Nicholas Booth Dot Com

After a long period, since Grace moved into her present bedroom, so probably about four years, I’ve finally got my CCTV system running again. This is based in a software package called ZoneMinder – and it allows you to toe up a bunch of video cameras to a PC and do all the monitoring and movement detecting you want – with alerts, time-stamps and the ability to manage and view from any net connected browser.
I have an eight port input card, which cost a fortune originally, and as I no longer run a power hungry file server, I fitted it into a Mini-ITX box. It’s running Ubuntu 8.04 as that’s about the most recent thing that will run (without recompiling a kernel) in the C3 mobo as the Via processor doesn’t have the mov instruction. Probably unsurprisingly, it runs quite well despite the lower specified board in use for this application. I’ve run a length of CAT5 from the point in the loft where the original co-ax cables terminated into the new study and connected a four way BNC/CAT5 balun at each end. This seems to work well enough for monitoring purposes.

I’m collecting four feeds (the fifth, an IP camera, makes the system reboot, so it’s not presently included) – one of which is a nest-cam mounted in a box on the side of the shed. At last, a blue tit has started using the box – as yet only at night to sleep – and this is probably because we have remounted it in a better position, now north facing, on the new shed. The picture accompanying this post is a montage of the feeds, including nightime Front Garden and Back Garden views and of the little bird snoozing this evening. Grace has named him(?) Albert.

• Looking for a spare SIM for the GSM modem. Where have I put you to keep you safe? #
• Unfortunate 4×4 had skidded on ice and ended up on its side near Gadbook this morning. Happens at the same place everytime. #
• Must have missed the flood at Betchworth – was OK yestrday PM, this morning clear as well, but signs were up and a car abandoned by bridge. #
• Looking for a mini server to take 4 video cam feeds that will output over IP network WITHOUT needing IE to view the streams. #
• Coming to grief with GSM modem and memory of AT commands. #
• Daughter has started sending me SMS messages from SWMBO's mobile "Let's get G a present" and other mystery phrases #
• A blue-tit finally takes up residence in the box on the side of our shed. Still from NestCam: http://twitpic.com/177b0v "Having a snooze". #

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A couple of Linux related activities in the first part of this week. Firstly, I’ve got my web->SMS page back up and working, so I can now send SMS messages from anywhere with web access. Hardly novel, these days, but when I first built a system like this for the bank I worked at then, it was one of those little occasions where Linux wormed its way into an organisation. That must have been in about 1997 or ‘98 I guess. (It was also about the same time I created the first effective search engine for the organisation using HTDig on Linux as well.)

All went well re-creating the set-up, except I wanted to use a GSM modem that actually had an FXO port on so I could tie it up to my Asterisk PABX as well for voice calls direct into a mobile network. Despite much fiddling, the Psitek modem was so old as to have an antiquated subset of the AT command set and it was too much effort to make it work SMSTools (although, having the source, I did recompile it a few times with some commands adjusted) – and which, by he way, is now at version 3.x under a new maintainer. Once I used the more modern (only just, though!) reliable Falcom GSM modem it worked a treat.

I’ve also updated and added to my entries in the Linux Counter, having been reminded of it by a thread in the Surrey Linux User Group mailing list. First registered there in about 2002.

Lastly, I’ve transplanted my eight port video card (only four ports of it though) into one of the Mini-ITX workstations, so perhaps later this week I’ll see if I can resurrect ZoneMinder and get the NestCam back in operation soon.

• WFH today. Citrix being a bit of a whatsit. Despite that., it's very peaceful and the view more relaxing than south London. #
• O2 to send a new b/b router as existing one has been restarting every few mins. all last night. At least OK now except set at slower speed. #
• Attempting to be diplomatic. #
• Playing with piped gzipping across ssh and running out of space again. #
• "This copy of windows is not genuine" Utter tosh! #
• Managed to get my #Chumby to display the 24hr power graph image from #Pachube every few minutes. #
• Off home now. Hope the river at Betchworth is still flooding the road! #
• Water subsided since this morning so need to wait for more rain #
• Off to look for water. #

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Much, well a little, excitement on the way to work this morning – the River Mole at Betchworth had flooded the road, both sides of the bridge, so the Landy was the ideal vehicle to drive through. Sadly, though, it was only about a foot deep – so no problems at all, and no other cars seemed to be having any problems.

The water had subsided by the time I came home in the evening – but the weather forecast suggests that there might be more rain on Sunday so perhaps there will be another chance after that. Hope so!

