Jonathan Brown

Ladies and Gentleman… The Bartles!

Jonathan Brown — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:35:12 +0000

Each year on Christmas day my family gathers in the recording studio to record a Beatles song with intentions to reproduce the instrumentation, sounds and performances as closely as our talents allow. This year, we’re releasing our first album recorded between December 1998 and December 2008. We called it Crappy Road. Check out The Bartles!

Beatleween 2009

Jonathan Brown — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:05:21 +0000

For this year’s pumpkin, I wanted to take a stab (no pun intended) at a carving with some shading technique. After considering Alex’s choice (the boys jumping), I decided I wanted the band with their instruments.

This carving turned out to be quite involved. The carving alone took about six hours, but I was slowed by my side project–a stop motion animation of the carving. This added greatly to the time, having to clean and snap a photo after every cut.

Overall the project turned out pretty good if I say so.

Here’s the animation:

My New Guitar

Jonathan Brown — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:22:14 +0000

My First Guitar - Chiquita Travel

Believe it or not, I’ve been trying to play the guitar since I was six years old. After a few years of playing old school rock band—a baseball bat for a guitar and lunch boxes and dinner trays for drums (pots and pans are so cliché)—my older brother and I had perhaps the most awesome (early) Christmas ever. I received a Chiquita travel guitar, red, very much like the picture to the right—and equally as awesome as the one Michael J. Fox used to blow up Doc’s massive speaker in Back to the Future—and my brother got a practice pad drum kit. And we started our second band, or the first with real instruments, which ever way you want to look at it.

Fast forward twenty-six years…now I run an I.T. department and my brother still beats on pots and pans (literally) and anything else that makes a sound when you hit it, including real drums. And he gets paid! That’s crazy, right? I mean, people actually fly him around so he can play drums for an hour or so. Get a job, man!

Over the last twenty-six years I’ve owned quite a few crappy guitars. I’ve had a Silvertone acoustic (my Dad’s old guitar), Fender Squire II, Yamaha acoustic, Yamaha nylon string classical and an electric Epiphone Special. All of them equally tawdry, inferior touch and sound, but good enough for me to barrel my way through fake books and what not to amuse myself.

My Gibson ES-137c

I’ve always wanted that one good guitar. A guitar that excites me, that stares me down and messes with my head. A guitar that I can’t put down. A guitar technically well-built with good intonation, electronics that don’t flake out, nice action and a unique warm sound. A guitar that will make me want to practice scales!

After a little inspiration (a viewing of It Might Get Loud), I decided now was the time to go get myself a real guitar. My dream guitar is a Gibson ES-335, but even used they are still very expensive and more than I’m willing to pay for a hobby. I searched local guitar stores for other semi-hollow bodies that fit my budget.

My older brother found my next guitar at a local shop. I’m not going to mention the name, because quite frankly, I think they really suck. He SMS’d me a picture and price, so I researched the model and put it in the back of my head. I continued to research other guitars.

Then last Friday evening, after dinner, I visited the guitar shop to see if the guitar my brother found was still there. It was, so I asked to take a closer look. I plugged into a Fender Blues DeVille and began noodling. I was sold. The guitar felt really good in my hands. It had great action and a big silky warm blues sound. After thirty minutes of the worst guitar-store riffing you’ll ever hear, I bought it.

It’s a 2003 Gibson ES-137 Classic. Lisa asked me if I was going to name it. The first name that came to my mind was Maud because it has a big fat butt just like the elephant Alex and I saw at the zoo earlier in the day. But really, who names their guitar these days? That’s cheeky.

Don’t Hang on the Rail!

Jonathan Brown — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:58:15 +0000

Alex hangs from a hand rail in the pool. Used iPhone 3GS with Vint Shift app to take photo and Photoshop for iPhone to add vibrancy. Very cool combo.

Posted from my Flickr account.

Alex Under Water

Jonathan Brown — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:24:14 +0000

Posted from my Flickr account.

