But that didn’t sit well with my inner nerd.

Plus Wirecast is $500 per license, and 6 licenses versus 1 didn’t sit well with my inner banker.

So here’s what we did…

First, we needed to get around the sound card input limitation. Most standard sound cards only have one input. You can sometimes tweak windows to use the mic AND line-in, but it’s flaky at best. Plus, 2 inputs is hardly 6.

Enter M-Audio’s Delta 1010LT. For those of you who are unfamiliar with said card, let’s have a look at it.

You can spend a moment and admire, if you would like.

These cards run about $200 and are generally considered “worth the money” since it was cheaper than building multiple boxes and buying multiple Wirecast licenses. The ’1010′ part in the card’s name tells us it has 10 inputs and 10 outputs.

It lies.

Kind of.

It has 10 mono lines in and 10 mono lines out. But Windows hates mono and sees them as 5 pairs of stereo inputs and outputs. Plus one of each is digital audio, which we aren’t dealing with, so we are down to 4 stereo inputs and 4 stereo outputs. Outputs are meaningless to us in this project since the output will be encoded streams leaving through the Ethernet cable, not the outputs on the card. So we have 4 stereo inputs. Not enough. We could use the mic and line in, but that is asking for issues.

Time for another M-Audio Delta 1010LT!

You can just skim over this one, it's the same.

So we put these into a box with the following specs:

• AMD Phenom 9150e Quad-Core Processor 1.80 Ghz
• 4 Gb DDR3
• Windows 7 Pro – 64 bit
• 500 Gb SATA Hard Drive
• 10/100/1000 Ethernet card

Not the greatest in the world, but should definitely be able to do the work needed. So we set it all up, install Wirecast, install the drivers (We had to use the 5.10.0.574 driver in order for Windows 7 to see both cards), and all that jazz. Everything worked. So we moved to the next step, setting up Wirecast.

First, we need to turn on a few things that are off by default so we can even see what is going on.

The top one shows us the master audio levels of the chosen stream, the second shows us the details below for the “Shot”.

We click on the Audio layer to view the available audio input sources. Just click the one you want and you will see its input manifest in the audio levels. That was easy, now we can setup the broadcast settings. It’s pretty straight forward and the only thing we did different was turn off the video portions of the streams. No need sending excess fluff over the wire when we don’t want it anyway.

Once we got that done, we fired up all 6 streams.

And hit the wall of fail.

Wirecast said everything was connected and streaming. And as we fired them up one at a time, they were. But at about stream 4, Wirecast started dragging to a halt and all streams stopped. So, we checked stats on the box.

CPU was at 30%. Nothing.

RAM usage was about 64Mb for Wirecast, about a Gb total. Also nothing.

Network usage was so small it didn’t even hit 1%.

So we called Wirecast. After a few minutes of bouncing in menus, I got a support rep on the phone. He said what we were trying was, frankly, impossible. We would have to go with the multi-server solution.

Obviously he had no idea what he was talking about.

So we called their sales people and asked who the Best and Brightest Wirecast Specialist there was.

Andy.

Andy knew Wirecast better than Einstein knew the Theory of Relativity. And he was free.

And best of all: he would call us back shortly.

Andy said what we were doing was not only possible, it was ideal. Our problem was the one thing we didn’t check: the graphics card GPU. Turns out Wirecast relies heavily on the graphics card GPU’s ability to process media extremely fast for encoding streams. He said to use a video card that was DirectX9 compatible and had at least 1Gb onboard RAM. He also said to go with nVidia if we had a choice. Not sure why, but ok!

For this, we found the nVidia GeForce GT 240. It fit the specs given to us by Andy and it was only about $100.

We threw that in and started the streams.

Success!

4 things must be in place before a computer will accept remote PowerShell connections.

1. The WinRM service must be running.
2. There must be a WinRM listener that accepts connections from one or more IP addresses.
3. The Windows firewall must be configured to allow the WinRM connection.
4. There must be an enabled and properly configured PowerShell session.

Now if the computer isn’t going to be accepting remote PowerShell connections, then you don’t need to worry about the above list.

