North Star Labs

Here’s my preferred method of drawing attention to screen elements in technical documentation.

Direct Link: Screen Shot Highlights

iPhone / iPod Direct Video Link

Procedure:

1. Copy window to clipboard with ALT+PrintScreen
2. Paste as a new image into the Gimp with CTRL+SHIFT+V
3. Use the rectangular selection tool to select the regions you want to draw attention to.
4. Feather the selection for effect.
5. Create a drop shadow if desired.
6. Insert a new, totally black layer named mask.
7. Keeping the selection in place, select the mask layer and delete the black pixels, creating a “hole” through the layer to the underlying image of the window.
8. Set the mask layer’s transparency appropriately.
9. Save the image, flattening the layers.
10. Insert the image into your word processor of choice.

The embedded screen cast was created with CamStudio, by converting the resulting AVI into an H.264 AVC MP4 file using the SUPER ffmpeg/x264 front end by eRightSoft.  The embedded player is JW FLV Media Player.  All tools are open source software.

In order to support the same version of python across all of our servers, I’ve also build Python 2.5.2 RPM’s for RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga).

This build is far more straightforward than the build for RHEL4, as the system X11 libraries link without patching Setup.dist and RHEL5 comes with a supported version of expat so statically linking  the library into the pyexpat module isn’t required.

The SRPM: python25-2.5.2-1.el5.src.rpm

Build command:

rpmbuild –define ‘__python_ver 25′ –define ‘dist .el5′ -ba ~/redhat/SPECS/python.spec

This package will not conflict with the system python package.  Scripts should use #!/usr/bin/env python25 to make sure the proper python is being used.

I’ve successfully built Python 2.5.2 RPM’s for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (Nahant).  The package is named python25 as not to conflict with the system’s python package.

Other than some minor tweaks to the patch process to account for the location of X11 libraries and db4.2, the only major change is that the pyexpat module is statically linked against libexpat.a since expat version 1.95.8 is required and not available in RHEL4.  If you build my SRPM, you’ll need to download an SRPM for expat-1.95.8 then build and install expat-devel-1.95.8 or greater.  Once present, the python25 SRPM will statically link in the correct version of the library.

The SRPM: python25-2.5.2-1.el4.src.rpm