Mika.Seppala's blog

Mac Pro vs MacBook Air in Movie Production

2008-10-24T00:23:21+03:00

To get a true picture of the performance differences, I took snapshots of CPU and memory usage of Mac Pro and of MacBook Air while the computers where producing the movie discussed in my previous blog entry.

The picture above shows the CPU usage of my Mac Pro, and the picture below that of my MacBook Air.

During the production of the movie, MacBook Air was typically using about 90% of its processor's capability while Mac Pro was using only about 25%.

Memory usage is also interesting.

The picture above shows the memory usage of Mac Pro during the movie production and the picture below that of my MacBook Air.

While the performance difference in this particular task, movie production with iMovie, was significant, the real difference lies in the fact that Mac Pro can perform several heavy tasks like that at the same time while MacBook Air must put all its resources into this one task only in order to perform it in a satisfactory fashion.

Podcast production: Mac Pro vs. MacBook Air

2008-10-22T23:52:47+03:00

I am spending a lot of time with podcast production. During the process of learning this trade I have gone through lots of hardware and software. From Windows to Mac, from USB microphones to condenser microphones etc.

Today I got my new Mac Pro set up and files transferred. The new computer is Mac Pro 8-core (2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM). I tested this against my MacBook Air (1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM).

In the test I first imported five Quick time movies to iMovie in both systems. These Quicktime movies where produced previously as exports of Keynote presentations with audio. Within iMovie I then combined these movies to a single 8:35 long medium size movie (640x480).

When creating podcasts for my students I typically produce movies in three different sizes (mobile, medium and large). The production, that is the creation of the final product from within iMovie when the movie already has been composed, of these three different sizes of podcasts takes typically more than 90 minutes for a 10 minute podcast. This is a slow process to which I wanted to get an improvement by upgrading hardware.

Here are the "not scientifically" produced numbers (I was simply taking time with a stop watch):

1. Importing video clips to iMovie: 2:56/1:25 (MacBook Air times given first), q = 2.07.
2. Within iMovie, exporting a 8:35 minutes long movie in medium format (640x480): 25:40/4:37, q = 5.62.

This is a dramatic improvement. Exporting movies with Mac Pro takes less than a fifth of the time compared to MacBook Air.

I have ordered 16 GB memory upgrade for the Mac Pro from Other World Computing. I should receive that tomorrow. I will then retake this speed test and report back to this blog of the results. Anyway, it seems clear that getting a more serious computer for podcast production was the right thing to do.

Grenoble meeting

2008-10-09T11:02:39+03:00

The French ministry of education organized a meeting entitles “L’Apprentissage des Sciences dans L’Europe de la Connaissance” that is right now taking place in Grenoble. Minister Xavier Darcos, the French minister of education, is talking and mentioned that, in France, during the last several years, physics has lost in average 5.5% of the student body a year. Several other countries report similar trends.

The conclusion of the minister is that we must improve mathematics and science education at high schools. How to do this is the problem. Inquiry Based Study, IBS for short, seems to be the new buzz word. IBS is another name for the method that Juha Oikkonen has initiated in Finland several years ago under the name “paja.” This translates to English as laboratory. The point is to encourage students’ individual activity. This is what the LUMA center at the University of Helsinki is also doing under the direction of Maija Aksela.

Minister Xavier Darcos talked about the challenges we are facing. Perhaps the most important challenge is to create a European framework to improve scientific education and to get more people into these studies.

Teaching science today: a new kind of pedagogy is needed. More sharing of knowledge is needed.

1. Sciences must be introduced at schools earlier than what is being done today.
2. Teacher training must improve. Promote greater mobility of teachers.

School for the 21st century program will be proposed to the European Parliament.

The above was the message of minister Xavier Darcos.

Nobody has suggested that we might want to import good students from Asia and elsewhere. This is what the US has been doing for a long time.

JEM server down on Saturday

2008-09-27T23:25:41+03:00

The JEM server was down most of today, Saturday, September 27. The JEM server is located in a machine room of the Physics Department, and, of course, none of the administrators of the machine room was reachable off hours. Together with Antti Alamäki I then went to Campus, got the security guard to let us in to the machine room, and rebooted ubu, the JEM server.

The reason for the downtime was distributed denial of service attack that started this morning. The attack apparently came from California or China, but it may, of course, actually be orchestrated from anywhere.

Perhaps it already is a recognition that somebody finds it worth his or her while to bring our server down. Perhaps a group of kids is only practicing, or perhaps somebody got upset of my last blog entry. We will probably never find out.

