Alhamdulillaah, I’ve just managed to produce my first HDR (high dynamic range) image the results of which I’m pleased with.  Once again, I have CHDK to thank for enabling this feature easily.

Note:  I begin this post with a mildly detailed explanation of the human visual system, HDR & LDR images, and the process to create HDR & tone-mapped images.  The pictures themselves are near the bottom of this post.

First, a little background about HDR.  The way our bodies capture and process imagery is, to put it lightly, amazing.  Starting from when light first hits the cornea through to when we perceive the visual object (not to mention how our brain’s store such visual images, which is far from just keeping a “bunch of bits”), the Words of Allāh resound with truth regarding His Creation:

And it is He who spread the earth and placed therein firmly set mountains and rivers; and from all of the fruits He made therein two mates; He causes the night to cover the day. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought. (Alqurʾān 13:3)

Thus, in the way that they are created, our eyes can capture an amazing amount of detail and range in their own way.  The range of regular (so-called “LDR” – low dynamic range) images is quite limited in comparison.  And this is, actually, the vast majority of image-related technologies, be they cameras, display devices, or even image formats such as JPEG.

HDR images, however, are those which do or have the ability to capture image details, specifically color & brightness information, at a much higher level than normal technologies.  Since normal technologies, such as our digital cameras and screens, can not capture nor display HDR images, we have to take a different route to get the information.  One technique is exposure bracketing where one takes a picture of the same scene at different exposure levels, one after another.  The reason for doing this is that, while the normal dynamic range of a camera may be unable to capture the bright, medium, and dark details of an image all at once, it does have the ability to capture these details separately with different settings.

Alhamdulillaah, there is also software that exists that allows you to take these separate LDR images and combine them into one now-HDR image that contains the details from all the separate exposures.  Doing so is not trivial, and it may take one multiple attempts to get something that looks good.  More often than not, the result is eery, because of a technique called tone-mapping.  Tone-mapping is a technique whereby the colors and range of an HDR image are brought down into a simulation of what our eyes would perceive in the scene.  In reality, that’s all but impossible, but it yields some interesting, beautiful, and sometimes striking results.

The specific software I use is the unpronounceable Qtpfsgui (I just say it one letter at a time).  Qtpfsgui is a front end for pfstools, which is an outstanding image toolkit for these kinds of images.  It takes care of aligning, merging, and finally tone-mapping the images one step at a time.  I short-circuited the first two steps (because Qtpfsgui can be fussy sometimes)  by using the command-line tool align_image_stack to align the different exposures (since I moved a bit between exposures) as well as creating the HDR image from the three separate images.  Then, I used Qtpfsgui just for the tone-mapping stage.

The first row of pictures are the original images, taken at -4, 0, & +4 EV settings.  Looking closely, you’ll notice that each range brings out different details: the darkest shows details in the clouds, the middle shows details in the sea, and the brighest shows details in the sand.  These are the separate LDR images at different exposures that I talked-about above.

The second “row”, containing only a single picture, is the result of the several steps I mentioned above to produce an HDR image.  I make no claims into how “real” this image looks, but it does show the details that I was looking for – from the clouds to the sand – in one image.  I also think it looks cool. 

This is the first HDR image I’ve created that I’ve wanted to share, and so I took this opportunity to explain the process too.  If you have any questions, then by all means, please post a comment and then subscribe to the comments so you’ll know when I’ve replied.

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured an announcement for the International Year of Astronomy.  This alone would be noteworthy enough, but they also have a downloadable trailer (warning: contains some music, but it’s not prominent until the end).  This is great for geeks, and especially video geeks like Belal & me (him much more than me, of course).

Best of all, the content on the website is licensed under a Creative Commons license (albeit, including the non-commercial restriction, which is the worst of the available standard CC licenses).

