Henry's Notes

I had to do some searching through my webserver logs today, trying to track down what got a woman all fired up and upset about me. It was something she saw on the website. But while I was looking through the Apache logs, I started noticing stuff. I saw a lot of different search engines crawling through my sites.

That reminded me of a question that's been nagging at me for a while How much traffic on my website is real people and how much is search engines?

That's a good question, and it deserves an answer. I had a big wad of Apache logs so I wrote some Perl and started looking. I was pretty surprised. For a start, there are a lot of search engines gathering data. Here's my list of keywords:

almaden babaloo baiduspider becomebot bot@bot converacrawler deepnet
eapollo emeraldshield envolk exabot factbot findlinks focused_crawler
furlbot geniebot gigabot girafabot google hl_ftien iaskspider ichiro
jeeves lbot linksmanager minibot mj12bot mnogosearch msiecrawler msnbot
nextgensearchbot nicebot noxtrumbot nutch obot "php version tracker"
plantynet psbot qihoobot scspider sensis seznambot skizzle snapbot sogou
"speedy spider" spider sproose steeler sumeetbot surveybot turnitinbot
voilabot webaltbot yahoo zyborg

56 spiders, crawlers, search engines, are crawling through my websites on a regular basis. Some visit very occasionally, some only once, and some are heavy visitors - Google, Yahoo and MSN. And look at the names - it reads like a list of Bender's robot friends from Futurama.

The little ones with only one or two entries are looking for very specific files and they are probing for things. And they aren't finding them. I've got more analysis ahead of me to find out what all the little visitors are looking for. And then I can take steps to make sure I don't have stuff lying around that I shouldn't have.

But at this stage of my investigation, I am pleased to report that I do have real viewers of my websites. 75% of the traffic is real viewers, and 25% is search engines. I was worried that 90% was search engines, but that fear was unfounded.

But still - 25% of the visits are from spiders and crawlers. Think of that all over the World Wide Web. Think about how much of the Internet's bandwidth is taken up with search engines. And then then consider that over 90% of email is spam. I'm surprised that anything is still fast on the Internet, with so much crap flying around.

We do need search engines. How else could we find anything?

I've done two all-nighters. One was last week to reboot half our production servers, and the other was this week to reboot the other half. It was a smooth operation, and all went well. The call centre wasn't disrupted, everything was calm, and the only thing that went bad was my sleep schedule.

It's taking me longer and longer to get over an all-nighter. I was just about recovered from the first one when I had to do the second one.

The good news is - no more reboots for a long time. Lots of sleep ahead of me.

And hopefully when March 11th rolls around, we won't have any problems with the early start to daylight saving time.

I tested the timezone change. If we were using the GNU standard C library, then a change to the timezone file would be recognised on the fly and daemons would not need to be restarted. Unfortunately, we aren't using rhw GNU standard C library. We're using Sun's standard C library for Solaris 2.8. I don't have source code to know for sure what is happening, but experimentation shows that a change of the timezone file is only seen when the daemon is restarted.

So we have to restart our systems. Effectively, we must follow Sun's patch notes and reboot. I'm not looking forward to that.

Two of our servers have an uptime of over 900 days. Who knows what's happened in that time. The thing I fear is that changes to the daemons have occurred but those changes haven't been reflected in the startup scripts.

I'll know all about it next week. I'll be coming in and rebooting our servers. Not all in one night, but overa few nights for safety's sake.

Things are heating up at work. Only seven weeks to go before March 11th arrives. What's March 11th? That's the day that Daylight Savings cuts in again. It should have been April 1st this year, but Congress decided we all needed more sunlight so Daylight Saving Time starts three weeks early and ends a week later.

That's fine. The extra sunlight means I get more light when I'm rowing. My big problem is that our servers at work think that Daylight Savings Time starts on April 1st and ends on October 28th, when in reality it will start on March 11th and end on November 4th. So between March 11th and April 1st, our servers will trigger future dated events one hour late, and note dispatch times that are one hour wrong. This is not good for business.

