Recently in Technology Category

Only 12 humans have walked on the Moon between 1969-1972.
We're coming up on 40 years since a human has walked on the Moon.
We're just now talking about putting another person on the moon in 2022.
That's 50 years after the last human walked on the moon.

Alabama has become a growing powerhouse in automobile manufacturing in recent years, picking up a Mercedes Benz factory in Tuscaloosa, a Honda factory in Lincoln, and Hyundai built their first state-side factory just south of Montgomery a couple years ago. Without delving deep into politics, low operational costs, largely non-union labor, good river, rail, and over-the-road transportation access, low cost of living, and massive incentive packages have made Alabama (and the southern United States) a very attractive place to build a factory.

Since I first wrote this article in May 2007, many things are changing in the automotive industry in the South:

• Honda recently announced that it will be building an new exhaust system factory to supply it's main Alabama plant.
  
• Hyundai has added a second engine plant (doubling their engine assembly footprint) in Montgomery, AL.
  
• Hyundai's sister company Kia, has built a
  very large plant just across the AL-GA border in West Point, Georgia. As of 3/2011 they haven't started tours yet, but it looks like they are planning to.
  
• Volkswagen is building their first US factory in Chattanooga, TN where they will be producing the 2012 Passat, amongst other models.
  
• Toyota will be operating a factory near Tupelo, Mississippi to build Corollas (3rd best selling car currently and highest selling car model of all time.)

A great feature of these factories (along with their local and regional economic impact) is that most are available for the public to tour them. I've gathered the relevant information about each tour for the factories in Alabama. (updated 03/2011)

	Mercedes-Benz	Hyundai	Honda
Location	Vance (Tuscaloosa)	Montgomery	Lincoln (Anniston)
Cost	$5/head	Free	Free
Reservation required	Yes, 10 day minimum lead time	Yes	Yes
Reservation Method	Phone	Online/Phone	Online
Minimum Age	12	First graders with parent Third graders with school group. minimum age: 6	12
Approximate Tour Length	1 hour 30 minutes	1 hour 30 minutes	1 hour 20 minutes
Tour Schedule	(currently on hiatus, call or check link below.)	Monday, Wednesday, Friday 9:30am, 12:30pm, 2:00pm Thursdays one tour at 6:30 pm	Tuesday and Thursday 9am and 1pm
Photography	No	No	No
Gift shop	Yes	Yes	?
Phone	(888) 286-8762 (205) 507-2252	334-387-8019	(None Provided)
Link	Tour Info	Tour Info	Tour Info

This information was gleaned from the manufacturers' websites at the time I wrote this entry. Please verify any information by contacting the factories at their website or by phone before embarking on your trip. You should wear shoes with closed toes and heels as well as long pants (some tours don't allow shorts, dresses, skirts.)

To give you an idea the size of these operations, the Hyundai plant in Montgomery produces in excess of 1,000 vehicles per day (sometimes several hundred more per day depending on demand.)

These tours are great for kids (see "Minimum Age") and adults alike and offer a portal into modern automobile manufacturing processes. The Mercedes-Benz plant has stopped tours while they produce the first examples of they new model year vehicles. I will including relevant information for that factory when it is available.

So you fell for Sandisk's marketing line about "supporting Linux." The full truth is they are Linux-tolerant and their device behaves well with Linux. Expect that you'll be doing a lot of the leg work on your own. I've pulled together resources I've found and created to put all the pieces in one place so you can at least start where I've left off.

Preparing your Fuze
First, update your firmware to the latest version and be sure you set your Fuze to connect in MSC mode.
From Fuze menu: Settings -> System Settings -> USB Mode -> MSC
(everytime you upgrade your Fuze you'll have to re-set the USB Mode.)

Re-labeling your Fuze
The VFAT label of your Fuze controls the name of the mountpoint when your Fuze is automounted at. It will be mounted in /media/VFAT_LABELNAME/ (/media/SANSA FUZE/ by default.) You can re-label the VFAT filesystem of your Fuze to eliminate the space character (an inconvenience), give your Fuze a more meaningful name, or give your Fuze a differentiating name if you use multiple Fuzes.