I had really wanted to seed the initial few hours of the release on my new server because of its great amount of network bandwidth, but that’s an opportunity I lost because of a crash like this:

Caught Segmentation fault, dumping stack: KB] [Port: 6924]                                                                                                                                                                                                                   [U 76/0] [D 0/0] [H 0/32] [S 3/86/768] [F 4/128]
0 rtorrent [0x41ea5d]
1 rtorrent [0x421488]
2 /lib64/libc.so.6 [0x3a76a322a0]
3 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e4caf4]
4 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e50683]
5 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10 [0x3a78e4f704]
6 /usr/lib64/libtorrent.so.10(_ZN7torrent9PollEPoll7performEv+0x5d) [0x3a78e24d55]
7 rtorrent [0x440379]
8 rtorrent [0x41f645]
9 /lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfa) [0x3a76a1e32a]
10 rtorrent(_ZNSt8ios_base4InitD1Ev+0x49) [0x40cc79]
Aborted

that kept happening.  Up to this point, I have never had a problem with rTorrent, alhamdulillaah, but still – that one time you really need it, and it goes?  The worst part is, when searching the problems I was having, it was due to memory consumption.  4GB is not enough to seed a couple of hundred peers?  I could seed almost 100 on my older hardware with only 1GB of RAM, and I never had the mainline client (which is written in Python) give me such problems.  rTorrent is written in C++, which I thought would help with these kinds of cases.  Shouldn’t, theoretically, a compiled application require less memory than one running within a virtual machine environment — maybe my understanding on computer science is lacking, but I always thought that was the prevailing wisdom.

Anyway, I didn’t want to turn this into a rant about rTorrent, but the emotions are strong enough to drive me to at least say something, especially because the crash happened during (my) nighttime, so I couldn’t restore the seeding until after I woke up and got back from fajr prayer.

If anyone has any recommendations on how to avoid the problem I had with rTorrent or on a better, more stable client that can handle such massive transfers and load, please let me know.

Alhamdulillaah, after loading up all blog-post pages (i.e., going to the bottom of each page and clicking for the next page), I’ve fixed all old posts that had HTML errors (according to the HTML Validator Firefox plugin).

This actually is a relief for me because amongst the major reasons I enjoy using WordPress is the work the developers put into it to make it a clean & standards-compliant application.  I’ve avoided themes that are not.  So, alhamdulillaah, it seems that all the posts are fixed.  I haven’t bothered with the pages that I’ve created, though, because I’m likely going to redo those shortly anyway, in shaaʾ Allaah.

That is all.

If this isn’t one of the most amazing pictures you’ve ever seen, I really would like to know what you’ve been looking at…

michael.dehaan (his spelling, not mine!) posted something that you can take or leave (I don’t want to start a flame war on my own blog):

michaeldehaan.net | Popularity Contests Are So Junior High School.

But what is intriguing are the ideas that develop in the comments.   Please take some time and read those first, and then come back here. 

What I wanted you to read were the ideas floated in the comments regarding raising awareness of the Freedom of Free Software for the common people, and the analogies made to such programs as NOVA & Cosmos on PBS.  This touched me personally because of how important such programs were to me and to nurturing my love & interest for Science & Nature.

These programs, it seems, were designed to take what may have been seemingly esoteric topics that were originally avoided by regular people and make them accessible.  People like Carl Sagan devoted their lives towards making deep topics such as the universe accessible and understandable by common people.  In no small part, I think they were successful.

So, if success can be had in such an area as Science, then why not also for Freedom?  Why not devote time to “marketing” the advantages that Free software and software freedom bring, both practical and social?  But the noveleity I found was in pointing towards the successful (if not “American Idol” successful) models of Public broadcasting, which did succeed in reaching  intended audiences and affecting them positive ways that brought about positive changes, in my humble opinion.

What’s the next step, then?  Let’s at least foster the idea that we should be working on producing media that fun, easy to understand and follow, and serves to promote what we, the users of Free software, feel is important about it.  I’m going to think some more about this and get back to you all, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to make some major- and sorely-needed-upgrades to Audio Islam.  Interestingly enough, for the vast majority of people, these changes won’t really be that visible as they are all behind-the scenes.

The desire to upgrade Audio Islam has been around for a long time, and I still have many more changes, particularly in relation to the code, that are pending.  But I decided to focus on performance due to the vast surge in visitors that will come during the month of Ramadhaan, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Therefore, I had to polish some things, upgrade others, and in some cases, fundamentally change them!

