FileZilla, the free FTP Solution

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Last update : November 21, 2014

On dezember 28th, 2008, I installed the version 3.1.6. of FileZilla, the free FTP solution. I used the preceding version succesfully for several months.

FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Both a client and a server are available. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). The client is available under many platforms, binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are provided.

My latest installed version is 3.9.0.6,  released October 20, 2014.

EC2 : Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as the computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing the applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings is created or a pre-configured and templated image is used to get up and running immediately. The AMI is loaded into Amazon S3.

Amazon EC2 is elastic (scalable), flexible, completely controlled, designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, reliable, featured for Building Failure Resilient Applications (Amazon Elastic Block Store, Multiple Locations, Elastic IP Addresses), secure, inexpensive.

The default instance is a 32-bit platform with 1.7 GB of memory, 1 compute unit and 160 GB of instance storage (small instance). Large, extra-large and high-CPU instances are available for compute-intensive applications.Price:

The price for using a small instance is $0.10 per instance hour for Linux and $0.125 per instance hour for Windows. Amazon EC2 uses a variety of measures to provide each instance with a consistent and predictable amount of CPU capacity. Understanding the EC2 price model is not easy and several questions in the AWS forum refer to this issue. Here are some answers :

If you start an instance once every 24 hours and run it for less than an hour, and do this every day for a 30-day month, you will be charged for 30 instance hours.  As long as your instance is running, it is billable at the rate for that instance. A website would not be publicly available if the instance is not running. To run a website available 24/7 in a month, it will cost about $90 for windows instance-hours + storage charge + data in/out charge + others.

One customer confirmed the price calculation and stated that he compared AWS pricing with that of other companies. Although there were several companies that offered hosting for cheaper, in the end he decided to start using EC2 for the following reasons :

Although those sites were cheaper, none of them gave him as much flexibility as he wanted. He had to use their preset hosting configurations, which wasn’t very condusive towards hiswebsite-model. Similar cloud offerings, such as the ones offered by RackSpace, actually ended up being more expensive in the end. But most importantly, he could take advantage of Amazon’s other web services as well.  The one he was most excited about is Amazon Cloudfront to get a full-fledged content delivery service in one easy-to-use package.  Thats one offering that those “$9.99 a month!” companies can’t offer, and it’s something he needs.

There are other providers offering elastic computing power :

Protection des oeuvres littéraires et artistiques

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La Convention de Berne pour la protection des oeuvres littéraires et artistiques permet aux artistes de bénéficier d’une protection légale dans les 164 pays signataires.

Le site Copyright-France constitue un dépôt de Copyright sûr, rapide, simple et économique qui a été choisi par des dizaines de milliers d’entreprises, de particuliers, d’administrations et de juristes.

Le Guide pratique du droit d’auteur d’Anne-Laure Stérin informe comment utiliser en toute légalité des textes, photos, films, musiques, Internet et comment protéger ses créations. Le livre publié par Editions Maxima, 2007 (ISBN 284001405X, 9782840014058) comporte 537 pages, des extraits sont visibles sur le site Google : recherche de livres.

Un guide très utile sur le droit d’auteur sur Internet est accessible sur le site de la cité scolaire Pierre Larousse de Toucy dans l’Yonne. Les règles de base à connaître et à respecter lorqu’on utilise un document sur Internet :

  • Citer le nom de son auteur et les références de l’oeuvre.
  • Respecter l’oeuvre, ne pas déformer la pensée de l’auteur, ne pas modifier l’oeuvre.
  • Si l’auteur est vivant ou s’il est décédé depuis moins de 70 ans, il faut demander son
  • accord écrit ou celui de ses “ayants droit » (famille, éditeur…).
  • Ne pas utiliser l’image d’une personne sans son autorisation.

On peut reproduire librement une œuvre si l’artiste est décédé depuis plus de 70 ans en citant l’auteur et la référence de l’œuvre ; dans le cas contraire il faut demander l’autorisation à l’artiste ou à ses ayants droit. Dans tous les cas il faut obtenir l’autorisation du propriétaire de l’œuvre. On doit toujours respecter l’intégralité de l’œuvre. Pour reproduire une photographie d’une œuvre, il faut également obtenir l’autorisation du photographe ou de l’agence qui le représente.

