ScreenFlow and Tascam US144

Today I wanted to record some demonstrations and I found the Telestream ScreenFlow application. It is a really competent recording and editing tool for recording from the screen, adding other types of media, text and much more.

I have a Tascam US144 Audio device. When trying to record from this device directly, it seems like the sample rate is not compatible with the expectations in ScreenFlow - it records, but it sounds like running a tape deck at 1/4 of the correct speed, and the quality sucks.

Found tips to use routing via Soundflower and Garageband to overcome the problem.

Do this:

• Start GB, add a track for voice, set it to record from the US144
• Turn on monitoring on the track (this is important, or you will be recording silience)
• Set GB output to Soundlower 2ch
• Set ScreenFlow input to Soundflower 2ch

You don't have to record anything in GB to make this work, it is enough that GB is on and monitoring the input. The cool thing is that ScreenFlow will now get the processed audio, so you can use reverb, compression and peak limiting - of if you want to go wild there is always the chipmunk effect :)

Although it sucks to not be able to record the audio directly I can at least use ScreenFlow to make my recordings (and I really like all the other features of this package).

Now to the joys of recording...

Experiences with Serna Free 4.1

Hi have been producing lots of DocBook text using the free Serna 4.1 editor.

Serna 4.1 is a great application - DocBook editing with WYSIWYM (... What You Mean) feedback which is much easier (and faster) to use than editing the raw XML and then generating the output to see what you are doing. Most of the time Serna does exactly what I want, and most of the time it is quite fast. Quite recently Serna decided to open source the free edition, and they are currently in the process of setting this up. Right now there is for instance no issue tracking system available, and what I am about to write about should really go into such a system (and it will as soon as they have set something up).

Anyway, here are some quite annoying things with Serna 4.1:

Paste pastes an old value (or nothing at all)

I think I have tracked this down to Serna not being able to paste clipboard content in certain formats. Pasting it in an intermediate container, and then changing it to a simpler text format helps. Using Paste as Text in Serna does not help - so something is probably wrong with how the clipboard contents gets parsed. Anyway - sometimes it is really difficult to tell which version got pasted. My solution now is to use a clipboard manager that can strip styling from the current content on the clipboard.

Frequent crashes.

Serna 4.1 crashes quite frequently, I have used it constantly for about three weeks now and there is at least one crash every day. Sometimes the user interface locks up, it is not possible to activate the window, and the menus does not appear. A Force Quit is the only option in these situations.

Confused "reload logic"

When explicitly asking Serna to reload a document it may trigger Serna’s automatic check for reload and it prompts with "the document has changed, do you want to download" - selecting "yes" in this case will cause Serna to crash (almost every time) - you get around the issue by instead selecting "ignore" (which works since you asked for a reload in the first place). My suspicion is that this happens because Serna closes the document to reload, and if the document that then (temporarily) becomes active includes a document that changed, the extra prompt will appear.

Pasting into ProgramListing and LiteralLayout drops end of line

Pasting text where line breaks should be preserved is a mystery. It sometimes work to use Serna’s "Edit as Text" and then pasting it there, but a lot of the time, the line ending are lost. I have a suspicion that this happens when there is something screwy going on with the clipboard format. Using Edit as Text does not work well when the text is XML (or contains special characters). Pasting it directly into the document editor has the advantage of getting transformation into > etc. The only way around this is to edit the examples first using Eclipse.

Irritated by Apache FOP footnote bug

I have managed to become quite productive with a combination of Serna for DocBook editing, and use of Apache FOP for producing PDF output. Except for some small snags that were easily worked around, there is a long standing Apache FOP bug for handling of footnotes in tables and lists - there simply is no easy workaround, so footnotes can't be used in these situations... (crap).

Starting to Use DocBook

I just recently started a documentation project and decided that DocBook was the lesser evil choice of:

• TeX / LaTeX - good formatting, but I want the text to be really reusable in help files, for the web, and for print. Maybe I am wrong, but it seemed backwards to go from typesetting to structured text.
• Wiki - really good for collaborative authoring, but markup gets horribly ugly after a while
• Word - everything in one big document - I guess some open XML format could be used so I can check files into SVN, but I would not want to be the one doing merging of a document that has been through word.
• Commercial Tools like FrameMaker (which is no longer available for Mac) - so I would both have to pay a lot for FrameMaker, and then have the dubious pleasure of running it on Windows.

Anyway, I found a good free tool called Serna that provides visual editing of DocBook in a sort of WYSIWYM (...What You Mean), which works really well.

I found several things to be really annoying, and it took a while to get used to how it works, but I managed to be quite productive (even if there is no spell check as you type).

In addition to using Serna's free distribution, I downloaded the latest XSLT stylesheets for DocBook. I also downloaded the latest Apache FOP (for formatting into PDF). Serna can invoke the FOP scripts, but does not include them in the distribution. Serna's scripts assume version 0.93, so I simply linked the 0.93 directory to the latest 0.95, and then thigns started to work.