Prior to today, Audio Islam was running a typical LAMP setup – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database server, & PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.  Also typically, at the behest of the PHP developers, my Apache HTTP server was configured to operate in prefork mode, which, to put it simply, causes the web server to assign one process per web request.

For a site like Audio Islam, where currently the programming logic is rather limited and the bulk of the action involves downloading of large files, the cautions that call for using the prefork mode, as opposed to the more performant multi-threaded worker mode, are less urgent, so I opted for the more efficient mode due to Audio Islam‘s need for very high concurrency on rather modest server hardware.  I’ve had to set the maximum number of clients in my webserver to over 700 and also offset the more popular mode of download to be FTP just to keep the website accessible, so I am very keen to seek out as much optimization as I can until I can move to another server that will sustain the site as well as this one in terms of bandwidth (currently, 20Mbit/s unmetered is keeping the site afloat, alhamdulillaah).

However, here is where the multi-threaded madness of PHP reared its ugly head.  In truth, I am not entirely sure that I can lay the blame solely on PHP here, but as PHP is not generally multi-threaded enabled and intends to stay that way, I don’t feel so keen on removing them from the blame completely, either.

Before going further, here’s a summary of the specific versions of each package (before/after)

• Apache HTTP Server: 2.2.0/2.2.9
• MySQL database server: 5.0.16/5.0.67
• PHP Hypertext Preprocessor: 5.1.6/5.2.3

As I install all my servers from source on my aging Red Hat platform in order to get the latest versions easily, that means I have the pleasure of compiling all my packages from source (I haven’t figured-out how to make my own RPMs yet…).  So, my first step was to compile Apache HTTP server, ensuring I enabled the worker MPM mode to enable multi-threading (a simple mistake I noticed when I saw the config summary included the old prefork MPM).

My configure command was as follows:

./configure --enable-modules=all --enable-mods-shared=all --with-mpm=worker

This went along very well. My next step was to compile MySQL, as I needed access to the client library in order to compile PHP with support for the database backend.  Note that the coming of PHP 5.3 should obviate this as it will feature a native MySQL driver for PHP which shares the same license as PHP, which sparked the whole problem of the separation between PHP the MySQL client library.

Before I show the MySQL configure command, let me present the PHP one:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql --enable-zip

This is a pretty basic PHP configuration script, rather slim, but sufficient for what I needed.  However, the configure script complained about a missing library for MySQL named “libmysqlclient_r”.  I looked for it on my system, and while I found it, it was the wrong version.  This is when I realizzed that I had to enable the thread-safe client in MySQL.  So, I did this, using this configure command:

./configure --enable-thread-safe-client

After a rather lengthy make & make install process, PHP was still complaining.  I looked for libmysqlclient_r and found it, but PHP still kept complaining that it wasn’t under “/usr/local”.  It didn’t matter that I explicitly instructed it to look at the install directory of my MySQL installation.

Anyway, after spending several hours trying to figure this out by researching online and trial-and-error, I decided enough was enough, and I was going to follow PHP’s recommendation of running it under FastCGI.  However, I do not have a lot of experience getting Apache to run under FastCGI.  Morever, as I didn’t need Apache’s power & flexibility for Audio Islam, I decided now was the time to go where I’ve wanted to go for a while – to host Audio Islam using lighttpd.

lighttpd (pronounced lighty) is a lightweight yet powerful HTTP server that is designed for low overhead and high performance. Despite these goals, it still hosts a slew of features that sufficed it to be the backend for Audio Islam, alhamdulillaah.  Once I realized that I was going to go through with it, I stopped all my efforts at getting Apache HTTP working and focused on installing lighttpd.  Amazingly enough, I discovered that the latest stable version, 1.4.19, was already available via yum for RHEL4!  I quickly went ahead and install it and its fastcgi module.  And, a short while later, after some configuration, I had Audio Islam up-and-running on lighttpd!  Alhamdulillaah!  It was rather surprising to see how it worked perfectly out of the box once I redirected it to my newly-fastcgi-compiled PHP.  For reference, here’s the final configure command I used for compiling PHP to ultimately work on lighttpd:

./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-discard-path --enable-force-cgi-redirect --with-mysql --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-mbstring --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --enable-zip

The first three arguments are from the lighttpd documentation, and the rest are what I wanted in the first place.