1. You need to have the 'mtools' package installed and configure a .mtoolsrc file in your home directory.
   sudo apt-get install mtools

2. run 'mount' and note the /dev/ name of your mounted Fuze (default will look something like "/dev/sdc on /media/SANSA FUZE type vfat") in this case "/dev/sdc" is the value to note, your device name may vary.

3. Create a .mtoolsrc file in your home directory:
   gedit .mtoolsrc

   with the following contents:
   drive f: file="/dev/sdc"
   mtools_skip_check=1
   (please substitute your device name from step 2 above for "/dev/sdc" above when you type it in...)

4. Then run the 'mlabel' command as root to re-label your Fuze:
   sudo mlabel f:

   You'll be prompted to create a new label, choose one without spaces, perhaps choose a unique label for if you use multiple Fuzes.
   

Content Management
I've configured scripts to replicate all (MSC) files from the Fuze (and microSD card on-board the Fuze) to my home directory on my primary computer. This creates a complete backup of all content on the Fuze (and microSD) and allows me to manage files either on the Fuze or to the local directory in my home directory. I can add songs into the directory on the computer when the Fuze is absent (left at work, etc.) and re-sync the files onto the Fuze when it is back at home...

This is done using a set of simple scripts calling the Unix rsync command to mirror two sets of files. It is very efficient and only transfers files that have changed, so even a large dataset transfers quickly if you've only changed a couple files. I

Example rsync script:
script goes here in the near future

Music
Not a lot to note here, the Fuze supports a wide range of music files from MP3, AAC, FLAC, OGG and seems to be fairly tolerant (I haven't seen any "Unsupported Media Format" errors for music files.)

Podcasts
Choose your favorite Podcatcher and point it at your /

FM Radio

Voice Recording

Slot Radio
I haven't sprung for a Slot Radio card yet (and I don't want to displace my microSDHC card) but I'm wondering what sort of DRM has been implemented on them. The marketing materials say you get 1,000 songs, but they play in a random (or at least randomized) order, you can skip forward but not backwards. Apparently you can add more media to the Slot Radio card if it has free space remaining.

Images
The Fuze will downsize your JPGs if you, but there's not much point in putting large .JPG files on your Fuze just to eat up storage. I prefer resizing the images appropriately before putting them on the Fuze. video4fuze is the easiest option for properly resizing images for display on the Fuze. (Note this is the same tool as the "Video" section below.)

Video
The Fuze is very strict about video. Deviating from the standard will result in "Unsupported Media Format".

The easiest general solution for Video currently is video4fuze which provides you a easy GUI interface to video transcoding (using mencoder). You can combine this tool with the rsync technique mentioned above to transcode videos offline, then sync onto your Fuze later.

Miscellaneous Useful Specs
From the owner's manual:
Screen resolution: 220x176

Notes:
3:2 aspect ratio = 219x146 or 171x114
4:3 aspect ratio = 220x165 or 176x132
16:9 aspect ratio = 208x117 or 176x99

Shortfalls:
There doesn't seem to be anyway to sort or arrange files using subdirectories (especially photos and videos.) You can create subdirectories, but the Fuze flattens the filespace out and sorts them all alphabetically.

I'm considering some different approaches to organizing my MP3s to make them easier to browse through. Sansa has a lot of room for improvement in this area.

Unless you've got the correct packages installed, you'll likely get an error with some missing dependencies. You can find the missing packages at:

libicu38
libboost-filesystem1.34.1
libboost-regex1.34.1
libboost-thread1.34.1
libboost-iostreams1.34.1
libboost-signals1.34.1
libboost-date-time1.34.1

Click the above links, choose your architecture, choose a mirror, then download and open with GDebi.

Then install the Amazon MP3 downloader as normal.

