
SuSE 9 Linux  /usr/bin/ssh-keygen
Solaris 8   /usr/local/bin/ssh-keygen

If you’re having problems finding it, just type:

find / -name ssh-keygen {return}

Here’s what happens on Mac OS X (machine responses italicized). You just hit return at each prompt (don’t enter a password!).

/usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t rsa {return}
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/wallyg/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /Users/wallyg/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /Users/wallyg/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
one more line displays showing the key…which I’ve omitted…

Two files were created by this process and each was placed in the .ssh directory below your home directory (e.g., in my case on this Mac the files are placed in /users/wallyg/.ssh/).

id_rsa  your private key
id_rsa.pub  your public key

Leave the id_rsa file alone but you need to copy the id_rsa.pub file to the /home/YourUserName/.ssh directory on any host you wish to connect to when using the user/host combination that created the keys.

1. Using either sftp or some other secure method, move the id_rsa.pub file over to each host you want to connect to. It needs to go into the /home/yourusername/.ssh directory of any host you want to add to your ‘password-less’ login group. Yes, you’ll have to enter a password during this process but we’re getting close to the time when that’s a thing of the past.

2. Once you’ve put the file in the .ssh directory, you need to rename it. The id_rsa.pub file needs to be called authorized_keys2
One method is the mv command:

$mv id_rsa.pub authorized_keys2 {return}

here’s another:

$ cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys2 {return}

Now, just to be safe, change the permissions on this file so other users on the system can’t view or modify it:

$ chmod 600 authorized_keys2 {return}

That’s it. If you log out and then login in again, you’ll discover that you no longer get prompted for a password.

This technique will save you several hundred keystrokes per week (no big deal, really) but your password never again goes across the net (a much bigger deal). A spin off benefit for system administrators—cron scripts, ftp transfers, backups and other tasks where you might not be around to issue the login password are now able to be scripted across machines.

If this description doesn’t work for your particular setup, you’ll find much more information about ssh and how it can be configured at www.openssh.org

About three weeks ago I began doing a test install of the Internet Scout Portal Toolkit (in the coming months we need to begin building a research portal and this is one of the packages I’m evaluating). The toolkit has many nice features (even OAI metadata export) but some real gaps as well. The first “showstopper” I came upon was the inability to import an RSS feed on the portal’s home page (had to wonder how they got to release 1.3x without adding that). Of course, my work on OSCR (an open source e-reserves package I developed about five years ago), taught me that the direction that development takes in open source software is pretty much a function of what interests the people working on it. So I decided to make this RSS import capability my contribution to Scout project. But I’m just lazy enough to make sure that the work hasn’t already been done before I begin…

Sent this to the Scout listserv (but wasn’t sure that development was continuing on the project as the last release was just over a year ago (10/27/2004)).

I have just started setting up a Scout-based research portal…and see that it supports exporting RSS feeds.

My question is whether anyone has done work so you can import a feed on the “home page.” I’m a user of Feed2JS for other pages that display RSS feeds and assume something like that could be grafted into Scout but before I begin hacking this, I’d love to find that someone’s already done some/any of the work.

Within 24 hours I got this back from Ed Almasy, Co-Director of the Scout project:

Version 1.4.0, which will be released sometime in November, supports the import of RSS feeds onto the home page, all pages, and the Metadata Tool and Portal Administration home pages.

I’d also like to mention, for anyone customizing the UI on the AdvanceD Search, Search Results, or Saved Searches areas, that the underlying infrastructure for those sections has been completely revamped in 1.4.0. THE upside of this is that it provides some new capabilities and is much easier to customize, but the downside is that sites that already have custom versions of those pages will require some work to upgrade to 1.4.0. So if you’re tinkering with those sections you may want to hold off until 1.4.0 is available.

(We strive to avoid or at least minimize backward compatibility issues, but sometimes the benefits are significant enough to justify the cost.)

Ed

So, I get some free time back and see that the Scout project is still alive and kicking. I’m eagerly awaiting release 1.4 and will now spend a bit of time looking at Mambo. It employs the same underlying technology as Scout (PHP and MySQL) but the focus is very different. Mambo is a CMS/Portal framework, not an OAI-compliant front-end to a collection of research materials. Who knows, now that we’re in the tall head of Web 2.0, we might just mash the two together…

The other day we talked in our Senior Management Team meeting about trying to “proceduralize” the idea that staff who attend events like conferences, workshops or training sessions ought to have a way to report back to the rest of the staff—sharing what they learned, experienced or “took away” from the event.

We talked about a couple of options (e.g., brown bag events, presentations, etc.) and one we’ve decided to try is a “Trip Notes” weblog. I’m hoping it will prove to be a useful idea and think it’s probably just the right technology for this sort of task. Not everything a staff member attends is worthy of a group meeting and a newsletter with this sort of information is too static and (by the time it sees print) too dated to draw much interest. Setting up a website is overkill and despite all the hype surrounding wikis, I think that approach is better for constantly updated/modified content. For this particular need, I think a weblog hits the sweet spot:

- web-based (available from anywhere)
- can be set up to allow multiple posters so it pretty much runs itself
- it will allow posters to link to the event’s site when one exists
- over time it will offer a searchable archive of professional development activity
- it will give staff a bit of practice with weblog technology

Thanks to the design work that’s gone into making it a simple process, I had a new WordPress blog up and running in about 15 minutes. I seeded it with a short report on my attendance at Apple’s WWDC 2005 last June. Not really a very interesting report but I hope it will show prospective posters how you can link to things from within a “trip report” to enable the interested reader to dig a little deeper into the topic you’re reporting on.

Will report back in a few weeks on whether this proved to be a successful “intranet” experiment.

Yahoo! Research and O’Reilly have combined to launch another internet research game. You get $10,000 to invest and then buy “stocks” in terms you think people will be searching the web for. If your terms turn out to be popular searches, your investment in those terms goes up. It’s called a research project (instead of just a game based on buzzwords) because, we’ll as the game’s home page puts it:

* To see if search buzz (including spikes and trends) can indeed be predicted by the collective wisdom of crowds in a market
* To provide an index of “what’s next” for technology enthusiasts
* To separate the wheat from the chaff among the various technologies that O’Reilly is constantly watching and tracking; to measure which forces in the technology industry are truly disruptive and which are mere flashes in the pan
* To discover how Yahoo! Research’s dynamic pari-mutuel market mechanism behaves in the “wild”
* To investigate opportunities around predicting trends in search engine behavior, and how they relate to events in the real world
* Last but not least, to entertain and engage participants in the game

http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/index.html

Yesterday I learned about a new “service” that Google’s about to offer…Google Base. From what I’ve seen, it’s a free database in the sky (in the same way that Google mail is a free mailbox out there somewhere). Of course, if you’re given to a bit of paranoia, it could be seen as yet another Google honeypot. Here’s what a Google spokesperson had to say about it:

“We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free”

Back in 2002 Paul Ford wrote a piece called “How Google beat Amazon and EBay to the Semantic Web.” If you can spend a minute or two reading that article—and then think about what Google can do once it’s added the private databases of millions of people to its ever-growing knowledge base—you might join me in starting to worry about embracing Googlization..

Hard to believe we’ve been sweltering in this space for just over 10 years (office opened in 1995)…but today, when it’s about 45 degrees outside, a group appears to install a ceiling-mounted supplemental air-conditioning unit. That’s OK, we’re still glad to see them. Maybe now we can get our Sun StorEdge Array out of the summer things box and hook it back up—who cares about BTUs?