Now if we stored dates and times in our databases in UTC (effectively GMT) worked with that and simply converted to local time for display, then there would be no problem at all. But due to design decisions made 17 years ago, long before I arrived to work on this system, we store everything in EST time and when future events are tested to see if it's time for them to be triggered, we pull the time in EST from the database, get the time now and convert to EST and then compare the two. Yes, it would have been simpler to store it in UTC and avoid two conversions, but that wasn't done and it's too late right now. Too many tables, too much data, on a system that runs 24x7x366, and it's imperative that we not be out of action for more than 20 minutes every year or so. That makes it kind of difficult to do wholesale data conversions.

Throw into the mix that we are using old Sun E250s for our servers, running mostly Solaris 2.8, but some 2.6 and 2.7, and you might appreciate that we could have a bit of a problem. Sun supplies patches for Solaris 2.8, but it doesn't appear that there are patches for 2.6 and 2.7. And they recommend that you bring the machine down to single user mode, apply the patch, and then reboot. No, this gets a bit tricky with our situation.

So it's my job to get this problem resolved with as little mess as possible.

I downloaded the Solaris 2.8 patch from Sun for the changes in Daylight Saving Time. Patch 109809-05 and had a good close look at it. They recommend some other patches to go with it. I had a look at those patches and they looked serious, like library upgrades and things that really would need a reboot. But there isn't anything that's strictly necessary in those other patches, and our Suns are comfortably running and we don't really like to take them down if necessary. Two of ours have been running non-stop for just over two years, another for almost two years and one's only been running a few months because it decided to spontaneously reboot which really screwed up a weekend for me. If I can avoid rebooting these machines, I will. If I can avoid stopping operations, I will. So I concentrated on the DST patch.

When you get down to it, for our location, the patch is about updating three files - two executables that aren't really vital - zdump, zic, and one single lone timezone file US/Eastern. So I went experimenting with our test and development machines and made some interesting discoveries. I can ignore zic and zdump as they really aren't needed for operations. So all I'm looking at is US/Eastern. They don't actually provide US/Eastern, they supply America/New_York and the patch copies it and renames it (or sets a symbolic link). This is a binary file in a very specific and old format that contains details about the timezone and DST for our timezone. It's not an executable, it's just data.

I found that if I just copy that one file into place as /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/US/Eastern, then hey presto, the machine now handles the new daylight savings times. I ran "zdump -v US/Eastern | grep 2007" before the file copy, and it knew that April 1st and October 28th were the change days, and ran it again after the copy and now it knew that March 11th and November 4th were the change days. Success. And so easy. And best of all, that file, because the format is well-established historically for timezone files could be copied into place on the 2.6 and 2.7 machines, the ones that Sun didn't supply a patch for, and even onto the x86 versions of 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8. Major success.

But something keep niggling at me. Just because zdump shows that the file contains the new DST times, does that really mean that programs that have been running for a few years will automatically see the new timezone file and use the data? Do I need to restart already running programs before they see the timezone change? I did more research.

The only times that the timezone files are used are when applications do timezone calculations. That is when they call localtime, mktime, ctime and strftime. What actually happens when these are called? I had a look at the source code of GNU glibc, the standard C library we use in our development. I burrowed down into those functions and discovered what happened. When these functions are called, they eventually call a function __tzfile_read. Depending on settings, this will read the timezone file US/Eastern and load the data into memory and use it. It also saves the inode, device number and modification time of that file. Every subsequent call of the function will check the inode, device number number and mod date, and if they are the same it just uses the data already loaded into memory. If they have changed, it will reload that file. Wow. I always wondered how this worked, and now I know.

So when I copy the new US/Eastern file into place, the next call to localtime will call __tzfile_read and it will know that the file has changed and it will load the new timezone details. This will work on the fly, and there is no need to shut down our system or reboot the machine. So the entire patch can come down to copying one file into place and our systems can keep chugging away.