This is an on-going compilation of the computers I've owned over the years. I'm keeping this for nostalgia and to share one day with my kids. It will be updated as things change.

Year	Model	Processor	Memory	Storage	Details	Price
??	Odyssey
December 1982	Coleco Adam	Zilog Z80 3.58Mhz	80KB	256Kb cassette tapes	Bought right before the video game crash of 1983.	~$300
1987	IBM PS/2 Model 50	Intel 286 10Mhz	1MB	20MB		~$3,600
	IBM PC Convertible	Intel 80C88 4.7Mhz	512KB	2x 720KB 3.5" floppy drives	Monochrome screen, drive 1 was for OS, drive 2 for app	~$800 (used)
1992	Generic PC	Intel 486DX 33Mhz	16MB	200MB
Employers provided for all my computer needs for this timeframe
1997	PowerSpec 6237	Intel Celeron1.7Ghz (O/C to 2.0Ghz)	256MB (->768MB)	40GB	Windows XP	~$500
1998	PowerSpec 6238	Intel Celeron1.8Ghz (O/C to 2.1Ghz)	256MB (->512MB)	40GB	Fedora Core 2,3,4,5,6	~$450
2007	Dell PowerEdge 1800	2x Intel Xeon 2.8Ghz	1GB(->5GB)	1.5TB+ RAID 1	Fedora Core 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12, Ubuntu Server	~$1150
2008	Dell Inspiron 1420N Laptop	Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz	1GB (->4GB)	120GB	14.1" screen, Ubuntu 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10	~$1100
2010	Dell Inspiron 1750 Laptop	Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 @ 2.53GHz/1066 Mhz FSB	4GB	500GB	17.3" screen, Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04	~$950

A friend's child recently watched me fighting with FBI & Interpol warning screens, distributor logos, and trailers while trying to play a DVD when she asked me why I didn't

Press Stop-Stop-Play

I looked at them funny (as I'm prone to do), tried it and now I use it every time. It will start playing the main feature without all the junk they packed in before it. Depending on the player, you may want to wait a second between presses. One player I have says "Pre-Stop" on the first Stop, "Stop" on the second Stop, then "Seq. Play" on the Play. Don't know if this always works, but it works on almost every DVD I've tried.

My kids won't know what life was like without the Internet, before computers were in every home. They'll never know what a modem is or the wonderful (yet grating) sounds it would make when you dialed a BBS. They won't know the joy of getting online 1200bps (and all the free time you had when you waited for downloads to complete.) Even their perspective on the Internet will be different. They won't know about Mosaic browser or text-based (only) browsing with lynx. They'll never know Prodigy or Compuserve. AOL is just a website. They won't know that Yahoo was a directory of links, or that Altavista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler were once prosperous search engines with a large market share. They won't know that there were years of Internet without Google at all...

They won't know of life before the convenience of microwave ovens.

They will think (rightfully so) that everyone has a phone and they are almost exclusively cordless or completely wireless. They won't know that at one time all phones were wired into the wall, that long distance calls were expensive and infrequently used. They will never know what a party line or a rotary dial phone was. They won't realize that phones didn't used to have cameras, games, music, and full QWERTY keyboards on them.

They won't know that people used to shave with just one blade.

Lightweight 27-speed mountain bikes with disc brakes and super travel full-suspension will be mainstream and affordable. They won't know the relatively low tech, heavy, inefficient bikes we had to ride. They won't realize that mountain biking was started in the mid-1970s.

My kids will never know what a caboose is for. They will only see them in train museums (and so we take them.)

Film photography will be some long-forgotten technique that people used to use before digital photography. They won't know what camera film looks like. They'll never know the growing pains of digital photography from low resolution to slow, delay-prone cameras. Everything will be high resolution, automatic, and instantaneous. It seems normal to them that you can store thousands of photographs on a memory card smaller than your thumbnail. Digital photo frames will seem normal to them. Static real photos printed and tucked into frames will seem pointless.

