Bangin' on a Rok » Camp KDE

Award-winning professor Philip Bourne to speak at Camp KDE

jefferai — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:04:47 +0000

Philip Bourne, the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award-winning computational biologist, will be speaking at Camp KDE 2010.

Professor Bourne is well-known in his field for contributions to open-source bioinformatics software and is a leading advocate of open access to data. Quoting from the UCSD News Center:

Bourne is co-founder of SciVee, the Web 2.0 resource dedicated to the dissemination of scientific research and science-specific research networking. Launched in late 2007 as a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, SciVee has been used by hundreds of thousands of students and professional scientists as a means of learning and sharing their research through online science videos that supplement peer-reviewed journal articles, stimulate discussion, and promote collaboration. SciVee earlier this month announced a number of significant upgrades to its site, along with the addition of 32 new science categories.

Open data access and open source share similar goals, and Professor Bourne's discussion of his experiences with open data access should prove informative and interesting to all.

Camp KDE 2010 Announced!

jefferai — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:18:06 +0000

I'm pleased as punch/as a fat cat/etc. to point you to The Dot (specifically here) to see the official announcement and some details. More details will be forthcoming soon (and especially as we get the web site in order). Start clearing your schedule and working on your presentations!

Camp KDE videos: Come and get ‘em

jefferai — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:41:00 +0000

After a month's delay, they're done.

In the interim (after the delays mentioned in my last post on this topic), my poor, underpowered desktop machine has endured transcode after transcode (from the original source material) and my Internet connection upload after upload as I tried to figure out just why Blip.tv wouldn't work with X or Y. (In fact, I can quantify these: X is Vorbis/Theora, which produced awful audio and very desynchronized audio/video upon their conversion to .flv; Y is a lot of things related to the original anamorphic encoding of the videos, which Blip.tv can't handle, and finding the right combination of settings and flags and adjustements to make the aspect ratios come out so that everyone didn't look like Gumby®.)

This was followed by a few days of uploading; Blip seems to max out uploading speeds somewhere between 100kbit and 200kbit, so uploading almost 6GB of data, one chunk at a time, took a bit.

The end result is thirteen videos, each Xvid-encoded (at least it's OSS, although patent-encumbered...see Vorbis/Theora problems above) with a Matroska container. You can get to them through my show or to individual videos directly (these might not be in strict as-presented order):

Enjoy!

Where are those Camp KDE videos anyways?

jefferai — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:15:00 +0000

Hello there. I have good news and bad news regarding the Camp KDE videos.

The Bad News

I've run into a series of setbacks regarding getting them prepared for posting. The first was that the Monday I got back from Jamaica, I had the following schedule at work:

9:15 AM: Check email
9:16 AM: "My details have been confirmed for my upcoming trip? What trip?"
2:00 PM: At the airport awaiting departure, thinking that I *knew* I should have checked work email sometime over the weekend...

Regardless, I did manage to have some of the files with me, and did actually get a few of the videos done during that week that I was away. I then got held back a bit waiting for the videos on Wade's camera to arrive -- they were 16GB or so in total, and so he had to fetch them off the tapes, encode them, and get them uploaded to me. After that, I started to put Wade's videos together with slides, only to find out that the videos would not properly work inside kdenlive. Or so I thought. After a period of long transcodings that I performed during my free time over the last few days, I find out this morning that the issue with the videos was a massive dose of PEBKAC.

There's only one other piece of bad news, which is that due to a bug in (ffmpeg? libmlt?) kdenlive's Ogg/Theora export is borked. So, I've ended up coding in XviD, which while using a patented algorithm is at least otherwise free software. I've thought about transcoding everything to Ogg/Theora afterwards, and I may end up doing so before posting them up, if the quality is okay. And before you ask -- it didn't seem right to post them up without having Wade's keynote up there to kick things off, which is why I've not posted some of the ones that are already done up before now.

The Good News

The good news is that 11/13 of the videos are done, and I forsee no obstacles in getting the rest of them to behave. So I am hopeful that I can start getting them up to Blip.tv within a couple days. Thanks for bearing with me.

Oh god: I had to use VBA

jefferai — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:40:00 +0000

I'm working on putting together the Camp KDE 2009 videos using the excellent Kdenlive, a non-linear video editor whose name is, well, an acronym for KDE Non LInear Video Editor. More on Kdenlive in a later blog post from me and/or Wade, but trust me -- with the latest versions it's much more stable, and it's getting very good.

Anyways, one of the reasons I'm using it is to splice the slides into the videos, because they're just not readable inside the videos for the most part. So I needed a way to turn each slide into some sort of an image.

It turns out that OO.o doesn't have this capability natively, but some users on the OO.o Forum came up with a script at the bottom of this page to export each slide into PDF. I modified it to do the following:

Export to JPG instead of PDF (PNG export didn't work)
Add extra 0s to numbers such that you always have three digits

The code is pasted below. One really fun (not) thing I found out: VBA (or just OO.o's implementation of it) doesn't really do type checking. As a result, if r is a string instead of an integer (which I had forgotten), the following code will always execute as True:

If r < 10 Then

Anyways, here is the code, in case it helps anyone at some point:

REM ***** BASIC *****

Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue ) As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
   oPropertyValue = createUnoStruct( "com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue" )
   If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Name = cName
   EndIf
   If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
   EndIf
   MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function

Sub SplitPDFs
dim oDoc as object
oDoc = ThisComponent
dim url as string
url = oDoc.getURL()
baseURL = Left( url, Len( url ) - 4 )
nNumPages = oDoc.getDrawPages().getCount()
For nPageToSave = 1 To nNumPages
    dim r as string
    r = Str(nPageToSave)+"-"+Str(nPageToSave)
    If CInt(r) < 10 Then
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"00"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))
    Else
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"0"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))