Assuming that you will be accepting remote PowerShell connections, the First thing you will need to do is open PowerShell with administrative privileges.  This can be done by right clicking the PowerShell icon and selecting “Run as Administrator”.  Now execute the cmdlet Enable-PSRemoting . If you would like to read more about the cmdlet type Get-Help Enable-PSRemoting.

Now, the easiest way to connect to PowerShell on a remote computer is to use the Enter-PSSession cmdlet. As with all cmdlets if you need help type Get-Help CMDletName.

PS C:\> Enter-PSSession servername

The above CMDlet is an example of what you would type to establish a connection to a remote server. Once you are connected to that server the PowerShell prompt changes to [servername]: PS C:\>

Once you’re connected remotely, any commands you enter at the prompt are executed on the remote computer.  For example you can list the files and folders on the remote computer by typing [servername]: PS C:\> Get-ChildItem C:\

To end your session, type [servername] PS C:\> Exit-PSSession

Next time I’ll continue this by showing you how to run a Scriptblock on a remote computer!

And so they do. Enter SenderScore.

When you plug in a random IP address into SenderScore, say 65.54.190.91 (bay0-omc2-s16.bay0.hotmail.com, a hotmail SMTP server), you get a page that looks like so:

This gives us a plethora of information (Jefe, do you know what a plethora is?). First, it gives us the Sender Score itself, in this case 78. 100 is perfect, so this gets a C+. Not good, but not horrible either. There is a bunch of other info too, but the trackable and important ones are found in the Reputation Measures. This table shows us the components of what makes up our Sender Score.

You can see an explanation of these numbers on the SenderScore FAQ page, but for convenience, here they are:

• Complaints: This score represents how complaints about that IP address compare to all other IP addresses observed by the Sender Score Reputation Network. Complaint rates are calculated as complaints divided by accepted mail and complaint scores are a rank based on your complaint rates.
• Volume: Volume is not in itself good or bad, but is an important part of the overall reputation algorithm: for example, an IP address which sends 100 messages and receives 99 complaints is problematic, while an IP address which sends 100,000 messages and receives 99 complaints is probably okay. A higher score equates to larger volume monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
• External Reputation: This score shows how the IP address compares to all other IP addresses seen by the Sender Score Reputation Network on a variety of external blacklists and whitelists.
• Unknown Users: This score represents the rank of the IP address’s unknown user rate compared to all other IP addresses seen by the Sender Score Reputation Network. Unknown user rates are taken directly from incoming SMTP logs of participating ISPs, tracking how often an IP address attempts to send a message to an address which does not exist.
• Rejected: This represents how often messages are rejected (bounced due to some policy reason, usually spam filtering or blacklisting) compared to other IP addresses seen in the Sender Score Reputation Network.

Now this is all great, but when you have 60,000 IPs, entering them in one at a time into this site is not feasible. We can screen scrape it, but that will only work until they change their layout. There is another option. A better option.

For those familiar with how DNSBLs work, this will be very familiar. For those that aren’t, this is pretty easy to pick up. The creators of black lists needed a fast, reliable, existing API methodology for finding out if an IP address is blacklisted or not. Usually this was taking place while one server was waiting for another, so it had to be very quick. They chose the DNS architecture since it is very good at finding IP listings quickly. Here is how you query it.

