The Journal of William M Butler

Automatic Projector Calibration with Embedded Light Sensors

2009-05-19T21:10:00.001-07:00

Very slick way to project video onto arbitrary surfaces.

Oracle running under Railo

2009-05-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

I have successfully installed Railo with the free version of Oracle XE. I have also gotten both the Oracle Thin Client and OCI drivers working. I'll let you know what I did to get each working, although, I think that the thin client is sufficient for most needs.

If you installed Oracle XE, the ojdbc5.jar driver is at:
/usr/lib/oracle/xe/product/11.1.0/client_1/ojdbc5.jar

Just copy that file to:
/opt/railo/lib/ojdbc5.jar

Your driver should work now (from the server administrator).

If you prefer to use the OCI driver, I had to get the 11g client from the Oracle website. Installing it was a bear because it required X11 and I am using Amazon EC2. Then you have to copy 3 different files into /opt/railo/libexec/

/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1
/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libnnz11.so
/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libocijdbc11.so

Hope this helps someone...

Rewarding Failure?

2009-04-17T14:36:00.000-07:00

So Obama fires a CEO who is a failure. Sounds like Melva Fried is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Another protester, 38-year-old Melva Fried, said the forced ouster of General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner was the last straw for her -- a symbol the federal government was moving toward socialism.

"When a president can fire the head of a company, that's too much," she said, holding a sign that read "Stop Rewarding Failure."

This is getting awfully real

2009-03-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

Phoenix - If I Ever Feel Better

2009-03-02T18:03:00.001-08:00

Concentric Circles

2009-01-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Mac Wheel

2009-01-06T14:44:00.001-08:00

I hate the iPod wheel! Leave it to the Onion to nail it!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Classic XKCD

2008-12-17T13:25:00.001-08:00

How God killed Dinosaurs

2008-12-11T18:32:00.001-08:00

Bend over America!

2008-12-10T09:11:00.001-08:00

Tunnel Internet traffic across ICMP Pings

2008-12-10T07:49:00.001-08:00

Link

Obama Speechwriter

2008-12-10T07:18:00.001-08:00

I love the Internet. Thanks Jon...

Chicago Governor

2008-12-09T09:19:00.001-08:00

This is better than an episode of The Shield.

No Monkeypox for me, Thank You

2008-12-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

Somewhere between smallpox and chickenpox lies monkeypox.

Flexible Display

2008-12-08T16:48:00.001-08:00

This is finally starting to look real.

Christmas Cross Country

2008-12-07T17:11:00.000-08:00

It was a busy and good day today. I flew my on my first solo cross country flight to Somerset, KY followed by Glasgow, KY and back to Smyrna. Then the whole family headed out to Watertown to Treeland to chop down a tree. Photos here.

Barack paying off Hillary's debt

2008-12-05T05:42:00.001-08:00

Just received an email from the Obama Campagn. If you wanted Hillary to win, but ended up with Barack, you now have the opportunity to help fix Hillary's failed effort. Not only is Barack giving her the Secretary of State position, but he's paying off her bills for her too! Now that is a responsible employer.

Rahm Emanuel

2008-12-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

SNL is on a roll this year...

Boat Audio/Video System with a Mac Mini

2008-12-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

My boat is a 40' Carver. It has a salon inside with 2 bedrooms and a bridge on top. There are effectively 3 zones for audio: Bridge, Salon, Aft bedroom. The front bedroom is not wired and it's probably not necessary.

My main objective was to eliminate the need for a typical car headend unit. This works great in a car where you are always within arms length, but it's more of an excuse in a boat as far as I can tell. I elected to have a MacMini as the 'headend' this presented several challenges as The MacMini and the 24" Samsung LCD are both AC Powered. I also decided to use a Clearwire modem for connectivity to the Internet. It's particularly nice because I'm connected anywhere my boat travels on the lake. It's plugged directly into the Ethernet Port on the Mac Mini and I have the MacMini setup to act as an access point sharing the Clearwire connection with any other laptops or iPhones that care to connect via WIFI. Sweet!

So, while the Mini (2 amps), Monitor (.5 amps) and Clearwire Modem (2 amps) are AC powered, the marine grade amplifier is DC powered. I ordered a DC breaker from Carver for my DC Panel. It's a short run from the DC panel to the entertainment center. I ran the positive and negative connections to separate distribution strips. Then I connected the inverter (I chose a 600W inverter - 5A at 120V) and the amplifier to those strips. In planning for this, I determined that without a headend unit, I was going to have a problem managing the power of the DC Amp. I decided that trying to remember to flip a breaker to turn the Amp on and off would result in a dead battery or overheating. With most car installations, the headend unit turns the amp on with a 12v remote control wire. Since I have no headend unit, I had to find an amp that would turn on by sensing audio on the RCA inputs. I found one, Kicker MX350.4 Marine. Happy Day.

Now the Mac Mini has a small, flaky mini jack as an audio out. I found a really cool device made by Behringer U-CONTROL UCA202 USB-Audio Interface for around $30. It plugs into the USB and outputs RCA, headphone and Optical. Absolutely amazing for $30! An added bonus is that there is no driver installation required on my Mini. Just plug it in and the device shows up as an output option in the Sound Preferences.

Now I've described the full path to get the power to the hardware and the audio to the amp. It's a 4 channel amp and I have 6 speakers. You may be thinking "Bill didn't think this through". Ah, but you would be wrong. I decided that I did not want to manage relative volume of the 3 zones through software so I found a piece of hardware to handle it. Managing zone levels in software is just not responsive and flexible enough. Sometimes it's easier just to tell someone to turn the knob down.

