Cleaning up your computer to give away

While cleaning up the house, I came up across two old computers that I really don't want. One of them is old enough to recycle, the other one I'll give away for charity. Eitherway, I want the hard-drives to be clean before they leave the house. Not that I have any sensitive stuff on them, but there's probably enough info for some identity theft.

Fortunately, a while ago I came across this tool: Darik's Boot and Nuke. This is basically an image file you download and burn on a CD. You boot the computer you want to recycle/give away/sell with the CD and it just wipes all your hard drives.

I used it with both computers and it worked perfectly. Now I can give them away without concern.

Oh, using this software had an unexpected bonus! Because I had to open the CD drive, it stopped me from sending the computer away with a backup CD in it!

Objects in Perl? Use Python!

I've been meaning to try Python for a while. I'm kind of a sucker for programming languages, and knowing a bunch of languages allows me to choose the right tool for the right job. Turns out that this week I had the perfect opportunity to check out Python.

The task at hand was analyzing patterns in a bunch of XML files. I had 270Mb of XML files, and the largest file was 32Mb. Because I was pretty sure I was executing the analysis more than once (errare humanum est and I want to improve the analysis in the future) I decided to use SAX to read the files.

Having decided to use SAX I then decided to use Perl to do the job. I'm pretty familiar with it and was able to quickly find a SAX sample. Besides, I had a few string matches and replacements to do, and Perl is a great language for that.

Turns out that using SAX in Perl demands that you use and define objects in Perl. And it turns out that defining objects in Perl is... well, terrible! I really hated the syntax, bless and the way attributes were defined. It all looks like a big hack! To add insult to injury, the perlSAX has a few quirks when changing handlers. This is mandatory to make your SAX code maintainable... So I dropped Perl and went for Python.

To my surprise the transition was really easy. I was able to convert my Perl code to Python very quickly, with only a few doubts now and then on specific stuff. Here's what I gained from the transformation:

• I learned Python (finally!)
  
• Better SAX handlers (the quirks that happen in Perl don't happen in Python)
• Clearer attribute access (if you have an object with a reference to an array of references and want to print it in Perl... things can get weird)
• Clearer object definition and usage (no bless!)
  
• Fewer lines of code (from ~250 to ~150)
• Same performance (I was worried about this, but both scripts took the same time to execute!)
  

I still love Perl. If I want to parse a bunch of text files, do text transformations and the like it will be my 1st choice.

But whenever I need to do something a bit more complex that requires complex data types or OO programming, from now on I'll definitely turn to Python!

Video Editing and Ubuntu

Last weekend I had to edit a video for work. It was nothing too fancy. I had about 45 minutes of video on tape and I wanted to save parts of it to my computer (the takes). Then I wanted to cut the takes into pieces (the scenes), edit it as I pleased and add some background music.

Let me go straight to the conclusion: I gave up and did it all in Windows. How depressing...

I was able to capture the video to disk without problems (I think I used Kino for that), but the editing part was really bad.

I tried out Pitivi but it just hang after a few clicks. Then I tried Kino but unfortunately it is too basic. No ability to add the background music (actually I think there's a way, but 2 audio channels is still to limited).

Then I found Cinelerra. I tried everything to make Cinelerra work properly, I even fixed the dreaded startup error regarding the shmmax parameter. And although the software looks very promising, it is full of bugs that make it completely unusable... It's a shame really.

I did manage to do a test video in Cinelerra. The video had cuts, background music, the works. But while doing this video the preview was out of synch (and that makes editing really hard), I had to restart the software at least 20 times (no kidding) and when I got to work with my new video to show my colleagues what a great editor I was, I couldn't make it play on a Windows machine!

So I went back to my Windows partition, installed VirtualDub and another video editor I can't remember the name right now and was able to do the job hassle free... 1 down for free (as in speech) software. :-(

PS: To fix the dreaded startup error regarding the shmmax parameter edit the file /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following:

# make cinelerra happy
kernel.shmmax = 2147483647

You'll need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

Why I am not buying a Mac

Yearly this year I was strongly considering buying a Mac. The design is so cool, OSX seems like a great OS, they have TextMate and people I know that own Macs don't miss a chance to tell me how great it is.

But as time went by I changed my mind. Here's some of the reasons why this happened:

1. The $$$ factor: I don't really need a Mac. Actually, I don't even need a new PC. It's a way too expensive whim.
2. iPod: I own an iPod. I love it. It's a great MP3 + video player but it does have its flaws, specially when it comes to iTunes. There's just some things it won't do right (like podcast handling) and it has a few bugs that cause my artwork to vanish from time to time. Fortunately Media Monkey solves my problem, but it does make me wonder about other Apple software.
3. It burns: A friend of mine has a MacBook Pro. The hand rest heats to a point where it is actually uncomfortable to rest your hands. This is an issue to me because I actually use the hand rest to... well, rest my hands! I returned a laptop because of this same problem, so it's a no go for me.
4. Safari: I downloaded Safari for Windows. It crashes as soon as I type something in an input box. Again my faith in Apple software went downhill.
5. Ubuntu: When I first considered buying a Mac I was using Windows. My machine was getting slower and slower by the day, so I believed I needed a new machine... Now I use Ubuntu and that problem is gone. And Ubuntu may not be as cool as OSX, but it is a cool enough OS.
6. Fanatics: The legion of Apple fans makes me more uncomfortable than reassured. They always assume Steve Jobs is right and that everything about Apple is great. This means they have a high tolerance to problems and that they don't talk about those problems. This is not an exclusive problem of Apple, it's a problem that occurs every time a technology issue is turned into a religious war (think Emacs vs Vi!).
   

