Well, I just created another, shown here. I think this is slightly better put-together than the previous video report, but still has a few shortcomings.

The process of creating video reports such as this has one major drawback; it is very, very time-consuming. For this report, of just over fifteen minutes, I think I spent over 5 hours working on it.

I know, with practice, that time is going to come down; but, not as much as one might think. Anyone attempting a task like this is still going to need to watch the video clips they’re working from; video needs standardised to one resolution, and one aspect ratio. Titles need created, and then the entire project needs rendered.

All this, to-date, is without the added complexity of including any narration.

Before I attempt that particular task, I’ve decided I need to ‘convert’ a walk-in wardrobe into a small, and – yes – cramped, sound booth. It simply would not do to have a refrigerator buzzing in the background, traffic noises from the street. Or, considering where I live, some of the more choice ‘banter‘ from the street getting picked up (For the insatiably curious, there are still Trainspotters in Leith).

However, I should show-off some of these tools a little. That might encourage a few others to try their hand at video-editing. Linux isn’t all ‘transmission line-noise’ like sed, awk, grep, modprobe, touch and fsck; despite what you may have heard, it is perfectly usable by mere mortals.

Moving right along, You’re probably interested to see the two “most graphical” of the tools used to create this video. Those are GiMP and OpenShot.

Screenshot of GiMP running on Ubuntu 10.04-3 LTS

If you’ve not seen, or heard of, GiMP then, the simplest explanation is that it’s a Free replacement for Photoshop.

If you are a Photoshop user, you’ll need to un-learn certain ways of doing things. But, by-and-large, GiMP is a completely free functional replacement.Yes, the screenshot show here is huge (click to zoom-in); but as you’ll notice, GiMP is a multi-window application. You can work on a lot of images at any one time, build new images layer by layer, and a lot of effects are at your disposal.

What’s shown is version 2.6.8 of GiMP running on-top of Ubuntu version 10.04-3 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

It would seem, from checking the GiMP website, that I’ve got close to the latest-and-greatest version of the program. Whether or not there is a slightly later point release (i.e. I have 2.6.8 which is the .8 release of version 2.6) is not readily checked. Even better news for Windows and Mac OS users. There are downloadable version of GiMP you can use; meaning you can get rid of the three-versions-back pirate copy of Photoshop you got via torrent.

Would that I could say the same for OpenShot. Sadly, their website confirms the latest version is 1.4, and I’m only running version 1.1.3; nor is there a Windows or Mac OS version of the package.

OpenShot - 1.1.3 Running on Ubuntu 10.04-3 LTS

In theory, it may be possible to compile OpenShot for the Mac or Windows platforms, but that’s beyond me, and I’ve no need. Having discovered there is a more-current version, the instructions for upgrading to it, and staying current, are relatively straightforward.

Hopefully, with an upgrade, I will see less crashes from OpenShot. The improved layout shown in the video on the program’s website looks impressive.

I will be checking if the limitations I’ve experienced so far with OpenShot are removed. The most annoying of these I’ve met so-far is the 9999 seconds length limit on any clip you work with (2 hours 46 minutes and 39 seconds).

The other irksome limitation is how long you can run a “still” for; a “still” being a static .jpg or .png image which you stretch out. The perfect example of this would be the top-right Wikinews logo with which I branded the above video. Since the longest you can run a “still” in this version is 300 seconds, (five minutes) I had to repeat it three times across the video editing. If you take a closer look at the screenshot, you’ll see the branding is on track 3 and starts about 8 seconds into the video.

Since this screenshot is right at the start of the video, you can see how I’ve constructed the title sequence.

Tracks are numbered from bottom to top, so I put the music clip in on Track 1. On track 2 I’ve placed a white still for background, and track 3 fades in and out the full-screen Wikinews logo before switching to running the top-left ‘branding’ version of the logo.

Track 4 isn’t used much beyond what you see here; fade in/out the two “stills” with title information on them. This is one point where I know I need to improve my editing; the two “stills” share a common heading, and that should not fade out and back in again. However, having seen the advances between this version (1.1.3) of OpenShot and the latest (1.4), I expect there are significantly different options for achieving those results.

Beyond the credits, I simply cross-fade from one clip to another, or to a different point within any clip. Closing credits are, unsurprisingly, a slightly more simple reverse of the opening credits.

