Using Gallery 1.3.4's new 'Offline Copy' feature on Mac OS X

Bonjour!
Interesting thread. If you have time :
Mark
painting

Upgraded Gallery to v1.3.4

I just upgraded the Gallery scripts to version 1.3.4 from 1.3.3 for our photo gallery section. The process is very easy but a couple nights ago when I first attempted the upgrade, I got an error (Warning! Apache is not obeying your .htaccess file...) when running the Web-based configuration script. I reread the upgrade instructions (for the 5th time!) just today and sure enough, I apparently failed to do step 2!

Here are the commands and steps I took... The commands I issued over a ssh (secure shell) connection in Mac OS X's terminal (ssh -l username hostname) and for the file transfer I used the Transmit FTP client.

1. cd /var/www/html/gallery (move into "gallery" directory)
2. sh configure.sh (put Gallery in config mode)
3. cd .. (move up one directory level)
4. cp -r gallery gallery-new (duplicate "gallery" directory as "gallery-new")
5. use Transmit to copy new v1.3.4 files into "gallery-new" (replacing files with same names)
6. mv gallery gallery-old (rename old "gallery" directory to "gallery-old")
7. mv gallery-new gallery (rename "gallery-new" directory to "gallery")
8. go to http://derektom.com/gallery
9. run Web-based config script
10. cd gallery (move into "gallery" directory)
11. sh secure.sh (put Gallery in secure/running mode)

Done!

Oh, one more thing: Because I had customized the CSS (cascading style sheets) files, I had to replace the new CSS files (just 2 files in the "css" directory) with mine (from the "gallery-old" directory). Of course, in step 5 above, I could have omitted trasferring over the "css" directory instead.

Also, if after the upgrade, all is well, you can delete the gallery-old directory.

Justin: "How you doin'?"

Justin at home on June 4, 2003 (14 and a half months old), ready to join the Ho family for lunch at Ruby Tuesday in Cityplaza, Taikoo Shing.

You love Winnie the Pooh too, don't you?

Photo taken on April 24, 2003. Justin at about 13 months old.

Anti-spam measures we use

Here's an email I just sent out today to all our Hong Kong staff regarding spam reduction measures (note that I'm not using our real address below to prevent "spam bots" from harvesting our address):

Hi all,

JFYI...

We have a "content-based" anti-spam filter on our mail server that has been in use since Feb 2002 and currently blocks about 175 spam messages a day. ("Spam" = "junk mail")

From last Thursday, I installed 3 new anti-spam filters that use "DNSbls" (Domain Name System-based "blacklists"). These have been blocking around 350 spam messages per day so many of you may have noticed a decrease in the number of spam messages you receive.

As with any anti-spam measure, some (but very, very few) legitimate messages may get rejected by our server. (These are called "false-positives".) If any legitimate sender (non-spammer) has their message rejected by our server, they will receive a return-error message like this:

550 5.7.1 If your message was wrongly rejected, please EMAIL help@ourdomain.com. A real person will get back to you within 8 hours to help. Your mail server is on the SpamCop blocking list (http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml).

If they read the message, they can easily mail help@ourdomain.com and I will help them get their message delivered successfully.

If anyone complains of difficulty in sending email to you, just email me and I will help.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

The content-based anti-spam filter I talk about is SimpleText Filter for the Mac-based EIMS mail server software we use. Here are the DNSbls I've installed:

1. BL.SPAMCOP.NET
2. BLACKHOLES.EASYNET.NL
3. DNSBL.NJABL.ORG

SpamCop also offers a cool spam reporting service. You sign up for an account (free or paid) and they give you a unique email address and Web site address from which you use to submit spam with. I submit spam using the email method and an AppleScript for Eudora makes it a slick one-step process. For each spam you submit, SpamCop emails you back providing you with a link to a Web page that shows you detailed technical analysis (example) of the spam you submitted (system uses DNS and whois lookups and I think some sort of fuzzy logic). At the bottom of that Web page, you have to then click the Submit button to send the report to the appropriate parties identified. Pretty nifty!