Except I don't trust it. That's what should happen, and I know what happens almost every time someone tells me "You should be able to replace the power supply without shutting down that E250" and what should happen and what does happen are two entirely different things. So I'm writing a quickie test program to confirm that this will work, and I've got a day of changing dates and timezone files ahead of me and at the end of it I will know for sure what will happen on March 11th.

I have what they call Profound Hearing Loss. What it means is that I have serious tinnitis, and in noisy environments the human voice disappears. If I'm dining out in a large group and the noise reaches a certain level, all human voices disappear. It's great. I smile, I drink wine, and I don't even bother trying to lip read. And let's not forget selective marital deafness.

But the tinnitis!!! The constant, high-pitched hissing in my ears, that's been hissing for 20 years and will hiss louder and louder till I die. If I go to a concert and don't use earplugs, then the hissing takes on a metallic tone and then everything takes on a metallic tone and then it hurts my ears.

Well that's been happening to me for the last few days. My ears have started hurting, sounds have taken on the metallic tones, and the hissing level has risen dramatically. I know what that means. Something very loud is constantly hammering at my hearing. I know what that is. The Unicomp Customer keyboard is way too loud. I took it out of service when I got home tonight, and after five hours without the keyboard noise, the metallic tone has edged away and my ears have stopped hurting and the hissing is starting to go down.

I am so pissed off. That keyboard feels so good, so righteous, yet it's so loud that it hurts my aged ears. The keyboard has to go. Sigh.

I've pulled my Microsoft Internet Keyboard back into service at home. That will let my ears settle down and stop hurting. I still have the problem at work with the little piece-of-shit Dell plastic keyboard. I have got to replace that thing.

I've ordered some PS/2 to USB converters from Newegg. These might work. If they do, I'll pull my other Microsoft Internet Keyboard back into service at work. If they don't, I'll keep looking.

I need a keyboard with white keys, has USB, has a good feel, and is really really quiet.

We got new computers at work. Little Dells. They don't have the PS/2 keyboard or mouse interfaces, just USB. So I can't use my Microsoft Internet Keyboard any more. Instead I am forced to use the little Dell USB keyboard that came with the computer.

This little keyboard is the biggest piece of shit it has ever been my misfortune to have to use. I've used some bad keyboards in my time, but never have I used a keyboard as pathetic as this. It must have cost them $2.27 to have this keyboard made. It's tiny. What they call a space-saver. The keys are jammed together, smaller keys, the keyfaces closer together. The feel of the keyboard is mushy. It is complete crap.

I'm a programmer. I'm pounding a keyboard 8 hours a day at work and another 5 or 6 hours a day at home. Until the new work computer arrived, I had a Microsoft Internet Keyboard at home and at work. Same make and model, same feel. They aren't too bad. The keys are spaced out a little, my fingers don't misfire, my fingers and wrist don't get tired. It's a good fit.

But now the comfortable arrangement has been ruined because Dell don't have PS/2 interfaces on their little computers. I tried a few PS/2 to USB converters that I had lying around, but couldn't make any of them work. I've been using that piece of shit Dell keyboard for weeks, and I can't get used to it. My speed is off, my mistyping is getting worse, I get angry and frustrated with it, and I want to pick it up and smash it into pathetic little plastic bits.

So I've been in the market for a new keyboard. I like to go to the local stores and try out keyboards for the feel and the size. But this time I can't find anything that would even remotely work for me. The latest fad is black keyboards with black keys. Wonderful. This is an arrangement that suits teenagers with great eyesight. You can always tell a teenager's website - dark grey text on black background. Their eyes can easily see the difference between the dark grey and the black, but old folk can't. It's a deliberate policy to exclude old folk. And couple that with the average teenager's morbid fascination with death and H.R. Giger, and most people can't see their websites except fuzzy black on black. And now the bloody colour scheme has extended to keyboards. Oh, and try finding a wired keyboard now. It's all wireless. And the keyboard comes with weird attachments like a mouse ball in the shape of a dragon egg, or a joystick built on to it. Yes, these keyboards are designed for home and games. Business is handled by Dell and their $2.27 piece of shit plastic toy keyboards.

