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Video of Matt Asay’s UTOSC 2008 presentation titled The Billion Dollar (Free) Software Opportunity is now available from opensourcetv.tv.
Matt Asay at UTOSC 2008
Matt Asay presented on Friday morning, 29 August.
Video of Howard Tayler’s keynote address from UTOSC 2008 is now available at opensourcetv.tv.
Howard Tayler, the creator of popular web comic Schlock Mercenary (available at schlockmercenary.com), spoke on Friday, 29 August, about how he makes money while giving stuff away.
A while back I posted about chiles rellenos. Now there's a video.
If you missed the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference or attended and want to relive a piece of it, you’re in luck.
OpenSourceTV.tv, a service provided by KnowledgeBlue and the Utah Open Source Foundation, is now (finally) up and currently features video of UTOSC keynote addresses given by Paul Frields (of Fedora/Red Hat) and Mac Newbold (of Code Greene).
More video from UTOSC 2008 will be showing up on OpenSourceTV.tv in the weeks to come as well as video from UTOSC 2007 and other events.
I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008. For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely. For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout. I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend. I’m really excited about this development.
In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website. Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders. We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.
One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge. We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s). There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!
Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue. With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes. They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community. We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube. This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.
Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008. If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend. With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab. We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids). Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.
NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t. One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family. Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools. If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.
I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing. Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.
See you all there.
Herlo
A couple weeks ago, Glenn Beck started doing a new bit on his radio program: "Battle Of The News Headlines" where he takes news headlines of the day about either Barack Obama or John McCain and pits them against one another. Then, after four or five of these headlines are revealed for each candidate, a winner is declared.
I found this to be hilarious and an ingenious way to demonstrate just how ridiculously biased (twiterpated, obsessed, etc.) the mainstream media is with B.O.
After hearing Glenn do this 3-4 minute bit for a couple of days, I came up with the idea of making some YouTube videos to go along with the audio of his show. And now, I've created video to go along with all eight of the "battles" aired so far. Enjoy.
On another note, while I'm editing these videos using a Windows application, I'm using open source software on Linux to edit the audio, create the graphic elements used in the video, and transcoding the video in preparation for upload to YouTube.
A couple weeks ago, Glenn Beck started doing a new bit on his radio program: "Battle Of The News Headlines" where he takes news headlines of the day about either Barack Obama or John McCain and pits them against one another. Then, after four or five of these headlines are revealed for each candidate, a winner is declared.
I found this to be hilarious and an ingenious way to demonstrate just how ridiculously biased (twiterpated, obsessed, etc.) the mainstream media is with B.O.
After hearing Glenn do this 3-4 minute bit for a couple of days, I came up with the idea of making some YouTube videos to go along with the audio of his show. And now, I've created video to go along with all eight of the "battles" aired so far. Enjoy.
On another note, while I'm editing these videos using a Windows application, I'm using open source software on Linux to edit the audio, create the graphic elements used in the video, and transcoding the video in preparation for upload to YouTube.
Wow!
About a month ago, my hero Glenn Beck had actor, writer, artist, etc. William Shatner on his television program for an hour-long interview. I missed it and didn't record it so I was very pleased to find out it was re-run this last Friday and got snagged on my DVR.
Wow!
That interview was just amazing and, surprisingly, contained almost no Star Trek content whatsoever. There were some clips from Star Trek shown when they were talking about Shatner's reputation for "overacting" but that's about it.
What did they talk about for an hour if not Star Trek? Some politics, some philosophy, some Shatner history, and alcoholism (Shatner's third wife suffered from alcoholism and it ended up claiming her life.)
Maybe I enjoyed it so much because it was just an almost-informal hour of discussion between two of my favorite people.
It looks like some dude on YouTube has done the honors of capturing the entire hour in six parts. At least he a real job of capturing the video and didn't just smack a Flip video camera in front of the TV like I've seen some people do!
Here are the obligatory links:
So I am sitting in my hotel in Los Angeles, preparing to head back to Utah, its 2:37am PDT and I have been meaning to post the rest of my experience at FUDCon. First off, I’d like to thank Mo and Ray for letting me stay at their home with them. They were great hosts! I’d also like to re-thank Max and Paul and the FedoraProject for sponsoring me out to Boston on such short notice. I still feel grateful to be part of such a great community!
