LOAD

No, I'm not reverting to the commodore 64. LOAD stands for 'Linux Open Administration Days' and is a community event targetted at sysadmins.

This being quite obvious, as I have a talk on the schedule. It'll be a repeat of my 'Debian Secrets' talk that I've also done at FOSDEM, in Essen, and in Buenos Aires. Except it will be better than it was at FOSDEM.

I'll be there the whole of saturday. Not sure yet about Sunday.

Events on Planet Grep

Since its initial incarnation, Planet Grep has carried the feed of FOSDEM, the Open Source event in Belgium.

Since I'm doing this, other people have asked me to carry the feed of their particular open source-event, too. In the past, I've been reluctant to do so, going so far as to consider removing the FOSDEM feed again.

The reason for this is that I want Planet Grep to be a community site; reading Planet Grep should be an easy way to figure out what lives in the Belgian FLOSS community. This becomes harder if it becomes too much of an advertisement site for event organizers rather than a user blog website.

But yesterday, I realized that community-organized events are part of the community, too, and thus it shouldn't be too strange to carry those as well. So I've decided that feeds from event organizers are welcome on Planet Grep, too, provided the event:

• Is a community-event. "Community" is defined as "non-profit, and entrance is free". Sponsorship is okay, but it shouldn't be an event hosted by a particular company to market its newest bit of software, even if it's a piece of software under a FLOSS license.
• Is about FLOSS, and FLOSS alone. Not "we're doing a Database-event, and two of our fifteen speakers are from FLOSS databases".
• Will happen in Belgium. It's okay if it's a travelling event that just happens to be in Belgium for this year, but we won't carry T-DOSE, for example (even if/when that event becomes popular in Belgium).

I've been considering to require that events should be about Open Source in general rather than just about one particular piece of software, but I won't add that restriction for now. I might revisit that bit in the future, however.

As another event that would fit the above set of guidelines, we'll be adding Loadays to Planet Grep shortly.

LOAD is over...

...and I think it went well. As someone who does some sysadmin-for-hire work, it does fit me quite well. I did my "Debian Secrets" talk again, which had moderate success: some people had already seen it at FOSDEM--which is normal, considering how the room was crowded back then--so they missed it this time around. Those who had seen it seemed to be fairly interested in what I had to say, so that's good.

Of course, while there, it made sense to pick up a few other talks, which I did; and I learned some interesting things in the process. I mostly liked the GOsa² one, but there were some other interesting ones, too.

Had I not been in Deurne for the concert of the choir on Saturday evening, I would even have won a book. But apparently the rules said that you couldn't win books if you weren't there...

All in all, I think it was a rather successful event; and if there's a repeat next year, I'll certainly attend again.

Eek.

I like watching movies. So much so, that I have way too many DVDs. Not as much as some other people out there, but still enough.

I used to buy my DVDs mostly at the local Extra Zone shop, but as that company has gone bankrupt, I now need to walk about twice as far, which doesn't happen as often. I guess it's a good thing for my budget, but anyway. I liked the shop, I liked the people, and I hate having to go elsewhere now.

As the Extra Zone shop was located on the Bruul, the major shopping street in Mechelen, the location where they were was obviously rented out to some other parlor very soon. Now, as a result, every time I pass there I cringe. Not because I think back of the old shop—businesses go bankrupt every day, there's nothing special in itself about that—but because of the ads for the new shop.

Spelling is hard, apparently.

DPL vote

The DPL vote is over. I did not win, apparently. Let me start off by thanking the other candidates for running, and congratulating Stefano for winning.

My own results aren't too bad; I beat 'none of the above' by a comfortable margin of almost 10 to 1, and ended up defeating Charles Plessy by a slightly smaller margin. My margin to NOTA was far better than during the previous DPL election that I participated in, though I did end up defeating more than half of the other candidates back then, which I didn't this time around. All in all, not enough to win, but enough to conclude that I might have a chance some other time. Margarita and Stefano were just better candidates this time around.

