Want to record video of stuff you’re doing on your computer, for training purposes or a presentation or whatever? Check out camstudio, a wonderful free little utility. You can record any region of the screen or the entire screen at once, and output to any video codec you have installed in your machine, or to a Flash swf file, and you can record voiceover or text annotations as well. This compares extremely well with the commercial alternatives. The only problems I’ve run into relate to the fact that I have multiple monitors attached to my machine. Well worth a download. We’re going to experiment with it for documentation of weblogging and image gallery usage for students at skidmore. They rarely read the documentation we write so we’re testing to see if they’ll watch the video clips instead.

Perhaps you’ve tinkered with photoshop’s panorama stitching tool and after the first time you never touched it again because the process is so time consuming and the interface was so sluggish. Wouldn’t it be great if it just worked automatically? It can. Check out autostitch. While this is more a proof of concept than a fully developed application, it works very nicely. Collect a set of images in a folder (no special naming conventions required), run the program, and tada, a relatively seamless panoramic image is created. It’s remarkable how well this works. It’s free for now (the product of research at the University of British Columbia) but they’re looking to license it. Who knows, it could end up in the next version of photoshop. I’ll use this to produce a couple of panoramas once I finally get around to posting some of my backlog of photography.

[update] First of all I forgot to mention it’s a windows-only tool. Second of all, I got around to testing it. Check out the page here in my gallery system – there are two examples of panoramas created with autostitch and then with the excellent panorama factory. The quality is basically equal – I’m really impressed with autostitch. For a free tool you can’t beat it. Panorama Factory has tons more features of course, so it’s not like I’m going to switch, but if you’re on windows and don’t care about quicktime VR output or don’t have the money for a copy of Panorama Factory this is a great tool.

Is there anyone out there who actually likes the windows key on their keyboard? For my part, I hate it – invariably I hit it by accident while I’m playing games and get booted out to the windows desktop, leading to a flurry of cursing and (usually) the loss of life in the gameworld. My recent new computer build reminded me of how useful this registry entry is – if you’re on a windows box and you’d like your windows key/s to stop acting like, well, windows keys, chances are excellent you’ll appreciate the link.

Certain inadequacies at my current employer have led me to begin turning myself into an actual sysadmin (as compared to the current bull in the china shop danger to every box I touch admin type I am currently – those of you who know me well are probably chuckling at the whole concept right now). Anyway one of the things I’ve had to come up to speed on quickly is sql – specifically mysql but understanding sql in general has become important to me. I’ve bought a selection of books and I’m using tools like phpmyadmin and so on, but interestingly one of the most useful things to me has been A gentle introduction to sql. If you’re looking for a well developed easy to understand set of tutorials to help you come up to speed with sql, database design and more, check it out, it’s really well done.

For at least 7-8 years I’ve been in the habit of upgrading my main pc roughly every 12-18 months. I broke that pattern this time around because of a variety of things – the supposed transition to 64bit computing, changes to cpu socket architectures (first I was waiting for amd socket 754, then 939) and the actual transition away from agp to pcix for graphics cards. The fact that my trusty AMD 2400 and Radeon 9800 Pro were basically capable of running every game I wanted to run at a reasonable framerate and resolution also kept me from feeling like I needed to upgrade.

That all changed about a month ago when I bought a 20.1″ widescreen LCD monitor. Suddenly my framerates were in the single digits and it was time to get serious about building a new box. One 1 gallon jug of change rolled up and deposited later and I had all my components. I was ready to replace my 2.5 year old machine with something new.
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We bought an xserve at work to serve as a quicktime streaming server and webhost for academic applications. This was not exactly by choice. Given my druthers, we’d have gotten a linux box. But a variety of issues caused us to go with the xserve for at least the next year, and the task of admining it has fallen on me. It’s been worlds less than pleasant. Somehow Apple in its infinite wisdom decided to compile php against mysql libraries from a different version of mysql then what they decided to install on the box. They also decided to NOT compile PHP with the GD libs, meaning out of the box an xserve, a ~$6k server product, is incapable of authenticating against mysql and incapable of image manipulation using php. What did they think people intended to serve on the box, static web pages? This is just so….. bush league. (If you’re not up to speed on such things – a whole host of very popular web apps – gallery, Coppermine Gallery, Drupal, phpmyadmin, Mambo, WordPress, Moodle…oh screw it, basically any good php-based app requires one or usually both of these in order to function). The mysql stuff is relatively easy to work around, but the GD libs one is huge and is going to require that I rebuild apache and php from source, no easy task and a huge time sink. Long term unix admins are thinking at this point ‘quit yer whining, I’ve rebuilt apache from source on a 286 with 128k of ram!,’ but the point is, we bought a mac, so-called kings of user experience and ease of use, in part because we needed to be up and running quick and we hoped non-admin types would be able to help run it. This box has been anything but so far. I won’t even get into how trying to tie the box to the college’s active directory servers were causing it to lock up (details here if you’re really interested), or how Apple’s VNC client, Remote Desktop, is a buggy piece of junk, or how their GUI server management tools are schizo (change some settings using only the gui! Others, back to the httpd.conf – what’s the point! If it’s going to be in two places and it’s not logical in what lives where, it’s actually harder to have a GUI! I’m better of putting webmin on the thing and training the non-admin admins to use that). I love my TiBook (and my ibook before it) but man, I would never advise someone to buy an xserve based on my experiences with this one. For a couple of grand I could have had a red hat-based 1u dell server which I would have had up and running within about 3-4 days of installing it in the rack, whereas I am still beating on this xserve after a couple of weeks. Lesson learned, I guess. I’d say something positive, like, well, the hardware is really nice, which it is until you compare the process of installing an xserve in the racks vs a Dell box. Apple has some ways to go with their servers is my 2 cents takeaway from this experience.

You’ve probably noticed firefox’s support for RSS if you’re running a recent version – the little icon at the bottom right of your screen (usually orange, unless you’ve installed a custom skin) indicates the presence of an RSS feed you can bookmark. Livelines extension changes the default behavior so that you can add the subscription to your preferred RSS aggregation tool. It does not (yet) work with every aggregation tool, but if you’re using Bloglines, Newsgator, Rojo, or any of several other tools, this can be very handy – instead of copying and pasting the RSS feed’s address you simply use the tool to automatically invoke the subscription. It also works with any program that recognizes the ‘feed://’ protocol, like my personal favorite Feeddemon. A handy time save if you’re figured out how useful RSS aggregators are. And if you haven’t, you really ought to. It’s all about efficiency.