Another Home Video

Just playing around with the camera. This is a view of our corral to the west of the house.

GiSTEQ GPS Datalogger

For my birthday, Jennie gave me a GPS unit that came with software to set latitude and longitude values on pictures. It is able to do this fairly accurately if your camera's clock is synchronized with that of the GPS unit. Here's a great review of it: http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/gisteq-phototrackr-r1032.php



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Video from a Canon HG10

Here's the first video Jennie recorded with her new toy.




The camera records to a 40GB HDD using the nascent AVCHD format. There doesn't seem to be a bunch of support for editing or transcoding from this format.

With some help from http://chomer.com/how%2Dto/ I was able to figure out how to use the bundled software to transcode the .M2TS file produced by the camera into an AVI or a Quicktime file.

Executive Summary: Import your video file into a project in Ulead's DVD MovieFactory, then right-click the movie and select Export Video -> Customize. You can then choose a different file type such as .avi or .mov.

The video you see here is very dark and doesn't represent how the camera performs. I'm not quite sure why it turned out this way.

Maven, rmic-maven-plugin and the Ant task

This is a Java tech post, not the type I usually include here, but I spent a lot of time searching for the solution and I wanted to share my findings.

I'm migrating a project at work from Ant to Maven and needed to RMI Compile (rmic) some classes.

There appear to be a couple options: Using a Maven Plugin, rmic-maven-plugin, http://mojo.codehaus.org/rmic-maven-plugin or using the rmic Ant task. The plugin is not very well documented and is still in an Alpha-SNAPSHOT version. The Ant task works great.

I found some direction on using the task from Maven from here: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MANTRUN-23

If you don't setup the dependencies for the maven-antrun-plugin, you'll end up with this error:
"Cannot use SUN rmic, as it is not available. A common solution is to
set the environment variable JAVA_HOME or CLASSPATH."

Below is a snippet from my pom.xml file.

<project>
.
.
.
 <build>
     <plugins>
         <plugin>
             <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
             <dependencies>
               <!-- runtime dependency for the antrun plugin.
                  It brings tools.jar into the plugins execution
                  space so the 'rmic' compiler can be called from
                  Ant's <rmic/> task.
               -->
               <dependency>
                 <groupId>sun</groupId>
                 <artifactId>tools</artifactId>
                 <version>1.0</version>
                 <scope>system</scope>
                 <systemPath>
                     ${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar
                 </systemPath>
               </dependency>
             </dependencies>
             <executions>
                 <execution>
                     <id>rmic</id>
                     <phase>compile</phase>
                     <configuration>
                         <tasks>
                             <rmic verify="true" debug="on"
                                   classpathref="maven.compile.classpath"
                                   base="${project.build.directory}/classes"
                                   includes="**/Remote*Impl.class"/>
                         </tasks>
                     </configuration>
                     <goals>
                         <goal>run</goal>
                     </goals>
                 </execution>
             </executions>
         </plugin>
     </plugins>
 </build>
</project>