Archive of posts from 2017
As noted, with the new year, I’m starting to use my new MacBook Pro full-time. Last night, it took a few hours to copy everything from my old backup to this new laptop. Did it work perfectly, of course not. Plus, I don’t like copying everything from my old laptop to my new one. There is a lot of stuff that I could throw away, but it takes time to go through it all. So I copied just my old home directory, but not the Applications directory. I know there’s lots of stuff that won’t run or that should be updated, so I installed all that stuff manually.
Dec 31, 2017 2017 Year in ReviewThe years just seem to be flying by. 2017 went by pretty quick. I have no complaints because I know how lucky I am. I’m in pretty good health. There are people who like to hang out with me, though I’m never really sure why. And while I’m not crazy wealthy, I can afford to do what I want and still give to causes I think are important. So, life is still definitely good. Let’s look at the details of how I hoped by year would go with how it actually went.
Dec 28, 2017 Learning More Windows 10 StuffMy last post talked about using xcopy to copy a bunch of files from one server to another. I had been running this for a day, but a couple of times the command failed with the error “Insufficient Memory”. Since my new server has four times as much memory and three or four times as much disk space, I didn’t think that error was actually true. A quick google search shows that this message usually comes up when filenames are over 255 characters long, which was going to be a problem for me. Instead, robocopy (robust copy) should be used. The command I’m now trying is:
Dec 26, 2017 Windows 10 – More Stuff I Didn’t KnowI’m installing a new Windows 10 computer in our office to replace the old Windows XP one. All this computer is going to do is host our shared windows disk. Not a lot of people use this disk, but it’s really good for sharing files or if a student is going to work at different computers in the lab.
Dec 15, 2017 Windows 10 in My Samba PDCI had recently installed windows 10 on one of our computers at work. I was able to successfully add it to the domain, but then none of my users could login. The error message was:
Dec 10, 2017 Time for ChangeOn October 29, 2013, I bought unlocked iphone 5s for $689.56 plus $99 more for AppleCare. The phone works ok, but the battery wasn’t lasting very long. If I listed to music and tracked my ride to work and then went to the gym after work, it wouldn’t last through a short workout. That seemed pretty short to me, so I bought a new battery from ifixit to replace it. I put it in this morning. First of all, it was a royal pain to take the old battery out because it was basically glued into place with sticky strips. I had to just continually pry around the battery to get it unglued. And while I was prying, I know I cracked some plastic stuff. As far as I could tell, I got everything back together. However, when I turned the phone back on, I got a message that touch id didn’t work and the speaker wasn’t working either. I don’t use touch id at all, so I don’t care about that. The speaker is a bigger deal. I don’t know why it doesn’t work. I’ve taken the phone apart three more times to check all the connections and it still doesn’t work. Most importantly, the phone will no longer take a charge. So it’s basically junk because the battery is now dead. I find this incredibly annoying. I should not break my phone by just changing the battery. I’m done with Apple because this is bs. I’m basically paying $200/year for my phone, not including the service. This to me, is ridiculous. So I’m looking for a new phone. And the primary feature that I’m looking for is repairability. Here’s the list I’m looking at:
Nov 4, 2017 New SpeakerI bought this speaker yesterday to give to my Mom.
Nov 2, 2017 RHEL7 KickstartNow that I’m in a place where all ip addresses are handled by dhcp, I need to change how I do kickstart installs.
Oct 29, 2017 Season OverToday, I finished pulling up all my tomato and pepper plants. I also took down the old chickenwire fence I had around my raised bed. And I filled five grass clipping bags full of plants and weeds that I pulled. I had thought of trying to make my own compost pile. But I found out that the city will pick up the paper bags and I can pick up as much free mulch as I can carry from a city building not too far from my house. So this year at least, I’ve decided not to do any composting. I may change my mind in the future.