It complained about hyphenation, and download of a jar from Offo (an apache project) was also required. I simply dropped the jar into the FOP lib directory to make it work.

Now I have two things to figure out:

• How to customize the style sheets - the output is almost useable as it is, but there are a couple of things I don't like.
• How the !#!#x@ to do cross ref linking between separate documents and still get generated text

The last time I undertook a major documentation project was 1992-1993. Earlier in 1989, I had to write the troff drivers myself as the printer was not supported, and I produced some finished 200 printed pages at the rate of about 2 (finished) pages a day. Working with 'vi' and troff is simply not a very productive environment.

In 1992 we started using Frame Maker, and I was delighted, it was simply the best piece of software I had used. With the release of FrameMaker 4 in 1993, I was very happy, and became very productive as I could do all the authoring, layout and graphics using a single tool. Not only did my productivity increase, the quality of the text increased as it was very fast to make illustrations inline with the text. Since pages were always rendered in full WYSIWYG it was possible to work at blazing speed. I produced some 2000 pages of documentation - about 1/3 was generated from program code (compare to java doc). When the project was all done, I calculated that I produced about 10 pages per day - but it is an unfair comparison as the earlier troff project had almost no graphics.

Today, I have spent about 4 days with DocBook, and I am struggling to learn Serna and the DocBook system, formatting etc. I have not yet started using graphics in my document. I seriously doubt that I will be able to create 10 quality pages per day including graphics.

Amazing how little has happened in 15 years - I am now back to hacking stylesheets to produce printed output... an exercise not very different from writing those troff drivers 20 years ago.

Finder -600 error - Mac OSx

Had some problems today:

• Safari hung when playing a youtube snippet in a Flash Player
• Had to force quit safari
• Safari was stuck in the dock (the blue light was still on), and when trying to click on it nothing happens - the menu shows "Application not responding" even when there is no Safari process running.

What I tried:

• Relaunching the Dock - did not help
• Relauncing Finder - now it is stuck too !
• Typing open -a Finder, and open -a Safari both result in an error that says "LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed error -600."
• From there things deteriorate
• I notice that Time Machine is taking a very long time to perform "finishing backup", and I try "stop backing up" - problem continues.
• I can't eject the backup drive since Finder will not start (sigh)

What solved the issue:

• Unplugging the USB cable to the backup drive !

Hopefully someone googling for poblems similar to what I had will find this OSx Leopard tip regarding "LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed error -600" and find it useful.

Terminal.app disappears - Charlessoft to the rescue

I just noticed that the Terminal.app disappeared from my OS x Leopard installation! Oh No! And this just as I was switching backup solution! (Damn). I googled, and found reports that claim that doing "something funny" like accidentally dragging Terminal out of the dock can cause it not only to be removed from the dock, but from Utilities as well ! HORROR !!

Well, I don't want to restore my entire machine - some 100 GB of stuff, and wondered if there was a way to select just Terminal.app from the installation CDs. And it turns out there is a free/shareware called Pacifist from Charlessoft that can pick individual files from .pkg files. Decided to give it a try.

I downloaded and installed the Pacifist package without problems, and started it up. It asks for a 20$ donation/fee to get rid of the nag that otherwise appears each time it is started, which I will donate if it helps me fix my problems ;)

There is an option in Pacifist to open Apple install disks which I used. After inserting install disk 1 and 2 a couple of times, a browser appeared with all of the packages. Used search to locate Terminal, a right click over the package said "Install to Default Location..." which I did, and it restored Terminal.app. The app data was apparently intact, because all my previously used locations where remembered.

Thanks Charlessoft, a check for 20$ is in the mail :)

Blush - I found the missing Terminal - it was a tiny icon on the desktop hidden behind the dock! f this is not what Pacifist did when it installed the new copy then I must have managed to drag it out of the dock and dropped it there, causing it to disappear. Searching for it did not help though...

NTFS on Mac OSx using Mac Fuse and NTFS 3G

When I switched over to using a Mac it was because my PC had crashed. Two of the disks survived though, and now I wanted to mount them on my mac to salvage some documents, and use of of the disks as a backup disk for my mac book pro.

I got an IceBox to mount the drive, and hooked it up using USB. This worked like a charm, and I could access my documents. But hey - the NTFS driver on Leopard does not support write! My idea was to first clean out all the garbage from the disk and then copy it to my Mac (the disk is larger than the internal one). Crap!

Googled and found the cure - use Mac Fuse, an umbrella for plugging in support for various file system types, and NTFS-3g, a driver for Mac Fuse that support both reading and writing.

I found this blog-post how to do this.

First download and install Mac Fuse, then download a NTFS-3G as instructed in this blog-post.

