wonkablog

I saw this post on Planet Gentoo about a new release of MPlayer — after a year wait, no less.

Actually, Luca is nice enough to provide us with development snapshots which is really cool. But check out some of these changes in the changelog. I’m really stoked:

• Flash Screen video decoder via lavc
• libdvdread updated to v0.9.4
• support for some more MythTV NUV files
• support for variable framerate Ogg/OGM files
• MPEG-1/2/4 and H.264 decoder speedup
• ported to GTK2
• AAC (FAAC) audio encoding
• encoding zones, DivX profiles support, luminance masking, multi-threaded encoding for XviD
• configure check and compiler optimizations for VIA C3, C3-2 and Pentium-M
• configure check and compiler optimizations for AMD-64 extended
• configure can now run with cross compiling, new configure option –enable-cross-compile
• Audio/Video synchronisation fixes

Isn’t FOSS great? It’s all about the minor improvements that as a whole make it incredibly much better.

Scott and I ended up going to the Utah Blogger’s Conference last night. I was totally indifferent about going the whole time because I had no clue what to expect (other than a free t-shirt … sure beats doing laundry). We went anyway, and had a surprisingly good time.

There was a lot of people there. I got to see Jason again, and I met Aaron (who I didn’t recognize at all from his hackergotchi, of course), and then once the thing ended I realized that the entire table sitting behind me were all from UOSP. Whoops.

I’ve seen the whole Windows Advantage Verify My DNA and Bloodtype thing mentioned in the news recently, but never gave it no mind since I have the thankful position of never using Windows except when I want to play games (Gentoo on my desktop at home and work).

What I just read on Groklaw though makes me really want to reconsider wiping XP off my harddrive and putting Windows 98 or 2000 on there instead.  It turns out their little anti-piracy tool that they don’t tell you they are installing tracks a lot of hardware information including your harddrive’s serial number.  What the crap?

Now, I’m really not bothered by most of the stuff they are collecting.  Basic hardware information, sure that’s fine.  System locale, sure.  BIOS information (make, version, date) is where I start to get suspsicious and grabbing any kind of serial numbers really pushes the limit for me.  Add that along with the fact that the server is *obviously* going to log your IP address and timestamp, they can track exactly which computer in the world is pinging them every time you boot up.  That’s just lovely.

Of course, it’s all in the name of security and piracy, right?  I’m sure Microsoft would never do anything like track those serial numbers of harddrives for marketing purposes.  Or to pinpoint who is pirating what.  I tell you what, man.  Microsoft is just like America Online: they target the people who don’t know any better and then screw them over for all its worth.  If I wasn’t so addicted to computer games, I’d give them up entirely.

I went up to Temple Square today, and went into the Museum of Church History and Art. They are doing another international art competition and I have to say — the entires are absolutely amazing.

If you get a chance, head up to Salt Lake and check them out. There were a few that really got me choked up looking at them. Beautiful, incredible stuff.

I setup a new trac project for bend: http://wonkabar.org/bend I included a very mini howto on the wiki if you want to try it out — dvd2mkv, at least … bend would be far too complex and confusing right now. Just download the two php files from the browse source page, and make sure you have all the dependencies.

Getting the trac frontend online is going to help a lot … at least now I can file bugs for myself so I don’t have to remember what else I need to get done. Maybe that’ll light a little fire under me at the same time.

You know you’ve been neglecting your pet project for a while when you try to run it and your system is missing one of the required libraries. Whoops.

Just yesterday I found a program that is going to help me a lot with the project. Ogle to the rescue, again. libdvdread comes with a binary called ‘disc_id’ which gives a unique identifier for a DVD. That is a godsend, since my way of getting a “unique” identifier for the discs was to read the disc title and then check it against a regular expression pattern in my database of possible values for titles. Needless to say, a 32 number hash is much simpler.

So, I’ve started plugging away at it again. It’s safe to say that this little script needs a lot of work. But in its most basic form, it works perfectly well once you get it setup. The backend is a still an utter and complete mess though. I’ve gone from writing it in a class to procedural back to a class. Oy. And I haven’t commented things very well, and it’s very confusing when I try to find why something’s not working right. I’m still really excited about it though.

I think one main thing I need to do (besides actually publically releasing it) is get a little text interface going, similar to nuvexport. That way you won’t have to do something like bend –archive –title “Malcolm in the Middle” –rip –encode. I’ve also thought about rewriting it in bash, but it’d be a pain the arse right now, since I don’t know any bash programming. It would cut down on the very strict level of dependencies though — right now it requires PHP 5.1.0 and PostgreSQL. Ah well. Someday.

I’ve setup a very crude archive of the previous Tips and Tricks sections from the GWN, available here.

There is a lot of good stuff in there. I remember reading a lot of them myself years back, and that’s where I learned quite a bit from what I know now. Pretty cool stuff. Maybe in the new section I’ll throw a link back to the old ones — they are still as relevant and useful today.

I’ve volunteered to help out on the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, and for now my big assignment is to come up with something for the Tips and Tricks section. I’ve suddenly drawn a blank, though, so if you have any suggestions, you can send me an email at beandog at gentoo dot org, or the GWN editors / writers / contributors with gwn-feedback at gentoo dot org.

Me and my good buddy Jared were hanging out tonight for a little bit.  First we went and saw Cars (because there’s nothing else to see that we haven’t both seen already), and were so bored that we left after about the first half hour or so.  Then we went up on a short walk through Provo Canyon.  It is really pretty up there.  We both mentioned how good exercise it is to go for hikes, and how it would be easy to get in shape doing something like that.  So we decided that instead of trying to find a stupid movie to go see on the weekend, we’d start going hiking instead.

I’m actually pretty excited by the idea.  It’s a good chance to get away from computers and technology that consumes my life so much these days, and instead just get out in the open fresh air where you can think clearly and have some fun.  I’m not much of an outdoorsy guy, as in I don’t do it much, but I really enjoy it.  Growing up, camping was always my favorite activity to go do for the youth church activities and things.  We’re gonna go camping in a few weeks, too.  That’s gonna be some great stuff.

I just watched a great flick — The Adventures of Robin Hood, a classic swashbuckling adventure from 1938! Gosh, that’s old.

It does not get any more classic than this — huge sets with lots of actors brightly dressed, dramatic acting, a really good story (man, that’s rare today) and a lot of spirit. This is the model of cinema that I really enjoy. I love these kinds of old movies.