Shallow Thoughts : : Aug

Debugging a mysterious terminal setting

For the last several months, I repeatedly find myself in a mode where my terminal isn't working quite right. In particular, Ctrl-C doesn't work to interrupt a running program. It's always in a terminal where I've been doing web work. The site I'm working on sadly has only ftp access, so I've been using ncftp to upload files to the site, and git and meld to do local version control on the copy of the site I keep on my local machine. I was pretty sure the problem was coming from either git, meld, or ncftp, but I couldn't reproduce it.

Running reset fixed the problem. But since I didn't know what program was causing the problem, I didn't know when I needed to type reset.

The first step was to find out which of the three programs was at fault. Most of the time when this happened, I wouldn't notice until hours later, the next time I needed to stop a program with Ctrl-C. I speculated that there was probably some way to make zsh run a check after every command ... if I could just figure out what to check.

Terminal modes and stty -a

It seemed like my terminal was getting put into raw mode. In programming lingo, a terminal is in raw mode when characters from it are processed one at a time, and special characters like Ctrl-C, which would normally interrupt whatever program is running, are just passed like any other character.

You can list your terminal modes with stty -a:

$ stty -a
speed 38400 baud; rows 32; columns 80; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = ;
eol2 = ; swtch = ; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R;
werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
-parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
ignbrk -brkint ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl -ixon -ixoff
-iuclc -ixany -imaxbel iutf8
opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0
-isig icanon -iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt
echoctl echoke

But that's a lot of information. Unfortunately there's no single flag for raw mode; it's a collection of a lot of flags. I checked the interrupt character: yep, intr = ^C, just like it should be. So what was the problem?

I saved the output with stty -a >/tmp/stty.bad, then I started up a new xterm and made a copy of what it should look like with stty -a >/tmp/stty.good. Then I looked for differences: meld /tmp/stty.good /tmp/stty.bad. I saw these flags differing in the bad one: ignbrk ignpar -iexten -ixon, while the good one had -ignbrk -ignpar iexten ixon. So I should be able to run:

$ stty -ignbrk -ignpar iexten ixon

Setting a trap, with precmd

However, knowing some things that differed did give me something to test for in the shell, so I could test after every command and find out exactly when this happened. In zsh, you do that by defining a precmd function, so here's what I did:

precmd()
{
    stty -a | fgrep -- -ignbrk > /dev/null
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo
        echo "STTY SETTINGS HAVE CHANGED \!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!\!"
        echo
    fi
}

And this fairly quickly found the problem: it happened when I suspended ncftp with Ctrl-Z.

stty sane and isig

Okay, now I knew the culprit, and that if I switched to a different ftp client the problem would probably go away. But I still wanted to know why my stty command didn't work, and what the actual terminal difference was.

Somewhere in my web searching I'd stumbled upon some pages suggesting stty sane as an alternative to reset. I tried it, and it worked.

According to man stty, stty sane is equivalent to

$ stty cread -ignbrk brkint -inlcr -igncr icrnl -iutf8 -ixoff -iuclc -ixany  imaxbel opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0 isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt echoctl echoke

Eek! But actually that's helpful. All I had to do was get a bad terminal (easy now that I knew ncftp was the culprit), then try:

$ stty cread 
$ stty -ignbrk 
$ stty brkint

$ stty cread -ignbrk brkint
$ stty -inlcr -igncr icrnl -iutf8 -ixoff

$ stty isig

I'm still not sure why meld didn't show me the isig difference. But if nothing else, I learned a bit about debugging stty settings, and about stty sane, which is a much nicer way of resetting the terminal than reset since it doesn't clear the screen.

One of them Los Alamos liberals

I love this Adopt-a-Highway sign on Highway 4 on the way back down from the Jemez.

I have no idea who it is (I hope to find out, some day), but it gives me a laugh every time I see it.

Mouse Release Movie

We caught another mouse! I shot a movie of its release.

Like the previous mouse we'd caught, it was nervous about coming out of the trap: it poked its nose out, but didn't want to come the rest of the way.

Dave finally got impatient, picked up the trap and turned it opening down, so the mouse would slide out.

It turned out to be the world's scruffiest mouse, which immediately darted toward me. I had to step back and stand up to follow it on camera. (Yes, I know my camera technique needs work. Sorry.)

