creating a video on a mac for youtube

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I’m currently taking the Coursera Public Speaking class.  It’s a nice supplement to Toastmasters.  In the class, we create 4 videos.  I’ve never recorded myself on a webcam before, so this is interesting.

Setup

I used PhotoBooth.  I liked the narrower field of view than QuickTime player because it meant I didn’t have to move anything in my home to get a decent view.  I shifted the webcam up a bit to get papers behind me out of the way.  If I was recording something important, I’d fix this to get a better background.  Interestingly this turned out to be a lot easier than cropping a video from youtube.

Recording the video

Photo Booth is really easy to use.  You select video and click to start.  It gives you about 3 seconds to get in position before starting.  Then you export it at the end.

Cropping

Photo Booth takes care of the problem of leaning over to the computer to start the video.  It doesn’t for the end, so this takes cropping.  Which I did in iMovie.

  1. In iMovie, create a new project and import the video.  A 4-5 minute video took about a minute to import/
  2. iMovie automatically splits the video into short thumbnails.  Drag the one(s) you want to the top.
  3. Then mouse over the last video segment until you see yourself leaning over.  It’s frame by frame so easy to find.  Select the parts you want to remove and then just cmd-X to cut.
  4. Share > Export movie.  It took about 4 minutes to export.

Uploading to YouTube

  1. Upload > video manager
  2. Close the box about creating a channel on google plus.  I don’t want one and I’d like to not be prompted every time.
  3. Drag the video in.  (The first time I made in smaller so people with slower connections could see, but then I learned youtube shrinks it for you.)
  4. Choose unlisted access to the coursera students/peer evaluators can view.

 

Creating a UML diagram with Eclipse Papyrus

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Yesterday, I upgraded my Eclipse to Kepler. I needed to create a UML class diagram and decided to try out Papyrus – an Eclipse incubator project.  It wasn’t as straightforward as I expected so blogging about what to do and what not to do.  Class_Diagram

I think this project needs more documentation (and a few more features) before using it seriously.  Luckily, my diagram was trivial.  In fact, it was so trivial, I decided to switch to PowerPoint (or in my clas – Open Office Drawing)

Regardless, here’s what I learned before giving up on it.

Creating a diagram

  1. File > New > Papyrus Project
  2. Enter project name
  3. Click NEXT (Do not click Finish.  I was unable to use papyrus > new diagram > create new class diagram when I didn’t create one right away)
  4. UML
  5. Click next
  6. Enter diagram name and click “UML Class Diagram”
  7. Click finish

Adding a class

  1. Switch to the Papyrus Perspective
  2. Drag a “Class” node from the palette view at right
  3. Click the “Class 1” name once and then type the name of your class.  (Do not double click the class box as it opens a hyberlink view.  Do not click the class box and expect to type in it
  4. Drag an ‘Operation” node from the palette at right onto your class
  5. Click “Operation 1” and type the name of your method (Do not add an operation to the model explorer view at left as it will not show up in the diagram)

Preferences

In the Eclipse preferences, you can set a number of view preferences.  They are extremely granular.  For example, I wanted to hide the fourth “section” of the UML diagram showing just class name, attributes and operations.  To do this, I had to:

  1. Preferences > Papyrus > Diagrams > PapyrusUMLClassDiagram > Class Node
  2. Uncheck “show compartment” in NestedClassifierComponent section
  3. Preferences > Papyrus > Diagrams > PapyrusUMLClassDiagram > Interface Node
  4. Uncheck “show compartment” in NestedClassifierComponent section
  5. Delete my diagram and create a new one as I could not figure out how to get preferences to take effect on an existing diagram.

What still puzzles me

There has to be a way to refresh the graphical view to sync with the model explorer and update based on workspace preferences.

eclipse kepler (4.3) on a mac

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Getting started

When going to the Eclipse site, I was greeted with a cool book looking page about Kepler.  Who Kepler is, what’s new, the link to download, etc.  kepler-book

Choosing a package

Eclipse has a nice chart comparing the features in each edition.  I’m excited to see git and maven got promoted to the Java EE edition.  In fact the Java EE edition is *almost* a superset of the Java edition now.  The download is 50MB bigger than last time.  And since Verizon wired the basement for FIOS but not any individual apartments yet, this means 30-45 minute download.  Now that I have the file eclipse-jee-kepler-R-macosx-cocoa-x86_64.tar, I can start.

Installing on A Mac was a small adventure

I did the usual of untarring and copying the eclipse folder into Applications.  I got an error: “Eclipse” is damaged and can’t be opened.  You should move it to the Trash.

I found a command here to get Gatekeeper to allow it:  xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app

Then I got: Failed to load the JNI shared library /Library/java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/../jre/lib/client/libjvm.dylib

I was on Java 7 update 17.  I updated to update 25, but that didn’t help.  I then tried using a launch startup script per the bug report.  Note that I needed to change two bolded lines to point to my install location.

#!/bin/bash
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/jre/bin/java \
-Djava.library.path=<strong>/Applications/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx.x86_64_1.1.200.v20130521-0416/eclipse_1507.so</strong> \
-Xms512m \
-Xmx2048m \
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/Eclipse.icns \
-XstartOnFirstThread \
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts \
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m \
-jar /Applications/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20130327-1440.jar \
-os macosx \
-ws cocoa \
-arch x86_64 \
-showsplash \
-name Eclipse \
--launcher.appendVmargs \
-debug

It sounds like this will be fixed in Kepler SR  1.  In the meantime I renamed my script to end in .command so I can open it via the applications finder window (nice tip)

First Impressions

Since some of the plugins I was using are now built in and others I don’t use anymore (that I installed over the past year), I decided not to import my plugins from a previous installation and start anew.  It’s easy enough to install from the marketplace.

The significant plugins I use:

Plugin Purpose
Mongrel Tomcat integration supporting Tomcat 7.  (The version of Sysdeo I was using seems to have had that too but at least Mongrel looks more active.) Used the Sysdeo source code and forked it since Sysdeo isn’t getting updates anymore.
Ecl Emma Code coverage
PMD and FindBugs Static analysis
Subversive To access Subversion repositories
Groovy/Grails Tool Suite Groovy project/editor and console
Eclipse Memory Analyzer For finding memory leaks – must use update site rather than marketplace
Freemarker IDE Freemarker syntax highlighting and macro assistance.  Note that it is listed under the JBoss Tool Project.
Papyrus UML editor – under install new software > kepler > papyrus  (I don’t recommend Papyrus at this time.)
Python Python plugin/perspective

What excites me

  1. Mylyn connector improvements (for code review)
  2. Remove type arguments after content assist – this happened just often enjoy to be annoying
  3. IDE support for JUnit Assumptions

What frustrates me

  1. The mess about Mac support for Kepler.  It’s annoying launching from the command line (or even a command).