So no luck there looking for keyboards. I went online. Once you start looking, you can find some pretty wild keyboards. You can't find anything like the Microsoft Internet Keyboard - large keyboard, white keys, nice feel. It's hard to find anything with USB. You can get the weirdest split keyboards, and one handed keyboards, and giant key keyboards. And I found a website where you can buy keyboards modeled on the old IBM Series M keyboards. Big heavy keyboards with buckling spring keyswitch technology. Solid keyboards that sound like real keyboards and feel like real keyboards. And some even come in USB.

I spent a bit of time choosing my optimum keyboard. I picked the Unicomp Customizer. I passed on the Linux Keyboard (with the Ctrl and Esc and Capslock keys in the correct places) because I couldn't get it in USB. But there was a snag. There's always a snag. They don't come in white anymore. I ended up settling for a black body and gunmetal grey keys. This black keyboard thing really is a new fad. When the keyboard arrived, the colour scheme was okay. I could see the keys.

But the feel of the keyboard was superb. The buckling spring technology was superb. My fingers pound down, are slowed and then flung back into the air again ready to hit another key. The feel of this keyboard is superb. My typing speed started to rocket, and my accuracy soared too. It's fantastic. There is one slight drawback. It's a bit noisy. That's an understatement. It's really, really noisy.

So I took it to work and hooked it up and started working. The keyboard noise filled the room. A shocked silence came over the cubicle farm and then came the chorus of "What the f*** is that?" and "What's wrong with your keyboard?". I explained that I had a new keyboard and kept working. Five minutes later I admitted defeat. It was too noisy even for me. It was so loud that it disturbed everyone else, and I winced every time I typed anything. I took it home. At work I'm back on the piece of shit pathetic Dell keyboard that has only one saving grace - you can't hear it type. So now, they can't tell if I'm typing or if I'm asleep. It was pretty obvious with the loud keyboard.

The Unicomp Customizer is at home and in operation. Anne has complained about the noise of it a little bit. I do most of my typing after she's in bed, and the computer room is near the bedroom. So there are some complaints. But Anne falls asleep quickly, so it should work out okay. I'm more worried about the neighbours. You can hear the keyboard all through the house. You can hear the keyboard outside. I half expect to have my neighbours banging on my door at 2am to shut me up.

I don't have much hard disk space left on this little Mac Mini. 5 gig free. I did some backing up and some cost cutting and clearing, and ended up with 30 gig free. But I want to load all my photos into iPhoto. I want to show them on the TV through the Tivo Desktop, and I want to create DVD slideshow movies and I want to do a lot of things with the photos. But I've got 40 gig of photos. Before I can start doing fancy things with them, I have to load them into iPhoto. I don't have the hard disk space.

I went looking for external hard disks. I found a great little device from Lacie. I already have three Lacie BigDisks attached to the Linux box, and they store my flacs. 1.5 terabytes of flacs. Yes, all 3,800 of my CDs are stored as flacs on my Lacies. The Lacies aren't bad. The earliest one gets very hot, the other two don't get as hot. They're getting better.

So I bought a little 250 gig Lacie Mini Hub. It's about the same size as the Mac Mini, sits underneath it, hooks up with USB and Firewire, and acts as a USB and Firewire hub. It's pretty nice. It just stays on like the Mac Mini and I now have 250 gig to play with.

I renamed my iPhoto directory, started iPhoto and I complained that it couldn't find the directory and gave me the opportunity to create a new one on the Lacie. Once that was established, I sftped all my photos across and told iPhoto to absorb them. That took a day or more. The first wave was 14,000 digital photos. They all have EXIF data so they sort nicely. Then I loaded the scans from my old SLR cameras. These don't have EXIF data, so they just position themselves roughly when they got scanned or copied. I've done some experiments and it looks like the best way to organise them is to set the date/time of those photos to the rough date they were taken. I do have that information, but there's a fair bit of manual editing to egt that right. And once that's done, tell iPhoto to sort in date order. That will work.

