Stephan Paukner :: syslog

The usenet originally only consisted of text messages, but it soon became a way of exchanging binary files as well. As posts are usually restricted to only a few MB, larger archives have to be split up into several parts, each attached to its own newsgroup posting. But if some parts of these posts aren’t transferred correctly to other usenet hosts, the archive parts are broken.

Not necessarily if the poster created PAR2 archives in addition to the actual data archive parts. In a RAID-like manner, parity information is placed redundantly into the additional files. Thus, it is possible to recover the complete archive if some parts of it are incomplete.

As I downloaded some image archives (No, they were not p’rn) containing pictures in the PCD format that encapsulates six different resolutions of an image, I also had to find out how to explicitly extract the large (3072×2048) resolution out of it. All in all, I created the following (simple) script that

1. checks the PAR2 files, and if some of the data archive parts are incomplete, it
2. tries to recover them, and
3. if check (or recovery) were successful, the PCD images are extracted and converted to JPEG.

I did it this way:

Obwohl ich schon einmal hier laut darüber nachgedacht habe, wie ich meine (digitalen) Fotos organisieren soll, reagiere ich nun auf eine Blogparade zu diesem Thema, auch um mich selbst etwas mehr zur Fotografie anzuspornen.

1. Auf wie vielen Datenträgern speicherst Du Deine Fotos?
   Auf drei bis vieren: Eventuell parke ich sie nämlich schon unterwegs auf dem Datentank. Danach habe ich eine Drei-Zeiträume-Strategie: Solange Platz ist, sind die aktuelleren Fotos am Notebook, zur Bearbeitung und zum schnellen Zugriff. Dann werden alle Fotos gemeinsam mit weiteren persönlichen Daten auf einen Backup-PC synchronisiert, der aber wohl bald durch ein USB- oder FireWire-Festplattenarray ersetzt wird; dort sollen sich alle bisher gemachten Fotos befinden. Zuletzt landen die Fotos zur Katastrophenvorbeugung auf DVD-RAMs (nicht CDs und nicht DVD-R(W)s), da diese relativ lange physikalisch haltbar sind; diese werden außer Haus gelagert. Darüber hinaus werden die besten Bilder schlicht ausgearbeitet.
2. Wie regelmäßig machst du Backups?
   Neue Fotos werden sofort aufs Backupmedium synchronisiert. Monatlich kommen sie auf DVD-RAM. Sobald eine DVD-RAM voll ist, verlässt sie das Haus.
3. In welchem Format speicherst du deine Fotos?
   In dem, in dem sie aus der Kamera kommen, d.h. RAW oder JPEG. Bearbeitungen werden immer als separate JPEGs gespeichert; TIFFs habe ich bisher noch nicht benötigt. Nicht überzeugende Fotos werden sowieso gnadenlos gelöscht.
4. Welche Ordnerstrukturen oder Dateinamen verwendest Du?
   Bisher lege ich die Ordner einfach in der Form YYYY/MM/DD_Thema an, die Dateinamen bleiben die aus der Kamera. Ableitungen erhalten ein Suffix.
5. Wie indizierst Du Deine Fotos?
   Mit digiKam. Allerdings fühle ich in letzter Zeit keinen Bedarf dafür.
6. Welche Software setzt du ein?
   Ich bin sehr hart im Nehmen, setze nämlich zu 100% Linux-Software ein. digiKam verwende ich zum Taggen und Aussortieren, GIMP zur klassischen Bildbearbeitung, Bibble Pro zur RAW-Konvertierung, QtpfsGUI zum HDR-Berechnen, und schließlich das Triplett aus Hugin, Autopano-SIFT und Enblend zur Erstellung von Panoramabildern. Desweiteren besitze ich eine Noise Ninja-Lizenz. Unter den Linuxern gehöre ich also zu den Pragmatikern, die nicht ausschließlich freie Software benutzen. Das Backup selbst fahre ich mit rsync.

In short, and for non-computer-geeks: SSL certificates are used for data encryption, to securely transmit private data over the internet. You probably know web URLs starting with “https” instead of “http”. OK, now, those secure web sites may run on a machine that use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Unfortunately, Debian had a problem with generating such SSL certificates. They were recently uncovered to not secure your private data anymore. Luckily, a fix came out quickly, but there are still many websites using the broken certificates.

You want to be alarmed whenever you stumble over a website that still uses one of those bad SSL certificates! You want the SSL Blacklist add-on for your Firefox web browser!

Fotobuch-XXL.de is one of the few providers (if not the only one) that has a native Linux app to create and order photo books. It is annoying that most services only provide versions for Win or Mac, and even web apps are rare. Unfortunately, Fotobuch-XXL only provide their app for the Ubuntu and OpenSuse distributions. But, as Ubuntu is just a derivative of Debian, it should actually not be too complicated to also install the package on Debian. Indeed, it isn’t:

One just has to take care that the Python version in Debian ‘lenny’ is 2.5, and not 2.4, thus forcing you to choose the corresponding package source for Ubuntu Feisty (7.1) and upwards:

After updating your package list, you can already find fotobuchxxl-studio. However, it also depends on python-wxgtk2.8, which is only available in Debian’s own experimental section. After activating this source, you’re finally able to install fotobuchxxl-studio.

Note that I just tried whether the app actually launches, I neither really used it nor did I order a photo book. Yet.

Recently I wondered why Google Earth stopped working on my 64-bit Debian machine when I upgraded Google’s app to version 4.3. It claimed to find no internet connection (“Error code: 29”), although everything was working fine before. The web finally unveiled the solution: The app needs the lib32nss-mdns package. Installed that, problem resolved!

On April 1st, 2008, it’s 10 years that I’m a netizen. I already had an e-mail address a few months before, but it was April 1998 when I seriously started to use the internet. This gives me some motivation to round it all up a bit.

I took my first programming steps around 1986 on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It was a home computer similar to the later following Commodore 64: It had a black/silver keyboard with a slot for cartridges. It could be connected to an ordinary TV, and own software was saved on ordinary MCs by a special tape drive—It was quite funny to listen to the noisy sounds when playing the MCs on an ordinary player. We had two game cartridges: TI Invaders (screenshots) and Hunt The Wumpus (screenshots). The computer had a TI BASIC interpreter built in. The first program my stepdad taught me was:

I successfully stitched together my first panorama pictures on GNU/Linux. I used the GUI frontend hugin, which itself uses autopano-sift for automatic detection of mapping points. For the actual stitching process I used enblend, but not from within hugin, as there currently is no possibility to watch it progressing. This tutorial helped me doing my first steps, more tutorials are available on hugin’s website.

My first try was on a series of 3 pictures of a rainbow above Vienna, Austria:

Next, I created a panorama picture of a mountain view consisting of 8 pictures, which I took last october near Kitzbühel in Tyrol, Austria:

Installation of these tools was quite easy, as I use a distribution which includes such cutting-edge multimedia programs in its package tree: Gentoo Linux.