My own vote was:

[ 2 ] Stefano Zacchiroli
[ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
[ 4 ] Charles Plessy
[ 2 ] Margarita Manterola
[ 3 ] NOTA

If you run, you have to be serious about running, and support yourself. So I did. After that, I wasn't sure that Stefano would do a better job than Margarita (or vice versa), so I put them at the same spot. Finally, I became convinced during campaigning that Charles has a lot to learn still about what lives in the Debian community, and I am of the opinion that feeling the community is a vital requirement for a DPL; so that ruled him out.

So why did I not win? Obviously because there were better candidates in the election, but the real question is: why is that the case? What did I do, or what did other candidates do, that meant they fared better than I? One possibility was given on IRC:

< svuorela> ol: and "I'm running because no other runs" is also
not a good way to get votes ...

Which is fair enough; but I did run with the intention of winning, and I did try to make that clear. I'm hoping that worked out okay, which would imply that there could be other reasons. I'd like to know about those. So if you voted, and did not place me on the top spot, I'd very much appreciate learning about your motivations for doing so—especially so if you were one of the 39 people who would rather have redone the vote than see me win. Comments on this blog post are welcome, or by private e-mail if you'd rather not see them made public.

Re: Kerberos and LDAP

Petter Reinholdsen asks about Kerberos and LDAP.

While I'm not sure about an implementation that does just the ACLs in LDAP, there are several implementations that support having the kerberos principals stored in LDAP (i.e., heimdal has supported it for ages, and MIT Kerberos implements it since fairly recently, too). This allows not only for easy replication of the principals to a secondary KDC; it also allows for using LDAP ACLs to decide who gets to create and maintain users.

In addition, there's supposed to be an OpenLDAP overlay that allows for updating the Samba and/or heimdal hashes in an LDAP directory when the OpenLDAP 'change password' extended operation is used, thereby making it somewhat easier to keep passwords in sync.

I should note that I've never tried any of the above, though.

Touching up a video with Cinelerra

I found myself with a problem: trying to linearly edit a movie clip with a non-linear editor isn't very simple, nor is it meant to be.

Case at hand: I have about 1 hour and 40 minutes of film material that was recorded with dvswitch, and which is 90% fine; but given what we wish to do with it, we really wish to remove the errors from the recording—things like failed transitions, rogue camera movements, and so on. This is why we recorded the individual video streams on tape too, so that we could indeed do some retouching afterwards.

Cinelerra, however, is not really made for that. If you want to create a transition, you need to have two segments of clips that are stuck together on the timeline, and the transition is then applied to the border between the two. You can create multiple video tracks, but you cannot cut from one track to another; you really have to add a clip to the timeline. Doing that has obvious issues if you have multiple video streams that were recorded on the same time and that can be time-synced on multiple tracks. You would prefer to just select one track or the other on a certain point in time, but cinelerra just doesn't do that.

So the workflow that I found is the following:

Add all video streams to the time line, each on a separate track. Make sure the to-be-touched-up stream is on top; when multiple tracks are in use, and the are not faded to 50% or so, cinelerra will only show the top stream in the final rendition.

Synchronize the streams: first, create a rough alignment by moving them with the mouse. Then, press arrow-down until you can see the streams on a frame-by-frame basis. Now for each of your camera streams, do the following:

1. In the 'main' stream, search a section that was filmed by the camera which we are trying to align.
2. Hit 'l' to create a label
3. Search for the exact same frame in the camera stream. It may help to disable playback for the 'main' stream temporarily to visually verify that the frame is the same in the compositor window.
4. Move the cursor to that frame, and create another label.
5. If the streams are indeed desynced, then one of the tracks will lead, and the other will follow. If the leading track is the 'main' track, arm the main track and any tracks that you have already synced before, and make sure to remember the audio tracks. If, on the other hand, this is the camera track, then only arm that camera track. At any rate, make sure to disarm the track(s) that are following.
6. Use the control and arrow keys to select the first label. Use control, shift, and the arrow keys to select the section up to the second label.
7. At the bottom right of the program window, you can see three entry boxes with time indexes. The first is the time index to your first label; the third the time index to your second label; an in between those, the second is the length of the interval from the first label to the second label. Set the contents of the first box to all-zeroes, to move the selection to the beginning of the time line; then press tab (to move to the second entry box) and enter (to confirm that you wish to create a selection of that length at the beginning of the timeline).
8. Press Shift-Space to insert silence at the location of the selection. This will move the armed tracks to the right, and not touch the not armed tracks.
9. If you did everything right, the two tracks should now be aligned. Move the cursor to the second label, and verify that this is true by disabling 'play' for the main track and any tracks in between the main track and the track you're syncing. The frame in the compositor window should not change if you re-enable the main track. If it does, use 'z' for undo, remove your labels and try again.