Une bande dessinée au sujet du droit d’auteur a été publié dans le cadre de l’accord entre l’Institut national pour la défense de la concurrence et la protection de la propriété intellectuelle (INDECOPI) et l’Organisation Mondiale de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OMPI) en 2001.

Blurb book “Artist’s Portfolio” of Leslie’s Artgallery

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The artbook Artist’s Portfolio edited by Leslie’s Artgallery is ready at the digital book publishing service of Blurb, a company and a community that believes passionately in the joy of books – reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them.

The book is published in standard portrait format, 4color printing, and includes 129 photos on 120 pages.

The book is available at Blurb’s bookstore for the general public with the following prices (without taxes or shipping) :

  • softcover: 29,95 EUR
  • hardcover dustjacket: 39,95 EUR
  • hardcover imagewrap: 44,95 EUR

The following badge bas been created with the Blurb tools :

Artist’s Portfolio …
By Zenia Malmer & Le…

Zen Cart : The Art of E-Commerce II – Installation

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Version 1.3.8a of the free open source shopping cart software “Zen Cart” can be downloaded from the official website. The installation guide is available at the same site in the tutorials section, a basic checklist to set up the shop and get it operational is included in the wiki section.

I installed a demo-version at my site www.web3.lu in the folder store_demo . I used the FTP program FileZilla to upload the software. The database can be managed with dbadmin. The MySQL version is 4.0.13.

After starting the installation, I received the error message that CURL is not compiled into PHP. CURL is required by some payment and shipping modules in order to talk to an external server to request real-time quotes or payment authorizations. An alert indicates that “Register Globals = ON”. Zen Cart™ can work with the “Register Globals” setting on or off. However, having it “off” leaves your system somewhat more secure. Another error message indicates that “PHP Safe Mode = ON”. Zen Cart™, being a full-service e-Commerce application, does not work well on servers running in Safe Mode. Two other alerts indicate for information that “PHP open_basedir restrictions = /www/provider/sarapro/pages” and that “PHP Output Buffering (gzip) = OFF”.

The database server is “ptmysql.pt.lu”, the name of the database is “sarapro”, the table-prefix is “store_demo” (to avoid confusions it’s better to end the prefix with _). Database sessions are stored in the database, the SQL cache method is set to “none”.

The physical path to Zen Cart™ is “/www/provider/sarapro/pages/store_demo”, the URL is “http://www.web3.lu/store_demo”. SSL is not activated. The phpBB forum is not installed.

The following initial values have been entered for the store setup:

  • Store Name : ARTGALLERY DEMO
  • Store Owner : Sara Proft
  • Store Owner email : alipa@saraproft.com
  • Store Country : Luxembourg
  • Store Zone : Alabama (Europe, default, nothing or Luxembourg does not exist)
  • Store Address :ARTGALLERY DEMO 36, rue Vullesang L-4853 Rodange Luxembourg
  • Default Language : English
  • Default Currency : Euro
  • Store Demo : yes
  • ZenCart update : no

I declared myself as administrator. After the succesful installation, I changed the proprieties of the config files on the server to “read only” and I deleted the install-folder for security reasons. The store setup values are registered in the config files. Congratulations: the demo-shop is working as expected.

Following tables have been created in the database sarapro (with the prefix store_demo) :

  • address_book
  • address_format
  • admin
  • admin_activity_log
  • authorizenet
  • banners
  • banners_history
  • categories
  • categories_description
  • configuration
  • configuration_group
  • counter
  • counter_history
  • countries
  • coupon_email_track
  • coupon_gv_customer
  • coupon_gv_queue
  • coupon_redeem_track
  • coupon_restrict
  • coupons
  • coupons_description
  • currencies
  • customers
  • customers_basket
  • customers_basket_attributes
  • customers_info
  • customers_wishlist
  • db_cache
  • email_archive
  • ezpages
  • featured
  • files_uploaded
  • geo_zones
  • get_terms_to_filter
  • group_pricing
  • languages
  • layout_boxes
  • manufacturers
  • manufacturers_info
  • media_clips
  • media_manager
  • media_to_products
  • media_types
  • meta_tags_categories_description
  • meta_tags_products_description
  • music_genre
  • newsletters
  • nochex_apc_transactions
  • nochex_sessions
  • orders
  • orders_products
  • orders_products_attributes
  • orders_products_download
  • orders_status
  • orders_status_historystore_demoorders_total
  • paypalstore_demopaypal_payment_status
  • paypal_payment_status_history
  • paypal_session
  • paypal_testing
  • product_music_extra
  • product_type_layout
  • product_types
  • product_types_to_category
  • products
  • products_attributes
  • products_attributes_download
  • products_description
  • products_discount_quantity
  • products_notifications
  • products_options
  • products_options_types
  • products_options_values
  • products_options_values_to_products_options
  • products_to_categories
  • project_version
  • project_version_history
  • query_builder
  • record_artists
  • record_artists_info
  • record_company
  • record_company_infostore_demoreviews
  • reviews_description
  • salemaker_sales
  • sessions
  • specials
  • tax_class
  • tax_rates
  • template_select
  • upgrade_exceptions
  • whos_online
  • zones
  • zones_to_geo_zones

