January 2011

There were 62 posts published in January 2011 (this is page 1 of 7).

Villa Real at Seaboard Station

Villa Real in Feb. 2009, courtesy of Steve Rhoade

A few weeks ago, the family and I stopped in to our favorite Chinese restaurant, Peace Street China, for some take-out dinner. As our order was being prepared, Travis and I wandered over to look at the trains in the CSX rail yard.

As we wandered up to the edge of the yard I saw that the owners of the private rail cars were there, working to restore them. It was the first time since I saw the cars appear almost a decade ago that I’d seen anyone working on them. According to a few web searches, the Villa Real is owned by Herman Page and Al Sauer, though I don’t remember now which owner I met. The baggage car next to the Villa Real was also being worked on and I met the owner of that one, too.
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The value of editors

Big Boss boo boo

I love editing so much that I married an editor. I like to think that I had some natural talent at editing before I met Kelly but I definitely gained a whole new appreciation for the art of editing after watching what Kelly does. I knew that an editor was responsible for making sure all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed, but what I didn’t know before I met Kelly was how much an editor’s role is as much arbitrator than anything else. In the publishing world, anyway.

Blogging is a bit different when it comes to editing. That is, I don’t really do any editing. I love swiftly cranking out a post, following an idea as my fingers fly unfettered across the keyboard, not caring much about the mistakes that might pop up. The reason I can do this is that blogging is extraordinarily affordable. I invest my time in composing my posts but not much else. Should a correction need to be made, I can always do a quick search-and-replace to fix it. I can also post a new post as a correction. Some times I even rewrite my posts after they’re posted when I think I can improve on what I have to say. I guess you could say that I take full advantage of the no-rules frontier that is blogging. Blogging doesn’t have to be perfect because it’s fluid and cheap!
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Fully open-source video streaming

I found the missing link today for my open-source video streaming project: Xuggle. The Xuggle project includes a version of ffmpeg which can RTMP-stream to the red5 server.

Well, sorta. The red5 server needs to be patched in order to work with Xuggle, An exception occurs otherwise. You grab the patch from here and patch the RTMPProtocolDecoder.java file.

Here’s the command line I use to get Xuggle’s ffmpeg to stream my USB webcam from Linux:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320×240 -r 15 -i /dev/video0 -f oss -ac 2 -i /dev/dsp1 -f flv rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

Normally I would use ALSA to grab audio from the USB microphone but Xuggle’s ffmpeg binary wasn’t compiled with ALSA support. Fortunately, the OSS driver works fine.

Here’s the command I use to stream from my ieee1394 (also known as Firewire) video camera:

dvgrab – | LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/xuggler/lib /usr/local/xuggler/bin/ffmpeg -f dv -i – -s 320×240 -r 15 -f flv -ar 22050 rtmp://eddy.neusemedia.com/oflaDemo/streamname

This takes audio from the DV camera, but if I wanted to take audio from the USB microphone (or the built-in microphone) I could put in a line like the first one.

The quality is absolutely outstanding! Even on my slow cable modem connection I can push 320×240 15fps video with 22KHz stereo audio to my server. On a beefier Internet connection (like the city’s network at the community center) I could dial it up to even higher quality.

So there you go. Other than the codec (which is not free “as in speech”), all the parts are free. The only cost is the hosting bandwidth. One thing I’d like to find is a good way to take this RTMP stream and push it out a high-quality video card for ingesting into the city’s cable access channel, if need be. That would turn this in to a great solution for the city’s RTN network to offer live coverage of city events. I’m also interested in an RTMFP solution so that the client plugins can share the bandwith, rather than having my server hammered when many people try to watch at once.

Now I know a lot of non-geeks are interested in getting their own streaming television, so I’ll get to work on writing up a howto with minimal jargon.

Discussing smoking in parks on WPTF

Perry and John in the WPTF studios

I was invited by guest-host Perry Woods to appear on the Bill LuMaye show on WPTF to talk about the proposed smoking restrictions the city of Raleigh is considering for its parks. I spent my lunch hour Thursday chatting about the proposed rule with Perry and his other guest, John Hood from the John Locke Foundation.