Sep 16, 2017 My Latest ObsessionIn my second summer of gardening, I’m thoroughly enjoying it. This year, in addition to tomatoes and peppers. Ted also gave me some beans, watermelon and pumpkin. And I also had zucchini. The pumpkin was weird. The vine grew like crazy all over the back of my house, but then died for some reason. I ended up getting one pumpkin, about the size of a 16″ softball. It was green when I picked it, but as it’s been sitting on my counter, it’s turning more orange. I picked one small watermelon and there are a couple more still growing. I haven’t yet cut it open to see how it looks or how it tastes. The tomatoes have been reliable. I planted some miniature red peppers and I like eating those the best. There are a lot of green ones out there now, so I think they tend to come a little later in the season than the tomatoes. I got a few good size zucchini. However, after I picked them, the plants seemed to die. Since I think I planted them too close together, I ended up pulling them out last month.
Sep 12, 2017 Merge Three Files into One Using Command LineI have three pdf files that I want to merge into a single file. But I don’t want the three files to be on three separate pages. I want one big page with the three files all there.
Jul 27, 2017 Problems with mp4 files in FirefoxWe had some students who took a video with their phone and wanted to post it on an html page. The html code we used was:
<video controls="controls" width="400"> <source src="Robot.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video>
In Chrome, this worked fine. But in Firefox, it would show like this.
When that happened, I went to Tools -> Web Developer -> Browser Console. I got a message like this:
HTTP "Content-Type" of "video/3gpp" is not supported. Load of media resource http://www.example.com/Robot.3gp failed.
This message was strange because I wasn’t posting a file called Robot.3gp, but one called Robot.mp4. So on my server, I checked the file.
$ file Robot.mp4 Robot.mp4: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, 3GPP
So whatever created this file, actually made a 3gpp file and not a legit mp4. However, I found that you can convert a 3gpp file to mp4 using ffmpeg. I renamed my Robot.mp4 file to Robot.3gp and then converted it.
$ ffmpeg -i Robot.3gp -ab 64k -ar 44100 -strict -2 Robot.mp4
ffmpeg version 2.8.12 Copyright (c) 2000-2017 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 4.8.5 (GCC) 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-11)
configuration: --prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --datadir=/usr/share/ffmpeg --incdir=/usr/include/ffmpeg --libdir=/usr/lib64 --mandir=/usr/share/man --arch=x86_64 --optflags='-O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -grecord-gcc-switches -m64 -mtune=generic' --extra-ldflags='-Wl,-z,relro ' --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-version3 --enable-bzlib --disable-crystalhd --enable-gnutls --enable-ladspa --enable-libass --enable-libcdio --enable-libdc1394 --disable-indev=jack --enable-libfreetype --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-openal --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libopus --enable-libpulse --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libsoxr --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libv4l2 --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-avfilter --enable-avresample --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --disable-debug --disable-stripping --shlibdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-runtime-cpudetect
libavutil 54. 31.100 / 54. 31.100
libavcodec 56. 60.100 / 56. 60.100
libavformat 56. 40.101 / 56. 40.101
libavdevice 56. 4.100 / 56. 4.100
libavfilter 5. 40.101 / 5. 40.101
libavresample 2. 1. 0 / 2. 1. 0
libswscale 3. 1.101 / 3. 1.101
libswresample 1. 2.101 / 1. 2.101
libpostproc 53. 3.100 / 53. 3.100
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'Robot.3gp':
Metadata:
major_brand : 3gp5
minor_version : 0
compatible_brands: 3gp5isom
creation_time : 2017-07-26 17:45:04
Duration: 00:00:20.23, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 5135 kb/s
Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt470bg/bt470bg/smpte170m), 720x480, 5005 kb/s, 30 fps, 30 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
Metadata:
rotate : 90
creation_time : 2017-07-26 17:45:04
Side data:
displaymatrix: rotation of -90.00 degrees
Stream #0:1(und): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 123 kb/s (default)
Metadata:
creation_time : 2017-07-26 17:45:04
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 SSE4.2 AVX FMA3 AVX2 LZCNT BMI2
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] profile High, level 3.0
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] 264 - core 148 r2699 a5e06b9 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2016 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=3 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subme=7 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-2 threads=6 lookahead_threads=1 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0 bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=1 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=40 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=23.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0 qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 aq=1:1.00