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Working from home today, so I needed to set up Citrix on my Linux desktop – which I’ve just rebuilt from a selection of parts from other hosts lying around in the study (including replacing the HDD which had a SMART uptime of more than 5 years – it used to be in a a server).

Anyway, after downloading the ICA client tgz file and failing miserably to get that to work, I looked around for more information. As with the Mac (which was a problem when the snow happened) there’s a newer bit of client software, so down the wire that came, and as an RPM should have been easy to install. A quick rpm -ivh did the trick. First step was then to disable a couple of font files which stopped it launching at all (/usr/lib/fonts/cjkuni-uming/* were the culprits). Logging in with the web interface to the office systems, click on the terminal services icon – and wham – a message saying I’d not chosen to install the AddTrust External CA root certificate.

Well – fortunately that existed in the Firefox setup – so a quick export from FF and copy in to the ICA certs folder and It Worked!

It’s still pretty awful – I can’t seem to adjust the screen size for the client window, so I’m working in a small (scaled down) 1024×768 sort of screen. At least, though, I can actually work.

Posted from GScribble.

Update: Inorder to use the wfmgr.bin utility to manage the citrix onnections I also had to symlink /usr/lib/openmotif/libXm.so.4 into /usr/lib (although there’s probably a better way of doing it). Now the session manager works I seem to have more control of window sizes. Phew!

• An evening spent swapping video cards & bits between various old PCs so I can end up with something that works well enough for my desk. #
• "A disk may be failing: disk has many bad sectors". Time to stop now. #
• At last, a combination of parts which might be reliable enough to run my new Fedora 12 desktop. #
• Got a call from a Market Research co. who said they were my wife's bank (but would not say which one). 01233648505 Kay Smith who are you? #
• Hundreds of alarms on a major site seems to be a scary false alert! #
• Reading this helps decide what's for supper tonight: http://tinyurl.com/ygd4y5t #
• Well, that's all the stuff for supper prepared and ready to go. Now I deserve a beer from the homebrew calling me from the shed. #

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• Chasing paperwork for things people want me to do for them. #
• Looks like more regex fun coming up – this time for estatesgazette.com #
• Minor MySQL panic as replication stopped after a slave restart. Fixed now, so I can go home! #
• I must learn to find out if a problem is actually a genuine problem before trying to fix it especially when reported as such by end users. #
• Just back from spending a very fascinating 45 mins wandering in a chinese supermarket. Wonderful stuff everywhere. Quite hungry now. #
• Bought jasmine tea, lychees and Fortune Cookies (and some for the nursery). Tea and cookies delicious, not tried the lychees yet! #
• IT Architects asking how many of our blogs are brochureware but their definition was a bit wooly. More than I would have guessed. #
• Arduino kit has arrived from oomlout. Very nicely presented indeed. Surprised how small the Arduino itself is. #
• LED attached to Arduino: It blinks (just the way I tell it to!) #
• An opportinity just arose to rescue a damsel in distress. Of course, I took it. #
• Bloke in front of me earlier this evening in Tesco bought £500 of Euro lottery tickets. I hope I win. #

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Today saw the long awaited arrival of an Arduino starter kit. Ordered from oomlout a couple of days ago it’s arrived in good time, and made a great impression.
The kit itself is neat, tidy and very well presented in a plastic compartment box – so no cause for untidiness or losing anything – together with a great little guide to getting started. The guide, as well as some handy introductory material about the kit, programming and electronic components. After that each page takes you through constructing a small experiment – working up in complexity and using all the components in the kit.
I chose to install the IDE on my eee 1000H netbook rather than my desktop as it had a much more up to date Ubuntu installation which met the requirements without any further hassle.

I started with the first example – to make a LED blink – and discovered how case sensitive the sketch seems to be – but it was easy to work out where I was wrong from the way it debugged during the compile and highlighted the offending line.
A very quick upload later and the LED was blinking merrily away. So easy to change the mark/space ratio by altering the delays in the loop and uploading again. How easy is that?
I see much time to be spent playing and learning how to get the best from this. Very satsifying indeed.

• Have ordered an arduino starter kit from oomlout. Too many ideas. #
• Received second time around wedding invite from an old pal. Have suitable gap in diary. That's Good. #
• is getting confused trying to load up and work a dispenser for brown pacel tape. #
• Struggling with win s/ware Typing Instructor for Kids 4 which has no sound (and should) & won't register DLLs properly at install. Grrrr. #

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