Then how to organise them? I'm coming up with two methods. First there's the keywords. You can set a limited number of keywords and these are treated as checkboxes. So I set up things like Cats, Family, Friends, Travel, Me, that sort of thing. Then you can set comments. So I can name the people in the photo, put the location, make notes, anything I need to distinguish photos. Then I can set up Smart Albums and include keyword = Family, Comment contains Evelyn. Things like that. That's how I'm playing with it right now. It might work for what I want to achieve, it might need fine-tuning, it might need a complete change. You don't really know until you start using the stuff.

So I've got 15,000 photos to edit. Set the date on 1,000 of them, then set keywords and comments for 15,000. That's my project for 2007. It'll take me that long.

I've already got the benefits. Anne's been asking desperately for the photos of the Geek Cruises for ages. They were the first ones I set up. She was able to sit outside in front of the Tivo, wineglass in hand, and watch the slideshow and watch happy memories.

There is one problem. I've only got 512 meg RAM in this Mac Mini. iPhoto appears to load all it's data into memory and then work with it. That might work for a few hundred photos, but it slows the thing down to a crawl when you're working with 15,000 photos. I either have to work out more efficient ways of working with iPhoto, buy and install more memory, or consider upgrading to a newer Intel based Mac Mini with 2 or more gig of RAM.

I heard about the Apple TV device that they revealed at the recent MacWorld thing. It's a nice looking little box, bit like a Mac Mini, that joins your TV and stereo system and acts as the connector between that and your computer system. Wirelessly. I'm interested.

But it got me thinking. I've already sort of got something like that. The Tivo is supposed to do something like the Apple TV device. Last time I looked, the Tivo Desktop was only for Windows, and I only had Linux. I had tried the JavaHMO for Linux thing, but failed to get it working. My fault. I couldn't wrap my head around it.

I looked on the Tivo site and now the Tivo Desktop is available for Mac. Okay, this is very interesting. It's free. I downloaded it and installed it. There are a few little glitches. The first time I rebooted the Mac Mini, I got crazed psychedelic stuff across the monitor and that's as far as it went. I ended up powering off the Mac Mini hard. On restart, it came up fine. But where's the Tivo Desktop? There are no icons, nothing under Applications. I found some stuff in some Startup directory, but couldn't make it run.

Dang. Better read the manual. oh, so there is no application. It's a background daemon that gives access to the Mac Mini to my Tivos. It's running all the time. Configuration is done through the Setup system. That works. I looked at the configuration and turned it on and said to share all my music and all my photos. Nothing happened. Oh, that's right, nothing happens here - all the action is on the Tivos.

I looked at my Tivos and went to Photos and Music and LOOK, there are two entries Photos on Henry's Mac Mini and Music on Henry's Mac Mini. Wow. I could browse all the photos that I had loaded in iPhoto (not too many, but enough to be impressed), and I could play music from iTunes. Sounded good through the big receiver and those thumping big speakers. This is awesome. It just works. And it's fun. And good quality photos loook great on a big TV set.

Note: A few times now when I reboot the Mac Mini, and the Tivo Desktop starts up as part of the boot process, I get the crazed psychedelic stuff on the screen. I have learn to just turn the monitor off and on and it comes good. Strange, but easily overcome.

I was thinking of selling my Sony PSP. The games are not my cup of tea, there aren't that many games anyway, and the ones that I've got I have pretty much conquered. It's not all that good as a web browser, it's okay for podcasts but I don't do that very much, and it's a bit bulky to use as an mp3 player. So maybe I should sell it off, cut my losses, and get a bit of cash for a new gadget.

I got the box out and got all the parts together and was ready to put it on eBay, when I noticed something at CompUSA after a spectacular Jamaican meal next door. A little program for the Mac called Popcorn 2. What caught my eye was the Sony PSP on the cover. This program will take movies and convert them to the right format so you can play them on the Sony PSP.

This is trickier than it seems. For some bizarre reason, Sony decided to make it really ugly to put videos on the memory card. You have to put them in a directory called /MP_ROOT/100MNV01, and then the video file has to be a filename like M4Vnnnnn.MP4, and the thumbnail image for the movie has to have a matching name M4Vnnnnn.THM. That's ugly enough, but the video file has to be specially encoded and have a special size and a special frame rate. They really did not make it easy. I had experimented with transferring movies to the PSP with Linux, but without any success. I couldn't get the encoding right.

