Day 009

Day 009
Originally uploaded by mkenworthy

We're in the middle of moving to Leiden right now. Janice and Anja are back in Wisconsin, ready to come over when our house is ready (which I hope is next week...) So far, I've been skidding on the iced up paths threading through Leiden. The score is Ice:2, Matt: 0.

Five years of Ticket Stubs

I have a large pile of ticket stubs from the past, oh, 20 years of going to see live music. I went through the whole pile, took photos of them, and made a collage with a pile of computer scripts to do the heavy lifting.

Looking at this image, I can see that "They Might Be Giants" were on my list three times, and that I saw a very early show of "Sneaker Pimps" back in 1995, along with Propellerheads at the Junction.

The stubs peter out after 2001, meaning that I have another pile hiding somewhere in the house. Time to find them tomorrow when I'm looking after the baby girl at home.

Cell phone suspect in cell

Quote: "A man accused of robbing a handicapped woman and taking a picture of himself with her cell phone was arrested Monday after Cincinnati police circulated that cell phone photo to the media.

He obviously didn’t realize the power of technology, Cincinnati police said.

Gary Walker, 24, of Bond Hill, was arrested Monday and charged with robbery, a second degree felony. He was held without bond pending arraignment today in Hamilton County Municipal Court.

The picture Walker allegedly took of himself was retrieved through the phone’s network, which contains data about the phone’s use."

Ah, Ohio!

Lightning only

It's pretty boring to watch lightning flash briefly, so I edited out all the boring bits and made a video of just lightning flashes in an isolated storm hovering over the mountains to the north of our house.


For the geeky:

Take a movie with cheap camera.

Split frames into individual jpegs using mplayer

mplayer -nosound -vo jpeg MVI_8542.AVI

Scroll through images and copy illuminated frames into a separate directory.

Make a backup of all the selected images, because you're a doofus and erased them the first time around:

tar zcvf lightning1.tgz *.jpg
mv lightning1.tgz ..

Rename the frames to a sequential sequence using a bash shell script called ren.sh, and make sure it is executable with chmod +x ren.sh > ren2.sh

#!/bin/bash
for i in 00*.jpg;
do
j=`printf "r%0.5d.jpg\n" $x`
echo mv $i $j
x=$((x+1))
done

This generates commands in the ren2.sh file like:

mv 00000422.jpg r00015.jpg
mv 00000423.jpg r00016.jpg
mv 00000804.jpg r00017.jpg
mv 00000805.jpg r00018.jpg

Now actually redo the naming by sh ren2.sh

Generate movie with mencoder.

mencoder "mf://r00*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o lightning.avi -ovc lavc
mplayer lightning.avi -loop 0

Mounting a disk formatted in FC6 on FC9

This is annoying enough that I have to geek out for a minute and write these instructions down.

I had Fedora Core 6 installed on a hard drive, which I used happily for a couple of years. I then bought a new hard drive, and installed Fedora Core 9 on it. I connected the original drive on as a slave drive so that I could pull over some custom configuration files over. The old hard disk was assigned /dev/hdc, so I tried:


root# mount -t auto /dev/sdc2 /asdf
mount: unknown filesystem type 'lvm2pv'


Well, crap! What is lvm2pv? I'm sure I formatted it as an ext3 filesystem, which is the default for most Linux distributions..... hmm.

A bit of Google searching turned up the answer, but it wasn't obvious how to do it in my case.


root# fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00027ac4

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 60801 488183220 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 36481 293033601 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00051754

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 14 60801 488279610 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 497.7 GB, 497779998720 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60518 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 2080 MB, 2080374784 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 252 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800




...but, but, but, there's the hard disk, recognised right there! Hold it, what's a Linux LVM?


# pvdisplay /dev/sdc2
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdc2
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 465.66 GB / not usable 3.56 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 32768
Total PE 14901
Free PE 1
Allocated PE 14900
PV UUID 88qBvg-DSwX-hCr2-X0uU-O1Cq-rlR5-q7fJr9


Oh man, this is a harder problem than I thought.

It seems that both sda1 (my boot disk) and sdc2 (my old disk) have metadata that claim them to bve VolGroup00. Apparently you have to use a Live CD, reboot into that, and rename using LVM tools the second drive to VolGroup01. This should not be so hard, but "it's the wave of the future", damnit.

Whorls

On my last observing run, we winded and clouded out. However, looking at the infrared water vapour pages at NOAA, I saw a beautiful line of vortices spinning out between two fronts of air.


NOAA keep all the imagery public for 30 days, so use a script to pull the images over and stitch them together with mplayer to produce an animated GIF.


# grab all the data for this night with the whorls in them
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}00.GIF;done
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}30.GIF;done
for i in *.GIF; do c=`echo $i | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; mv $i $c; done

for f in *gif ; do convert -quality 100 $f `basename $f gif`jpg; done

mencoder "mf://wcwv*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800