Output #0, mp4, to 'Robot.mp4':
Metadata:
major_brand : 3gp5
minor_version : 0
compatible_brands: 3gp5isom
encoder : Lavf56.40.101
Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (libx264) ([33][0][0][0] / 0x0021), yuv420p, 480x720, q=-1--1, 30 fps, 15360 tbn, 30 tbc (default)
Metadata:
creation_time : 2017-07-26 17:45:04
encoder : Lavc56.60.100 libx264
Stream #0:1(und): Audio: aac ([64][0][0][0] / 0x0040), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 64 kb/s (default)
Metadata:
creation_time : 2017-07-26 17:45:04
encoder : Lavc56.60.100 aac
Stream mapping:
Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 (native) -> h264 (libx264))
Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (aac (native) -> aac (native))
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
frame= 607 fps=178 q=-1.0 Lsize= 1593kB time=00:00:20.22 bitrate= 645.1kbits/s
video:1408kB audio:162kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 1.439324%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] frame I:4 Avg QP:19.34 size: 9992
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] frame P:171 Avg QP:22.56 size: 4317
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] frame B:432 Avg QP:24.06 size: 1534
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] consecutive B-frames: 3.3% 2.6% 8.4% 85.7%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] mb I I16..4: 28.5% 58.4% 13.1%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] mb P I16..4: 4.2% 9.2% 1.8% P16..4: 37.9% 7.7% 5.0% 0.0% 0.0% skip:34.2%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] mb B I16..4: 0.3% 0.5% 0.1% B16..8: 42.5% 2.7% 0.4% direct: 1.4% skip:52.2% L0:48.5% L1:48.6% BI: 2.9%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] 8x8 transform intra:59.6% inter:80.2%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 32.2% 41.0% 4.4% inter: 7.5% 10.5% 0.3%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] i16 v,h,dc,p: 33% 24% 26% 18%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] i8 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 10% 16% 45% 3% 9% 3% 9% 2% 3%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] i4 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 13% 14% 27% 3% 18% 4% 16% 2% 3%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] i8c dc,h,v,p: 61% 18% 20% 1%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] Weighted P-Frames: Y:2.3% UV:0.0%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] ref P L0: 56.2% 10.7% 21.3% 11.6% 0.1%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] ref B L0: 84.3% 11.6% 4.1%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] ref B L1: 94.4% 5.6%
[libx264 @ 0x1e6d1e0] kb/s:569.65
$ ll Robot*
-rwxr--r-- 1 hep html 12988147 Jul 27 12:53 Robot.3gp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hep html 1630980 Jul 27 13:43 Robot.mp4
$ file Robot.3gp
Robot.3gp: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, 3GPP
file Robot.mp4
Robot.mp4: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1
Now the Robot.mp4 file plays in Firefox without a problem.
Jul 19, 2017 Keyboard not working with old program setupAt work, we use some very old programs. In one program (layout), it opens up the other program (specctra). The weird error was that the keyboard would not work in specctra if it was started from layout. If I started it by itself from the command line, it worked perfectly. I looked at the logs when it started and found a lot of warnings that looked like this:
Jul 6, 2017 Compromised AccountI had a user account that was compromised yesterday. Fortunately, all they used it for was to send out a ton of spam for 11 hours or so. The person whose account was compromised came in today to find over 50,000 bounced messages in her account. So I had a pretty good idea of which account was causing the problem. After stopping her mailer and then starting and stopping sendmail, I saw that the messages were still going out. I changed her password and that appeared to stop things. I kept an eye on things and will continue to do so for the rest of the day, to see if anything else goes wrong.
Jul 2, 2017 Year is Half OverThat was quick. 2017 is already halfway over. Thought I’d take a minute to see how the year is progressing so far.
Jul 1, 2017 The Back Part IIOn July 21st, I got up as usual and did some stretches for my knee, as I had started doing again a few weeks before, and was putting my shoes on when I felt a sharp pain in my back. I don’t know why, but I do know that I had done this before. So I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. It is now 10 days later and things feel pretty good. I started to be able to do normal things without a ton of pain after about a week. And as I noted in my previous blog post, ice is better than heat. And lying flat on the floor is quite helpful. Though, getting up from lying on the floor is quite painful. But I think it’ll be back to normal after another week. I’m mainly writing this to note how long things take to get better and how often this is happening.
