Neotextus

Cool augmented reality demo on CNN

paul — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:29:01 +0000

CNN are running a segment today publicizing a GE advertizing campain for their Smart Grid which has got to be seen to be believed. If you have a camera on your PC, follow the instructions to print out the sample page and hold it anywhere in view of the camera. The flash application downloaded will create a three dimensional animation which bursts out of the page you are holding. This is really fun, and all done in Flash – wow! The model not only reacts to movements of the paper, you can even blow over the wind turbines (well actually into the microphone on your laptop) to make them spin.

It’s all done with the open source FlarToolkit – kudos to GE for not only getting the best out of open source, but also publicizing the fact. There is a demo on the website for those who want to play around with the ideas, although most of the documentation is in Japanese

Another smbclient timeout fix

paul — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:29:24 +0000

There are new Fedora samba packages (3.2.8) upstream, so here is another update to my samba packages to address the smbclient timeout issues which were causing BackupPC to fail.

libsmbclient	libsmbclient-devel	libtalloc	libtalloc-devel	libtdb	libtdb-devel
samba	source file (.src)	samba-client	samba-common	samba-debuginfo	samba-doc
samba-domainjoin-gui	samba.spec	samba-swat	samba-winbind	samba-winbind-devel	tdb-tools

Updated smbclient timeout fix

paul — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:34:23 +0000

There are new Fedora samba packages (3.2.7) upstream, so I’ve updated my samba packages to address the smbclient timeout issues which were causing BackupPC to fail.

libsmbclient	libsmbclient-devel	libtalloc	libtalloc-devel	libtdb	libtdb-devel
samba	source file (.src)	samba-client	samba-common	samba-debuginfo	samba-doc
samba-domainjoin-gui	samba.spec	samba-swat	samba-winbind	samba-winbind-devel	tdb-tools

Merry Christmas Everybody

paul — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:45:22 +0000

And So This Is Christmas;
And What Have We Done?
Another Year Over;
A New One Just Begun;
And So Happy Christmas;
I Hope You Have Fun;
The Near And The Dear Ones;
The Old And The Young.

John Lennon, Happy Christmas (War is Over)

Merry Christmas everybody

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”

paul — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:03:02 +0000

If you are like us and really love the idea of a white Christmas, it’s been a great week with snow and ice all week culminating in 10″ of snow last night – wow! It looks great, and there is a real chance that we’ll be getting more snow just in time for Christmas. The girls just love running and jumping in the snow, but they are a little confused by the ice

smbclient timeout fix

paul — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:17:43 +0000

Sometimes, I just really hate Windows. Don’t get me wrong, I use a Windows laptop all day long for work and then come home and run Windows for Photoshop etc. in the evenings. It’s just that some things in the Windows environment are plain broken, take virus scanning for example – when an application attempts to read from a file, the on-demand virus scanner must block access to the file until virus scanning has been completed. This works fine for 1K text files, but really slows things down with today’s gigabyte videos, VM filesystem images, etc.

Normally, this is just plain annoying, but when it comes to running backups with BackupPC, the delay is just fatal. The problem relates to how BackupPC uses smbclient to backup Windows. Now smbclient has a hard coded timeout of 20 seconds for access to shares, with no ability to override this timeout from the command line. Hence, backups were consistently failing with “Call timed out: server did not respond after 20000 milliseconds opening remote file”.

Since I’m using Fedora 8 for my backup server, I’ve created updated samba 3.0.33 packages (samba, samba-client, samba-common, samba-debuginfo, samba-doc, samba-swat, libsmbclient, libsmbclient-devel) with the relevant patch, source and spec.

Daisy Loves The Water

paul — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:39:54 +0000

As if anyone could have any doubt at all that Daisy LOVES the water, here is what she was up to over Thanksgiving

Farewell Marco

paul — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:21:09 +0000

We lost Marco on Saturday, after a year long struggle with cancer. He will be sorely missed.

Happy Birthday Dove Lewis

paul — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:58:44 +0000

A big thank you and happy birthday to Dove Lewis Animal Hospital who celebrated their 35th birthday today with a party in Pioneer Courthouse Square. We all headed down there to enjoy the great food and music, and the girls created some wonderful designer bags.

Dove Lewis has given is great comfort and understanding in some of our most difficult times over the last few years, and we wish them all the best. Thanks guys, and Happy Birthday.

Dog Day Afternoon

paul — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:47:50 +0000

Hazeldale off-leash Dog Park is holding its fifth annual benefit tomorrow with fun for the whole family, both human and canine. The park offers a large, welcoming and safe fenced play areas with lots of small trees to provide shelter from the heat and poop bags and water on site. Come join the fun including competitions, demonstrations and vendor stalls from 10AM till 4PM (contests start at 1PM)