Then it headed up the hill a ways before finally lapsing into the high-bounding behavior we've seen from other mice and rats we've released. I know it's hard to tell in the last picture -- the photo is so small -- but look at the distance between the mouse and its shadow on the ground.

Very entertaining! I don't understand why anyone uses killing traps -- even if you aren't bothered by killing things unnecessarily, the entertainment we get from watching the releases is worth any slight extra hassle of using the live traps.

Here's the movie: Mouse released from trap.

Time-lapse photography: stitching movies together on Linux

A few weeks ago I wrote about building a simple Arduino-driven camera intervalometer to take repeat photos with my DSLR. I'd been entertained by watching the clouds build and gather and dissipate again while I stepped through all the false positives in my crittercam, and I wanted to try capturing them intentionally so I could make cloud movies.

Of course, you don't have to build an Arduino device. A search for timer remote control or intervalometer will find lots of good options around $20-30. I bought one so I'll have a nice LCD interface rather than having to program an Arduino every time I want to make movies.

Setting the image size

Okay, so you've set up your camera on a tripod with the intervalometer hooked to it. (Depending on how long your movie is, you may also want an external power supply for your camera.)

Now think about what size images you want. If you're targeting YouTube, you probably want to use one of YouTube's preferred settings, bitrates and resolutions, perhaps 1280x720 or 1920x1080. But you may have some other reason to shoot at higher resolution: perhaps you want to use some of the still images as well as making video.

For my first test, I shot at the full resolution of the camera. So I had a directory full of big ten-megapixel photos with filenames ranging from img_6624.jpg to img_6715.jpg. I copied these into a new directory, so I didn't overwrite the originals. You can use ImageMagick's mogrify to scale them all:

mogrify -scale 1280x720 *.jpg

I had an additional issue, though: rain was threatening and I didn't want to leave my camera at risk of getting wet while I went dinner shopping, so I moved the camera back under the patio roof. But with my fisheye lens, that meant I had a lot of extra house showing and I wanted to crop that off. I used GIMP on one image to determine the x, y, width and height for the crop rectangle I wanted. You can even crop to a different aspect ratio from your target, and then fill the extra space with black:

mogrify img_6624.jpg -crop 2720x1450+135+315 -scale 1280 -gravity center -background black -extent 1280x720 *.jpg

If you decide to rescale your images to an unusual size, make sure both dimensions are even, otherwise avconv will complain that they're not divisible by two.

Finally: Making your movie

I found lots of pages explaining how to stitch together time-lapse movies using mencoder, and a few using ffmpeg. Unfortunately, in Debian, both are deprecated. Mplayer has been removed entirely. The ffmpeg-vs-avconv issue is apparently a big political war, and I have no position on the matter, except that Debian has come down strongly on the side of avconv and I get tired of getting nagged at every time I run a program. So I needed to figure out how to use avconv.

I found some pages on avconv, but most of them didn't actually work. Here's what worked for me:

avconv -f image2 -r 15 -start_number 6624 -i 'img_%04d.jpg' -vcodec libx264 time-lapse.mp4

avconv -r 15 -start_number 6624 -i 'img_%04d.jpg' -vcodec libx264 -r 30 time-lapse.mp4

Adjust the start_number and filename appropriately for the files you have.

Avconv produces an mp4 file suitable for uploading to youtube. So here is my little test movie: Time Lapse Clouds.

Sphinx Moths

We're having a huge bloom of a lovely flower called pale trumpets (Ipomopsis longiflora), and it turns out that sphinx moths just love them.

The white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata) is a moth the size of a hummingbird, and it behaves like a hummingbird, too. It flies during the day, hovering from flower to flower to suck nectar, being far too heavy to land on flowers like butterflies do.

I've seen them before, on hikes, but only gotten blurry shots with my pocket camera. But with the pale trumpets blooming, the sphinx moths come right at sunset and feed until near dark. That gives a good excuse to play with the DSLR, telephoto lens and flash ... and I still haven't gotten a really sharp photo, but I'm making progress.

Check out that huge eye! I guess you need good vision in order to make your living poking a long wiggly proboscis into long skinny flowers while laboriously hovering in midair.

Photos here: White-lined sphinx moths on pale trumpets.

Privacy Policy

I got an envelope from my bank in the mail. The envelope was open and looked like the flap had never been sealed.

Inside was a copy of their privacy policy. Nothing else.

The policy didn't say whether their privacy policy included sealing the envelope when they send me things.