Stormy weather

No, I'm not being metaphorical here in Hong Kong... As I look outside from my office window it's pouring rain and very dark — gives you quite an eerie feeling! Although it's only 9:55am, the darkness makes it feel like it's 7pm. Amber Rainstorm and Thunderstorm Warnings are in effect.

http://www.underground.org.hk
http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/CHXX0049_f.html

Yikes!... Yahoo forecast (above link) shows we're expected to have thunderstorms for the next 4 days at least!

DVD-R burning on Mac OS X very unreliable

Setup:

• QPS external FireWire DVD-RW drive with Pioneer DVR-103 drive (an older version of QPS's DVD2i)
  
• PowerBook G4/500MHz/768MB/30GB
  
• Mac OS X 10.2.6
  
• Roxio Toast Titanium 5.2 software
  
• CharisMac Discribe 5.0.36 software

In the past, I had high failure rates with the above hardware but after having upgraded the Pioneer DVR-103's firmware, having successfully burned about 10 DVD-Rs on my Window 2000 PC using DVD X Copy Xpress, and using Imation-branded DVD-R media, I was hoping to be able to reliably backup the ton of digital photos that I have on my Mac onto DVD-Rs. Disappointingly, however, out of 10 tries using slightly different setups each time, only 2 were successful (80% failure rate!). Yes, just yesterday, 8 DVD-R discs were wasted (or turned into "coasters", as they say)!

After having read the DVD problems and fixes that many others reported on Macintouch.com, I made sure that I: (1) unticked the "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver preference pane; (2) selected no more than 3GB of data to backup; and (3) left the PowerBook alone with only the burning sofware running while burning. When using Toast, I tried burning with and without "Buffer Underrun Protection" and at 1x and 2x speeds — all settings combinations failed. Initially, I tried burning with data stored on an external 3.5" FireWire hard disk. I then tried burning with all the data stored on my PowerBook's internal hard disk with only the DVD burner connected on FireWire. I got 1 successful burn that way. But then subsequent tries that way were unsuccessful. I also tried different FireWire cables and different software (CharisMac's Discribe) but the various combinations didn't help.

What would happen is the DVD burner would simply stop burning (burn LED indicator would go off) and the software would "hang" anywhere between 8 to 45 minutes after starting the burn process. I guess I could try different media but then again, I successfully burnt 10 or so DVD-Rs on my PC using the same DVD burner and media. I might try burning the files using my PC with Nero burning software.

At this point, I'm extremely frustrated, yet am tempted to buy a new Pioneer DVR-105/A05 DVD-RW burner.

Been researching DV-to-DVD conversion and editing

On and off over the past few months I've been researching ways to transcode (convert) my DV tapes to DVD format (DV stream to MPEG-2 format) to better preserve our videos of Justin. I was hoping to find an external box that had some sort of hardware acceleration to do near-real time DV stream-to-MPEG-2 transcoding, had FireWire ports for connection to DV camera (input) and computer (output), and ideally, included software for both Macs and PCs. Guess what? I didn't find anything like that. I heard that I could buy a new Mac and do the transcoding of a 60-minute tape using iDVD in about 2-3 hours. An advantage of using a Mac would be the excellent software — iMovie and iDVD — for editing the video and then organizing and laying out the DVD with backgrounds, buttons, and menus. My colleague, Eric Lin in Taiwan, recommended CyberLink's PowerDirector Pro for doing the transcoding on the PC although he said it took about 5-6 hours on a 2GHz Pentium 4 box with 1GB SDRAM — slower than on the Mac. At present, I'm not prepared to buy a new Mac for this "project". My feeling is that right now, Apple's existing Power Mac line-up is over-priced and under-powered. I think they need to start using faster processors. I'm waiting for Macs to use the successor of the PowerPC G4 processor with speeds close to 2GHz. So thus far, I haven't transcoded any of my DV tapes!

I did find an article, Video Editing: PC or Mac?, that was quite interesting and insightful. It makes a strong case for going with a PC for video editing and also introduced some cool applications such as the Windows-only DVD X Copy. With DVD X Copy (and DVD X Copy Xpress) you can make perfect backups of your DVDs and I think it's the only product out in the market that does it.