I’d like to publicize an issue that the F-Spot developers have been slow to address:

<rant>

There is a good possibility that every photo you’ve imported to F-Spot has had its EXIF date tags altered without your permission and without F-Spot informing you that it has done so.

From bug reports going back over two years it is clear that F-Spot has a serious date problem.

What is the assigned severity of these bugs? Normal.

What is the status of these bugs? UNCONFIRMED.

How’s this for confirmation:

Mangled EXIF data as viewed by Gthumb

The above is a screenshot of the EXIF date information (as viewed by Gthumb) of a photo I imported to F-Spot version 0.6.1.3 for testing purposes. Prior to import, all three of the fields (DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, and DateTimeDigitized) had the same timestamp: 2009:10:26 13:37:11. This timestamp corresponds to when I took the picture: 13:37 on October 26th.

As can be seen, F-Spot has decided that the users are idiots and to update the fields with the values it thinks are best without telling anyone. It decided to set the DateTime field to the time when the photo was imported into F-Spot (as if that date is so important it needs to be saved for posterity). For DateTimeOriginal F-Spot decided that the appropriate time is the UTC time when the picture was taken (conveniently deciding that since my computer is currently in U.S Eastern Daylight Time, I must have been in the same timezone when I took the picture and that my camera was set to the correct time for my timezone at the time I took the picture). The EXIF date fields do not have timezone information in them so setting it to UTC is meaningless because there’s no way to tell from looking at the data that that is what you’ve set it to! The DateTimeDigitized field is the only one F-Spot left alone which gives us the strange paradox of the picture being digitized 4 hours before it was originally taken! <sarcasm>Yeah, that makes sense.</sarcasm>

This problem is so bad some users have resorted to writing perl scripts to try and fix things after the fact or launching the program in different ways to prevent the problem from happening. I am going to take the nuclear option and simply remove F-Spot from all of my computers.

An open letter to the F-Spot devs:

To whom it may concern,

Data corruption is ALWAYS a critical problem but you list bugs 340903 and 454082 as “UNCONFIRMED” with a severity and priority of “Normal”.

UNCONFIRMED? Normal? Who are you kidding? Data corruption is always critical and these bugs are years old and have been confirmed in your own bugzilla by dozens of users.

Regardless of whatever reason you had for introducing this stupid date-changing “feature”, you never change EXIF data unless the user expressly tells you to. That’s basic common courtesy.

You’ve known about this issue for over three years. You need to grow up, acquire a clue, and fix F-Spot’s terrible and destructive behavior. Yesterday.

Until then I will distrust F-Spot and anyone who says it is anywhere close to being a good, decent, or even “ok” photo manager. You and others keep telling me that F-Spot is awesome, that F-Spot is great, that it is the best Linux photo manager. I no longer believe you. From now on F-Spot is not getting anywhere near my photos. I’ve written about you before but I take all the good things I said then back. I was younger, more impressionable, and foolish. But those are just excuses. The fact is I was wrong. Yes, you appear to have some nice features, but your core has some rotten bits and I don’t eat rotten apples (even if only bits of them are rotten), I throw them away.

Goodbye,

Daniel Bartholomew

</rant>

Before I do, let me lay down some ground rules. I won’t be reviewing the products I mention (at least, I’m going to try and not review them). I am also not recommending these products. You can take the fact that I use them as an implicit recommendation if you want to, but keep in mind that I might decide to redo everything next month.

What I will be doing is writing about the specific products I use and how I use them. Think of this as my description of how I did things as of the date this post was first published and leave it at that.

Anyway, on with the show-and-tell.

Part 1: Hardware

A Zenith from 1981

Our main television is a 20+ year old Magnavox or Zenith set from back when they were built into wooden cabinets. The picture is not of my television and mine is not quite as fancy but it conveys the general idea. I’m not exactly sure what the make or model is, I do know that it was purchased by my maternal grandparents, who eventually gave it to my parents who gave it to me.

I haven’t jumped on the HD bandwagon because all of my accumulated movies and TV shows are in standard definition. I’m sure I will at some point. The point will probably coincide with the death of our current television, which judging from how long it has lasted, might not come for a good long while.

The main disadvantage of having such an old set is that it has a single coaxial input. To get around this I have an RCA-to-Coax converter box and an RCA switchbox. These are used to switch between the Wii, DVD player, and Popcorn Hour.

The Wii and DVD player are pretty standard affairs. You may not be familiar with the Popcorn Hour so I’ll skip over the other two and focus on it for a bit.

The Popcorn Hour A-100

I have a Popcorn Hour A-100, which isn’t available for sale anymore (it has been replaced by newer models). But to the left you can see a picture of it along with everything that comes in the box.

If you click on the picture you’ll be taken to a review of the Popcorn Hour A-100 which I wrote for the Linux Journal last year.  The article pretty much covers the capabilities of the box, so I won’t say anything more about it here.

Media is delivered to the Popcorn Hour through our home network (Cat5 Ethernet, 100 Base/T switch and router). The media sits on my home server. The server is one I built myself and have expanded over the years. The processor is quite slow by today’s standards, and was nowhere near top-of-the-line when I built it. The main feature it has is two terabytes of RAID-5 storage via five 500GB hard drives. I chose 500GB hard drives because they were available at a decent price when I added the RAID array to the server.