They'll think ketchup has always poured easily from a flexible, upside-down bottle.

They'll never know what a reel-to-reel, an eight-track, a vinyl record, a Mini-disc, or a cassette tape is. Even CDs are going to the wayside as things gradually swing towards completely digital music delivery, played on the all-pervasive MP3 player. Walkman and Discman will be largely historical and unfamiliar to them. They won't ever know about VCRs and Laserdisc players. They'll have always known DVD, Blu-Ray, and DVR. They'll think televisions were always flat and thin. HDTV will be the norm for what they are used to viewing. Their music will be all-digital and all multi-channel. They will think that films were always projected off perfect digital copies with high-resolution digital projectors. They won't know the magic of the imperfections of a real film projector.

My kids won't know what a floppy disc was (8", 5.25", or 3.5") Wow! They won't know DOS (and I'm doing all I can to make it so they won't have to use Windows.) They won't know about daisy wheel printers, slow and noisy dot-matrix printers or fan-fold paper.

My kids will probably never know much measured in terms of 'megabytes' and will likely be more familiar with the concept of 'terabytes' rather than with 'gigabytes'.

I'm excited about the rapidly changing world they've been born into, but I'm sad they won't know the world as I do. I'll try to teach them what I can and maybe if I'm lucky they'll help me see their world through their eyes someday.

Wired recently published an article containing 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know.

I was just staring at an old 8-inch floppy disk I keep around sitting on my desk, contemplating how storage capacities and densities have increased since it was introduced on the market in 1971.

The outer dimensions of the disk is 200x200x1mm or 40,000 cubic millimeters. It holds 79.7KiB of data or 81613 bytes. That works out to 2.04 bytes per cubic millimeter.

For comparison, I've chosen the modern-era microSDHC card. It has dimensions of 15x11x1mm or 165 cubic millimeters. It holds up to 16GiB of data or 17,179,869,184 bytes. Quick math turns up 104120419 bytes (104MiB) per cubic millimeter.

In 38 years the storage density of removable media has increased by a factor of over 51 million. I wish I knew what a 8-inch floppy disk cost when it was introduced to the market to do some cost/capacity comparisons.

SanDisk has announced they expect a 128GiB Micro SDHC card to be available in 2011.

My hardware:

• Canon Rebel XTi (uses Compact Flash (CF) memory)
• Inland USB multi-format SD/CF card reader ($12 at Micro Center)
• Dell PowerEdge 1800 running Fedora Core 11

My goal is to start out with files like this on the Compact Flash card::

[CF Card]/dcim/102canon/img_9999.CR2
[CF Card]/dcim/102canon/img_9999.JPG
[CF Card]/dcim/103canon/img_0000.cr2
[CF Card]/dcim/103canon/img_0000.jpg

run the script, and end up with the same files, transferred to the server and renamed like this:

[server photo repository]/2009/200902/20090215/img_1029999.cr2
[server photo repository]/2009/200902/20090215/img_1029999.jpg
[server photo repository]/2009/200902/20090215/img_1030000.cr2
[server photo repository]/2009/200902/20090215/img_1030000.jpg

Removal of files from CF card is performed manually by the Format function on the camera, once I'm sure all the files have survived the trip from CF to hard drive.

The (re)naming convention assures unique file names for photos coming from my camera until I get to 10,000,000 photos. At my current rate of taking pictures, that would be several thousand years. It also allows me to easily manage my photos by year, month, or day (and eventually decade) as I choose.

I've written a script to automatically copy and rename my files from the CF card to an appropriate directory on the server when it is run.

