linux

Track your collections with Tellico

administrator — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:33:55 -0500

Is there anyone who doesn't collect something? I, for instance, have a sizable collection of books. Remembering who gave me which ones, and keeping track of ones I've currently lent to friends, is a nightmarish chore. Happily, the Tellico collection manager can catalog all sorts of collections, including books, movies, games, cards, coins, comic books, and even wine.

See for more info:
http://www.linux.com/feature/125325

BBC moves Linux into TV production

administrator — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:06:05 -0500

Expensive and error-prone digital tapes has forced BBC UK, one of the world's largest television broadcasters, to look at using computers running Linux to help produce its programs.

Speaking at the annual linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Melbourne, Stuart Cunningham from BBC research, said copying digital tapes is a slow process as it must be done in real-time.

"The key to solving digital tape problem is with standards-based files in the MXF (material exchange format) as you can store more in less space," Cunningham said.

To solve this problem, the BBC Research team developed Ingex for tapeless TV production using Linux.

Ingex is used to get the TV footage from the studio into the post-production editing suite by intercepting it via the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), a digital broadcast standard, rather than from tape.

"Ingex is a low-cost, file-base production system where a commodity PC with an SDI capture card -- the most expensive part of the process at between $1000 to $5000 -- that does software encoding with ffmpeg and writes MXF files, which can be stored on a NAS server or a USB drive," Cunningham said, adding a USB drive can be physically transported to post-production.

Once the USB drive arrives at post production, the AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) and MXF files are copied to the Avid editing "bin" for post-production.

The team set up two dual quad-core Intel systems with 4GB of RAM and 4TB of disk storage with the XFS file system. OpenSUSE Linux is the operating system. The XFS file system was found to have the best performance for getting high bit-rate video to disk, and an open source developer was contracted to develop a DVCPRO50 codec for ffmpeg which resulted in a better decoder than many of the hardware based decoders, according to Cunningham.
"The goal of this is to get rid of all tapes [as] we save the time in manually processing tapes," he said. ---PB--- The new system was first used for the show Dragon's Den and then for a Foo Fighters music video which needed a fast turn-around for digital TV and Web TV.

Next was television soap opera EastEnders which has strict storage protocols, mostly done with tapes.

"We provided a NAS server running with 10TB of storage which is a no-name brand PC running Linux and Samba," Cunningham said. "I couldn't encourage them to drop tape all together and use our system so they are still using tape."

"Now we have proven it works, productions are going to rely on it and the next version will have RAID-5. We've thought about complete redundancy and that would double the cost, but we are already much cheaper than the alternatives."

After the initial prototype in 2005, BBC is now in trial stage so productions "willing to have a few extra bits of kit lying around the studio" are using files instead of tape.

"Tape is still useful for backup so the next stage of production will expect to use our system for online and offline [storage] and only use tape when something goes wrong," Cunningham said.

Ingex is high-definition ready and has been tested and can use the same hardware to do two digital streams which no commercial hardware can do.

All of the source code is available at ingex.sourceforge.net.

Cunningham said BBC has been involved in open source, particularly standardization, "for a while" and where it benefits the industry "it is quite straight forward to release it".

BBC's next challenge will be to migrate its massive archive of a million tapes to the LTO format and then eventually to disk where appropriate.

DB2 Magazine

joe — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:49:24 -0500

DB2 Magazine's quarterly print edition is packed with tips, tricks, and solutions for working with DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows, DB2 for z/OS, Informix Dynamic Server, and other information management software. It's free. It's filled with expert advice.

DB2 Magazine's monthly email delivers the latest news and technical articles about DB2, Informix, and other information management software to your inbox, along with special offers on DB2 and Informix books, certification, and events.

DB2 Magazine Digital Edition collects all the information from the print magazine in a downloadable, printable digital format. Quarterly email updates let you know when the new issue is available. A simple registration puts you in the know.

Website: http://www.db2mag.com

Word of the Year 2008: Open

joe — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:06:15 -0500

The beginning of the year is traditionally a time to look back, and, for the brave of heart, to make a few predictions looking forward. Lacking the requisite bravery, I'll just quote something that the Economist wrote recently:

Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008.

Now, had this "fearless prediction" been made a year ago, I would have been impressed, because 2007 has turned out to be the year when everyone, it seems, wants to be open.

For example, hard as it might be to believe, Microsoft actually became an open source company in October last year, when two of its licences were accepted by the OSI as meeting the necessary criteria to be blessed with its approval. But the high-tech company that has beaten the “openness” drum more than any has been Google. No surprise there: as I've explored elsewhere, open source lies at the heart of Google's competitive strategy.

First we had Open Social:

a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.

See source for more info: Linux Journal

McKesson Migrates To Linux As Boost To Patient Safety

joe — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:35:30 -0500

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two.

Three years ago, McKesson's Acute Care Solutions offered its hospital and doctors' office applications to run under IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s mainframe AIX or other larger server Unix. But customers were bringing smaller Intel (NSDQ: INTC)-based servers into their hospitals and doctors offices. A small doctor's group had little use for an eight or 12-way Unix server, but a two-way Intel or AMD server was about right.
So McKesson has migrated 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two, said Michael Simpson, senior VP and general manager of the unit. All new applications are written for Linux, specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"We standardize completely on Red Hat... Standardizing on one distribution increases reliability and safety, and customers don't really want to support six different distributions in-house," said Simpson in an interview. The McKesson/Red Hat partnership is a significant one in the growing field of health care. Handling patient medical records and supplying provider IT systems is a significant contributor to healthcare costs. Generating examples of how to lower those costs can be a feather in the cap of a major supplier to the healthcare industry.

See for more info: InformationWeek

Slim Down and Speed Up Linux

joe — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:28:03 -0500

While Linux is pretty efficient with a computer's resources out of the box, there are still ways you can make it run leaner and meaner on your desktop. Using a little bit of know-how, a willingness to run a few terminal commands and a mind for efficiency, you can get every last bit of power from your Linux box, or get more life from an older system. Read on for a roundup of ways to slim down and speed up Linux that any level of user can implement.

Microsoft Makes Windows Embrace Linux

joe — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:08:01 -0500

When it comes down to identity management, the Windows and Linux operating systems fail to play by the same tune. But at the same time, Windows Server can be leveraged in order to manage both platforms. This is the promise of a whitepaper authored by Chris Travers, the owner of Metatron Technology Consulting and Contributing Author to the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. Travers revealed that Windows Server 2003 R2 was effectively a turning point for the streamlining of the implementation Windows-based identity management solutions tailored for Linux.
Read more at: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Makes-Windows-Embrace-Linux-739...