I tried to install the product type book from Paul Hailey. When I run the SQL patch to create the book product tables, I receive the error message “1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘ENGINE=MyISAM’ at line 1
in: [CREATE TABLE store_demobook_authors”.

To fix this problem, I run the following example to test the syntax with success :

CREATE TABLE shop (
article INT(4) UNSIGNED ZEROFILL DEFAULT ‘0000’ NOT NULL,
dealer  CHAR(20)                 DEFAULT ”     NOT NULL,
price   DOUBLE(16,2)             DEFAULT ‘0.00’ NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(article, dealer));
INSERT INTO shop VALUES
(1,’A’,3.45),(1,’B’,3.99),(2,’A’,10.99),(3,’B’,1.45),
(3,’C’,1.69),(3,’D’,1.25),(4,’D’,19.95);

The table store_demoshop was created with the correct values.

After deleting the default statement ENGINE=MyISAM, the patch was executed correctly and 169 statements have been processed. The following additional tables have been created in the database sarapro:

  • book_authors
  • book_authors_info
  • book_color
  • book_color_description
  • book_condition
  • book_condition_description
  • book_genre
  • book_genre_description
  • book_type
  • book_type_description
  • book_dd1
  • book_dd1_description
  • book_dd2
  • book_dd2_description
  • book_dd3
  • book_dd3_description
  • book_dd4
  • book_dd4_description
  • book_dd5
  • book_dd5_description
  • book_dd6
  • book_dd6_description
  • books_to_authors
  • books_to_genres
  • books_to_types
  • books_to_languages
  • books_to_dd1
  • books_to_dd2
  • books_to_dd3
  • books_to_dd4
  • books_to_dd5
  • books_to_dd6
  • product_book_extra

Finally I added the auction product type developped by Bramnick which is available at the Free Software Addons on the ZenCart website. After uploading the additional files, the SQL patch processed succesfully 17 statements.

File storage and video hosting on Amazon S3

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Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key. It’s possible to write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.

The pricing plan for Amazon S3 is based on “Pay only for what you use”. There is no minimum fee. The prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the location of the bucket. For Europe the pricing effective november 2008 is as follows :

Storage :

  • $0.180 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
  • $0.170 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
  • $0.160 per GB – next 400 TB / month of storage used
  • $0.150 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Data Transfer :

  • $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
  • $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
  • $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
  • $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
  • $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests :

  • $0.012 per 1,000 PUT, POST, or LIST requests
  • $0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

The Amazon S3 service is part of the Amazon Web Services, an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. The direct link to the S3 login page is aws.amazon.com/s3/. I created my account on Amazon S3 on october 13th, 2008.

Some test files to verify the correct configuration are accessible at the following links :

The sender of a request to an AWS web service is authorised by Access Identifiers. Access identifiers are also used to authenticate requests to AWS. For services that require authenticated requests, where you need to prove that you are authorized to make the request, you must sign the request by including a “signature” in the request. A request signature is calculated using the pair of public / private Access Identifiers. AWS supports two types of Request Identifiers: AWS Access Key Identifiers or X.509 Certificates.

The Access Key ID is used as the value of the AWSAccessKeyId parameter in requests you send to Amazon Web Services and identifies you as the party responsible for the request. Since the Access Key ID is not encrypted in requests to AWS, it could be discovered and used by anyone. Services that are not free require you to provide additional information, a request signature, to verify that a request containing your unique Access Key ID could only have come from you. You use your Secret Access Key to calculate a signature to include in requests to web services that require authenticated requests.

