I have recently released domdash.com an application to help those that have a growing domain portfolio keep on top of their status. This was a personal itch that I needed to scratch with a domain acquisition almost every couple of months and a new project being released almost every quarter, things were getting a little hard to keep atop of.

One of my issues was that I have domains that sit on a mixture of hosts and domain name providers, so there was not one central tool to let me get information about my portfolio.

I paid particular attention to simplicity and usability when creating this application, constantly asking “does this feature add value”? With that mentality I dropped a couple of features which was hard discarding the time spent working on them but worth it for streamlining the end result. I intend on adding or refining features as I feel they fit the purpose of the application.

The most exciting aspect of this project was working with CodeIgniter 2, an ORM system and moving to a dedicated and affordable slice host Linode who are cheaper than the better known Slicehost and seemed to have a pretty good reputation. So far Linode have been great, they have comprehensive documentation on getting applications and services configured on your distribution and this was how easy it was to get up and running:

http://twitter.com/kulor/status/12903252621

just set up an Ubuntu LAMP stack from scratch on my lunch break on linode.com (including signup)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this application, if you have feedback, feel free to click on the feedback link on domdash.com.

If you are looking for a free solution to slow down 60 frames per second (FPS) AKA 60p footage to get a slow motion effect on your Mac, you can download and install the freeware video de-interlacer JSE Deinterlacer. This will allow you to export your video at a slower framerate like 24FPS through stretching the film to be double length and use the additional frames shot to fill the time, kind of like stretching out  a coiled spring. Fast frame rates are now available from the Canon 7d and 550d cameras with signs that many more cameras follow suit by offering this feature, thus the reason to offer a no-cost option of how to handle the footage.

Step one: Import

Specify the film you wish to process, thats it, use the default values for everything else.

Step Two: Project settings

This is the main part we need to care about. Ensure you have Deinterlace selected from the options and Both fields and Double movie duration checked. Normal height and Adaptive will be selected by default, this is what we want.

Step 3: Output

We specify your desired output video location and set the settings for the movie that is exported. Select the export option and choose Quicktime Movie.

Step 4: Movie Settings

If you are explicitly looking for slowed speed sound select the sound checkbox and your audio channel will be exported, else just unselect this. Click settings to choose more specific output options.

Step 5: Video Settings

Choose MPEG-4 Video as your compression, choose a frame rate of 24 – 30 using keyframes every 24 frames. The other settings are just for how high you want quality to be.

Step 6: Finishing up

Now you can return back to the output screen and select Ok, this will start the conversion process off that could take some time depending on the size of your source video. Once you have converted your video, you can take it into your choice of video editing suites such as iMovie.

I have talked in the past about how to get a fully working time lapse system on a Mac using a webcam and some command line scripting. That was great but could do with some tweaks to get a more elegant solution which I attempted to reach here.

I wanted to get more use out of my digital SLR camera so I set my camera up on a tripod, connected it up to an intervalometer (my mac) and gained a bunch of files that needed to be processed and turned into a movie. I created the following script to turn my images into a movie.

This script will run on any unix like environment with a bash shell and uses ffmpeg so make sure you have it installed on your *nix machine.

1. Download images2movie
2. Change the permissions to allow the script to be executed chmod a+x images2movie
3. Copy file to /usr/bin/ sudo cp images2movie /usr/bin/
4. Run by images2movie <directory> 30

If it all goes well, you should see the following output:

Movie generated: timelapse.mov

Some more work could be done to resize images in advance to ensure that ffmpeg doesn’t choke on the image sizes but I will save that for another time.

I created a terminal theme with a retro look of soft amber tones. I find this really nice to work with and have been using for a couple of months now. Download or fork it on Github.

To use: download the amber.terminal file to your computer, open up Terminal.app, go to the preferences, settings tab, then under the list of themes, click on the settings button and click import, now choose the amber.terminal file.

Shell scripts are a simple way of completing (repetitive) tasks on the command line, much like many programming languages will be used. You will see ~ something — ignore the ‘~’ this is to signify that it is a command entered onto the command line itself.

Writing the code

~ vi helloworld.sh

#!/bin/bash
# My first script
MESSAGE="Hello World!"
echo $MESSAGE

Here we have just entered a really simple example of using variables and returning the value.

Setting the permissions

We need to set permission to allow the script to be executed, this is needed to be done on all unix environments for something to be run

~ chmod +x helloworld.sh

Running the script

~ sh helloworld.sh

Hello World!

Now you should have the response “Hello World!” from running this script.

Going more advanced

Lets explore some of the basic options we have to play with in the shell by example.