Popcorn promised to make it all very easy. So I bought the program and took it home and fiddled with it. First step, obtain a movie to move to the PSP. I shoved in a DVD and Popcorn wouldn't look at it. That's against the rules, they say, and they won't transfer a DVD to anything. Bugger.

I did a little research and came up with a wonderful little Mac utility called Mac The Ripper. This will extract the movie from a DVD and store it on disk in a directory called VIDEO_TS. You can do a few things with the movie as you're extracting it from DVD, all very good things. For me. And once the movie is on hard disk, Popcorn will look at it and say "Sure, that's good, let's get to work" and it will re-encode that movie for the Sony PSP. It creates two files - the movie and a thumbnail with the filenames in the right format, and the encoding correct, and all I have to do is move the files to the memory stick and I can be watching the movie on my PSP. It works. It works great. I transferred the Oyster Farmer to disk, and then to the PSP and watched it again just for the hell of it.

It doesn't always work. The second movie I wanted to move to the PSP was The DaVinci Code. While Mac The Ripper was extracting it, it reported I/O errors on the disk. I remember this stupid trick from the 1980s with games for the Apple ][+. Copy protection really hasn't advanced any. But anyway, the movie was nicely extracted to hard disk. Popcorn, in collusion with the DVD distributors, refused to touch it. There was a problem with the movie. I examined the situation for a few seconds, but couldn't see anything obvious, so didn't bother transferring it to the PSP. I just watched it on the Mac and got the details I wanted. (Note to self - the TV is getting very dim and I can't see some of the details from the DVD. Might need to buy a new TV.)

I transferred some episodes of Survivor to the PSP, and soem would play and some had the wrong encoding. Okay, so it's not going to be a perfect process. So I shouldn't choose DVDs with copy protection, and I shouldn't bother with BitTorrents of TV shows in formats that the PSP can't handle. Most DVDs will work though.

I've had the Lord of the Rings extended versions of the DVDs ever since they came out and I haven't watched them all yet. This would be a good experiment. I used Mac The Ripper to move them to hard disk, and then used Popcorn to make PSP versions of them. They are so big that I can only get half a movie on the memory card at a time. But they all work and they look fabulous on the PSP. When I'm stuck somewhere, like waiting for the car to get a service, or the dentist to be ready for me, I whip out the PSP and watch some more of the Lord of the Rings. Sure it's geeky. But it's a really good use for the PSP. It makes me happy. It's useful. The PSP isn't going to waste. I'm not going to sell it.

I buy a lot of computer books. An inordinate amount of computer books. I have pile sof them spilling all over the house. Some books are keepers, meant for the long term. Like the W. Richard Stevens books. But many books are introductions to new technology and when I've absorbed them and moved into that technology, the books sit there unused.

But no more.

I have finally, after thinking about it for a few years, signed up with O'Reilly's Safari Online Books. I can read all the books I need online and it costs me $20 a month. Given that I buy at least $100 of books a month (and it could well be more), that will save me a lot of money, and save on books lying around the house.

I wish I had done this years ago when the Safari service started.

I worked my way through the new book on iLife, grabbed a series of video clips filmed as we rowed through the locks to Steel Bridge and back in 2005, and I made a DVD.

An animated menu featuring photos from that row, scene selections, titles, captions, menus, and the movie. It looks smooth, it plays, it works exactly as expected. It's amazing. I'm sure it's as rough and amateur as any DVD ever made at home, but to me it's great. I've made copies to hand out to the other rowers.

My next version will contain slideshow presentations of all the photos taken during that row, and I'll fix the scene selection menus so they have a bit of colour and life, and fit on the screen.

This is awesome. This is why I bought this Mac. This opens up a whole new world to me. I want a video recorder now. I'll put the rest of my Hewlett Packard calculator collection on eBay and then go buy a video recorder.