Once your video tracks are aligned, you need one final video track that comes all the way on top. This is an empty, 'override' track. Anything you put in this track will override the main track. This way, you do not have to cut from the main track to another camera; instead, you just copy from a camera track and paste on the override track.

It is, of course, possible to paste onto the main track, but that has the disadvantage that you cannot easily undo such edits after a 'save' operation. Using a separate 'override' track does allow that.

To copy from one track to another track without moving in time, use the following method:

1. Select the region where you wish to select another camera.
2. Arm the camera track that you wish to copy from, and make sure not to arm any other track.
3. Hit 'c' to copy the clip at that point.
4. Disarm the camera track, and arm the 'override' track
5. Without moving or removing the selection, hit 'v' to paste onto the override track.

All this may be basic knowledge for people who are more flexed in nonlinear editors than me; but I couldn't find this procedure on the Internet, so I thought I'd put it out there so that the next person who tries this doesn't have to try for days on end to come up with this, as I had to do.

Yanina Wickmayer, heroine of the Belgian fed cup team

Last weekend, I went to the Grenslandhallen in Hasselt, to see Belgium compete against Estonia in a Fed Cup tie of the World Group playoffs. The winner of this tie would gain a seat in the top-tier World Group next year, which opens the possibility of winning this competition.

The Belgian team was the strongest possible one, with all four best Belgian female tennis players—Yanina Wickmayer, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Kirsten Flipkens. On paper, the team should not have had any problems beating the Estonian team.

Unfortunately, Justine fractured her pinky finger during practice on wednesday; and while it did not make it impossible for her to play, it did reduce her fitness somewhat, which meant that on Saturday, Kim and Yanina had to defend the Belgian colors. They did and won, but then Kim injured some muscle in her foot, which made it hard for her to walk on Sunday, let alone play.

With only Justine, Yanina, and Kirsten available, coach Appelmans chose to put Justine on the field. Though she made a valiant effort, she unfortunately did not manage to beat an unleashed Kaia Kanepi, who—it must be said—played a terrific match. As such, it fell on Yanina to bring home the tie in the fourth singles rubber against Maret Ani. Being a bit nervous in the start of the first set, she made some unnecessary errors; but after a few games, she came through and started to play much better. Unfortunately, by that time the score was already at 5-1. Yanina won her first service game of the match to bring it to 5-2, but it wasn't enough, and Ani won the first set somewhat easily.

She couldn't put anything on the table against a storming Wickmayer, however, and after two more sets, the outcome of the match—and, by extension, the tie—was clear: a win for Belgium.

I can't help but note that Wickmayer has been a great player for the Belgian fed cup team these past few years, however. Since her first Fed Cup participation in 2007, she holds what is, given her ranking at the time, a rather impressive 9-4 win-loss record in Fed Cup. If it wasn't for Wickmayer, the Belgian team would not be where it is now. It was Wickmayer who won her three matches against Canada, one as part of a doubles team, to prevent demotion from world group II to the Europe/Africa zone back in 2009, with a 3-2 score. It was Wickmayer who won the crucial third rubber against higher-ranked Radwanska in February to beat Poland, with the latter even holding the home field advantage. And it's now been Wickmayer who won two of the three rubbers against Estonia that were needed to win the tie.

So Congrats, Yanina!

It was a dark and stormy night.

The moon shone through the clouds. The sun didn't. The lightning did. Or, well, didn't.

The beer flew wildly, and changed the food into something of the past. Discussions arose about lasers, ceramic knifes, and stormy nights. Promises were made that were only kept by some, including me, but not including him.

Much was said that mattered little. Little was said that should've been forgotten. Yet much was.

He would've been proud.