Deep Learning

Information technology is a field that is always undergoing change. Keeping up with this constant change is a constant challenge. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been diving deep into the area of cyber security.

Information Security is a field of study all its own, with a wide array of career paths, subject areas, and specializations. The challenge is that ordinary IT folks should be doing our work with security as an integral part of our processes. For smaller organizations, there is no dedicated security team to turn to, so the role of security falls squarely on the IT department.

The trick is finding the right security optimizations that can be implemented with the resources and time that we already have. The simplest place to start might be a security framework. There are a host of these out there, so selecting one might seem like a challenge all by itself. COBIT is a high-level framework that covers a lot of ground, but doesn’t seem to address specifics. PCI is very popular, but is focused heavily on the financial sector. ISO and NIST are also very popular and I hear good things, but they’re not free. CIS is a great framework for smaller organizations to integrate. There are many many others, but starting with a framework provides a direction to begin, and highlights some of the simple tasks that make a big difference in securing a computing environment.

GuruPilgrim

After completing my first video series for the GuruPilgrim project on Inkscape, I began work on a similar series on Gimp. Right around that time, the option of upgrading my gear presented itself. Rather than make my next video series with the same quality, I decided to delay it and make something with higher quality, taking the lessons learned at ever stage of the process and enhancing things in minor ways.

In my last update, I talked about the Canon 6D, which will serve as my video camera for future YouTube videos. I also picked up an Electrovoice RE92L lav mic, a directional cardioid mic that should help pick up my voice and eliminate background sounds in my untreated home studio, (also known as my living room). It took longer to arrive than the camera, and I needed to do some testing to become familiar with it, so that pushed back my timeline further. While I was making changes, I decided to start using my Tascam DR-70D to record instead of routing the mic through my mixer into my computer. This should give me a much cleaner sound to work with.

So far in my tests, the new mic does just what I had hoped. Sound clarity is spot on, and the off-axis rejection makes a big difference. I’m looking forward to using this mic for years to come.

Penn Manor Auditorium

Speaking of audio, one of the highlights of my month was the chance to take a tour of the new auditorium at Penn Manor High School. Penn Manor is undergoing a full reconstruction of the High School building. As a result, the contractors installed a brand new state-of-the-art sound and lighting system.

I was super curious what hardware they would select and how things would be configured. There is a separate room near the auditorium that is set up for an orchestra. That room has its own mixer that sends sound into the auditorium mixer. Soundcraft was selected for the mixers in this setup. It was fun to see the way this was configured.

The lighting system is also state of the art, capable of handling any kind of event. They have the Strand Neo console for this, which is a really awesome rig.

StreamBuilder

Due to the heavy focus in other areas over the past month, StreamBuilder has only started to get my attention over the last week. I don’t like to predict the future in these updates because it’s really hard to say for sure what will happen, but I’m ramping up to work on the camera tab in StreamBuilder. My hope is to replace the PTZOptics camera controller for the TBC Bible Church live streams so I can start getting feedback on the application early in the process of building it.

Below is a screenshot of the cameras tab as it is now. This is really just a partial mockup to place some things where they will go.

Sushi

Around the start of the year, I started teaching myself how to make sushi. I’ve always enjoyed sushi, so it seemed like it might be worthwhile to learn to make it at home.

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It’s become a near-weekly event in our house, and has proved to be both as fun and as tasty as I thought it might be. One big requirement of making sushi is a good sharp knife.

I’ve got a lot to learn about sushi making. As I understand it, sushi chefs need to have at least 2 years of experience before a good sushi head chef will let them make sushi for guests in a restaurant.

“Do a lot of work.”

I recently stumbled upon a motivational video featuring Ira Glass (a radio personality) which brought to my attention the barriers for creatives like myself to break through and finally get started doing what we love. What’s the key? “Do a lot of work. Do a large volume of work.”

The thinking is, you might know that you’re not good at doing something, and you might want to be better at it, but you’ll only get better if you start doing it. Over the past few months, I’ve been putting this concept in to practice by attempting to be more consistent in my content creation.

GuruPilgrim Project Launch

In February, I uploaded the first video for the GuruPilgrim project. Here is a brief summary of what the GuruPilgrim project is and what I’ve accomplished so far.

For over a decade, I’ve been using the handle “GuruPilgrim” for a lot of my online activity. The term “Guru” has come to mean one who has obtained great knowledge of a subject. And “Pilgrim” of course, is one who is on a journey, often in search of something better. A “GuruPilgrim” then, is one who is in the constant pursuit of great knowledge.