Uploading and managing files on the Amazon S3 distributed system is not straight forward. Amazon offers documentation, release notes, sample code & libraries, developer tools, articles & tutorials and a community forum as resources to developers.

A comfortable user interface to upload and manage files on the 3S servers called “Bucket Explorer” (version 2008.06.30.01) is offered by Chambal.com.Inc for Windows, Linux and Mac (website www.bucketexplorer.com). The price for one licence is USD 49.95, a 30 day free trial version is available. A free plugin for the Firefox browser called “S3Fox Organizer” (version 0.4.1) has been developped by Rjonna of Suchi Software Solutions from India.

Another Firefox plugin (Gspace) developped by the same author and distributed by Fon Labs allows you to use your Gmail Space (2700 MB) as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail. Your gmail account looks like a FTP host and you can upload and download your files. After you install, you get an option called “GSpace” in your “tools” menu clicking on which opens the window for transfer. You have to be aware that this extension is not endorsed by Google and that this usage is not compliant with the Google Terms of Service.

BlackBerry RSS reader

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Viigo Inc. develops and markets one of the world’s most popular mobile content and services applications for smartphones. With over 5,000 channels and information services, Viigo customers around the world enjoy up‐to‐the minute access to news, weather, sports, stocks and markets, entertainment, and blogs in one intuitive, simple, freely-downloadable application.

Viigo offers a free beta version of an RSS reader for BlackBerry. This third party application is also used by RIM executives, as stated by crackberry.com, the #1 site for BlackBerry users & abusers.

Crop or padd a video

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Last update : August 2013, 2013

Sometimes it’s necessary to crop or padd a video to change the aspect ratio and the resolution. The size of a video image is measured in pixels for digital video, or horizontal scan lines and vertical lines of resolution for analog video. In the digital domain standard-definition television resolution is specified as 720/704/640 ×480 for NTSC and 768/720 × 576 for PAL or SECAM. However in the analog domain, the number of visible scanlines remains constant (486 NTSC/576 PAL) while the horizontal measurement varies with the quality of the signal: approximately 320 pixels per scanline for VCR quality, 400 pixels for TV broadcasts, and 720 pixels for DVD sources. Aspect ratio is preserved because of non-square pixels.

High-definition televisions are capable of resolutions up to 1920 ×1080 pixels.

Aspect ratio describes the dimensions of video screens and video picture elements. All popular video formats are rectilinear, and are described by a ratio between width and height. The screen aspect ratio of a traditional television screen is 4:3. High definition televisions use an aspect ratio of 16:9.

Some common used video resolutions and aspect ratios are :

  • 128 : 96 > 4 : 3
  • 176 : 144 > 11 : 9
  • 240 : 176 > 4 : 3
  • 320 : 240 > 4 : 3
  • 352 : 288 > 11 : 9
  • 480 : 272 > 16 : 9
  • 640 : 480 > 4 : 3
  • 720 : 480 > 3 : 2

To keep the aspect ratio of a video without distortion when changing the resolution, you often need to crop or to padd the video (delete or add pixels on top, bottom, left and right side). I use the great video-tool Super from eRightSoft to do this job. The current version is v2013.build.57 released on July 13, 2013.

DVD Video media

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Last update : November 4, 2013

DVD Properties

DVD

DVD

DVD Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD (DVD-ROM) discs, and is currently the dominant form of consumer video formats in the world.

A DVD contains 3 type of files: VOB, IFO and BUP.
A VOB file (Video Object) is a container format contained in DVD-Video media. It’s the core file of a DVD and contains the actual Video, Audio, Subtitle, and Menu contents in stream form. VOB is based on MPEG-2 program stream format, however, VOB files are a very strict subset of the standard. An overview to show the logical structure of VOB files is given on the MPUcoder website.

An IFO file (InFOrmation) stores information about Chapters, Subtitles and Audio Tracks. It contains important navigational information, such as where a video chapter begins, and where audio and subtitle streams exist within the movie (VOB) file. IFO files are not encrypted.

A BUP file (Back UP) is a backup of the IFO file and is used in the event that the corresponding IFO file is unreadable, perhaps due to a scratch on the surface of the disc.