May 15, 2017 The security ID structure is invalidAll of my new users in my samba domain were getting this error when they tried to login to windows after I updated our ldap server. The problem was that I didn’t update my script to use the new SID on the new server. So for these users, the sambaSID and sambaPrimaryGroupSID values were wrong. I changed them with this ldif file.
May 12, 2017 Uninterruptible SleepRecently, I’ve upgraded some servers at work to RHEL7. I’ve had a few things that I didn’t plan for, but that’s to be expected when you do a major upgrade and you can’t test everything in advance. However, I have had one issue that is still causing problems. And ironically, it seems to affect my own account the most.
Mar 9, 2017 New Big ProjectFor quite a long time, I have wanted to write a book and try to sell it. For a multitude of reasons, I haven’t. As of yesterday, no more! I signed up for 30×500 to get started. I’m hoping to find out ways to determine if my idea will actually help people, thus making it worth doing. Am I sure about this? Absolutely not. Who do I think I am to write a book? I’m not an expert at anything. It will probably be the worst book ever and will sell zero copies. However, I’ve decided that this is something I want to try. I’ve decided that being afraid of failure is worse than failure itself. I want to give it a try. And the 30×500 class is a way to help me hedge my bets. It cost me $1900 and my goal is to make that back within the next three years. (Official date: March 8, 2020) Doable? I have no idea. But I’m going to put in the work on it. I’ve deleted everyone I follow on Twitter, except people that I know personally. So I shouldn’t be wasting any time there. I’ve also deleted all the bookmarks for blogs I like to read and youtube videos I like to watch. Again to not waste time. Lastly, I’ve created a new account on my laptop to use for studying and writing. So all of the programs and things that I have on my laptop aren’t available to this second account and thus I can’t have them open while I’m working. I’ve created a website for it. http://www.pickabout.com Let’s get started!
Feb 17, 2017 Early Year ProjectsFor the start of the year, I’ve been working on some little projects that I’ve enjoyed. I guess one of the projects was big. I finished three bookshelves for my cousins for xmas.
Feb 6, 2017 Compiling GEANT4This one is strictly work-related.
Jan 31, 2017 January 2017 CheckinBased on last year, I know I won’t keep up with checking in each month. However, January is usually pretty easy. Let’s go straight to the chart.
Jan 20, 2017 Awk notesI love awk and use it a lot. Yesterday, I used it for something with multiline records. Awk on single lines is quick and easy to use, but I always have to look up what to do with multiline records. And I still don’t exactly understand everything about multiline records, but here’s what worked for me.
Jan 15, 2017 First Book DownI started it last year, but finished it in 2017. So “Thank You for Being Late” by Thomas Friedman is the first book I read this year. It’s all about how so many aspects of life are speeding up and how that’s affecting people in different ways. I’m not sure that I agree with many of his ideas, but it was an interesting read. I have to say my favorite part of the book was when he described the town in Minnesota that he grew up in. I’m sure everyone didn’t get the same sense of it that he did. But it was nice to hear about a place where different people worked together and weren’t all just looking out for themselves. I like to think that most of the country is still like that, but it’s getting harder and harder to do so. If nothing else, this book got me to go to a neighborhood advisory meeting and join the group. I’m happy about that.
Jan 9, 2017 Reset a Mailman List Admin PasswordI shouldn’t have to do this again. If I don’t have the admin password for a mailman mailing list, I can reset it with:
Jan 7, 2017 Not a great startSo I thought I was doing a great job avoiding sugar last week and it turns out I was mistaken. I think it started with my Costco run where I thought I was buying food without sugar. I swear that I read all the labels and didn’t see sugar on what I bought. But I should take my reading glasses with me when I shop because two of my purchases have sugar. I ended up eating a chicken pot pie because I already had it in the oven when I reread the label. I wasn’t going to throw perfectly good food away. The second one was a pot roast and thanks to the chicken pot pie incident, I reread the label before I even turned the oven on. That one sort of pissed me off because I don’t think there’s any need for sugar in it. And because I love pot roast, grrr.
Jan 1, 2017 Hello 2017!Happy New Year!