Again everything worked fine - Except - it failed to mount one of the partitions on my disk because apparently I did not shut down the NTFS properly before installing NTFS-3G (merde).

This was a bit tricky to fix. An error message appears with instructions, but they are not accurate. Basically what is needed is a mount with "-o force" to make it clear the "unclean shutdown".

Googled, and found the answer in this forum. To get rid of the problem you need to do two things:

Create the directory where the drive is to be mounted by opening a Terminal window and typing:

mkdir -p /Volumes/C-DRIVE

Where C-DIRVE is the name of the volume, and then forcing it to be mounted by typing (all on one line):

sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/C-DRIVE
-olocale=en_US.UTF-8,force,auto_xattr,defer_auth,defer_permissions,volname="C-DRIVE"

Where C-DRIVE is the name of the volume. and "/dev/disk1s1" is the device name as shown in the error message displayed by NTFS-3G.

In my case this produced an error, as apparently /Volumes/C-DRIVE was already inside an ntfs-3g mounted partition (there are two partitions on my drive), but it did at least tell me that it cleared the Log File.

After this, it worked find to just eject the drives, and plug in the USB cable - no need to run the commands again. But I guess they will come in handy when there is an unclean shutdown sometime in the future....

Got my iPhone 3G - Love it, but why the US number format?

Absolutely love the iPhone 3G - the design and user interface is amazing. Syncing it with contacts from p900 worked like a charm, downloaded my entire music library, it synced email, and did everything on its own! The entire process went very smooth.

But what did they do with phone number formatting?!! It has US style formatting even though the international setting is Swedish. It is almost impossible to decipher the numbers - did I enter the correct number or not?

08 123 45 67 becomes 081 345 567 (sigh).

Telia's iPhone 3G pages says nothing about support - but refers to apple's pages. Apple on the other hand, refers to Telia for repair. I guess the packaging for Sweden is done by Apple - so this must be their problem. I reported this as "a bug" on apple's feedback pages.... wonder what will happen next...

Love everything about the device except:

• US phone number formatting of Swedish numbers
• Why does it take so damned long to sync when I just synced 5 minutes ago and nothing has changed in contacts (syncing contacts takes for ever - or at least that is what iTunes says...)?
• Would like to see the photos of my contacts in the Favourites list
• Battery life is a bit short...

Migrating from Sony Ericsson P900 to iPhone 3G

My iPhone 16G Black finally arrived after first having received two 8 GB iPhones (could it be because some idiot thought that two 8GB iPhones = one 16GB?).

Anyway, before jumping into all the fun with the iPhone, I needed to sync my old faithful Sony Ericsson P900. I did not really want to install the Sony Ericsson software for this, and I was very pleased when I found that Mac OS x Leopard ISync supports the device!

First hurdle - when scanning for devices in iSync having marked that I wanted to scan for "phones" produced no result, but scanning for "Any" worked, and the mac and p900 started talking ok.

iSync installs an iSync agent on the phone, and first attempt failed, because instructions where not 100% clear. You are supposed to "open" the message to install it - not just accept it with "ok". After a second install it worked ok.

Starting iSync - it quickly gets to 33% done receiving changes from P900, but then it is stuck there for a long time (several minutes), and I thought something was wrong, googled for possible solutions, and while reading some articles, iSync popped up a report with what it wanted to sync!

Worked just fine, and it even got the images for the contacts. Neat.

Heading out to pick up my iPhone... I hope I am going to be happy with it - I really liked the way the P900 was manageable with just one hand using the the wheel on the side.

Testing Publishing using Ecto offline publishing tool

This is a test of using the Ecto offline publishing tool. I found it quite tedious to write longer articles using the blogger web interface.

So here is a small test:

Dependency Icon

Dependent Icon

And a larger screen short of Buckminster showing embedded OPML and the new Component Outline View.

Works quite well.

OS X man pages GUI

Found a useful man page user interface for OS X called ManOpen - you find it here:  http://www.clindberg.org/projects/ManOpen.html

How to get a WMV video on to a DVD on the Mac

This was really giving me problems at first. I installed Flip4Mac (free edition) to be able to play WMV files using the QuickTime Player that came with Leopard - and it worked just fine. Trying to import the WMW file into iDVD however caused iDVD to hang (perpetual multicoloured rotating ball).  I then upgraded my QuickTime to a QuickTimePro to enable being able to convert the video to QuickTime mov format. This worked as a charm, and it was possible to use this file in the iDVD project.  Only flaw is that there is big letters telling everyone that the video was converted with the free edition of Flip4Mac.  sigh So, I spent an additional 29 USD to get rid of it, and I could now create the iDVD project. I am sure there is some free version somewhere, but I was in a hurry. If anyone has any info about free versions to perform the same conversion I would be glad to hear from you.