A DVD contains the following data files :

  • VIDEO_TS.IFO : The ‘Video [Title Set] Manager Information Set’ is a configuration file that defines the disc structure and also includes region coding information and aspect ratio etc
  • VIDEO_TS.VOB : The ‘Video [Title Set] Object file for VMG Menu’, this file works like a bookmark to tell the player that it is the start of the disc.
  • VIDEO_TS.BUP : Backup file of the’ Video Manager Information Set’ (VIDEO_TS.IF0).
  • VTS_01_0.IFO : The’ Video Title Set Information Configuration` file for the first lot of VOB files, it also tells the player how to proceed when using the on screen menu system
  • VTS_01_0.VOB : ‘Video Object Set for Video Title Set Menu’, the first video and audio stream sequence to be played usually the on screen menu system. These files may contain several streams of audio/video “multiplexed” (MUX) together (eg. chapters/language selections)
  • VTS_01_0.BUP : Backup file of the’ Video Title Set Information’ file (VTS 01_1.IFO)
  • VTS_01_1.VOB : The first ‘Video Title Object Set’ file, the main file containing the picture and audio streams. It is usually split into three to four files, each with ascending filenames; for example VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_01_2.VOB, VTS_01_3.V0B and so on. No VOB file is to exceed 1GB in size, with a maximum total of five VOB files in sequence on a single layer disc (DVD 5) and no more than nine on a dual layer disc (DVD 9). VOB files have a naming standard VTS_xx_yy.VOB (xx = Title number, yy = Section number).

A DVD can also include additional Video Title Sets that include the IFO, VOB and BUP with ascending filenames such as VTS_02_1, VTS_03_1 and so on. These are usually the extra features that come with the title, such as documentaries and behind-the-scenes footage. Each title has at least 2 VOBs (one for the menu and one for the main feature) and exactly one IFO and BUP file.

An freeware editor IfoEdit (version 0.971) for IFO-files is available at www.ifoedit.com. A complementary program PgcEdit (version 9.3) with more possibilities, called the swiss knive of DVD edition, is available at the videohelp.com website. A guide how to create IFO files from VOB files with IfoEdit is available at the digital-digest website.

A very detailed description (in german) about DVD’s is available at the dvd-tipps-tricks website.

DVD Resolution

Whether a Display Aspect Ratio (DAR) of 4:3 or 16:9, the native resolution of a DVD is 720 x 576 pixels (5:4) for PAL/SECAM (Europe) or 720 x 480 pixels (3:2) for NTSC (US). The DAR is registrated in the IFO-file and handled by the television or the DVD player to present the video in the correct aspect ratio.

For PAL, a 4:3 video ist stretched to 768 x 576 pixels, a 16:9 video is stretched  to 1.024 x 576 pixels. For NTSC, a 4:3 video is resized to 640 x 480 pixels, a 16:9 video is stretched to 854 pixels.This process is called anamorphic widescreen.

If the DVD shows Panavision (ratio 2.20:1), CinemaScope (2.39:1) or other widescreen films (1.66:1, 1.85:1, 2:35:1, 14:9, …), hard-matting or black bars adding techniques (letterboxing) are used to include the image within the 16:9 format.

DVD authoring

DVD authoring is the process of creating a DVD video that can be played on a DVD player. DVD authoring software must conform to the specifications set by the DVD Forum group in 1995. The specifications are complicated due to the number of companies that were involved in creating them.

There are a lot of DVD authoring, encoding and burning programs available: professional, commercial, proprietary, free of charge and open source software. Among the free programs, I prefer  DVD Flick (only for Windows available), developped by Dennis Meuwissen (pseudo : Exl). The latest version is 1.3.0.7.

DVD Forum

The DVD Forum is an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and content companies that use and develop the DVD formats. It was initially known as the DVD Consortium when it was founded in 1995.

DVD Formats

The following main DVD formats are available :

  • DVD-R : recordable ; capacity 4,7 GB; approved by the DVD-Forum
  • DVD-RW : rewritable ; capacity 4,7 GB; approved by the DVD-Forum
  • DVD+R : recordable ; capacity 4,7 GB; developed by the DVD+RW Alliance
  • DVD+RW : rewritable ; capacity 4,7 GB; developed by the DVD+RW Alliance

There are a number of significant technical differences between the dash and the plus format, although most DVD drives can handle both formats and most users would not notice the difference. The write time for a full disc depends on the maximal speed supported by the media; the current maximum speed (Sony DVD) is 24x (31.68 MB/s).