Backup and Archive SDHC Cards

Jonathan Brown — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:18:58 +0000

Continuing with my backup and archiving strategy, one of my goals was to get a grip on the growing number of SDHC cards I use with my video cameras; mainly my Canon HF10. I’ve been ordering about five 4GB cards every couple months. Besides being small and easy to lose, they are difficult to label and therefore difficult to manage from an archiving perspective.

There are a few options to deal with this. I could import the video from the cards into iMovie or Final Cut Express and reuse the cards, but there are a few disadvantages to doing this. First, the imported AVCHD video files are huge compared to their natural compressed state on the SDHC card. Second, you never know when you need to get the video back on the camera in its original form. Another option is to use iMovie’s archive feature, which copies the contents of the card to a folder on your hard drive, but I found a better solution that provides many advantages.

I theorized that I could create an image of the SDHC card so I did a quick Google search to see if someone was doing this already. I found this post on Scoopz Blog which is exactly what I was looking to do. The short story is, using Apple’s Disk Utility, I can make a disk image (DMG) of the SDHC card. Here are a few advantages to this technique as opposed to iMovies archive feature:

Manage single DMG file versus directory structure—I’m copying the resulting DMG file over to my NAS (running FreeNAS), then letting FreeNAS copy to an additional external FireWire drive using RSYNC. With the intricacies and caveats of multiple file systems, fewer directory structures and increased control over file naming becomes really important in backup/archive strategies.
Mounting image acts like SDHC card or camera—When I choose to remount the DMG file, iMovie and Final Cut Express recognize the mounted drive as if I just plugged the camera into my Mac or inserted the SDHC card into a reader.
Copy DMG back to SDHC card—Scoopz gives a very good reason why this is important. In his case, his camera records 5.1 sound; however, iMovie can’t handle all of those audio tracks and reduces to stereo. Getting the raw data back on the camera improves options for future usage. There’s no messing with formatting the SDHC card the way the camera expects as the DMG handles that by its nature.

For a tutorial on how to make an image of your SDHC cards using Disk Utility, read Scoopz post. As for naming the DMG files, I used a combination of camera, video format and a sequence number. For example, canon_avchd_0001.dmg.

Now that I’m confident my raw video footage is being archived, I need to focus on labeling/logging the video in the event I need to find that one clip I want to use without resorting to mounting every DMG for browsing. After researching a few tools to do this sort of thing, I decided that in the event I needed to recover this data, one less tool to install and configure the better. And while I’m not 100% sold on the solution I came up with, I chose to do something now so I could proceed in archiving all of the SDHC cards on my desk rather than waiting for the perfect solution to present itself.

I decided to use a spreadsheet (something searchable) with a few columns: REEL (the dmg file name), CAMERA, FORMAT, DATE, SUBJECT, KEYWORDS and CLIP THUMBNAILS. I used iMovie’s import feature to grab screen shots of the clips for a visual reference. I doubt this process will scale, but I’ll see how it goes. Here’s an example of the spreadsheet I created using Numbers:

Setup Time Machine on FreeNAS

Jonathan Brown — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:35:49 +0000

Update 11/27/2009 — As HarryD notes in the comments, FreeNAS 0.7 (which was still in RC at time of this writing and did not contain this feature) allows a much easier way to setup Time Machine using AFP. See his post here. I’ve not tested this feature in 0.7 and currently using the approach as follows.

In my overall strategy, Time Machine serves as a point-in-time backup and restore. The use case here is I’m working on a project and realize I accidentally deleted an important file a few days ago. Using Time Machine, I can go back and recover that file. I’ve never attempted to do a full restore from Time Machine, and while I hear it works well, that’s not how I would do it. If I have a catastrophic incident, I will treat it as a refresh point and rebuild my system from a new OS install and then reinstall all of my applications. I find it to be a great way to do a spring cleaning of sorts—re-identifying the important tools in your workflow.

