A few weeks ago I heard about the new Canon 550D camera which was going to hit the market. This photocamera allows you to record movies in full HD resolution using your normal photography lenses. After seeingsomerecordings with this camera I was completely astonished by the filming quality. It looks so professional. I immediately ordered the camera and within a few days I received it. Unfortunately I don’t have that much time yet to experiment with it, but I managed to record from behind glass (at home) some hares in the pasture. But it is at 500 mm without a tripod, so it proves that it can record, but the quality is not representative.
Another issue is that my computer cannot manage to play the HD files, so I also need to buy a faster computer. Which probably will be required if I want to really start editing movies, my laptop is not fast enough.
This was a hard one to figure out, but I managed to get my Conceptronic CH3SNAS up and running with Mediatomb (DLNA-server) and my Samsung UE32B7000 LED television. The problem was that my television didn’t want to recognize my media files and came up with a message like “unknown format”. To setup the NAS as a DLNA-server – be sure to disable the built-in DLNA server via the admin panel – first install funplug, a good tutorial I used can be found here. The latest funplug has Mediatomb already integrated, so no worries about that.
Now comes the important thing, find your Mediatomb config.xml file. In my case it was located at /ffp/var/mediatomb/config.xml. To edit the file, open it with vi:
In the config file search for the variable named protocolInfo and change it from no to yes:
<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>
Enable the custom-http-headers section by removing the <!– and –> tags and enter the following lines, which are essential for the Samsung television to recognize your media files:
Somehow the Samsung LED tv will only play files if they are mapped as .MPEG files, even though they can be divx/mpeg/whatever. Not sure why/how, but it seems to be the solution.
Restart Mediatomb, click here for information about daemons. Be sure to clear your Mediatomb database and reindex all media files, this can be done via the Mediatomb web interface which is by default accessible via the IP of your NAS-device, port 49152. When you’ve finished all the steps, your Samsung LED television should play most of your media files flawlessly from your CH3SNAS via DLNA.
Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting plugin for Firefox called AutoPager. Normally I don’t pay too much attention to all those plugins because I am happy with what I have – if you don’t know what you miss … – and the only plugins I used were blockers or webdevelopment-related ones.
But the AutoPager plugin is a really handy one. It automatically tries to detect when a site has multiple pages, like Google for example. Normally when you have reached the end of a page you click on a link to go to the next page, this goes on and on. With the AutoPager plugin you only have to scroll down to the bottom of your page and it automatically adds the next page below your current page. So the only thing you now have to do is just scroll down and the upcoming pages will all appear below each other. So less clicking.
Since June this year I started at work developing in the open source web application framework Grails . In the past I developed some websites in object oriented PHP in combination with templates in Smarty. Gained experience in handling quite common things like forms/JS, uploads, usermanagement, simple fancy stuff, user friendly URL’s via mod_rewrite et cetera. Actually in my last project (WTC) everything was very nice and clean, no more than 50 lines of code for handling a page, everything beneath was done by OO-classes interfacing with the database. But still it was not a real framework and I have never used one in PHP, although there are plenty of PHP frameworks out there. I think my expertise was more on the building of stand-alone applications with Java Swing/AWT.
But, everything has changed for now. I started building a new prototype of the data support platform for my work in Grails, which is a concatenation of Groovy on Rails. Groovy being a superset of Java – 100% compatible with normal Java, so easily integrate existing libraries – allowed me to pick up things quite fast. Furthermore what I mentioned about my personal PHP experience in the above paragraph, is already covered completely by the Grails framework. Everything works nicely via the Model-View-Controller concept. Beneath the hood Hibernate and Spring are doing their work for persistency/database stuff. The only thing you have to do is write your domain classes which describe your database tables, constraints, fields and relations. Then with a single command you can generate the whole application with CRUD-interface, which means the controllers and views for your domains are generated. To start your webapplication you only have to type ‘grails run-app’ and that’s it. One final thing to mention is that there are many plugins available to give your application a lot of nice features and that Netbeans has a plugin to support Grails.
Of course most effort is then going into customizing your views and controllers and testing. But I am quite convinced that for the upcoming time Grails has become my favorite webdevelopment environment. I am currently even busy to port all existing WTC code to Grails and within a short time it was already up and running. I’d recommend anyone to give it a look/try.
