Timedog will tell you exactly which directories were backed up and how much data they represented. For me, the culprit turned out to be my Thunderbird mail client. It stores all email for a mailbox into a single flat file, and some of my mailboxes are gigabytes in size. Every new message I receive is causing the entire mailbox to get backed up again, eating up all my available backup storage pretty quickly.

Now that I figured it out, fixing this was pretty easy: simply put an exclude filter in Time Machine preferences to ignore any changes in my Thunderbird folder. All of my email is stored in my Gmail so it’s already in 2 places anyway.

Ultimately this is what worked for me. I was only able to figure this out through several hours of experimenting with ImageMagick options, so I hope this will help someone.

  convert in.png -type TrueColorMatte -define png:color-type=6 out.png

a=[];until(a.length==5);n=1+rand(56);a<<n if(!a.include?(n));end;puts "your numbers are #{a.sort*','} and Mega Ball #{1+rand(46)}"

I ran into some problems trying to get the updatetool for Glassfish working on my VPS (at Rimuhosting) though. The updatetool is a Java Swing app and I’ve never run any GUI apps on this remote host before. It doesn’t have Gnome or KDE running so VNC was not an option. The trick is mostly just to set up your systems for running remote X11 applications over a SSH tunnel. Here’s how I got it to work…. I should say this server runs Ubuntu Hardy and locally I’m on Mac OS X so the X11 install from the Mac OS installation disks was the easy part.

Here’s what I had to do on the remote host:

open /etc/ssh/sshd_config and make sure you set

  X11Forwarding yes

in /etc/ssh/ssh_config  check that you have the following settings:

  ForwardAgent yes
  ForwardX11 yes

there are a few other dependencies that you may not have yet on a clean Ubuntu install. I was getting very confusing java link errors in my stacktraces until I’d installed all of them. So grab these with:

  sudo apt-get install xauth libxp-java libxtst-dev libxi-dev

at this point, log out and log back in with

  ssh -X  yourname@yourhost

The -X option is important here : it’s telling the server that you’re going to want to run a X11 application over this SSH tunnel.
On my system I got the following message after logging back in:

  /usr/bin/X11/xauth:  creating new authority file /root/.Xauthority

that’s all. I was now able to run the Glassfish updatetool simply by calling

  /var/www/glassfish/updatecenter/bin/updatetool

and the application came up nicely on my Mac desktop. These steps will probably work to run just about any Java Swing application on a remote Ubuntu/Debian server.

I hope this helps some people…

Here’s the basic steps on how to get this Trendnet TV-IP400 / IV-IP400W driver to work in ZoneMinder:

• Make sure you have indeed version 1.23.x. You can see this in the title of the main console window. If you are still using version 1.22.x, either upgrade your ZoneMinder or use my old driver.

• Download the driver file here, and store it in the right directory. For me (having compiled Zoneminder from source on ubuntu) that location is /usr/local/perl/5.8.8/ZoneMinder/control. If that location doesn’t exist on your system, you can do a search for another camera driver such as Visca.pm and store the TVIP400.pm file in the same location.

• Create a new camera for your TV-IP400 if you haven’t already done so. The source tab looks something like this:

Make sure you change the IP address and port number if necessary. You will need to make sure that access control is turned off by the way.

If you had enabled the ZM_OPT_CONTROL setting in the system options screen, you will also see a control tab in the camera config window. This tab should look like this:

Again, make sure you set the correct IP address (the same as what you set in the source tab). You won’t have a TV-IP400 option yet in the Control Type dropdown, so click on ‘edit’ there and let’s create one.

In the Control Capabilities window, click ‘Add New Control’. Then set the settings in the Main and Move tabs as follows:

In the Pan tab, only check the ‘Can Pan’ option and leave the rest blank.
In the Tilt tab, only check the ‘Can Tilt’ option.

All options in the Zoom, Focus, White and Iris tabs can be left blank since none of these features are supported.

The Presets tab should be set as follows:

Though you can’t actually set presets through ZoneMinder, you can move the camera to presets that you’ve configured through the Trendnet web interface. I’m only using 5 presets but I believe you could access all 24 presets that the Trendnet supports.

That’s all! Save the configuration, and give your new controllable camera a spin in ZoneMinder. Let me know how you like it.

Thanks to Armando Oritz for his help in testing this driver. 

I’ve been working with jQuery for over a year now and have always wanted to give something back to the user community by releasing my own plugin. Unfortunately it seemed like every type of generic functionality I might ever need had already been developed by others. Until last night.

I was working on a webapp in which my main browser window had to open a popup window, and the user would then perform an action in this window. Upon completion of that action the main (parent) browser window needed to be notified.
Though parent and child window can easily access eachother’s DOM, a common way to get a value from one window to another is by setting a value on a hidden input field of a form in the other window. This requires you to add form markup to your page, which is clunky. A second issue is that if you have several types of events or data to send to the other window, you’ll need to add an input field for each type. And a third issue I ran into is that ‘change’ events do not seem to fire for an input field if that field was updated by another window. ‘change’ or custom events using jQuery didn’t work either this way. ‘click’ events on links or buttons do work, but they would need to be hidden, otherwise the user could click on them too. I got it all working but this all started to look like an ugly hack, cluttering my pages with messy javascript and markup code.