Loop test

~ vi looptest.sh

#!/bin/bash
# My first loop
FILETYPES="xml html css js"
for TYPE in $FILETYPES
    do
        echo 'Looking for' $TYPE 'files'
        find . -name '*'$TYPE
    done

Now set the correct permissions and run the script

~ chmod +x looptest.sh
~ sh looptest.sh

Looking for xml files
./somefile.xml
Looking for html files
./somefile.html
Looking for css files
./somefile.css
Looking for js files
./somefile.js

If conditional test

~ vi iftest.sh

#!/bin/bash
# If the file does not exist, make it
FILE='test'
if [ ! -f $FILE ] ; then
    mkdir -p $FILE
fi
ls -las $FILE

Now set the correct permissions and run the script

~ chmod +x iftest.sh
~ sh iftest.sh

Hopefully this is enough to help you on your way to making more use of the powers of Unix…

Further reading

Bash Manual
Useful bash one liner scripts

Not too long ago dealing with my personal and work emails was turning into a full time job. Having countless subscriptions to mailing lists, trying to handle critical projects, trying to keep on top of communication regarding relocating to another country, it was all getting rather stupid. This is my solution to the hassle of email communication — project:inbox zero.

• Set up an archive folder
• Move all emails in your inbox older than a month to the archive folder
• Decide on the remaining emails in your inbox which need actioning, keep these ones there, move the others to the archive folder
• Now you have reached an inbox state that is maintainable and you will continue to maintain
• Remove all automatic redirection filters to folders. Any email should enter your inbox and you decide if it gets deleted or filed in that folder
• For new incoming messages be quick to archive messages that may be useful later but not actionable or delete messages with no later action/reference
• Your goal now is to action off all the items in your inbox at all times to get your inbox message count to read the majestic ’0′ figure
• Close you email client when you need to get on with work, else it will act as a distraction. Read your emails in the morning, lunch and 30 minutes before you go home, if anyone has something urgent they are likely to phone or instant message you.

I recently attended my old university — the University of Greenwich to view the final year Multimedia & Internet Technology students’ presentations of  what they had been up to over the course of their studies. I had been in this same position 4 years ago, however standing observing it all came rushing back like it was yesterday; the sea of emotions experienced at that time, some of excitement to be finished, some of uncertainty and panic as to what I would go on and do with my life.

Anyway, the work was ok, the presentations ok, the engagement for the most part was ok but everyone seemed to be playing it safe. This was their pitch, the chance for them to be hired or to make the right impression to people that could make a difference. Some tips I would and did put forward to students looking to secure a job in the web industry.

1. Have a website
   1. You want to work in the digital world then you need a digital presence, surprising how many students don’t have one.
   2. Have your best work shown and presented well, definitely quality over quantity here.
   3. Make sure you have a working email address. If you have just set up an account on a new site, check it works.
   4. Use LinkedIn or a similar service to list your qualifications
2. Have a career direction
   1. If you like film, animation and web then consider a role that encompasses them all – Advertising, online gaming, etc.
   2. It helps when speaking to people to tell them the job title your hoping to secure, an employer would be able to think if they need that position filled in their company a lot easier than having to correlate your skill set and make a job title themselves.
3. Have a speciality/selling point
   1. If you find handling web services or making websites accessible a doddle and others seem to struggle you are likely to have a specialist skill which bodes well in securing a job at the CV and interview stage. Be prepared to demonstrate/discuss in detail these attributes of yours.
4. Be proud and believe in yourself
   1. If you do not believe in yourself then no one else will. You are well educated, created work to be proud of, so believe in yourself. Dress smart, hold your head high, engage in conversation as opposed to taking the back seat, its all about confidence you portray.
   2. It’s likely you will not pass interviews or CV picking processes. For this have a thick skin, being safe in the knowledge that you will be fine, and that you will find better opportunities out there.
5. Give me your business card
   1. It’s great if you have one but make sure you hand it to me, not to say force but offer at least.

Me on a time lapse from James Broad on Vimeo.

This video is what you can create (that or something similar) by following these steps on your Mac.