So, there you have it! Audio Islam is now running on top of lighttpd, alhamdulillaah.  In shaaʾ Allaah this setup will enable the server to sail through Ramadhaan far smoother than previous years.  I guess we’ll find out in a couple of weeks, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery.  You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of video.

He’s released a few videos that are freely available that are samples of what the entire program entails.  I found the one entitled “Three POWER Principles of Filmmaking” to be quite refreshing in how simple, yet effective, such techniques can be.  Even more beneficial is that the tips he provides, while framed around the production of video media, are general enough to be beneficial in almost any context.

Give his site a check-out and leave some comments as he’s very keen on getting & responding-to feedback from his visitors & members of his program.

Disclaimer:  Belal is just my friend – I am neither associated with Message Mastery nor am I enrolled in the program…yet.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now.  And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share.

The sheer amount of work to upload these and present them in anything close to an appealing way through WordPress has made me decide that I am going to seek an alternative method for disseminating the videos.  I am hoping I can leverage my Gallery installation, in shaaʾ Allaah, but it’s support for alternative media types has not impressed me to date.  And don’t even dare suggest that I use a Flash-based solution…

Read on for the feature presentation(s)!  As usual, make sure to get a copy of the free-and-open-source VLC player if you don’t have it or another media player that can play Ogg Theora videos.

Kuala Lumpur Downtown Time Lapse

VGA

720p HD

Balcony Sunset Time Lapse

VGA

720p HD

VGA

720p HD

VGA

VGA

720p HD

VGA

Quick links to all video downloads

• kuala-lumpur-downtown-time-lapse-vga
• kuala-lumpur-downtown-time-lapse-hd720
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-vga-24fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-720p-24fps
• balcony-sunset-time-lapse-vga
• balcony-sunset-time-lapse-2-hd720
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-3-vga
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-vga-30fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-720p-30fps
• time-lapse-balcony-sunset-interrupted-epilogue-vga-30fps

Enjoy!

Alhamdulillaah, I just caught the news that Nokia is planning to buy Symbian and subsequently plans to open-source Symbian OS last this year or at the beginning of this year.  If this all plays out and is true, then this is a great boon to world as a high-quality mobile operating system will be free from proprietary encumbrances.

Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here.  Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme.  These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind.  Click the link to see them!

Just yesterday I purchased a tripod specifically so I can take more steady shots.  It will also help me in taking more clear & even panoramas, because with a tripod I can have a more even axis of rotation – as opposed to the rotation happening due to me twisting my waist with the camera held in front of my face.  I think this will yield even better & more accurate panoramas, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Look to a future post where I explain how I created these images.  It’s amazingly more simple than it seems, alhamdulillaah.

Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.

I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.

Sunset 1

This time-lapse sequence is composed of 900 images, taken with an approximate interval of 5 – 8 seconds (it’s not very precise due to a few factors).  As happened with at least one other sequence, something interesting started to happen just as the sequence finishes…you’ll have to watch the whole thing to find out…

Highlights include seeing the contrails of planes transform into high-altitude cirrus clouds as well as shadows from individual clouds sweeping across the sky!

Bonus points if you can identify the embedded subliminal message about lawn care. 

Lessons learned: Capture more!  If something looks interesting in real-time, then it almost certainly will be more so in time-lapse!

Sunset 2

Possibly my best sequence yet, it is composed of a whopping 1500 images, taken with an approximate interval of 2 – 4 seconds (the setting was 1 “second” in CHDK).  This is cropped to 720p HD resolution after I resized the sequence a bit to make it more manageable.  For an uncropped sequence, see below.