This reminded me of my visit years ago to the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany. We were shown around at the Institute. I was pleased to see that the library was always open, and people were able to take books to their rooms without having to show ids to the librarians. There were no librarians sitting in the library! I asked, how many books they loose a year? Wouldn't it be better to have a librarian to check that books will not get stolen?

The person answering could not say how many books get stolen, but told about this one meeting during which some chapters, relevant to that particular meeting, were cut out of some books! It seems that the academia is not any better than the rest of the society.

Mission Impossible

2008-09-17T13:23:02+03:00

This blog comment is related to Olga Caprotti's blog entry "Mission Accomplished."

We are in the business of advancing the use of information technology in education. At times I feel that this is a Mission Impossible. It may be just as easy for us to advance the use of ICT in education as it is to advance the arriving of a summer in Finland by melting some of the snow and ice away by hot water. Things happen at their due time, and then with great force. In Finland, winter turns into spring, and spring into summer just in a few weeks. The hot water, that we used as kids, has absolutely no effect in the process.

At the Trondheim meeting talks about the EUROPEAN VIRTUAL LABORATORY OF MATHEMATICS were given. Talks were good. It seems, however, that many people talk the talk but do not walk the walk. The European Virtual Laboratory's hit counter reports today, that it has received 3471 hits. This is a repository set up by Community funding within the Leonardo Programme. The data seems to be since last October.

This statistics means that nobody is using the Web Site, not even the creators of the site. I get that many hits just in a day or two to my online calculus course. And I consider this just scratching the surface.

Our Mission Impossible is now "How to Break the Enormous Inertia of the Academia" to improve education, to make it more affordable, and to make it much more accessible.

Helsinki Online Calculus

2008-09-10T11:09:04+03:00

The basic calculus course at the University of Helsinki has been offered online for many years. The course was completely revised this time. We are trying to activate students by asking them to contribute to weekly forum discussions, and by giving generous extra credit for that. Next time I may make that a compulsory part of the course.

In fall 2007 the lectures were held in the virtual conference room. The course met for lectures twice a week (total 4 hours a week) and once a week for problem sessions (2 hours). This time the lectures are offered as podcasts, and are available to students at any time. Instead of lectures, we now have weekly meetings to discuss the topics on basis of the forum contributions of the students.

Podcasting lectures is the main new thing in this course. To a certain extent that was done already last year, but the quality of the podcasts has now improved a lot. Also the coverage of the podcasts has been extended. Part of the materials is available also in English, see http://web.me.com/calculus/Site/Calculus_Podcasts/Calculus_Podcasts.html.

For virtual class meetings we use the iVocalize system. It is a mature program that offers the possibility to show slideshows, take snapshots of any window on a computer and share that with others, and cast the screen of a computer to others. I find the snapshot feature most useful addition. That was not available a year ago. Students may now create the presentations of their solutions to homework problems in any way they like, i.e. using TeX, Word, Pages, PowerPoint, MathType or by scanning hand written solutions, and display them in the virtual exercise session using the Snapshot functionality. Suddenly the problem of creating and displaying mathematical text has been solved by low technology: a pen, paper, an eraser, and a scanner or a mobile phone camera. That works even in one-to-one Skype sessions: the hand written solutions can be shown in the Skype video.

More to follow….

Podcasting Problems

2008-07-21T19:04:20+03:00

I got wrong advice. Or perhaps I asked a wrong question.

I have reported earlier in my Blog about the bug in the new version QuickTime, which resulted to Keynote loosing audio of a slideshow when exporting the slideshow to QuickTime. In the meanwhile Apple has published an update to Keynote, and now also the export of a Keynote presentation to PowerPoint fails so that PowerPoint 2008 cannot open the exported file. No improvement in exporting the audio to QuickTime. Even worse, currently the QuickTime export will export a slideshow to QuickTime without the audio channel. iMovie, however, fails to open this exported movie. Remedy to this is to open the exported file with QuickTime Pro, and then save the file as a QuickTime movie.

In my quest to improve calculus podcasts I asked the advice of a professional musician about microphones and audio interfaces. Following that advice I then bought a good condenser microphone, and Mbox 2 Pro from Digidesign (http://www.digidesign.com/), which comes with the industry leading audio system Pro Tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Tools). This created an additional problem: I have not yet been able to get Pro Tools operate with the new Mac OS Leopard. To purchase Pro Tools was the wrong advice that I got. Or maybe I should have asked “What is the best audio editing system for me?” rather than asking “What is the best audio editing system?”

