Archive of February 2008

Automated Installs

Throughout big deployments, whether they are server's or workstations lots of people have found the merits of automated installs.

Automated installs allow people to save time by answering questions asked by an installer before hand and letting the installer deal with the install without asking questions throughout it.

Such installs can easily be rolled out amoung every OS. WIthout it, it wouldn't have a place in a lot of evironments. To save me explaing more, and ranting, I am going to cut to the case.

Automated installs under Window's is as simple as running a wizard (although it doesn't burn the disc for you).

Debian and Ubuntu (which use the same installer) is a little bit harder and runninng an implementation of it itsn't as easy as you'd hope.

Mac is a bit different, as it seems you either need an OSX server or you have to hack it to work; not very pretty or cheap. I say "seems" as I haven't really looked into this yet and having only two working Mac's, one of which being a laptop and the other the server itself doesn't exactly constitute having a custom CD.

I am going to read into custom Debian installers as having to often install it is a tad annoying; its not a straight cut process and takes a rather long time.

In the mean time I am going to start a set of picture tutorials for making your own custom CD's. February 28 @ 02:11 PM | 0 Comments

Photography Update

The plan for this blog was as a photography blog however this has failed misrebly as all I seem to post about is Servers and Apple.

This is probably because I never get out anywhere; and when I do I'm too tired to think about whether or not I should be shooting.

I've been trying to focus on portraiture but I indeed suck at this and the attraction of wildlife photography is looming although there is the problem of expensive, scratch that, very expensive lenses.

In the mean time I do have my 200mm lens which would of course be fine for a lot of things. That means that I just need to get out there... February 27 @ 02:09 PM | 0 Comments

Mac OS X Server

This is by far the most impressive peice of server front ends I've seen in a long time.

And that's essentially all it is. Its an expensive front end to mostly Open Source software. But I like it.

As with most things Apple the influence comes from simplicity and it works really well.

I'm just trying out 10.4 (Tiger). Mostly because I am avoiding Leopard for quite a bit longer, although I could quite happily take the new OS and use on both my MacBook and iBook (When its fixed), I won't be able to upgrade my server; the CPU is a tad too slow being clocked at 450mhz and Leopard requires a CPU of just uner 900mhz.

For the time being I am going to use this (my PowerMac) as my primary server and then shift my main site over (this blog) so I can remove some of the load from having a rather large amount of virtual machines running.

I am going to do this gradually though, as I do not want to move this over, find there's a problem then having to move it back. I may also be setting up reverse DNS, which will make my host names all pretty, for this though I need to understand how to do it. That's going to be a task for Easter as I'll have lots of time to waste.

In the mean time; I'm going to get this setup by Friday evening once I have a job with a Debian server sorted. I can speculate this blog moving over once my RDNS is setup; which will be a while yet as I don't know how and what I need. February 26 @ 02:08 PM | 0 Comments

Guerilla Film Making: Elements to a good movie

A good, watchable film has the following elements:

clear storyline
good audio
reasonably steady shot
good editing

Unlike what you read about; having a completely steady shot is not usually a problem, in some ways it can be beneficial not to think so hard about getting a steady shot (especially in a film genre; trying this with a documentary would drive people insane).

The most important technical decision to make in producing a [very low budget] film is to have quality audio. Having bad quality audio from the start with influence people's decision whether or not they like the film.

By this I mean; no on-camera microphones they're terrible and do not produce the quality of sound that you will want to go with your film. A good place to start is to look into cheap external microphones. In a couple of days I should be about to go and buy my first, so by then I will have a much greater knowledge about them as a whole (this will be another article).

If you film does not have a clear storyline you should be in big trouble, if the viewer (a normal reasonably intelligent one) cannot pick up the storyline then you will not sell the film to the general public; even if you are not trying to.

Good editing is the final quintessential part of a good film. What most regard as a rough cut can be the best thing that ever happened to your film. A rough cut is a cut where the basics of the story are put together. (I will also go about explaining this in detail later).

I hope that is a reasonable brief outline of what I think makes a technically good film. I will be continuing this feature for quite a while, as I develop my own skills and try to explain what I have gotten through to try and do it. February 25 @ 08:57 PM | 0 Comments

Guerilla Film Making: Intro

Over the last couple of days I have been rereading about film making. To this date I have made one film, a childrens tv programme which although well liked was a technical disaster.

I currently have another in the works on which I plan to have it a hell of a lot better than the last.

Over the next couple of weeks I am going to outline some of the things you can do to improve your film cheaply, I call these guerilla techniques; as it will cost you next to nothing and will dramatically improve the sound. These guides will mostly be made out of rage, from finding that people although they make some good film making gadgets, do not explain them properly, or talk about specific products rather than explaining why they chose a certain product with reasons.

None of these should cost over £50; but I will be taking certain liberties with equipment. I am assuming you have a camera to hand (a video camera, obviously) and a computer on which you can install software / edit. February 24 @ 06:53 AM | 0 Comments