With all this in mind I'll save my $$$ and keep this not so fast machine for at least another year.

Scribus vs Inkscape

My sister in law is having an exhibit next week. To help her out I did the paper invitations during the weekend. This was the first time I needed to do something like this in Ubuntu, so I did a test drive on two applications.

Due to an article on Full Circle Magazine I decided to give Scribus a go. I already new Inkspace by name so I also gave it a try.

The short of it: Use Inkscape. If you want to know why, here's the details.

Scribus
Scribus annoyed me a bit. The first bad experience was with the "new document" menu. It doesn't save your settings! I was doing a few experiments so I had to start new documents quite often... and typing all the settings all the time is a drag (I had to change 4 values for the margins and 1 value for the units).

The next thing I disliked was the line tool. When you draw a line it stays red (because it is selected) and wider than the line you actually draw. Pretty bad for WYSIWYG. Also, moving the thing around had some odd behaviors....

The next problem was undo. Not sure what it actually did... Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't... sometimes it did odd things. Like after moving the line, undoing deleted the line. Pretty bad.

The final annoyance was with the snap to guides. I set the option but it did nothing... it just kept not snapping. I gave up at this stage.

Inkspace
No questions asked when the software starts, the document is already there and it actually has the settings I wanted to use. Not bad.

Drawing lines was also as I expected, and after a web search on how to snap to the guides, it worked OK. And undo did what I expected.

After I did a bit of work on the actual invitation, I decided to move the files around to organize my folders. Turns out Inkspace stores the pictures as references, so I lost all the pictures I had in the drawing (about 9 pictures). Restoring the references seemed like a drag, but since the save format is SVG I was able to use a text editor and perform a simple find and replace! Not bad.

Then I wanted to add a new page. I wasn't able to find out how to do it! Fortunately there is the concept of layers, so I just used one layer for each page. I could have used another document, but since the invitation isn't that complex this solution was good enough.

Time to print! This was another surprise. You actually need to know the lp command details and how CUPS works to do some basic printing tasks (like printing more than one copy in normal mode). So much for a grandma friendly application. But at the end of the day I managed to print everything without a problem and the invitations were sent on time.

Here's the final result:

Sandboxie

Are you looking for the best free text editor? Looking for the best wma to mp3 converter? It is quite easy to find free software to do these tasks, the problem is that after you install and test them all, your Windows installation is suddenly filled with registry entries and software you really don't want!

A while a go while browsing LifeHacker I read an article about a software that promised to end these troubles: Sandboxie. So I gave it a try.

I had some wma files to convert to MP3 files and found this free converter, so I installed Sandboxie and run the installer of the software. Everything went OK and the software was installed. I then run the free converter inside the Sandboxie and converted the files. Sure enough the converted files only appeared in the special folder selected by Sandboxie to be the sandbox.

I copied the MP3 files to a real folder on disk, turned off and cleared the contentes of the sandbox. And my Windows installation was exactly what it was before I installed the converter!

I only wished I knew about this software before testing 14 different text editors and totally trashing my Windows installation.

ICDSoft Appraisal

If you're looking for a hosting server, my advice goes to ICDSoft. I host my sister's in law website there and it has all the features I need (PHP, MySql, Ruby, email accounts galore, ...) and I never had a problem with it.

Of course not having problems isn't good enough reason to recommend a hosting service. That's the minimum they can do for you! The reason why I recommend ICDSoft is for their support. Let me tell you about my two experiences with them:

Ticket 1: I tried to place a Rails application on the website. For some reason I wasn't able to make it work, so I decided to contact support. In 5 minutes I had a reply with all the required instructions to make my application work.

Being new to Rails I didn't really understand the response... So I told them something like "I couldn't make it work. Please poke my code and see what is wrong. And fixe it while your at it". And can you believe it? They did look into my code, corrected my scripts, changed the permissions to make it all work and sent me a reply with all they had done... In less than 45 minutes! Now that is great support...

Ticket 2: Still working on my sister's in law Rails version of the website I decided to use RMagick to resize the images and create the thumbnails. I uploaded the website to my account to test it and it didn't work. ICDSoft doesn't have RMagick installed.

So I contacted support. I don't know how long they took to reply, but I think it was about 5 minutes like the first time. The reply said something like "We're talking to the sysadmins and we will contact you soon". And they did!

Less than 30 minutes later I had a reply stating that the sysadmins had installed RMagick. I tested my website again and RMagick was really working!

As a client, my feeling was that they were there working just for me! They edited my code, they installed a package on the server because I asked them to. Never a support service made me feel this pampered!