Highlights include very detailed view of cloud structure as well as cloud formation & dissipation.  Additionally, more cloud-shadow streaks are visible.  Finally, there is some interesting stuff happening at sunset that appears to be some very high-level development, such as waves within the clouds.

Lessons learned: Fix the exposure and other settings so that there is a consistent feel throughout the whole sequence, unless that changing exposure settings are intentional (which they are not, in this case, but it’s not so bad, either).

Sunset 2

(VGA resolution)

This is from the same image sequence as above, except the original 4×3 images are resized to VGA (640×480) resolution.  It should be easy to identify where the crop took place (somewhat below the exact middle of the frame, poised just above and between the non-sky parts).

Windy Day 1

Windy Day 2

These two image sequences (Windy Day 1 & 2) are real gems, alhamdulillaah!  I really liked them.  Sadly, they are also the shortest.  And why, might you ask, are they the shortest (and most irregular in length)?  Well, the sequences are titled quite appropriately – they were taken on an exceptionally windy day.  So windy, in fact, that my lightweight plastic tripod (that came more-or-less free with my camera from Newegg) was blown over by the wind…twice (once per sequence, thus the abrupt endings)…with the camera still on it.  The first impact was on concrete.  The second was grass.

Highlights include some stunning sun rays sweeping through the holes in the clouds.

Lessons learned: Have a basic understanding of physics (especially the aspects of mass, force, leverage, and thus, torque) before undertaking photography in averse conditions that lend to beautiful photo ops.  Additionally, should one’s understanding of above-mentioned topics not be sufficient, at least retain the common sense to place the camera in an area where damage from falling would be minimized.

Windy Day 3

Windy Day 4

These last two image sequences were done on a different windy day, but with a heavier tripod (an old, well-built metal one belonging to my father).  There really isn’t as much inspiring about these sequences.  The quality of the images was outstanding, but nothing particularly interesting happened.

Lessons learned: Place the camera in such a way as to minimize unwanted obstructions (in this case, the trees didn’t add much).  Also, a deeper field of view would make for a more interesting shot – more time to see the cloud formations develop and dissipate.

So there you have it!  I’ve been working on these sequences (both making & processing them) all weekend and until today, so I am happy to finally be done with them so I can share them.  Comments most welcome!

Time-lapse sky by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!

One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time – i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.

Through the script menu, I was able to setup the time-lapse to take one photo every second. As my office is on the 4th floor of large cubic structure in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, I had a nice view that combined parking lot-and-street activity with some nice cloud shows. That both days were signficantly overcast actually proved to make the videos more interesting – so much so that the last image sequence was pointed more towards the sky to capture the natural splendor up above.

Note: All videos are in free and open source Ogg Theora format.  If you do not have a player that supports this already installed, then I recommend the VLC free and open source player.  Most users of a GNU/Linux or other *nix-based systems will probably not need anything special to player, so this note is mostly for Windows users.

Time-lapse view from my office window by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

work-window-time-lapse-1

This was my first image sequence out of my office window. The white balance is really off, unfortunately, because I didn’t attempt to adjust it at all. Subsequently, the entire image sequence has a color hue due to the tinting of the office building’s windows.

work-window-time-lapse-2

My second image sequence came out a little better with regards to color, because I set the white balance to “overcast”. This is still not as accurate as it could be, however.

work-window-time-lapse-3

The third image sequence is the longest, and first one from the second day. This is a sequence of 600 images in total! I manually adjusted the white balance for this and the next sequence, and as such, the color appear much more natural & realistic in these two sequences.

work-window-time-lapse-4

The last & final image sequence for this batch was really just something I did without giving it much thought. Amazingly enough, it turned-out to be the most interesting until the end when it gets cut off (due to lack of space on my SD card) – the direction of the clouds began to change! This sequence in particular encourages me to try to stake-out a day with excellent cloud activity and just setup the camera to capture as long a sequence as is sane.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and these clips as much as I did making & manipulating them. I’ll make another post explaining how I captured the images & converted them into videos. Feel free to post comments and/or questions should you have any.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.

Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).

Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with

Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day – at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

First, the hidayahonline server (seeding the x86_64 DVD ISO file):

And second, the audioislam server (seeding the i386 DVD ISO file):

Although the audioislam server has twice the tubeage of the hidayahonline server, it is also the one more heavily loaded due to AudioIslam.com. So, they both ended-up serving around 32GB of data to the Tubes before I disconnected them for the day.

I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.

Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:

• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/519149-REG/Sanyo_VPC_HD1000BK_Xacti_HD1000_HD_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/521864-REG/Panasonic_HDC_SD5BNDL_HDC_SD5_AVCHD_Digital_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/539291-REG/Canon_2708B001_VIXIA_HF_100_AVCHD_Flash.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537788-REG/JVC_GZ_HD5_GZ_HD5_60GB_HD_Everio.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537789-REG/JVC_GZ_HD6_GZ_HD6_120GB_HD_Everio.html

The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded.  Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD.  There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues.  I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding.  I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.

Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg – that is the topic for another article, perhaps.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!

Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.

Introduction

Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.

The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts – management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to – knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.

Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.

Background

I have long had a passion for audio – be it with regards to editing, recording, production, or even creation. And, given my other passion for Islamic education, it should come as no surprise that I like to work on recording, producing, and making-available quality Islamic recordings for the benefit of everyone. Thus, ever since I first attended the Texas Dawah Convention, I knew that I wanted to be involved, at least with the audio aspect. This desire became even stronger as the Convention has had some troubles make the recordings from the previous years widely available.

The Convention itself is outstanding, and I strongly encourage everyone to attend it if you can – whether or not you are Muslim, it provides an excellent place where someone can learn about the proper understanding of Islam free from extremism, misguidance, and distortion. Naturally, those are based on my own opinions, and everyone is entitled to their own about whatever they like, I suppose…regardless, it is held every year in late December. Details can usually be found on their website as Winter approaches.

First Contact

Back to the point, I had a golden opportunity to pursue the desire to become more involved with the Convention itself. It just so happened that Shaykh Waleed Basyouni, the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, was holding an AlMaghrib Institute seminar (Rays of Faith) in Columbus, Ohio (Qabeelat Hayl). As I was the coordinator for the class, I was blessed with extra time with the shaykh, so I approached him with a bold proposal. Being that he was the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, I proposed to him to hand over audio recording & production entirely to me for the then upcoming convention. I knew it was more-or-less a shot in the dark, but he respectfully listened to me in full, giving me more than a generous portion of his time given that he was heading back home soon afterward.

Pleasantly enough, and after a series of e-mails & phone conversations, Shaykh Waleed took me up on my proposal, which I was wisely discussing as a prospect with a close friend & future partner the whole time. As such, we were mentally prepared with the idea that we’d have actual work to do during the convention.

Preparations

As much as one prepares for a task, it’s amazing how many aspects can still come up and leave one shaken and struggling to stay standing. To be honest, it is in management of this kind – preparing for the logistics of something hands-on – that I tend to be rather weak. Alhamdulillaah, my friend and business partner came to the rescue and prepared, more or less, the entire plan for how the work needed to be broken-up, divided, and thus organized so that it could be managed in a reasonable way. Without his sheets, plans, and equipment labeling, the task would have been an operational nightmare.

Part of our charter for the audio work was to purchase a variety of recording equipment, most of which would be used for the many coming years, in shaaʾ Allaah. Consequently, once again, my friend showcased his business prowess, and was able to secure the best pricing for the majority of the equipment and supplies we needed. The biggest challenge here was my procrastination and that of others, through miscommunication, which resulted in us spending way more money than necessary for some basic items (e.g., CDs, labels, and some equipment).

Showtime!

Once we got to the site, we had very little time really to spend with the volunteers we’d be given to be our runners. It was somewhat of a challenge to divide the work up amongst them – we had 8 total (a 9th came in midway through the convention, alhamdulillaah). Each had their own level of skills, be it technical or otherwise, that we had to balance and find out. What was most troubling to me was that, despite the sheer amount of work involved, frequently the volunteers found themselves without anything to do simply because we didn’t know how best to divide up the work. Again, and I will continue pointing this out through the post, my partner-friend really took to managing the volunteers and ensuring they were kept reasonably busy with productive things while also ensuring they weren’t overworked and could attend the parts of the convention their really wanted to.