The first step is to carve out some space on the NAS. After a lot of experimentation I determined the best file protocol to handle this was AFP (Apple File Protocol). In FreeNAS, you can enable AFP from the Services->AFP menu. Check the “Enable” box in the upper right of the screen. I entered a server name (thenas-afp, to differentiate from the samba server), checked “Enable local user authentication” and checked “Disable AFP-over-Appletalk to prevent DDP connections”.

I created a directory structure on the NAS to store Time Machine backups (/mnt/NAS01/Backup/Time Machine) and then a directory for my primary MacBook Pro, which is named jb15uni. You can create directories via the File Manager (Advanced->File Manager). Next I created an AFP share so my MacBook could access the NAS. On the Services->AFP Shares tab, I added a new share with a name (TM for jb15uni), a comment and set the path to my jb15uni backup directory. I left the other options as default. I verified the share was working and I was able to write to the share. If you use the File Manager to create directories, you may need to set proper permissions so your local user can write to the NAS. To do this you can SSH into your FreeNAS and run some chown and chmod commands.

By default, Time Machine is not configured to use network shares as a destination for backups. To enable it, you have to turn on a preference to tell Time Machine to show network volumes. To do this, run Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

I researched quite a few ways to accomplish this next step, which is to create the sparsebundle image that Time Machine usually creates on its own. The problem with the way Time Machine creates sparsebundles is that it will use the maximum available drive space because it’s supposed to be used with an attached drive dedicated to backups. I certainly didn’t want 2.6TB of Time Machine backups on my NAS. Because of how I’m using Time Machine in my backup strategy, I want just enough space to keep a few weeks worth of history. I have a 320GB drive on my MacBook Pro of which about 220GB are used. I wanted Time Machine to only take up a maximum of 500GB for backups.

The best tutorial I found that worked was this one which you should follow to create the sparesebundle. One thing I learned—painfully—is that the way OSX names your computer by default will not work for the sparsebundle name on the NAS. The problem seems to be the apostrophe in the default name (e.g. Jonathan Brown’s MacBook Pro). To change the name of your computer, open Sharing in the System Preferences. Be sure to change the “Computer Name” field as well as click the “Edit” button and change the local hostname. I decided to keep my computer name short and descriptive—less than eight alpha-numeric characters.

Time Machine expects the sparsebundle to be named a particular way—_.sparsebundle. You can find your MAC address by opening up Terminal and running an ifconfig command. Your MAC address will be listed under the en0 device and will look like this:

ether 00:26:4a:00:25:c8

In my case, the sparsebundle name is:

jb15uni_00264a0025c8.sparsebundle

The command in Terminal I used to create my sparsebundle was (this is a one line command):

hdiutil create -size 500g -fs HFS+J -volname “Backup of jb15uni” jb15uni_00264a0025c8.sparsebundle

That command creates a sparsebundle file on the Mac computer that will grow to a maximum of 500GB, formated with HFS+Journaling file system. Once Time Machine maxes out that space, it will begin getting rid of the oldest backups to make room for new.

Next, I copied the sparsebundle file to the share I created earlier on the NAS. Initially the file is a few hundred MBs in size. If you are connected to your network wirelessly, I recommend plugging into your network before configuring Time Machine as it will kickoff backup shortly after selecting the disk.

Open the Time Machine preferences in System Preferences, click the “Select Disk” button and choose the new backup share. Time Machine will ask for credentials to the NAS share. Be sure to enter your credentials to FreeNAS, not your Macintosh. Time Machine will start the first backup shortly after selecting the disk. The initial backup will take some time even if on a gigabit network. I let it work while I slept. After the initial backup, Time Machine will kick off hourly.

It’s a good idea to take a look at your files and exclude some directories that are not necessary to backup. In my case I have a few virtual machines that total about 50GB. I exclude those as well as iTunes music as my MacBook Pro contains a subset of music that’s already on my NAS. iMovie events are huge and I’ve got backups of those which I’ll talk about in another post.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. It may sound daunting, but it’s a pretty simple thing to do.