Part 2: Software

The software that supports my setup is minimal. The basic problems to solve are these:

1. Large amount of storage space for files.
2. Converting media (mainly DVDs) into files (the files are copied to the storage space).
3. Sharing the files in a way that the Popcorn Hour can see and use.

That’s it.

For server software I use the latest Ubuntu Server Edition. It’s free, open source, and works very well.

With all of the files I have stored, the one thing I don’t want is for a hard drive to die and destroy a bunch of my files. To prevent this I use RAID. RAID is simply a way of using a group of drives together in a special way so they appear to the server as a single very large drive and so they are redundant (that’s what the ‘R’ in RAID stands for), meaning the group of drives can tolerate one or more (depending on how you set things up) of the drives failing without losing any data.

Most often, RAID is implemented via special add-on “hardware RAID” cards. My server doesn’t have a hardware RAID card because the good ones are too expensive. Instead I use Linux Software RAID. I don’t have the time or space to delve into it here, but there is a lot of documentation online if you just search for it (the link in the previous sentence does just that). Linux Software RAID is very good, better and more reliable than many hardware RAID solutions. As mentioned before, my drives are configured as a RAID-5, which tolerates a single drive failure. If a drive fails I need to replace it ASAP because if another drive fails before the replacement is in place I will lose data, so I keep a spare drive handy. I also make sure I have backups of the files I really don’t want to lose (family movies and photos mainly).

I share my files with the Popcorn Hour using NFS, which has been part of the Linux and Unix worlds for decades. Like Linux Software RAID, it’s a standard component of Ubuntu Server (and every other Linux distribution), and it is very easy to configure. After installing the Ubuntu “nfs-kernel-server” package, the only thing I needed to do was add my share to the ‘/etc/exports’ file on the server and run the ‘sudo exportfs -ra’ command. Here is what I added to the exports file:

/mnt/files   192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

The above line shares the /mnt/files directory on the server to any computer on my network. /mnt/files is where my RAID drive is mounted. Read the nfs documentation for more information on how to setup nfs.

To convert my movies into files which the Popcorn Hour can play, I use Handbrake. There are versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It uses VLC to help it read some files, so I have it installed too. I generally just use the default conversion settings.

Converting movies into files that the Popcorn hour can play is easy but time-consuming. Each one takes several hours to convert. The upside is this: once they’re converted and copied over to the server it’s done and never has to be done again. The movies are placed on the shelf and never have to be touched ever again.

Part 3: Putting it All Together

I like diagrams, so here’s a simple one showing how things are connected:

Popcorn Hour Wiring Diagram

They’re not shown on the diagram above, but if they were, the Wii and DVD player would be shown hooking in to the RCA Switchbox just like the Popcorn Hour.

Part 4: Conclusion

That’s about it except for a brief list of stuff we don’t have:

1. Cable or Satellite TV Service. Too expensive and too many commercials.
2. Over-the-air TV. The price is right, but still too many commercials.

And an even briefer list of stuff we do have:

1. Netflix. If we want to watch a show we don’t have, we wait for it to come out on DVD and then we rent it from Netflix.

Thanks for watching!

On reboot it gets past grub and then kernel panics with the following error:

acpi aborted because no cpio magic

Anyone ever seen this error before? I never have. I’m hoping the hardware isn’t borked in some way.

I’ve got memtest running on it now, and after that runs for a while I’ll try booting in single-user mode.

Thanks to Bazaar and my paranoid habit of pushing copies of my article repos out to different machines I haven’t lost any of the work on my current article projects (one is due Monday), but it’s still annoying that it happened.

And here I was feeling pretty good about the Shuttle and how reliable it had been . . .

UPDATE: The memory doesn’t appear to be bad, nor does the hard drive.

It looks like the kernel is the problem. When I select 2.6.27-11 from the grub menu, I get the error. When I select 2.6.27-9, the system boots just fine. I’ll reinstall the 2.6.27-11 kernel and see if the problem goes away. This is weird.

UPDATE 2: Well, one sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-2.6.27-11-generic and a reboot later and I am back running on 2.6.27-11. I still don’t know why it happened, but I can envision it as a B-movie at the local drive-in: “When Good Kernels Go Bad!”. I’ll update again if I find out.

Dell comes back and says the bios needs to be updated on it and they give us a LiveCD to use when performing the bios upgrade.

After booting the LiveCD and logging in as root, we get the following message:

Ummm . . . it’s funny, yeah, but it sure doesn’t inspire confidence.

Hey Dell, how about some official tools? Thanks.

Screenshot: Adobe AIR Setup

I know this particular issue isn’t the fault of Foresight or rPath, but the fact remains: Ubuntu and Fedora rule the roost when it comes to distributions and if you aren’t on one of them, good luck with third-party software or anything else not in the repositories.

If only this were the only problem. Conary is too slow, for one thing. And what is up with the gui printer configuration tool? It just plain doesn’t work on my system.

I’ll probably be switching my Foresight system back to using Ubuntu.