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Vacation video (pt 2)

I am constantly amazed at how easy it is to accomplish things in Linux once someone works out the process. DVD Authoring is a good example of this.
— Chris Stoddard, Linux Gazette #83

Vacation video done, at last (pt 1)

In case you wondered why I didn't update my LJ for several weeks (and rarely said something on Twitter, either): I was busy editing last year's vacation video. I won't link it here, it is mostly personal stuff and the quality of the footage is rather poor, but it was a nice exercise to learn editing. As Kdenlive still isn't suitable for such a large project (but progressing quite well currently,) I had to resort to a non-free editing solution. Adobe Premiere Elements did the job amazingly well, at least I didn't miss any feature of the professional version. Granted, as a 32 bit application it runs out of memory quite often with such a comparatively large project, but I've seen much worse behaviour of much more expensive software. The movie had more than 700 774 clips on the time line in the end, and runs for 94 minutes.

About eating your own dog food

I've successfully updated my machine located at the data centre from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.1 via a remote SSH connection and "zypper dup" yesterday. Contrary to my previous experiences with online upgrades, only minor obstacles were encountered:

  • Jabberd, the only package from OBS, got rebuilt between downloading the meta data and the package itself

  • Zypper somehow got confused by blank characters in repo locations midway through the update (simply restarting zypper helped)

  • I had to copy back my manually edited postfix configuration as it was replaced by the generic one from the RPM

  • Tomcat6 startup scripts missing JAVA_HOME

Just two hours of work (mainly observing zypper working and checking functionality), no serious breakage, no trip to the data centre, no manual update of half of the packages. I'm truly impressed.

Wake on LAN doesn't

One difference between openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 really bugged me: even though I enabled Wake on LAN (WOL) on eth0, the driver would switch off the transceiver on suspend to RAM. After some investigation I found that the atl1e driver has the "wakeup" flag for power management set to "disabled", regardless what I set with ethtool. After enabling it with "echo enabled >/sys/class/net/eth0/device/power/wakeup", WOL works again. As a quick workaround I created a file /etc/udev/rules.d/78-enablewol.rules with the following udev rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ENV{INTERFACE}!="eth*", GOTO="skip_wol"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo enabled >/sys/class/net/$env{INTERFACE}/device/power/wakeup' "
LABEL="skip_wol"

Edit: Forgot that redirections aren't implemented in udev. Sigh.

More fun with OpenLayers

While browsing through the documentation of tangoGPS I found the the relief map at maps-for-free.com. The map is free (licenced under the GNU FDL) and generated from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data:

Rendering GPS tracks

Sure, you can chose from numerous implementations if you want to render GPS tracks. But for scalable online maps, nothing I found was good for my purposes. The available on-demand renderers are too slow and need too much memory processing a data set with aproximately 100,000 fixes from all over California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. Thus, I had to render the tiles offline. Basically, two free solutions for that exist: Mapnik and Osmarender.

How to process three weeks of GPS data

Handling three weeks of GPS data collected on an RV trip through the American West is quite a challenge. Roughly 930,000 GPS positions are far too much to process directly. There are lots of wrong fixes that need to be removed, lots of identical or nearly identical positions, and a huge amount of fixes located on a straight line. Feeding the data unfiltered to Google Earth either results in GE drawing nonsense, locking up or crashing. The gpsbabel filters don't help, either. Thus, I wrote my own filter. It performs several steps:

Disabling bash completion scripts

Do you hate the "intelligent" bash completions on openSUSE or SLES/SLED as much as I do? touch ~/.bash.expert turns them off.