FUDCon F10, for me, was a time of realization. Understanding what it is to get involved in projects that scratch that itch. For providing services toward something I’m good at, into a larger community who could really take advantage of that service. And while I am still feeling my way through the Fedora world, I think a few things are clearer now after reflecting on this last FUDCon.
I want to record and stream audio and video.
I’m thinking that along with the Fedora Talk project, I could configure and use tools to provide a non-interactive streaming server for certain events/presentations. What I am thinking of here is things like FUDCon keynotes and sessions. In fact, I plan to purchase a higher quality microphone / mixer combo to better record the audio at the source.
Video and screencasting in real-time seems a bit more of a challenge. Putting that together with the streaming audio seems like a fun project and scratches several itches I’ve been experiencing lately.
I need to learn how build better RPMs
Spot taught a great session at FUDCon F9 in Raleigh about RPM packaging, and Rex Deiter talked this time about becoming a package maintainer. I’ve got a few packages that I’d like to get into the fedora tree, and I think by the end of this year, that can happen. I’m okay at packaging, but haven’t ever submitted a spec file to spot. While I’m nervous about how ugly the first package will look, I’m also excited at the prospect of learning better and more efficient ways of building useful tools for the masses.
I think everyone should build their own spin of Fedora
After the 5+ hour session on Friday’s hackfest regarding the spins website and what the spins SIG has already accomplished, I’ve taken some initiative and started to create content to help the prospective spin enthusiast. I’m a big fan of the Eee PC and am looking forward to purchasing the 901 in the winter. Until then, I’m planning on helping improve the spin process so we don’t fail to release spins again. The custom and official spins ‘built with Fedora’ can be so much more prolific if we just provide the right tools to build a spin. It really should be nothing more than, here’s my kickstart, build me an iso. This would of course have to follow the general standards for acceptable software.
The relationships (FUDBuddies) made at FUDCon are up my alley
I met Rex Dieter, Mo Duffy, Ray Strode, Dennis Gilmore and Ian Weller this time. We had great conversations about the world and of course Fedora. I also got to talk more to Toshio, Greg and J5 who I had met previously at FUDCon F9. I indeed learned a bunch from Toshio about TurboGears too. Its something I’ll treasure for releases to come.
To end this post, I’ve got some audio of the olpc session and paul’s keynote, as well as some photos I’ve posted around the interweb, enjoy. Paul’s keynote will also be up on our new FedoraTV Miro channel, check it out!
Cheers,
Clint
I bought an MSI NX6200AX-TD256H D2 video card (It's an NVIDIA GeForce 6200 256MB 8x AGP card) to drive the MythTV frontend, since MythTV can't manage to play even the most modest content using my trusty old Radeon 7000 (MythTV doesn't support VIDIX, only XVideo). I hoped that the upgrade would allow me to watch live HD television, which means XvMC.
Before I go any further, the other relevant stats: the computer I'm using (for the purposes of this post, anyway) is an 64-bit AMD Athlon 2800+ running 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04. The motherboard is a VIA K8T800. I'm actually using TwinView to share the Desktop computer with MythTV, but I tested everything with a single-screen (the CRT) to avoid confounding, and using TwinView doesn't seem to make a difference one way or the other.
All the normal stuff works great, but XvMC does not though it should. Whenever I try to use XvMC, the client (mythfrontend or mplayer, for example) freezes up and must be killed. I tried all the standard tweaks that Google could suggest: enable/disable sync on vblank, enable/disable OpenGL vsync, various xorg.conf settings. I tried just about everything I could think of and then some, and the only thing to make any difference at all is this setting in xorg.conf:
Option "NVAGP" "0"
That is, I disabled AGP. When I do this, XvMC works as it should. After a little research, it perhaps shouldn't be too surprising that AGP is the problem on a VIA motherboard. At least it's a lead.
Interestingly, when I downgraded the driver from the latest (173.14.05) to the newer legacy driver (96.43.05), XvMC works fine with AGP enabled. As one would expect, it outperforms the newer driver with AGP disabled. Here's a performance table:
(% CPU when playing SD/HD in MythTV)
Driver Xv Xv+linear XvMC+bob
173.14.05 (AGP disabled) 20/100+ 30/100+ 12/60+ (OSD is too much)
96.43.05 20/100+ 30/100+ 8/45
There's a few caveats to XvMC, either way I get it to work. When deinterlacing is on, the OSD gets deinterlaced too. This isn't a pretty sight, though it's functional. The OSD is always grayscale, in spite of setting XvmcUsesTextures to false in xorg.conf and choosing chromakey. But that doesn't bother me much, I don't much like the color schemes of the OSD themes I've seen.
