DV video capture and edit in Ubuntu linux August 12th, 2008
Video editing capability is a necessity these days, when I finally found a good combination of software to use I was very happy. After-all, all you students and poor people out there, it's not like you want to have to go pirate Final Cut Pro or anything like that just to practice some skillz as an amateur film producer .. Video editing should be free! Content is King!!
Use DVgrab directly (no need for fancy UI here)
sudo apt-get install dvgrabsudo dvgrab -a outfile-When you are done editing, save back into format RAW dv
From there use a program such as DeVeDe ...
sudo apt-get install devede
devedeThese are the basics that will get you going in a professional way! I am very happy to see that Cinelerra has matured so much and the Ubuntu packages are working flawlessly on my main workbeast that currently runs Ubuntu Gusty. Thanks a bunch!
bash history and reverse history search March 31st, 2008
Spending a lot of time in linux means that you may type the same command twice or more. Using the bash history can save you a lot of re-typing. I typically only use one feature of history search known as 'reverse history search'. You can activate this mode by pressing CTRL-R at the bash prompt and then typing a substring of the command you want.
However, the default options for bash history don't do it any justice. By default it will only save the history when you exit from a terminal, the history is overwritten each time the save happens and is set to a small history size. To remedy all these things you can put the following in ~/.bashrc
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
export HISTSIZE=1000000 HISTFILESIZE=1000000
export HISTFILE=~/.bash_history_safe
export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a; history -n'
shopt -s histappend
Also, if your .bashrc file is already using PROMPT_COMMAND for other features then you must edit the PROMPT_COMMAND string and add '; history -a; history -n' to the end. For example, my .bashrc file was changed to the following:
# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME}: ${PWD/$HOME/~}\007"; history -a; history -n'
;;
*)
;;
esac
acts_as_serializable March 15th, 2008
You heard it here first folks. Acts_as_serializable is making it's public debut today! Yes it may be horrifically stuck in a brain twister of recursion that could bring your server to it's knees when used improperly, AND THAT'S why I feel it is finally READY.
Are YOU ready? Here we go:
script/plugin install http://svn.rubyonlinux.org/acts_as_serializable/trunk
Haha, I know no one is even reading this. That's ok because I need someone to help me finish coding it first :) It's really coming along though! Even as I'm writing this, I would describe it to you but instead I'm going to work on the documentation and tests.
...
OK, I think the way I was approaching it was too crazy. I think this serializable thing is better suited to be some kind of helper like the TestFactory. Mocks etc should be used to stub out required relationships. Building a generic solution is way less effective than teaching how to export your data serialized in yaml form (custom).
Example:
..coming soon
If what you see in the SVN interests you, drop me a comment.
Rails Conf was crazy! May 20th, 2007
My mind feels like a flat tire with a buncha fix-a-flat pumped in at 60 miles an hour right now. I can't help but sit here try to blurt out some useful info. Took lots of notes, which I need to organize.
Here are some cool links
Sweet site, IRC bot grabbed a buncha good quotes and links from #railsconf during the conference. Reading it is a great re-cap if you attended the whole thing. The quotes are priceless (and very spot on).
Ni.hili.st
O'Reilly's official wiki
presentation slides
Also worth noting.. There was a lot of sponsored talks/discussion around GlassFish3 which is Sun's much hyped name for Java EnterpriseEdition (latest version). They made it sound really cool but later when I did some research it seemed to me that it's not as cool as you might think. Running jruby w/rails instead of ruby (native), while a novel idea, is only useful if you can't install anything except for java (literally, if you can't install ruby even tho it would compile, install and run fine because of company policy and pre-existing support contracts).
Do not be fooled by the jRuby hype!! Go ruby 2.oh and Yarv!!
Netbeans sounds like it might be a cool editor.. However, the Sun guys at the booth made it sound like it wasn't too super close to release.. Early next year would be my guess. If anyone wants to check it out, I got this link from a Sun dude for the daily builds etc. You cannot download Netbeans 6 from the official Netbeans site.
here's the secret netbeans dashboard url
Thank you Rails Conf. It's been real.
Rails conf 2007! May 16th, 2007
Woo! Rails Conf this weekend here in Portland, Oregon. I'm so excited my company paid for us to go to this. I've been working on some stuff for Baleen.org that I'll be making a post about here soon. They are riding their bikes to Costa Rica for the SOS children's villages. I've programmed up some rails XML magic to read in RSS and output KML for a google map/earth that tracks their current location. Pretty cool, cause I'm such an XML junkie. Anyway, I'm going to post some snippits from this for all you XML/KML fans out there.
code highlighting links May 12th, 2007
Code highlighting is enabled! Here are the links that helped get me started:
Elliott Blatt's Blogand
Raymond Lim's Blogthe code was overflowing out of the div at first, so I changed the top of codehighlight.css to enable horizontal scroll
pre {background-color: #FFFFCC;
background-color: #000;
padding-left: 20px;
padding-top: 1em;
padding-bottom: 1em;
margin-bottom: 1.5em;
color:#fff;
width: 450px;
overflow: auto;
overflow-y:hidden;
}props to the theme guys! May 12th, 2007
I've finally got the theme selected and tweaked! Using inf02 which was in the Mephisto Theme Gallery
Props go out to the following:
Design by Inf infscripts
Ported by railsgrunt
Powered by mephisto
Also, I made the following MOD to layout.liquid enabling search:<div id="menu">
<div>
<form method="get" id="sform" action="/search">
<input type="text" id="q" value="search" name="q" size="10" onfocus="q.value='';" onblur="q.value='search' "/>
</form>
</div>
...Using DRb and ruby to control mplayer and record/playback HDTV. March 14th, 2007
I wanted HDTV broadcast in Ubuntu, so I bought a PC-HDTV 5500 tuner. It needs a 2.6.18 or higher kernel to work.
I’ve been working on some scripts to control my TV. So far I have a rudimentary server and client along with a HDTV record script that uses a direct copy from the device using the linux tool ‘cat’. My system @kernel 2.6.19 had a bug which causes cat to overflow.. So there is error detection and resume recording after a crash.
I’ll be using linux CRON to schedule recordings.
It is a work in progress.
Here is the SVN repository:
http://svn.rubyonlinux.org/mplayerctl/
I used Kazuki Takemura’s code to control mplayer, and extended it to use DRb connections.
Go ahead and comment if you are interested in helping with the project. I want it to become a simpler MythTV style thing eventually.. SIMPLER is better.
New commits, March 2008. Rudimentary recording and scheduling via cron are now possible. Need to improve the actual mplayer part now but it’s working so that’s great.