Fixing PHP Timezone Issue in Snow Leopard (10.6)

Jonathan Brown — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:48:52 +0000

I always forget about my PHP development environment when I upgrade OS X. Apple must think it’s really funny to make developers figure out what’s changed and how to fix it. Snow Leopard brings us PHP 5.3, which apparently requires a value in the date.timezone setting or your code will produce warning messages. Unfortunately, this value isn’t set in the php.ini file shipped with 10.6. Here’s how to fix:

Open Terminal
Run this command to rename the php.ini.default file to php.ini: mv /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini
Open the new php.ini file in vi (or other editor if you wish) with superuser: sudo vi /etc/php.ini
Search for the date.timezone key and set it to your timezone. Mine is America/New_York. You can find a complete list here.
Save the php.ini file.
Restart Apache with this command: sudo apachectl restart

The Beatles Let It Be Album

Jonathan Brown — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:33:17 +0000

I picked up the latest addition to my Beatles record collection this morning.

Posted from my Flickr account.

My FreeNAS Project Part 6: Final Build and Overview

Jonathan Brown — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:05:17 +0000

I’ve completed the NAS build, installed and configured FreeNAS and have a nice 2.6TB storage device connected to my network.

Before I start writing about how this NAS fits into my overall strategy, here’s the final cost sheet for the project thus far. Note that some of the components (APC UPS, Linksys gigabit router) aren’t technically part of the NAS device, but complementary devices to support my total strategy. I’m happy to report that the total for NAS-related costs are $629.47, which compared to say a comparable Drobo setup which would include a Drobo w/ 4TB ($799.99 + shipping) and DroboShare ($199.99 + shipping) to share it over a network, I’ve saved $370. Not bad considering I didn’t intend to do this cheaper than buying off-the-shelf.

Component	Quantity	Price	Total
Donor Machine: Intel chipset w/ Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 460W Power Supply, DVD optical drive, GigE, 4x SATA RAID	1	0.00	0.00
SilverStone LC10S Aluminum Front Panel ATX/Micro ATX Computer Case (Silver)	1	85.49	85.49
Syba Ultra Adapter Dual IDE 40/44PIN To Compact Flash	1	13.98	13.98
Allegro 3PORT Firewire 400/800 Pci Card	1	64.78	64.78
TRANSCEND 2GB Compact Flash Card	1	17.29	17.29
Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Hard Drive 3.5″	5	79.99	399.95
Tripp Lite P940-19I Serial ATA (SATA) Signal Cable (19 Inches)	3	9.00	27.00
BFG 550W GX Modular Power Supply	1	89.99	89.99
Case/Power Supply Fan, 80mm, 3-pin, ball bearing	1	6.99	6.99
3-Pin to 4-Pin Fan Adapter	1	3.99	3.99
APC BACK-UPS XS 900	1	129.99	129.99
Linksys WRT310N Wireless-N Gigabit Router	1	129.99	129.99
LaCie d2 Quadra 1TB eSata/FW800/FW400/USB2 External Drive	1	151.98	151.98
	Shipping		0.00
	Total		1121.42

Now it’s time to revisit a few of my main goals for this project and see how this NAS fits into the overall strategy. From my original post…

Incorporate Time Machine backups
Identify super important things that need multiple backups (e.g. backup to disk and DVD or online backup)
Network sharing – this is rather low on the list. As I said before, I only do real computing on one machine (to avoid syncing multiple machines), but with Apple TV and the rumored Apple Tablet… hmmm

Based on those three objectives, I’ve put together a high-level strategy and you can see the NAS is right in the middle of it:

In the next few posts I’ll talk about specific parts of the strategy and how I technically implement them.

Shameless plug—The diagram above was created using OmniGraffle and my Architecture by Hand stencil.