With that said, I’m off to remove OpenShot and Blender from my system, add the library for the latest version of OpenShot to my selected software repositories and, install the lot from scratch.

I would be curious to know what free software exists for Windows and/or Mac OS that provides the same functionality.

A sample Wikinews reporters' business card

At long last we’ve got funding, and the go-ahead, for Wikinewsies to have press IDs. They won’t look like the business card design to the left, but that will be a starting point.

As highlighted by Wikimedia UK, a code of conduct for those issued credentials by Wikinews is our final prerequisite.

In the modern world, where the UK’s Lord Leveson is dragging the country’s tabloid press across hot coals, it may seem archaic or strange that a code of conduct or ethics applies anywhere in journalism. But, it does.

Reporters and photojournalists are a publication’s “ambassadors”. We most certainly will not have people camping out in the bushes, with long lenses, trying to catch celebrities enjoying otherwise-private moments. Our guidelines for Original Reporting already cover a fair amount of ground on what is, and is not, appropriate behaviour.

There are a slew of documents to go over. I am of the opinion that a code of conduct should be combined with a code of ethics to provide a “Principles of Wikinewsies“. At the moment I am reviewing the following documents with a view to working to produce a base document which is workable globally, not just within the English-speaking world. Those documents are:

• NUJ Code of Conduct
• SPJ Code of Ethics
• BBC Editorial Guidelines
• CBC – Radio Canada – Code of Conduct
• Sydney Morning Herald Code of Ethics

That is probably quite enough reading for anyone going forward. However, if you know of any other important publications with English-language versions of their codes of ethics/conduct, I’d be delighted to add them to the list.

For those with an interest in the minutiae, the Wikimedia UK discussion granting us funding for ID cards is here.

Before I waffle off into lawn-minding territory, let’s just say I wholeheartedly agree that Unity is the “Windows Vista moment” in Ubuntu’s development history. If you’re not looking to criticise my commentary and get told to “get off my lawn“, you can click here and skip the curmudgeonly reminiscing. Whatever you do, don’t mention Windows ME!

I’ve dabbled with Linux on-and-off over the years, but my main use of UNIX-ey systems was with Big Iron — Sun, d|i|g|i|t|a|l, IBM, HP and so on. To this day I would still prefer to work on VMS boxen but, am not going back to a four-foot-high monster in my office. Besides, HP/Compaq screwed the pooch on the hardware side.

Thirty years playing, and working, with computers. I cut my GUI teeth on SunOS 3.2 back in the late 1980s, also dabbling with the original Macintosh for some desktop publishing work; but, the main place work got done using computers was at the command line.

Fast-forward through 20-odd years using various systems, paralleled by the rise and rise of Microsoft Windows, I was relatively at-ease with Windows XP. I’ve heard various remarks about Microsoft making it “too good”; well, no surprise there. As Gates did to Apple with the original version of Windows, he’d done the same to VMS for the underlying system by taking all the good bits for the Windows NT core.

But, Vista? Nooooo!

Some money-grubbing moron in the bowels of Redmond City (and, I mean that as-in they need cast back into the sewers from whence they came) decided development of the next incarnation of their desktop was taking too long. Vista is the result of handing a pre-alpha piece of software to a marketing team. Lipstick on a pig, followed by extensive use of Photoshop. I suspect their sole concern technical quality-wise was avoiding a repeat of the Windows 98 keynote BSOD. Everything else was a disaster.

Myself, virtually the entire business community, and other more tech-savvy computer users stuck to Windows XP for years. You’ll still find XP in a huge number of offices, and the pressure was such that Microsoft withdrew — at least twice — planned end-of-support schedules. Enough really big companies rely on thousands of XP desktop installs to make failure to provide security fixes something that could see Microsoft in court, and crucified throughout the press.

I recall interviewing for a contract, and being asked about Vista by the hiring manager. He was unaware Windows 7 was in the works, and my advice to not allow staff Vista pending the Microsoft developers fixing marketing’s screw-up didn’t go down too well. Had I been brutally frank, I would have told him, “anyone coming into the office asking for Vista on their desktop or laptop because they, have got it at home and, like it urgently needs removed from any decision-making process beyond which colour paperclips are ordered”.

When a Vista laptop entered our house, one that was a victim of Microsoft’s pressure on vendors not to write XP device drivers for newer hardware, I stuck SUSE Linux on it. It was perfect for my Monster, and he spent an enormous amount of time playing various games on it — and doing the odd bit of homework.

