I wrote, that I prepared a CUE file for the “ASOT Tune of the Year 2004″ mix from Armin van Buuren. I updated the file with corrected time stamps. The minutes and seconds were shifted a column to the right and the times for the last 4 tracks were a little bit off.

I hope, this dying of Trance/Dance radio shows doesn’t continue. I just read it here. A State Of Trance is discontinued on ID&T. According to the message, there might be some hope, that Armin continues with something in the similar direction. After the Partyservice@einslive, this is the second show, I see dying after my relatively show life in the Trance universe.

Oh well, on the other hand there has been Talla 2xlc, who started Technoclub@Sunshine Live in September 2004.

Update: Apparently there is a correction on tranceaddict, which says, that AvB’s show is down to one hour and won’t be called ASOT. This is simply too short. You can’t really get into the mood within a hour.

Update to the update: A State of Trance is apparently moving to The Radio Department. (Found within the tranceaddict thread.)

I’ve now scanned my first larger batch of films, overall 362 images from 12 films. Here are some thoughts and experiences along the way.

First, you need to decide about the format, in which you intend to archive the scans. If you choose maximum quality, which would be 16bit per colour channel and TIFF format. A typical scan would then be 84 MB in size on your disk, so you wouldn’t get 10 scans on to a single CD-RW. Next format would be 8bit per colour channel, which in turn reduces the size of a scan to about 42 MB. You can save some additional Megabytes if you convert the scans to PNG format, but this must be done afterwards since the Minolta software only allows to save in TIFF, JPG and BMP. Since I’ve been using 200 and 400 ASA films, I thought, that this would be a waste of disk space. So I decided to save the scans in JPG format with a low compression rate. This makes a typical scan about 12 MB in size and allows me to put all of the 362 scans on to a single DVD.

To get all the 362 images scanned took about a week mostly in the evenings. The scan of one image takes about 3 minutes. However my hardware needs to be taken under consideration. I did the scanning on an older DURON 1200MHz system with USB 1.1. Since all automatic optimization options of the scan software were activated, there a fair amount of computation involved for each scan. And, if you consider, that a scan takes up the space of about 42 MB, it is clear, that the scan time can be decreased by using a faster processor and USB 2.0.

The scan results are very good in my opinion. The various automatic image improvement options do a very good job, so there’s rarely the need to post process the scans to remove some colour tint. I was particulary impressed how good the scans from pictures taken by this Olympus point’n shot camera came out. I bought the camera some time in 1988 during a USA trip.

I also tried to operate the scanner under Linux with VueScan to take advantage of USB 2.0 on my main computer, but it didn’t work. I might try it another time under Windows XP on my old DURON system. There’s a review, which gives it pretty much thumbs up.

And before I burn the images on to a DVD I’m creating a nice HTML album with JAlbum to allow a easy perusal with a browser.

That the number of years, I’ve reached today.

In my company on the department host I lost authentication connectivity to the Windows domain controller sometime during the year change for Apache web authentication purposes. I was using the mod_auth_samba to allow authentication against the domain controller. This was working ok more or less. If the configured domain controller was unavailable, the module would core dump however. And also the group management for this module was somehow fragile. And after I came back after the Christmas and New Years holidays, I couldn’t get authentication to work again. Maybe some NTLMv1 vs. NTLMv2 issue.

Anyway, on my Linux PC, I tried to prototype a scheme, which I then would install on the production system. And because the production system still runs an older SuSE Linux 8.1, I needed to stay with Apache 1.3. If I’ve wanted to move to Apache 2.0 I would have needed to update to a recent SuSE version. At this time I did have time for such an undertaking.

This also caused some problems along the way. I started with to protect a location with Basic Authentication backed by a Berkeley Database (mod_auth_db.so). I couldn’t this simple setup to work. After a long search I found, that it was a problem with differing DB version. My Gentoo PC has DB 3.x, 4.0 and 4.1 installed. Apache 1.3 is explicitly build with DB 4.0. To setup the password and group files I used dbmmanage, which is a Perl program and part of an Apache 1.3 installation. However the Perl DB_File module, which dbmmanage utilizes is of course linked against the latest and greatest, which is 4.1. And Apache 1.3 linked with DB 4.0 can’t use 4.1 database file. So I removed DB 4.1 and reinstalled the Perl DB_File module now linked with DB 4.0. After recreating the password and group files my basic setup worked as expected.

Next I tried mod_auth_ldap to authenticate against the Windows Active Directory, but unfortunately it doesn’t work (or I couldn’t get it to work). Sometime ago I tried Apache 2.0 with the integrated mod_auth_ldap module and this worked immediately. But not Apache 1.3.

On to mod_auth_pam in connection with pam_ldap. This setup worked. After making the required changes for pam_ldap in /etc/ldap.conf or /etc/openldap/ldap.conf depending on your Linux distribution and changing the file /etc/pam.d/httpd to use the pam_ldap.so shared library, I could successfully authenticate against the Active Directory. I could also integrate with the AuthDBGroupFile directive, so that authenticated users could be authorized depending on the membership of a particular group. As a side note, which wasn’t immediately obvious to me from reading the documentation and I learned only by consulting the mod_auth_ldap source code, that mod_auth_pam reads the /etc/group file. This means, that a possible authentication scheme might be done through the system files. But that also means, that any user to be authenticated must be existing in the /etc/passwd file.

So I moved this setup to the production system. From first glance it really appeared to work, but the Apache error log showed frequent segmentation faults. I couldn’t really isolate the problem, but it definitely it had something to do with authentication through mod_auth_ldap. So, again a no go.

In the end I settled for the Perl AuthenLDAP module (since the production system also has mod_perl installed). This worked flawlessly direct from the beginning. Integration with AuthDBGroupFile was also working fine. So this is it.

The setup has still problems though since the passwords go unencrypted over the wire. In future another change might be necessary possibly with the integration of SSL and Samba 3.0.

Downloading pictures from my Canon Powershot G3 via USB reliably crashes my Linux box. I’ve seen this with every 2.6 kernel I’ve tried up to date. One some very rare occasions it didn’t crash, but I didn’t have a solid clue about a possible cause.

Now, I think I’ve found something. I think the crash is due to some interaction between the Video4Linux driver software (for a Hauppauge Primio FM BT878 based card) and the USB driver. I manually unloaded all Video4Linux related driver modules and retried to download some picture from the digicam and, surprise, no crash. There was only a message in /var/log/messages about “…serial8250: too much work for IRQ 11″. So, my crash might be due to some problem with IRQ sharing between USB and Video4Linux and that the system does not crash once the Video4Linux driver modules are unloaded. Not really nice, but this is now a thing that can be worked around.