1. Take the IP address and reverse it. Our example 65.54.190.91 becomes 91.190.54.65. (why we do this goes beyond the scope of this article, sorry.)
2. Add the DNS zone to the end. There are 5 DNS zones that SenderScore has, at least that I know of. They are:
   • cmplt.rating.senderscore.com (our example becomes 91.190.54.65.cmplt.rating.senderscore.com) used to find the Complaint Index
   • filtered.rating.senderscore.com (our example becomes 91.190.54.65.filtered.rating.senderscore.com) used to find the Filtered Index
   • score.senderscore.com (our example becomes 91.190.54.65.score.senderscore.com) used to find the SenderScore itself
   • uus.rating.senderscore.com (our example becomes 91.190.54.65.uus.rating.senderscore.com) used to find the Unknown User Index
   • vol.rating.senderscore.com (our example becomes 91.190.54.65.vol.rating.senderscore.com) used to find the Volume Index
3. Now do a normal DNS query on those “hosts”:
   • -bash-3.2# host 91.190.54.65.cmplt.rating.senderscore.com
     91.190.54.65.cmplt.rating.senderscore.com has address 127.0.4.97
   • -bash-3.2# host 91.190.54.65.filtered.rating.senderscore.com
     91.190.54.65.filtered.rating.senderscore.com has address 127.0.2.8
   • -bash-3.2# host 91.190.54.65.score.senderscore.com
     91.190.54.65.score.senderscore.com has address 127.0.4.78
   • -bash-3.2# host 91.190.54.65.uus.rating.senderscore.com
     91.190.54.65.uus.rating.senderscore.com has address 127.0.3.84
   • -bash-3.2# host 91.190.54.65.vol.rating.senderscore.com
     91.190.54.65.vol.rating.senderscore.com has address 127.0.1.100

   The last number of the return “IP” is the value you are looking for.

So there you have it. Most any language that I know of has the ability to do NS lookups, so just extract the last number, store it in a database and track it!

ARIN knows this, and it also knows that having one machine talk to another machine via email is grotesquely inefficient.

And so they changed their game.

Their new website is, once you get past a few flowery must-have pages, entirely an API. Using Rot Fielding’s RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) style, the URLs tend to look something like http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-131-107-0-0-1 and look something like:

It’s not pretty, and certainly won’t win any awards for design or user interfacing.

But it wasn’t designed for you, the human.

If we right click on the page and view the source, we get something like this:

<net xmlns="http://www.arin.net/whoisrws/core/v1" termsOfUse="https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html">
<registrationDate>1988-11-11T00:00:00-05:00</registrationDate>
<ref>http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-131-107-0-0-1</ref>
<endAddress>131.107.255.255</endAddress>
<handle>NET-131-107-0-0-1</handle>
<name>MICROSOFT</name>
<nameservers>
<nameserver>NS2.MSFT.NET</nameserver>
<nameserver>NS4.MSFT.NET</nameserver>
<nameserver>NS1.MSFT.NET</nameserver>
<nameserver>NS5.MSFT.NET</nameserver>
<nameserver>NS3.MSFT.NET</nameserver>
</nameservers>
<netBlocks>
<netBlock>
<cidrLength>16</cidrLength>
<endAddress>131.107.255.255</endAddress>
<description>Direct Assignment</description>
<type>DS</type>
<startAddress>131.107.0.0</startAddress>
</netBlock>
</netBlocks>
<orgRef name="Microsoft Corp" handle="MSFT">http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/MSFT</orgRef>
<parentNetRef name="NET131" handle="NET-131-0-0-0-0">http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-131-0-0-0-0</parentNetRef>
<startAddress>131.107.0.0</startAddress>
<updateDate>2004-12-09T00:00:00-05:00</updateDate>
<version>4</version>
</net>


It’s XML with a stylesheet to make it more readable to humans, but that’s not the primary viewer, machines are. So the new site delivers almost exclusively XML output and only shows the immediate information asked for, making it fast and light. For a machine to view multiple pages is nothing, where we humans get more annoyed as more clicks are required to get us to where we go.

They haven’t made the information writable, so they are still relying on emails to modify the info, a change that is the next step in their RESTful plan. Once that is done, ARIN SWIPs will no longer be the major pain they are now.

But it does make their site awkward for the few humans browsing their pages.

Maybe they need a mobile phone ap.

Watson is much more then a computer system designed to play games. IBM set out to design a computer that processes natural language. Watson is a Question Answering system that has been under development for more than three years, and will also incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities just like it’s human competitors. When its competing, Watson will not be connected to the Internet, or have any outside assistance.

Chrome’s newest and probably most requested feature is the addition of extensions.  Extensions, which were made popular by FireFox, extend the browsers functionality into a variety of areas. My favorite extensions are Xmarks, Google Mail Checker, and StumbleUpon.  Also on the list of new features is auto fill, full page zoom, auto scroll, and a tab drag feature that allows you to compare two tabs in a side by side view.  With these added features, my use of Chrome has increased significantly. But the most important feature it boasts is its speed.

