How little things with Final Cut Server ruin your day

The day was going along pretty well today until I decided to do a small tweak on FCSvr.

I'm freeing up room on our expensive drives by archiving to cheap drives.

That was going just fine. What happens is it copies the file from the main media drives, on to the archive device, checks that it is there, then deletes the file from the main media drive.

Worked like a charm until inexplicably it started refusing to delete from the main drive.  That's weird I thought. But then, considering who uploaded the video, I thought to myself "weird stuff always comes from his computer...probably his fault" 

So as a nascent server admin I immediately blamed a user. It felt really good to do that. Unfortunately it didn't help me.

So I updated the xserve to the lates pro-app and OS upgrade. The server hung during the update, so I pulled the power on it and plugged it back in. It's one of those moments where you pause and think to yourself, this will either work, or I won't see much of my family this week.

It worked. Still couldn't delete though.

Finally I called up the folders on the media drive and compared them to others and sure enough, the permissions weren't set right.

FCSvr is an admin. admin did not have read/write permission on those rogue folders.  Problem solved. Change permissions and it works like a dream. Even better I still get to blame the user because they created the folders in the first place so it is probably their fault.

 Score.

I used to just work on story

That used to be my gig, having good creative ideas and making them into entertaining stories. Now I do that, and I'm a server admin. Go figure. I'm about the most dangerous server admin you can get. 

Updates without backup....check.

Just pushing the power button when hung...check

Blindly entering commands in terminal just because some website tells me so...check

Working with signage software

Even the name itself "signage software" should be enough to scare you away. "signage" ... what a terrible word.

The software is made to sell people things using moving pictures in waiting areas. Waiting for a bus, waiting for a plane, waiting to buy a bag of chips and a slurpee. The software is about as mundane and inspired as those places.

If you want a nice stock ticker (because that's what busy people demand) and a brightly coloured billboard suggesting the soup and sandwich special at the "transportation station snack bar" then this software for you.

This software is decidedly not for public galleries driven by an education and conservation mandate using HD footage.

It works but barely. Whatever you want to do, it will do, but it will make you work for it. Of all the things I want to time on, making presentation software work is not one of them.

Right now we have a touchscreen and a plasma running off of one computer. To get the touchscreen to update the plasma is pretty much impossible. I can do it in the omnivex (yeah I'm calling you out Omnivex) architecture but it's going to make me work for it. Basically it will take about 5-6 hours to set up, then every change thereafter will take about an hour. I don't want that. I want to be able to do it quickly. I want to be able to update often. 

I want the ease of putting a 7 day weather report in there. Thankfully the software makes weather reports easy, unfortunately our cichlid exhibit is not currently in need of weather reports.