I have one more straw to grasp before I consign myself to using the legacy driver (which I may do if it runs FlightGear and X-Plane ok) or crossing my fingers for a fixed driver before the Olympics (I intend to submit a bug report). I'm going to try poking around with AGP driving strength settings in the BIOS. I tried 0xEA and X wouldn't start at all, but with the same symptoms I get with XvMC. That hints at the same cause, so maybe with some kind of binary search I can stumble on a compatible setting.
So in conclusion, I'm going to try using the legacy driver even though my card is supported by the newer driver, and for OSD reasons only use XvMC for HD.
After the MiniDV videotape camcorders and before the explosion of hard disk camcorders,
several manufacturers were making these camcorders that would record directly to DVD media. A handful of them recorded to full-size DVD media, but most recorded to a small (~3 inches in diameter) mini-DVD media. One of these discs can hold about 30 minutes of SD (740x480, 30 frames per second) video or about 1.4GB of data.
A couple years ago, I was working on a video editing project and one of my sources was from one of these mini-DVD camcorders. One of the perks of the mini-DVD format is you can throw it right into a DVD player and it plays it, without much grief, like a normal DVD movie. There's even a scene-selection menu that shows you thumbnails of images to select scenes recorded on the DVD.
I think the mini-DVD format was a great idea for people who just want to videotape an event and throw it in the DVD player, but it's not so good for someone who wants to edit the video on the computer. The camcorder manufacturers probably shipped the cameras with some kind of conversion program to extract the video from the discs and convert it into an editable format, but since I didn't own one of these mini-DVD camcorders, I didn't have such software.
A little googling and I found the answer!
Check out this command:
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dvd.vob
This mplayer command may be familiar to those who rip video from DVDs to convert it to an MPEG4 format or something similar.
I can't edit a VOB file, so I needed to convert the VOB into, preferably, an AVI. Most of the AVIs I edit are DV format AVIs that I get off my DV camcorders. I knew if I could get the video on the mini-DVD into that format, I'd be in heaven. I didn't find a direct way to do this, but I did find two more steps that would do it.
ffmpeg -i dvd.vob -target dv dvd.dv
cat dvd.dv | dvgrab -f dv2 -s 0 -stdin
The first command (ffmpeg) converts the VOB into raw DV data. This is data you could stream to a camcorder and store on a tape. It's not in an AVI container, but it's close. The next command (dvgrab) is usually used for capturing video from IEEE 1394 (Firewire) video devices, but being that it has an option (-stdin) for reading data from standard input, we can use it to convert our raw DV data to an AVI.
Voila!
My brother gave a talk about using python to detect lasers with webcams and also demo'd a prototype of a 3d game with wiimote headtracking. For those who missed the preso, there's now a video up. .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .fl
I have a 64-bit desktop machine, that has rarely been run as a 64-bit machine. The hassle was too great and I couldn't really see a reason to put up with it.
I think that 64-bit support has come a long way in the meantime, and it may be time to try it out. It sounds like a livable situation. So with the pending release of the next Ubuntu version I'm thinking of wiping and going 64-bit.
One of the primary motivators is that 64-bit holds some promise for transcoding video, and now that I have an HDHomeRun to capture over-the-air HDTV signals, I will be doing quite a bit of video transcoding for MythTV (to save disk space—a full-quality HDTV program is about 9 gigabytes per hour).
But before taking the plunge, I thought I'd do an empirical test and see if there would be any real savings. I captured a couple of minutes of HD content from PBS, then transcoded 60 seconds using ffmpeg and mencoder. Then I did the same with the Ubuntu 64-bit live CD. The 64-bit execution difference was statistically significant.
ffmpeg was about 1.12 times as fast—a savings of about 10 seconds per minute, or 10 minutes per hour.
mencoder was about 1.08 times as fast—similar savings.
I didn't test mythtranscode itself, since getting it installed in a live CD environment would be too much work. I also must point out some other possible confounding variables. I used the Ubuntu 7.10 versions of ffmpeg and mencoder in 32-bit, and the Ubuntu 8.04 versions in 64-bit. Did both projects improve their code to be about 10% faster in the meantime? Unlikely, but perhaps not unfathomable.
So will I make the switch? I don't know yet. 10% faster is significant, but not obviously worth it. I'll have to think about it.