After having wasted several days with these problems I gave up and purchased Apogee Duet (http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/duet.php), a wonderful Mac only audio interface. It works with Mac OS X Core Audio system (unlike Pro Tools), its design is slick, and the system worked right out of the box. In 10 minutes I was already recording my version of “Veronika, Der Lenz ist Da” together with Palast Orchester. No, you will not want to listen to me singing. But I am now looking forward to adding the audio tracks by iMovie to Keynote slideshows exported to movies. We should perhaps have a JEM Training session on these topics in Trondheim.

ICMI and ICME: Mathematics Education at a Crossroads

2008-07-13T03:09:54+03:00

I am right now taking part in the ICME 11 conference, the most important international meeting of mathematics educators. ICME conferences meet every four years. This time the meeting is taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. Together with Olga Caprotti I organized a workshop entitled eLearning Mathematics and participated in the activities of the meeting in general.

Several talks about using technology in mathematics education were given. Most of them focused on the use of laboratories and Computer Algebra Systems in allowing students to experiment with mathematical concepts. The more valuable application of technology, namely automatics assessment, was discussed only in a couple of presentations. This reflects the fact that mathematics educators are not, in general, aware of what can be done with systems like MapleTA, Mathdox, STACK, Webwork, etc. Here the JEM community must do a lot of work, and keep talking about this.

Right now I am attending the final session of ICMI Study Groups.
Seymour Papert’s seminal work has been prominently discussed (http://www.papert.org/). The work of the Seventeenth ICMI Study (http://icmistudy17.didirem.math.jussieu.fr/doku.php) is most relevant to JEM – recommended reading for all JEM partners. See Olga's photo stream at flickr for some very nice photo's of the ICME meeting.

Quicktime bug

2008-06-30T09:23:05+03:00

I have been creating Podcasts using Keynote and iMovie. This has been working fine, and I have created podcasts that cover a basic calculus course completely.

Yesterday I needed to create another podcast. I started my Keynote, produced and recorded the presentation, and exported it to Quicktime. But no sound. The recording did not play anymore when the presentation was exported to Quicktime.

I found out that the culprit was the new version (4.5) of Quicktime. See
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20080617143056579. Downgrading Quicktime 7.5 to Quicktime 7.4 helped, and I got my sound back to my presentations. Observe that you need to downgrade Quicktime, not the Quicktime Player. So I finally got to sleep at 3 am this morning.

BlackBoard Blues

2008-04-18T06:14:23+03:00

This semester I have been teaching two large sections of calculus I at Florida State University. FSU is a big time BlackBoard user. The system has been in use for many years and always worked fine. Until this week. This is also the last week of classes. Final examinations are next week. Hence this week is extremely busy time students using BlackBoard to prepare for the final examinations or to submit course work. Hence closing down BlackBoard and restarting it is not really an option.

The symptoms are BlackBoard answering very, very slowly, and sometimes failing to gather the necessary content from the database. Perhaps too many users, or an angry and very capable student hacking the system.

From the FSU BlackBoard page on April 17: "We currently do not have an estimated time of recovery; however, we are working around the clock to get things running smoothly again as soon as possible. We realize that the timing of these problems is extremely inconvenient and appreciate your patience given the circumstances."

Fortunately I am using WebALT services together with BlackBoard. So I have a way to deal with this situation. I will report here if I find out what the cause for this problem was.

Macgic

2008-03-10T09:33:06+02:00

The Department at FSU recently replaced some old computers with new ones. Almost all secretaries got new Macs with large screens. The result has been that some secretaries stay at work much longer than needed. It is so nice to work with the new computers, was the comment of one secretary.

I got a new Mac Book Air. Sweet machine leading the way to the future of computing. Yesterday I arrived from Florida to Helsinki to spend the FSU spring break in Finland. At the security screening in Frankfurt, the person checking me looked at the MacBook Air and asked: is that a computer? The question was an honest one. She was astonished to see such a thin machine, not much thicker that an issue of Der Spiegel.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Mac, MacBook Air, Macgic

Mac Keynote pdf bug

2008-02-17T20:34:48+02:00

Working on the bleeding edge will lead to some cuts every once in a while. I report hereby one such situation for the convenience of those who may want to follow my advice regarding the the production of mp4 movies out of PP files using Keynote.

I have created my lecture podcasts recording Keynote presentations and converting them to movies. I also provide printed slides to my students as pdf files. Keynote allows one to print presentations to pdf files. They look great in the Mac Preview viewer. They also look good in Acrobat 7 but not in Acrobat 8. For some reasons the colors get mixed up when viewing the files with Acrobat 8, the viewer that most people will use. Text boxes containing text in black fonts appear randomly gray and become very hard to read. The files are not usable.