Long story short, this is where my new skills of creating jQuery plugins came to the rescue. This could all be put into a nice little plugin that would hide all the messy details of adding a form to your page and using hidden form elements to transfer data back and forth between windows. Even better, my new plugin makes it very easy to use multiple callback handlers, so you can define your own events that you can send from one browser window to the other. And events can be sent both ways in almost the same fashion. To my delight, it worked flawlessly in all browsers I’ve tried (FF, safari on Mac, and FF and IE7 on Windows).

Here’s how to use it:

In any page that needs to receive window events, make sure to call the initialization function upon page load:

$.initWindowMsg();

The parent window can open a child window the good old way:

childWin = window.open('child.html', 'mychildwindow');

and then send it an event with data:

$.triggerWindowEvent(childWin, "myevent", "some data");

The child window can register a callback handler for this event as follows:

$.windowMsg("myevent",  function(message) {
    // do  something  with message from parent
});

The child window can send a message back to the parent with:

$.triggerParentEvent("parentevent", "message to parent");

The parent can register a handler for this event in the same way:

$.windowMsg("parentevent",  function(message) {
    // do  something  with message from child
});

That’s all.

You can see a simple demo here. (make sure your popup blocker is turned off).

Download the plugin and demo files
One thing to keep in mind is that it is of course a requirement that one of the windows opened the other, and that neither window has navigated to any other pages. Once they’ve lost the reference to eachother, there’s no reconnecting. The triggerWindowEvent and triggerParentEvent functions return a boolean which indicates if the event could be sent or not. I could pretty easily add a function that could check if the parent or child window is still there actually… will add that in the first update of the plugin.

As with the old Perl driver for Zoneminder (which I’ve been told doesn’t work anymore with the latest version of ZM, since the interfaces for the PTZ drivers have completely changed), this driver only controls the pan and tilt functions of the camera. Actually, you can also put it in swing mode and store or access preset positions, but none of the available functions actually do anything with the video stream. The video can simply be accessed at:

http://yourcam/image.jpg to grab a single frame of the current camera view
http://yourcam/video.cgi to get the mjpeg stream from the camera

There’s no real zoom control since the cam only has a digital zoom, which I believe is implemented in the client software only (so there’s no way to actually have it stream a zoomed image to your client).

Okay, onto the example script now. The code below demonstrates how to use all the features of the camera driver.

require 'Ip400.rb'

# substitute your host IP address or name and port number here.
# If you have turned off access control, you can simply use:
# ptz = Ip400.new("192.168.0.140")
# if your camera is accessible at a port other than 80, simply
# specify the address like this: "192.168.0.140:90"
ptz = Ip400.new("192.168.0.140", "ruby", "ybur")

# go to the home position
ptz.home
sleep 3

# pan right 3 steps
ptz.pan(3, Ip400::RIGHT)
sleep 3

# pan left 5 steps
ptz.pan(5, Ip400::LEFT)
sleep 3

# tilt up 3 steps
ptz.tilt(3, Ip400::UP)
sleep 3

# tilt down 3 steps
ptz.tilt(3, Ip400::DOWN)
sleep 3

# pan and tilt at the same time
ptz.move(4, Ip400::RIGHT, 2, Ip400::DOWN)
sleep 3

# go to 1 of the 24 preset positions
ptz.goto_preset(1)
sleep 3

# visit all preset positions with about 5 second intervals
ptz.swing_preset
sleep 20
ptz.stop_swing # stop the swing mode again

# go into continuous scan mode (scan left and right with 1 second intervals)
ptz.swing_scan
sleep 10
ptz.stop_swing  # don't forget this!

# get the current absolute position of the camera
pos = ptz.abs_position
# store this position at preset 15
ptz.set_preset(pos['pan'], pos['tilt'], "myposition", 15)

These examples should get even a Ruby novice going pretty quickly, and the Ip400.rb driver class can be used in or outside of a Rails app. The camera you’re controlling can be in a different room or even in a different country.
I’m releasing it under the MIT license so it’s open for further hacking. If you end up using this code anywhere I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll release it as a real Ruby plugin if enough people show interest.

Have fun!

Download the above example file and the IP400.rb file.

The above image of the view from the East Bay hills is at most a couple of minutes old (unless the camera is down). Click to view yesterday’s timelapse movie.

I came across a hilarious essay by David Sedaris on youtube that (fairly accurately) describes the Saint Nicholas tradition in Holland. You can view it right here – highly recommended. (it’s in 3 parts, make sure to watch all three of them…)