Went to Barnes and Noble looking for books.

Got the O'Reilly book iLife '05 The Missing Manual. Big heavy book, glossy pages, full colour everywhere. Gives me the background I need to know about iMovie and iDVD so I can start making movies. It's not bad, and not too expensive. Also got me interested enough to install GarageBand. Not to make movies but for recording speech. Making podcasts, maybe.

And I got the O'Reilly book Postfix The Definitive Guide. The book looked good at first, but when I saw the chapter on spam, I was impressed. When I saw the chapters on how to run simple mail lists, and mail lists with Majordomo and mailman, I bought the book. This book will show me what I want. I've been struggling with email lately, trying to move my mailserver to the webserver and set up decent spam control. I can use sendmail and work with it and make it do a lot of stuff, but I want to do a lot more. I've been reading about Postfix recently, and wanted to get started with it. So I'll leave the existing mailserver running, but build Postfix up on the webserver and if I can make it all work, I'll change DNS and take out the current mailserver.

Some research indicates that for Windows viewers, I need a file with an extension of avi. So I have to convert from mov to avi. Mplayer should do that for me. I do some research, and in the end find a formula that will convert the file that Windows users can hopefully view.

mencoder film.mov -o film.avi -ovc lavc -nosound

That's the formula I used. I converted the file. I don't know if the conversion was successful for Windows people. I added it to the website, and Linux can view it just fine, the Mac wants a Quicktime addon before it will play it, and I don't know how Windows reacts. I'll have to wait for feedback.

I thought about Amy's movie, and from the sound of her emails, she hasn't seen it yet because she can't view it. So I wanted to get it to her so she can view it. We're rowing at 6:30am, and I have to be up at 5:30am, so I want something quick.

Oh that's right, that's why I bought the Mac Mini with the Superdrive, so I can make DVD movies. So there's these two piece sof software that I don't know how to use, don't even understand the basic concepts, haven't got a manual for, that will create a DVD - iMovie and iDVD. I plunge into them.

Oh look, the Mac Mini comes with ssh and sftp built in, once you find the terminal. So I get the little movie across, and import it into iMovie and then share it with iDVD and I still don't know what I'm doing but I click at random and futz about and it asks me to insert a blank DVD. I do. It burns it. And there it is - a beautiful little DVD with a menu and some fancy animation and the 15 second movie. Yes, a whole DVD capable of hours of movies and I have a 15 second movie on it. And it plays in the real DVD players. Amazing.

I wish I knew what I did, or how iMovie and iDVD really work. Time for a trip to Barnes and Noble.

I'm really excited by this. This opens up a whole new world for me. I can make DVDs of my photos, I can make DVDs of Peter's photos, I can make presentation DVDs at end of year for the rowing club. And now I'm thinking about something I've always rejected - a video camera. This is amazing stuff, and it was so easy. I knew absolutely nothing and managed to make a functional and attractive DVD. With a little knowledge, I can go on to great things.

Amy sent me a small 15 second movie of her and Jen, and Tim, sculling. I added it to the website, and then got complaints.

The movie came straight out of her camera, so it's a file with a .mov extension. As best I can tell this is an Apple Quicktime format movie. My digital camera takes movies too, and they are in mov format, and most movies that I have seen come out of a camera are in this format. On the website, I can click on the link, using either Linux or Mac, and it plays in the browser. So I assume that all is well, and Windows, being so much better than Linux at all things fancy, will do it just as easily. Not so. It won't play. Maybe they have to have extensions to Internet Explorer, or maybe Microsoft wants nothing to do with Appel formats. I don't know. I haven't used IE since about, oh, 1995. I don't know what it does, nor do I care.

So I got around the problem by getting viewers to download a free Quicktime viewer from Apple and then they have to download the file and play it manually. There's something seriously wrong with that. The camera creates it in that format, it's output from a consumer device and isn't that where Microsoft excels? The two obscure operating systems (Mac and Linux) just use it. Microsoft makes it difficult.

I need to convert the mov to something else. More research needed.