The focus of the project is on doing things with Open Source software. Making graphics, videos, websites, photographs, software applications, or live streams involves elements of both architecture and art. All of these kinds of tasks have one thing in common, you’ll need to use a computer to make or modify them. This gives me enough common ground to put a lot of content in one place, showing everything from post processing photographs to programming languages. I hope to connect these many elements together in an easy to understand way.

I’ve completed my first tutorial series, Intro to Inkscape, and I’m gearing up for another one, Intro to Gimp. The lessons learned in making the first series have helped me to make some changes that should make the Gimp series just a little better.

Learning Cloud Technologies

When you have a career in technology, you really can’t stand still. It is important to always be looking to learn something new and relevant. I’ve been focusing my study on cloud technologies recently.

Most of the cloud providers have a “free tier” to help people get started on their platform without spending a lot of money. Oracle currently seems to have the best free tier offering, which makes sense as they have been pushing hard to get more people using their cloud solutions. That has attracted me to the platform and I’ve been really enjoying a lot of things about it.

Oracle has an “Always free” offering that includes 2 free virtual machines, which I was quick to use up. The way that they isolate products into “compartments”, combined with the sane and safe default security settings, make everything feel secure. You only open the doors you want to open, connect the things you want to connect, and grant only the permissions you want to grant.

Cloud solutions are likely a big part of the future in systems administration, so I’ll continue to explore Oracle and the other major cloud providers for the foreseeable future.

StreamBuilder

One of the needs that I’ve come across in the live streaming world is for a way to schedule, manage, update, and post-process live events across multiple live streaming platforms and sites. Let’s say you have an event, and you want to live stream it on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, and Periscope. When it’s over, you want to upload the full video to Vimeo and YouTube, and upload snippets to Twitter and Facebook. That would be a whole lot of work, before, during and after the event, but it’s all the same event with a single source of content.

As I thought about the problem, I realized that with the available REST APIs for all of these platforms, it should be easy enough to build a single interface that could handle all of this. Thus, StreamBuilder was born.

The plan is to build StreamBuilder in Python using the Kivy framework for the GUI. This will allow me to compile it for both Windows and Linux. If I had easier access to Mac, I could also compile it for Mac, so someday in the future the door would still be open for that as well.

The interface is split into four tabs: Streams, Videos, Cameras, and OBS. The Streams tab is where you will schedule, manage, and manipulate upcoming stream details across the live platforms, as well as trigger “go live”, and monitor activity. The Videos tab is where you will be able to work with the videos that OBS generates, insert and manipulate cut-points, and upload portions of your live stream as individual videos to the same or other video platforms (some video platforms can’t handle live streaming). The Cameras tab will allow you to control PTZ cameras with some new and very helpful controls, potentially even easier than with a joystick. The OBS tab will allow for integrations with OBS for showing and hiding overlays in your stream, greatly simplifying the number of scenes needed to get the same control.

This project is still in the conceptualization stage, but has great potential. I’m looking forward to implementing it piece by piece.

Blender

For years, I’ve dabbled in Blender (3D software), but until version 2.8x dropped, it was always overwhelming. Thanks to the Blender Guru, Andrew Price, who years ago shook up the Blender community with his podcast where he tore apart the Blender interface, there has been a huge redesign that took more than five years to realize. That design change has made Blender monumentally easier to use, and I’ve been much more successful recently in making things with Blender.

In keeping with the “Do a lot of work” theme, I’ve been thinking about ways to use Blender more consistently. The intros and outros for the GuruPilgrim videos so far have been created in Blender, and I’ll continue to explore other things I can do with it.

Enve

It used to be that the biggest gap in good open source software for creative work was video editing. Kdenlive has advanced to a level where that can no longer be said. Now, the biggest gap is good 2d animation software. Blender has incorporated a great 2d animation toolset, but Blender still has a steep learning curve. Just a couple of weeks ago, I came across a new open source application that might just be the ticket!

Enve (pronounced like “envy”) is a new project, with one primary developer, who frankly isn’t all that responsive. They continue to commit to the project though, and it is starting to show some skills. Enve for me is really easy to learn, because it allows you to import from Inkscape (one of my favorite tools), and it works in a very similar way to Inkscape.

I still have some learning to do in regard to using the program, and there isn’t much documentation yet, but it has me pretty excited about the potential.