To their credit, the volunteers, in general, all performed outstandingly, maa shaaʾ Allaah walhamdulillaah. Given that there were three straight days of seminars, sometimes 6 at the same time, the fact that we had only a few really major mistakes (including one lecture that was a complete write off, unfortunately) is really a testament to their hard work and willingness to pull through some tough schedules we’d made for them. Jazaakum Allaahu khayr!

To Be Continued…

While this wraps-up the general procedure for everything, I have intentionally left the technical side out as I am going to focus on that in a dedicated post, including possibly mentioning a near disaster that was narrowly avoided due to the Mercy of Allaah in answering my supplications. See you then!

It is hard to describe without referring to the picture, because what struck me about it is that it is just so small. It is less than half a centimeter in diameter at its widest, and at first glance, it looks like just a piece of plastic. In fact, it is so small that you can pick it up with one finger simply by pushing down with some force – lift your finger, and it comes up with it. Looking closely, though, I noticed something interesting:

On one side is a coiled span of wire wrapped around what appears to be a dark, metallic substance. Immediately, I thought this was either a tiny voice coil (e.g., speaker) or a microphone. The question is – where is it from? Nothing I have is missing such a component, to my recollection. It also doesn’t appear to have any internal power source, so I guess I can rule out the idea that it is a planted bug…right?

When I first saw it, it was actually on the ground, very likely to be sucked-up by a vacuum or kicked by a stray foot or eaten by a gigantic centipede. Looking closely, the characters on the dark side are “3R3″, with a larger circle to the left and a smaller circle above the 2nd “3″.

Here it is sitting in the middle of my laptop’s trackpad.

Any clues as to what it may be? All pictures link to my media gallery, where you can more pictures of both this mystery device as well as a whole slew of other things,

• Ability to record to an uncompressed or losslessly-compressed format with reasonable quality
• USB mass storage-class device (for drag-and-drop between the device and any computer with a USB port)
• Ability to play, at least, MP3 as well Ogg Vorbis-formatted files
• Reasonable amount of storage capacity

The iHP-120/H100 was the only PAD™ on the market at the time that met all of these requirements. After acquiring it, I discovered that, not only did it meet these requirements, but it did so with flying colors, mā shā ’Allāh. I thought I couldn’t be happier with the device. This proved to be true until I discovered Rockbox. After loading Rockbox onto my PAD™, I was in an entirely new world of bliss. Not only did I get the warm-&-fuzzy feeling of using a free-&-open-source product on my PAD™, but Rockbox took away the built-in limitations that came with my PAD™ – most importantly, the time/size limit of any single recorded file (in WAV format). A later revision of Rockbox introduced the ability to record directly to a WavPack format, which meant even greater space savings and fewer disk writes – theoretically, this could save additional battery power, but I never evaluated whether or not this was truly the case. But I digress…

The majority of my usage of my PAD™ was in playback – either lectures, Qur’ān recitation, or previously-recorded sessions (could be either of the previous two examples). Other than playback, I have used my PAD™ to master many live recordings. Many, many recordings that I’ve posted online, either on this or other sites, have been recorded through my PAD™, and there remain many more that I have yet to post (though they are mostly of me, and therefore, have dubious value…).

After all this gushing, surely you can imagine my chagrin when I first started to experience drive-based errors on my PAD™. Though they were fleeting and infrequent at first, they unnerved me. The frequency of these drive errors increased with time until it actually prevented me from using the device altogether, and even being able to turn it off became an exercise in precisely timing a hard reboot along with hitting the power button as soon as the PAD™’s firmware could receive commands but before it had a chance to attempt to read the disk. This culminated in the PAD™ becoming utterly unusable. My heart sank.