Step 1

Download & install a command line webcam capture utility, we will be using isightcapture
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18598
Open the DMG and extract the binary to /usr/bin/
sudo cp /Volumes/isightcapture1_1/isightcapture /usr/bin/

Step 2

Set up new directory to work in.
Lets use ~/captures/
cd ~
mkdir captures
mkdir captures/scripts
mkdir captures/series

Step 3

Make script to take photo and save it
cd ~/captures/scripts
vi captureme.sh

Insert the contents into the file:

CAPTURE="isightcapture -t jpg"
cd $HOME/captures
D1=`date +%y%m%d/%H`
D2=`date +%y%m%d.%H%M%S`

# If the date directory does not exist, create it
if [ ! -d $D1 ] ; then
mkdir -p $D1
fi

# Construct the filename and path and capture a pic
FN="$D1/$D2.jpg"
$CAPTURE $FN

# Make a symlinked image of the last photo taken
if [ -h 'last.jpg' ] ; then
rm last.jpg
fi
ln -s $FN last.jpg

Save and quit (:wq)

To be able to run this script we need to allow execution permission on this file.

chmod a+x captureme.sh

Step 4

Put your capture script on cron
crontab -e

Write the contents:

* * * * * ~/captures/scripts/captureme.sh

Step 5

Install a utility to convert a series of images to a movie. We will be using ffmpeg
cd /tmp/
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

We need to install ffmpeg to our machine, this process is going to basically compile the code. Hopefully nothing will go wrong for you here, if it does though, take a look on http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.net/articles/ffmpeg-howto.html

./configure --enable-shared --disable-mmx
sudo make
sudo make install

Step 5

Make script to grab photos and run them through ffmpeg
mkdir ~/captures/videos/
cd ~/captures/scripts
vi make_complete_sequence.sh

Write the contents to the file:

COUNTER=0;
rm ~/captures/series/*.jpg
for i in `find ~/captures -name '*.jpg'` ;
do
#Write the filename to be friendly with ffmpeg's odd filename input
FILENAME=`printf '%03d.jpg' $COUNTER`
cp $i ~/captures/series/$FILENAME
let COUNTER=COUNTER+1;
done
nice ffmpeg -r 20 -vcodec copy  -i ~/captures/series/%3d.jpg ~/captures/videos/timelapse_complete.mov

Again setting the permissions to be able to run the script and then run it to generate a movie based on the images taken so far.

chmod a+x make_complete_sequence.sh
./make_complete_sequence.sh

Step 6

View the finished result
Browse in finder to your home directory > captures/videos and watch the result.

So the problem is that you want to eject a disk/DMG/mount on your Mac and it says it is still in use “The disk “x” is in use and could not be ejected.”. Here is the solution using your command line (Terminal.app) to be able to safely eject the mount.

lsof +D /Volumes/{VolumeName}/

This will give you some results like:

COMMAND   PID  USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
HoggingApp 69668 myuser  txt    REG   14,5  3791772   27 /Volumes/{VolumeName}/App.app/Contents/MacOS/App

Hopefully you will recognise the application that is using that resource (in this example HoggingApp). If you can close this application you should be able to eject your mount now.

If closing the application did not work for some reason you could try the following command using the PID found from the above result(s)

kill 69668

Or If running a kill has a permissions based issue just add ‘sudo‘ to the beginning of the line (assuming you have sudo access).

Is YQL relevant to you? Well if you do any work with web services then definitely, it allows you to pull in multiple data sources, sort, transform, query your data points, to name but a few selling points. It will still be relevant to you if you are familiar with the SQL syntax, as it is actually really fun to play with using the console, especially if you take the provided example queries as a jump off point to tinker with. To demonstrate how easy we can make things, take a look at this example of a search query using this code.

YQL is now becoming even more powerful with a feature called ‘Open Tables’ which in essence instructs YQL on how to construct a web service URL. The power of this is that it enables you to interject values from other web service calls via sub selects. Some examples of Open Table definitions and example queries are being constructed at github.com/spullara/yql-tables.

During my talk I demonstrated a lot of the PHP code used to consume the results of the YQL calls which can be found over on my GitHub repository or you can browse my example scripts at http://carbonsilk.com/yql_php/.

To make development in PHP straightforward I used CodeIgniter for it’s MVC strengths and ease of installation. The beauty of using the framework with YQL and OAuth libraries doing the hard work behind the scenes is that you can write a few simple lines like the following to retrieve instant results:

// Controller method to allow us to access http://someurl.tld/yql_php/search_wikipedia/
function search_wikipedia($term = 'open')
{
    echo '<pre>';
    $yql_query = 'select * from xml where
            url="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=' . $term . '&format=xml"
            and itemPath = "SearchSuggestion.Section.Item"';
    print_r($this->yql_lib->query($yql_query));
}

The above code is the same query as could be found if you view in the provided console or view in my final project Search Wikipedia through YQL.

All I can say from doing this talk and looking deep into YQL is that there is a huge potential at our disposal here.