#!/bin/ksh
startdir=`pwd`
cfsourcedir="/mnt/usb"

# make sure to use your device name here, check output of 'dmesg' \
# on your server with card reader connected.
cfdeviceid="/dev/sdc1"
canondir="${cfsourcedir}/dcim"
datepath="/photos/raw/`/bin/date +%Y/%Y%m/%Y%m%d`"

sudo umount $cfsourcedir

sudo mount $cfdeviceid $cfsourcedir
result=$?;

if [ $result -eq 0 ];then

   if [ -d $datepath ]; then
      echo "Directory $datepath exists"
   else
      mkdir $datepath
   fi
   #echo "canondir: $canondir"
   #echo "datepath: $datepath"

   rsync -az $canondir/* $datepath --stats --progress | \
   tee -a /tmp/loadfromcf.out
   cd $datepath
   for i in `find -type d |sed 's/^.\///g' |grep -v ^\.$`
   do
      cd $i
      directorynumber=`echo $i | sed 's/CANON//g' |sed 's/canon//g'`
      for j in `ls -1 *`
      do 
         k=`echo $j |sed "s/img_/img_$directorynumber/g" |\
   sed 's/IMG_/IMG_${directorynumber}/g' |sed 's/JPG/jpg/g' |sed 's/CR2/cr2/g'`
         mv $j ../$k
         chown speed:speed ../$k
         chmod 0544 ../$k
      done
      cd ..
      rmdir $i 
   done
fi

sudo umount /mnt/usb

if [[ $result = 0 ]];then
   grep -i Number /tmp/loadfromcf.out | tail -2
   pwd
fi

I've also contemplated modifying this script so it would automatically (cron) check for a CF card in the reader, then automatically start the copying process. If I make this modification, I'll post it here as well.

I'll be adding code/comments as I improve this script.

I've been working with variations of Unix for a long time now and thought I'd jot down some of my favorite tips and tricks. They are mostly OS/distribution/shell/language independent (unless I indicate otherwise...)

1. Get rid of blank lines in a file
   grep . inputfile > outputfile
   This matches (and thus prints) only lines that contain some text, not blank (empty) lines.


2. comm
   Many people never cross paths with the comm command, but it is very useful. I works similarly to diff, but outputs the contents of two compared files into three columns. The first column is content only in the first file, second column is content only in the second file, and third column is content that is in both files (matches between the two files.) While this may not seem useful at first, you can select which columns to output, so if you only want to know what is in both file1 and file 2 (column 2) you'd suppress columns 1 and 2, by running:
   comm -12 file1 file2
   Don't forget that your input files must be sorted.


3. paste
   Systems administrators frequently use the cut command to parse files, but many people I run into have never used the paste command. The paste command will concatenate two files line by line (as opposed to file by file, like cat.)


4. less instead of more
   This is not available on all Unix-based OSes, but the less command works very similar to more, but will let you move through a file forwards and backwards more easily. Want to jump to the end of the file, type Shift-G Depending on the version of less you are running, it will provide context highlighting when you search for a pattern.


5. Jump to vi from more
   While paging through a file in more, press "v" to jump to editting the file in vi at the current position in the file.


6. Jump to a line number when editing a file with vi
   vi +linenumber filename
   will open up the file with the cursor automatically moved down to the specified line. This is useful when you get an error that indicates "syntax error on line 2047." You can jump straight to the problem without fumbling around.


7. Invisible characters become visible
   Sometimes you'll end up with carriage returns on each line in a file originally created on a DOS/Windows system, or filenames with spaces, tab, or other control characters in them, but you can't see them typically.
   The cat command provides three useful options -v, -e, and -t that will let you understand these invisible characters
   -v (displays non-printing characters)
-e (prints a "$" at the end of each line to indicate a NL character)
-t (prints "^I" for each Tab in the file)
cat -vet filename |more


8. Remove DOS ^M from ends of lines
   The "^M" characters are visible when editing in vi but here are two approaches to remove the characters.
sed 's/<Ctrl-V><Ctrl-M>//g' -i filename
   or in vi: <Esc>:%s/<Ctrl-V><Ctrl-M>//g

If you ever do end up with me interviewing you, I'll likely work one or two of these into the discussion to explore your level of knowledge about Unix. If you need more information, remember: man pages are your friend.