By 2008, I was dual-booting my desktop machine; XP for work developing software that required Windows, and Ubuntu to dabble with. Moving back to the UK, and catching up with old friends, saw me starting to switch other people over to Ubuntu. There’s more than one friend who’s a musician, so I took a good long look at the Ubuntu Studio derivative. Immediately disliked the desktop, so started looking at selectively installing relevant packages on top of ‘base’ Ubuntu. Well, we didn’t get the band back together again but, I found a pretty impressive set of tools.

Common job(s), common needs

Now, having sworn off Ubuntu due to Unity, I’m looking at Linux Mint. If I can get the full set of audio-visual tools installed, that’s where I’m heading.

Prior to going though, I’ve learned a few tricks to Ubuntu customisation and intend to apply them. Being open-source, it’s relatively easy to make things just the way you’d like them. I’ve created bootable USB versions several times; they’re incredibly useful when it comes to quickly installing a system. Now, though, I’m going to attempt something a little more ambitious – a Live version which suits me, contains a toolset geared to general use, and a setup which is conducive to working on Wikinews.

To keep on-topic for the Editors´ blog, a brief digression into news…

Several days ago, one of my fellow Wikinewsies pointed me at this brave soul streaming his city’s bombardment live from Syria. As with all wars, it involves long periods of boredom punctuated with bouts of extreme violence.

One session of streaming, nearly four-and-a-half hours long, saw the building the camera is in hit. Another strike close-by came a few minutes later. The clip/”report” you see to the right is excerpts from the entire 4½ hrs of footage, obtained using Linux tools.

Those tools should, relatively easily, all fit on a bootable single-layer DVD. Not just those, but an extensive range of other useful programs. Graphics manipulation, sound editing, office tools, and on and on.

Not only would such a DVD be useful for getting a familiar environment at any PC you sit down in front of, security is important. An environment secure, and comprehensive, enough that “Baba Omer” in Homs could use it to get information out; that a more-comfortably situated editor can edit the footage, and prepare relevant graphics; edit, spell-check and grammar-check, the appropriate copy.

That self-same “comfortably situated” editor may have their own needs for security and privacy. Government after government is instituting poorly thought-out laws which could easily see an enthusiastic citizen journalist jailed.

Taking what I know, and the building blocks offered throughout the Linux ecosphere, let’s see how I get on making a Wikinewsie’s Live DVD.

I suspect there is enough work in this to merit its own blog for coordination and discussion,…

You knew they would, didn't you?

Well, Godaddy had their chance(s); they failed — on an epic scale.

The wikinewsie.org codebase is zipped up and downloaded, databases backed up and new hosting plan in-place.

Partway through the process of removing their stupid “Privacy protection” from the domain. This, if you’ve not had the experience, is a clever ploy to lock you in and make migrating out a real pain.

My Amerikan fellow Wikinewsies may be slightly annoyed as the site is moving to an Amsterdam-based host. However, we’ll cease having to pay separately for email hosting which is limited  in terms of the number of supported accounts. And, we’ll finally have a “proper” mailing list.

So where are we off to? ITEC Hosting, that’s where. Getting used to CPanel as-opposed to the perpetually changing proprietary interface offered by those SOPA-supporters from Arizona is interesting but, with well-nigh 30 years of geekdom, I’ll cope.

I, personally, cannot say enough bad things about dealing with Godaddy support — and I’ve worked tech. support. That means I know a good 60-70% of the problems you deal with fall into the PiCNiC (Problem in Chair, Not in Computer) category. When they do not, your support has to shine. If it’s taken a customer three or four attempts to get support to acknowledge a problem, you don’t just pass the buck to second line — you keep checking it, make sure second line fixes it, and follow up with the customer to ensure they’re satisfied.

We experienced two disastrous problems with Godaddy. The first: they never, never-ever, thought to notify us we were on their “legacy” hosting package (read: only fit for static pages, frequently sub-1% CPU time available). The second: one of their so-called “One Click” package installers is broken. Naturally, it would be the one for MediaWiki.

You quickly grow tired of “click-click-send” responses from an uncaring support team. And, having to craft a script to check CPU loading because normally-available commands aren’t is just, well, tiresome.