Oh man... Thunderbird and Lightning - not an ideal combination either....

Hm, this really sucks. Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 and Lightning 0.7 and GCalDeamon isn't exactly ideal. In the couple of hours I have tried it, Thunderbird managed to list one mail item twice while missing another item in the same inbox (IMAP). When deleting the double entry, the hidden email disappeared! The multiple tags features does not work. When leaving the mailbox (for any other view), only one of the tags remain (maybe this caused the earlier problem). Lightning, and GCalDeamon seems to have different views of the correct time in my timezone - DST screwup somewhere perhaps? An email viewed in Thunderbird that contained an .ICS attachment had no functionality associated - when clicking it, nohing at all happened. (This really sucks). I am actually better of with a functioning iCal which is integrated with Leopard mail, and having a read only view of my google calendar (and going to google online for editing). Crap. I was hoping for Thunderbird and Lightning + google to provide one set up for mail, usenet news, rss, and calendar.

Working Calendar setup on OS X leopard

After much searching and looking at alternatives, I gave up trying to integrate Leopard iCal with Google Calendar. It worked fine to just read the data, but not update the calendar. Maybe a few releases away then google may support CalDav, or someone interested enough in the combination may come up with a solution... There is a GCalDeamon http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage12.html written in java that works well with google calendar, but the Leopard version of iCal uses a different format than the Tiger version, so this particular combination does not work :(. So, I switched to Thunderbird and Lightning (Sunbird) instead, and there it was quite straight forward to install and integrate with google. You have to enter some UNIX commands when doing so, but it is quite simple. Happy for now, but the configuration to also suport offline use is a bit more complicated, and something I will continue working on... Now I also have to figure out how to start the GCalDeamon as part of the OS x start up. (I am sure that is easy, but I have not done this before)

Just found a much better version of Open Office for Mac that runs nativly (i.e. does not require X11). You find NeoOffice here http://www.neooffice.org Tip, you need to move OpenOffice to the Trash to get file associations to pick NeoOffice. I guess  Open Office can be reinstalled if you don't like NeoOffice.

Installing pgAdminIII for OS X was also easy even if the right windows did not pop up automatically - I had to go look for the pgadmin "disk" in the finder.  The pgAdminIII is available from http://www.postgresql.org/

Continued setting up the environment on my mac. Time to get a database - Installing postgreSQL was quite simple once I found this ready made installer for OS X at http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/postgresql/  The instructions worked just fine.

The blogger dashboard widget has some quirks. Try typing a lot of text - it expands nicely, but the text starts to go off screen after a while - and WTF! There is no scoll - so you can't get to the "save as draft" and "publish post" buttons at the bottom... Guess it is intended for shorter messages only....

Calendar I was very happy when I found out that there was a way to synchronize the iCal with google calendar - finally a good solution with calendar + sync I though. After spending hours on downloading, configuring and trying to figure out what was wrong, I realize that the sync software dow not work on Leopard because of a change in the file format of iCal (it is now in a database). Bummer! Ended up at least showing the google calendar, in iCal, but have not decided what to do yet for the final solution. Skype No problems, only issue being that the version lags behind skype for windows. Calculator I am used to having a hex/bin calculator and also scientific functions Found several calculators for the dashboard, and settled on two different - Calculate 1.1.0 that handles scientific calculations and support variables (neat) in a rolling window, and Hex Calculator Widget version 1.5. (There are plenty of semi useless calculators in the dashboard widget listing at apple btw).

I have just converted from Windows to Mac! Having lots of fun setting up my laptop with cool gadgets and useful software. Thought I share the experience as I go along. Firtst, I installed the Blogger dashboard gadget and this is the first post that I have made using this cool tool. Really conventient! Mail Had no problems connecting to my various mail accounts. Worked like a charm. Had some confiuration to do to make the mail client behave like a wanted. Chat Now this was problematic. I have chat accounts in AIM, ICQ, YM, GoogleTalk, and Skype and also want to chat on IRC. Now tell me which client I should use? Turns out that iChat does google talk, jabber, and the mac specific chat only. I spent quite some time figuring out if Jabber was useful. Jabber acts as a gateway and supports multiple protocols. The setting up is a bit messy (a different client (like psi) is needed to connect to jabber servers to configure subscriptions, and I never got it to work with iChat. Then I read somewhere, that iChat perhaps is not the best Jabber client, and to fully make use of Jabber other clients were suggested. Duh ! The reason for setting up jabber was that I really wanted to try to use the software that comes with the mac as much as possible. Ended up doing the following instead: - downloaded Adium with covers all the different types of chat except IRC which is kind of funny as Adium provides support via IRC :) Anyway, Adium recomended Coloquy as an IRC client. - Downloaded and set up Coloquy - which works very well after some intitial problems with connecting with my nick name (I was already logged in from another computer and this caused some trouble).