I’d never done an in-studio interview before and was a bit nervous at the start but overall I think I sounded credible. It was difficult making my points in-between the huge number of commercial breaks but I enjoyed it more than I expected.

You can listen to my portion of the show here:


MP3 File

Abraham Inc. brings the klezmer funk

C_Rays_Walz, Me, and David_Krakhauer

As I tweeted earlier, it’s almost not fair that it’s still January and tonight I saw the best show I’ll see all year. Abraham Inc. absolutely rocked NCSU’s Stewart Theatre tonight. I had high expectations for this show and damned if Abe Inc. didn’t just live up to them, they blew them out of the water.

After the show, the band stuck around and signed autographs. Impressed with the welcome the band got in Raleigh, keyboardist (and beat maestro) Socalled joked “From now on we’re just going to play in the South!”

If you haven’t heard Abraham Inc.’s crazy mix of hip-hop, klezmer, and funk you’ve got to check them out. I sure hope they play here again soon!

Made in America?


Our daughter Hallie had a recent homework assignment where she was to find things around the home that were made in other countries. I laughed when I heard the assignment: it’s easy to find things made elsewhere – the real challenge is finding anything made in America anymore.

Hallie wanted some variety in her countries, so we quickly ruled out 70% of our household items by logging something made in China. Then it was a struggle. Our Toshiba TV is (presumably) made in Japan, as is our Nikon camera (again, presumably). Our Honda vehicles weren’t safe choices because they were likely made in American factories. We hit pay dirt when I suggested we check our clothing labels. It’s still true that clothes come from a variety of places: Phillipines, Jordan, Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, among others. Again, American clothes are few and far between.
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Make it a goal: cleaner roadsides

We spent an extra $500,000 getting the airport finished in time for the NHL All-Star game this weekend, yet the I-440 Beltline – Raleigh’s welcome mat – could fill dump trucks with the trash it has on it.

Apologies to the folks in town for hockey. Trust us, we do clean up nicely whenever we get around to it.

First impressions are tremendously important, and the new airport space with its light and openness, not to mention the subtle influences of North Carolina, will show travelers the forward thinking and design sensitivity of the Triangle. The thousands of hockey fans descending on the RBC Center for the NHL All-Star game will be impressed, so the expense of speeding the conclusion of the job was money well-spent.

Given the positive impressions that arrival will create, I can only hope that the sun will have set before most visitors make the drive into town from the airport. The litter-strewn highways of the area are a mess, in stark contrast to the new terminal.

via Make it a goal: cleaner roadsides – Other Views – NewsObserver.com.

Free media streaming, solved!

On a happier note, tonight I figured out the last piece of the puzzle of my free media streaming project! I have paired the red5 Flash media server with Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to create stunning live video, all ad-free. The total cost of my software: $0. It’s just what I’ve been looking for.

I began by downloading and compiling the red5 software on my hosted CentOS server. This involved running a few “yum” commands to install the necessary Java dependencies but that was little challenge. Then I walked away from the project for a bit and when I returned I could not remember how to start red5. After a few more Googles, I discovered red5 had to be started from the /usr/lib/red5 directory on my server.
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Highlights of 2010: Gerry

Gerry Reid

Gerry Reid

This is the entry that I’ve been dreading to write because it’s anything but a highlight. Amazing how busy I can make myself with other things when there’s something I don’t want to do.

March 2010 was when my good friend Gerry Reid passed away. He was one of my closest friends, more like a brother, even. They say a good friend is one you’d be willing to hide from the cops. They say a great friend is one who wakes up in jail with you the next day and says “wasn’t that great?” That describes Gerry perfectly.

The man was so full of life. Fearless and intensely curious. He was a best listener of anyone I’ve ever met. His way of striking up conversations with random people on the street is legendary. You could talk to him about anything and he could relate and offer sage advice.
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