Once I actually got clear on the second of these problems I was indeed royally pissed-off; what Godaddy’s installer for MediaWiki did was flat-out wrong. It clearly violated the instructions as-provided in MediaWiki’s documentation. Guess what, Godaddy? I know Brion Vibber; met him at Wikimania 2008 in Egypt, and he’s the lead programmer on MediaWiki. He would likely laugh, and shake his head sadly, at your second line team installing a open-to-all ‘test’ wiki in my account to check my complaint. That they didn’t clean up after themselves speaks volumes.

Farewell then Godaddy, may your server farm go up in a puff of blue smoke! ‘cos I’m sure-as-hell sick of your support staff trying to blow smoke up my ass!

For any website, one of the most important things is how quickly it loads. wikinewsie.org has not been faring well in that department – apart from the 100% static pages, or those including a bare-minimum of generated content. Frequently, page loading was giving timeout errors, and the cause was impossible to pin down.

After wasting an age looking into caching code and content, swearing profusely at the load-times whenever I made a change, and finding a bug in Godaddy’s MediaWiki installer, I took up the latter with technical support.

Round, and round

I’d previously emailed support when a couple of my submissions via their MediaWiki installer failed to ever complete. Eventually, I’d given up on that when a “higher” level of support ‘fixed’ a failed install and gave no indication what had actually gone wrong. My best-guess is that when you set the password for a new install, you can’t use the “£” character — although, they don’t list it as forbidden.

I finally got really annoyed at a double-slash where it didn’t belong in page addresses. To-date, I’d had two useless responses from tech support. And, I mean really useless responses. First, blame me (naturally) — but qualify that with ‘it might be the package‘. It isn’t; the problem lies with Godaddy’s installer.

In my second email to support, I highlighted this, including a cite from the MediaWiki manual – specifically, the entry on what to put in for the name of the server it’s running on.

This was ignored. I’d given the agent an easier out — I’d grumbled about the pathetic response-times in serving up pages as well as actually telling them something they were doing is wrong.

So, I got the “two-clicks and he’s done” on how to tune a MySQL database. Way to go Ryan P., Online Support Representative! That’ll keep your average handle time down.

I nearly gave up on the couldn’t-care-less vibe from my few interactions with support, but the performance issue caught my attention. When a couple of other site users reported timeouts, and I kept getting HTTP 500 Server Error responses, it was time to look at that performance issue for myself. I logged into the server, and started poking around.

Use of top: Permission denied. To cut a long story short, I hacked together a script to parse the list of processes output by ps. Here’s a screenshot of that in-action:

Yes, that really is only 0.3% ‘free’ CPU (the server has 4 processors).

I went a bit “ballistic” at support when I emailed them this output. But, it simply seemed they had never bothered to inform me that I was able to switch to a more modern form of hosting at no extra cost.

Move done, things have improved — although I am inclined to say I’ve seen more responsive MediaWiki installs with other companies.

Longer-term, wikinewsie.org has to move outside the United States. It may pain some of our accredited reporters who hope the U.S. will live up to the “Land of the Free” motto, but both Sweden and the Netherlands are more-respected in terms of press freedoms.

On that point, I would like to invite you to contribute to our running costs; not only would wikinewsie.org be better-off were it to move elsewhere, but the entire site should be secure (using an https:// connection). On Godaddy, your donation of £1.50 pays for around a week’s-worth of hosting, or email account provision. But, just having an SSL certificate for the full site is over £5 per week.  If you don’t understand why we should move to https, then I cannot recommend enough reading what the EFF has to say on the subject.

[For those of you more-used to dollars, £5 usually fluctuates between $7.60 and $8.00.]

Whilst the primary function of the domain will still be letting accredited reporters have more-professional email addresses, and a nonpublic wiki for ongoing investigations or embargoed material, this blog is intended to give some insights into the processes in-use on Wikinews.

Writing articles frequently proves a challenge for newcomers so, from time-to-time, we’ll have posts on how to formulate an article, what are — and are not — acceptable sources, what we mean by inverted pyramid style, and the most-common errors people make when first trying to contribute to Wikinews.

Since the cadré of accredited reporters is expanding to include those working on the non-English versions of Wikinews, some of those posts may be in other languages.

For now, why not have a play with our feed tracker? This, as it expands, should be a useful tool to quickly track down additional sources when writing synthesis articles. It even helps you format the markup to cite a source on Wikinews.