The remedy is to print first the slides (using Keynote's built in facilities) to ps files, and then to convert these ps files to pdf by Acrobat. This is not convenient, but seems, unfortunately, necessary for the time being.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Keynote, Acrobat, pdf, ps

Blogging directly from Flock

2008-02-14T18:15:43+02:00

It is not what you know but what you can learn! It seems that, in order to be able to surf in the high waves of information technology, one must be prepared to take up new things almost on daily bases. When the WebALT project started I had the motto that "we are sailors, not the wind." By that I meant that the best we can possibly do is to take advantage of the developments in the field, and, perhaps, add little ingredient of our own.

I certainly have the same opinion still. But I must say that the wind is blowing hard. We must be good sailors. For some, this may appear as a hurricane destroying everything that remains on its path.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock

From Garage Calculus to Calculus Movies

2008-02-11T02:32:29+02:00

I have earlier reported in this blog about using GrageBand, a component of Apple’s iLife 08, to produce Calculus Podcasts. While GarageBand allows the convenient editing of the soundtrack, the quality of graphics that GarageBand supports, is not good enough for Calculus Podcasts.

Incidentally Apple came up with the new very thin laptop, Mac Book Air. I liked very much its add (http://www.apple.com/macbookair/#ad) in which Yael Naim sings about being “A New Soul in this Strange World.” I even then searched for the song in YouTube. In the song (http://youtube.com/watch?v=-YUxbDEPFiM ), after the part which is included in the Mac Book Air ad, she signs that she finds herself “making every possible mistake.”

I feel the same. Clearly GarageCalculus was not going to work.

Now I have learnt to use Keynote and iMovie enough to be able to produce Calculus Podcasts at the rate of 2-4 podcasts on a good day. The way I am doing it is the following.

Algorithm: from PP to mp4:

Input: fairly decent PowerPoint slide show on a mathematical topic with mathematics edited by MathType.

1. Copy the file to a Macintosh, and open the file with Mac PowerPoint. You need to have a copy of MathType as well.

2. Click the MathType formulae included in the slideshow, and close them. After this preparation Keynote will be able to understand all the fonts needed for the formulae.

3. Increase all the font sizes so that the generic font is at least 24 pt. This improves the legibility of the text on small devices like the iPod Touch or the iPhone. 18 pt fonts are also readablee, but not as good as 24 pt fonts on these devices.

4. Next open the saved file with Keynote, and split each page to an individual slideshow.

5. Record each individual slide show with Keynote, and export the recorded slides shows to QuickTime (requires only a couple of clicks).

6. Next in iMovie, create a new project for your movie, and import the recorded and exported Keynote movies to iMovie. Compose your Calculus podcast in iMovie.

7. Use iMovie’s one button publishing feature to upload your work to .Mac.

Yael Naim ends her song: this is a happy end... I guess that I also have a happy end -- but for different reasons than what the song suggests. I have been able to set up a Calculus podcast production line. In the attached picture, you see me working on my production line explaining the secrets of differentiability to my imaginary audience.

For the current results of my podcast production line, see http://web.mac.com/mika.seppala/Site/Calculus_Podcasts/Calculus_Podcasts.... You may notice that I did not always have time to edit my presentation from 18 pt fonts to 24 pt fonts.

GLOG, BLOG, POD and Teach

2008-01-25T22:29:54+02:00

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM) explains the abbreviation RTFM as “Read the Fucking Manual” and lists almost 40 equivalent expressions like GLOG for “Go Look on Google.” The multitude of such abbreviations simply tells us that people do not have the patience to learn before starting to use computers. I almost never read the booklets entitled “Read This First” when opening a package and starting to use a new computer or other similar device. I assume that it will be self explanatory, and that I will be able to use these devices right out of the box.

Now the same applies to learning in general. Students - this certainly applied to me when I was a student - will try to see whether they can solve the problems of an exam or of a class before actually taking the class. To study a course I started from the old final exams of that course and worked my way back from these old final exams. Usually that gave me enough information, and I was able to pass final exams of classes that I never took. I did that a lot.

With this observation in mind, I am now offering to my students exams which, in a way, teach the students as needed. This is a service offered by the WebALT Company. For an example of this, you may take the practice session on limits at http://www.webalt.com:8081/classes/Calculus/. Do not worry, we are not monitoring your responses. Stay tuned, more will follow.