You will need to have access to both a Windows workstation and a Linux workstation with X windows installed, to proceed with this tutorial.  If you do not have a Linux machine handy then download a copy of Virtual Box and build yourself a virtual machine that runs your favorite flavor of Linux. I personally like Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu in that order, but ultimately it doesn’t matter which distro you choose.

To get started, first download and install Xming.  If you don’t already have a SSH client installed, then also download and install PuTTY.

Now open up Xlaunch from start, all programs, Xming. Choose multiple windows for this test and click next. Start no client, then click next. Leave clipboard checked and click next. If you want to save this config then click Save configuration, then click finish.

Now open PuTTY. Type the host name or IP address into the top space provided.  Make sure SSH is selected if not select it. Under Saved sessions type a name to lable this connection, and click save. Now in the menu on the left click SSH. Check Enable compression.  Now click the plus sign next to SSH in the left hand menu. Click X11, and check mark Enable X11 forwarding. On the menu scroll back up to the top and click Session. Click Save once more to keep the settings we just made changes to. Now click Open and log into your linux machine with your user name and password.

After you have successfully logged into your linux machine, type the name of a graphical program you like to use. Examples of such are “firefox”, “kwrite”, and “konqueror”.  If you are unsure what the command is for your app I recommend doing a google search for it.

here are some more gui apps that can be launched.

startkde – opens a full view of the desktop with menus and desktop items. (this one has proved unstable in my tests)

firefox – opens the firefox browser.

ktorrent – opens the ktorrent bittorrent app

konqueror – opens the konqueror web / file browser

most gui apps will open by simply typing the name of the app and pressing enter.

Normally installing a network capable printer is a routine task. Install the drivers, select the port you want to use (tcp/ip), and for the most part go. Yes I’m over simplifying the process, but not by much.  Installing the x9350 though wasn’t even close to this procedure.  First of all I could not simply add the printer through add printers, even as the administrator. I was forced to use the Lexmark installer, which is a bit odd, but not immediately problematic.  However the installer would not see the printer on the network. I could install it just fine with the usb cable, but that defeats the purpose of having it as a network printer, unless I want to chain it to another print server of some form.

So I called Lexmark tech support, and yes, the techs are in India.  And while I have no doubt our Indian IT counterparts are more then qualified to handle support calls, it doesn’t make their accents any easier to understand. Nothing personal, and I don’t mean to knock their abilities, but when I’m already frustrated by an unusual and needlessly difficult printer install, it would certainly make things a bit easier if I could readily understand the person trying to help (Are you listening Lexmark????).  With that said, they were obviously having a hard time understanding me as well, because even after repeating it a number of times and to a number of tech’s, they kept insisting that I was trying to set this up as a wireless printer. I even asked them to remove any instances of wireless anything from my support ticket, though that proved to be about as futile as this printers ability to connect across the WAN.  Finally after stumping a couple of techs I was transferred to network support and got a tech who seemed to speak English as a first language.  She again guided me through the install from start to end, only to achieve the same results I did, no x9350 printer in windows printers.  She put me on hold to consult another IT staffer, who then told her that all network ink jet printers use MAC address as opposed to TCP\IP to simplify the installation and make it easier for the installer to find. MAC addresses are not however route capable and thus I will not be able to use this network printer on our network. Which leaves me at the point I stated at the beginning of this blog post, as I am currently waiting for my RMA to send this printer back to our supplier.

To sum things up, I never was able to use this printer because Lexmark decided to create a port / protocol that is incompatible with the standard tcp/ip port already present in EVERY Operating System. And Lexmark has needlessly hurt their own product by trying to simplify an already easy operation. And for the people who would have difficulties setting up a network printer, those people would have to call tech support anyway, which just makes their attempt at simplifying this process a completely mute point.  I will certainly think twice before purchasing a Lexmark printer in the future, and well given the same amount of time to read reviews etc prior to buying a new printer, I’ll just assume Lexmark does not make a product that will fit our business needs and start my search with their competitors. If I were to give them a score between 1 – 10, Lexmark would have to provide me the points to achieve a positive integer.