After a few attempts at trying to manually re-seat the disk drive (after hunting for the right-sized Torx screwdriver), I realized that perhaps it was time to move up in the world of PAD™ recording. Therefore, recently, I have come across several devices that may possibly serve as a replacement to my PAD™ in the capacity of its usage as a recording device, mainly for spoken events, such as lectures or Qur’ān recitation (e.g., during tarawīḥ). The results of my ongoing search for a replacement to my PAD™ can be found in an upcoming post, in shā ’Allāh.

I can only wonder how many times the above (or whatever the equivalent was…my memory is fuzzy, at best) information flashed on my family’s Casper 14-inch monitor in the early 1990s (of course, back then, it would have just been “90s”, when we were young & ignorant of such vile truths as Y2K). ANSI art was the height of graphics technology. Our Hayes 9600 baud modem allowed us to look down at those peasants that would dare connect with a lowly 2400 baud no-name brand (probably some upstart company like USRobotics or something…). Indeed, those were the days. Downloads over the zmodem protocol (much better than that xmodem fluf that had been around for so long) brought me my 300kB ARJ archive faster than I could get up, go to the bathroom, make a sandwich, grab a can of pop from the fridge, come back and…find it half-way through. Could things get better? Signs point to “no”.

With Pyro VBBS, I had 100 minutes a day (my brother was friends with the sysop, so I got a bit of a boost from the regular 60 minutes those peasants would get…) to enjoy message boards, this new “electronic mail” (just like real mail, only you have to print it out if you want to take it with you!), and pulling the sysop (a friendly fellow who went by the name of Rabid Mongoose) away from his episodes of Darkwing Duck with continuous ASCII beeps. I pitied him, but you see, it was crucial that I saw just how long it took him to get up and see why one of the users was paging the sysop.

But the real draw was, and always will be, door games. They are called doors because, more or less, the BBS software hands control over to the application until it exits – so it is as though you passing through a door to another…room? Yeah, I didn’t come up with the name, so don’t blame me.

Pyro VBBS introduced me to several different kinds of poison, and without a doubt, the most frequent ones I had up were Tradewars 2002, Solar Realms Elite, & Land of Devastation – ANSI gaming at its finest! If I could count the number of hours I spent playing those games…um…I could count very, very high.

The draw of these & other door games was a combination of classic gameplay elements, their quaint yet creative text-based interfaces, and their colorful text elements, such as the random encounters, quips, & quotes of the game’s characters & plotlines.

Tradewars 2002 was a space-trading simulation, and the version on Pyro VBBS likely predated the multi-node versions that came later, so it was strictly one-player. And we were thankful. With 1000 sectors to explore, the player could trade ports, attack alien ships (including the dreaded Ferrengi, if you had enough fighters), upgrade to a more powerful ship or one with more cargo holds, and even build your own planets. There were “Good guys” and “Bad guys”. I only learned later that the “Bad guys” could do cool things like stealing from trading ports. One of them actually kept sending me money to increase the police bounty on his head…I never figured out why…

Solar Realms Elite is a staple of the BBS world, and the original author even has a site dedicated to it. It is a rather elaborate economy/warfare-based empire simulation game, where the player manages the military, population, & resources of a nation, with the other players doing the same. While battling off pirates (rogue states?), you can also engage the other players either through trade, cooperation, or even all-out battle. Very enjoyable and fun.

Land of Devastation was definitely a time-eater. With a large world to explore and an intricate plotline, the game pitted the player as an adventurer in a post-nuclear holocast scenario. You would fight monsters in the wastelands, while finding, purchasing, and/or selling equipment you’d find. There were many different factions (nearly all of them hostile), and the game even feature NPCs that could interact with you. The game had a clever “discussion” system that would allow you to glean information & additional topics from a character you were interacting with, which may change their disposition from hostile to friendly, or even giving you additional items if you asked for them! This description doesn’t do the gae justice, but it’s also close to 1AM, so I’m going to wrap it up here.

I became so hooked to these and other games that I have actually downloaded the original executables for most of these games and play them from time to time locally on my PC (as there are few BBSes that are accessible these days, except through telnet). Playing them locally also means I can enjoy them at my own pace and play sysop from time to time as well.

So, there you have. A manifesto of an ANSI game addict. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!