Another interesting problem to resolve was the amp power. I needed to use a DC powered car amp. I looked around and finally found the Kicker ZX series. Most amps are turned on with a remote +12v wire. This amp has a selector to enable power-on when it senses audio input on the RCA jacks. It's exactly what I was looking for! Now, it automatically shuts off when the mini stops sending sound.

I found the Niles Audio SSVC-4 Speaker Selector with Volume Controls. This is a 4-way speaker distribution box with separate volume controls and on off switches for each zone. I'm assigning 3 of the volume control to my 3 zones. I bridged the 4 channel amp to turn it into a 2 channel amp and ran those wires to the input on the Niles Device. I then hooked each zone (bedroom, salon, bridge) up to the Niles Zone Controller. The Niles requires no power so that was easy.

So, that's it! My Mac Mini sleeps after an hour of inactivity and the monitor sleeps after 1 minute. Interestingly, boxee has a 'suspend' setting the sleeps the mini...very cool. The amp powers down after sensing no audio after 30 seconds or so. The best thing about this setup is that there is no loss of continuity when I turn off shore power since all pieces of gear run off the house batteries. My house batteries have dedicated chargers that run when the engines are running and when the generator is running, and according to my calculations, it would take 15 hours of continuous use in order to run the house batteries down.

Software: The Mac Mini is running iTunes for music and Apple made a great iTunes remote application for the iPhone so I can manage music, including volume from anywhere within WIFI range of the Mac Mini. For video, I am using Boxee.tv. It's in alpha now, and is getting better every day. It connects to many video web sites including CNN, CBS and Hulu and streams video. It also plays basically any format of video you can imagine and works cleanly with the Apple Remote Control. For HD Channel over the air I am using Elgato's EyeTV Hybrid. It works great but I wish that it integrated into Boxee. That would truly rock.

The Mac Mini has a built-in DVD player and Boxee can play from that as well. Looking skyward ala Jon Stewart "Give us BluRay....damn you Apple...". I could play music from the boxee interface, but Apple really nailed it on the iPhone remote application. I'd give anything if Boxee could emulate that for movies/tv/torrents. UPDATE: I found 2 programs that seem to work, although I'd say that Xmote works best. It's $3 and controls any XBMC server. Since boxee is based on XBMC, all I had to do was turn on the web server and I set the port on both boxee and Xmote to 8080. You also need to configure the IP address of the boxee machine in the settings area of the iPhone where Xmote shows up.

Another critical piece for the Mac Mini is a way to have a trackpad. I bought a bluetooth keyboard, but using a mouse with an entertainment center sucks. Air mouse for the iPhone works incredibly well! It's well worth $5. It also acts as a pretty usable keyboard in a pinch. Now I can walk on my boat, wake the Mac mini and have music and or video in a matter of seconds controllable at various levels in various zones. The cost on the entire setup including the Mac Mini and monitor was about $1400. The monitor was $500 of it and the Niles device was $250 and the Amp was $200. I hope this help someone who is struggling with a similar situation. Now I'm looking for standard round speakers that have extra bass response, because I don't want to go through the hassle of installing a separate Subwoofer.

UPDATE: Looks like my inverter was only good for about 5.3 amps and I think I was drawing close to 5.3 amps. I had an easy solution. The Clearwire modem AC/DC brick provides 12V DC to the Clearwire modem. I tested the output from it and it was pushing around 15.5V. The battery bank on my boat varies between 13.5 and 15.5 V so I decided to lop off the brick and I wired the clearwire modem directly into some spare terminals on the distribution strips. I was very careful to make sure that the polarity was correct. The tip (inside) needs to be positive. Make sure you test it with a multimeter to avoid frying the Clearwire modem.

One piece that I had given up on was having the ability to sync my Laptop music library with the Mac Mini. Since I keep my library organized solely on my Laptop, I want to have the Mini on the boat reflect exactly that without exerting any additional effort. A simple Google search revealed Syncopation. It's $24 and it just works. There are many options and I was able to make my Laptop the master and the Mini the slave.

Great Geek video from Seagate

2008-11-26T20:49:00.001-08:00

Oil Prices

2008-11-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

Oil is hovering at around $50 and OPEC wants it to sit at around $70-$90. Since OPEC controls the supply, it's probably a safe bet that it will settle to the desired level within a few months of the second round of production cuts coming later this month....

Minority Report, here we come!

2008-11-16T09:56:00.001-08:00

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

What happens when a country starts to print money?

2008-11-15T13:48:00.001-08:00

We are about to find out....

The paper from our printing press gradually becomes worth less as we inject it into the economy for these 'investments' in poorly managed companies. Let GM fail. Yes, there will be a time of unemployment, but a smart group of investors will pick up the operation for a fair market price and a portion of those jobs will be retained and the factory will actually start making cars that people want to buy. With the failure will come an entirely new union structure or possibly no union at all.

I mentioned Peter Schiff in my prior blog entry. He is not the only one who is predicting massive inflation thereby making gold, copper, and foreign currencies very lucrative investments over the next 2-5 years.

My sincere hope is that Barack has the wisdom to tackle all sides of this complex issue. I voted for him because I believe that he is going to look at the problem from all angles including that of Mr. Schiff whom I believe has some extremely compelling arguments over the next few years. I'd encourage anyone who is interested in a fresh, realistic perspective on the dire straits of our economy to subscribe to his podcast.

Peter Schiff

2008-11-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

Do you think we should start listening to this guy in the future?

A President Who Uses Technology

2008-11-06T18:43:00.001-08:00

I really shouldn't be impressed, but the bar has been set so low by past presidents in this arena that I'm frankly stunned. Look here, we actually have a governmental website to show us the transition steps being taken by Obama.