For the curious, here's my numbers. I did at least two runs of each to check for agreement, and what you see is the average. Of course, these would not be the settings you'd necessarily use to transcode—ffmpeg has a pretty low default bitrate for example—but I think we can agree the speedup is likely to be in the same ballpark no matter what settings you're using.
# 64-bit 32-bit
# 86 s 95 s
time ffmpeg -y -t 60 -i foo.avi -acodec copy bar.avi
# 55 s 64 s
time ffmpeg -y -t 60 -i foo.avi -acodec copy -s 640x480 bar.avi
# 83 s 90 s
time mencoder foo.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -frames $[30*60] -o baz.avi
Clifford Thomson sent me a link to a talk Dan Solove gave at Google on his new book The Future of Reputation. I interviewed Dan on Technometria a while back about his earlier book The Digital Person.
Dan's a very interesting speaker and raises important issues in his books and in this video. This is well worth watching if you're interested in the intersection of privacy and reputation in the Internet age.
I've mentioned a thing or two about the book Liberal Fascism, but last week, Glenn Beck had author Jonah Goldberg on his TV program. I've uploaded the segments to YouTube for public consumption. Goldberg presents an interesting argument, not that liberals are Nazis as many accuse him of saying, but that progressive liberal movements such as those being pushed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, bear an eerie resemblance to fascist movements in history.
It pays to study your history or else you're doomed to repeat it.
View the video segments on YouTube.
Some people have seen this, but now I've uploaded it to YouTube.
This is a video I put together on September 12, 2001. I guess it was my way of dealing with the grief I was feeling after the 9/11 attacks. The footage was taken in 2000 while I was in New York for the LinuxWorld conference at the Javitz Center. My buddy Chadd and I walked from Midtown to the World Trade Center.
I'm not sure why I hadn't uploaded this video before, but I was inspired to do it tonight. You can watch it on YouTube by going here.
You can also read my September 12, 2001 entry.
I think this will be the last interview video from the 2007 Utah Open Source Conference. This is Derek Carter of NeverBlock talking about Xen, virtualization, and his history using and teaching about Linux and open source software.
I think I may be able to put together video for one more conference session, but otherwise, we're pretty much done with video for the 2007 conference. We're looking forward to doing a better job of recording all the keynotes and sessions at the 2008 conference.
You can see this video and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.
I've uploaded two more videos to YouTube for OpenSourceTV.tv.
First, we have an interview with Clint Savage of the Utah Open Source Foundation and the main driving force behind last year's first Utah Open Source Conference.
Next, we have an interview with Scott Paul Robertson (AKA "spr") who gave a presentation at UTOSC 2007 on Django and who is also the author of one of my favorite open source utilities: oggify.
I've got at least one more interview to edit and upload and we also have other content coming soon as well.
You can see Clint's interview and Scott's interview and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.
A few days ago, someone at Sun made a video that poked some fun at Ping Identity (disclosure, I'm on their advisory board--I think--it's been a long time). Ping fired back with a humorous video of their own. Heck, if they both keep acting like this, the world's going to have to pay attention to federation, just for entertainment value alone!
Tags: video humor identity federation
The Utah Open Source Foundation, OpenSourceTV.tv and KnowledgeBlue are excited to announce another video from the Utah Open Source Conference 2007.
This time, meeting with Doran “fozz” Barton, its Jared Smith of Digium. Fozz and Jared discuss the future of Asterisk and Digium’s role in bringing Asterisk to the general public.
Here’s the link, enjoy.
Cheers,
Clint Savage
As I mentioned before, I bought a new HD TV for Christmas (a Sony 40 inch XBR4). That put me on the hunt for good sources of HD programming.
Something I overlooked for a while, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is over-the-air, free programming from local TV stations. We're so used to the "antenna == bad" school of thought that the cablecos dished out for the last twenty years that we don't even consider it.
There's no doubt that for analog television antennas almost always produced worse results than satellite or cable, but for digital, that's no longer true. In fact, I think the digital TV programming over an antenna is actually superior to the programming you get, for clarity anyway, over cable or satellite. Of course, you can't get ESPN or Discover, but that's another issue.
You might think you need a special antenna for HD programming, but that's not usually the case. It's just UHF TV. When I built my house, I had an antenna installed in the attic and a cable run down to my machine room. Turns out, that works fine. I get 30 digital channels or something with that.
Thirty is a little misleading since stations have decided to use their bandwidth differently. KSL, the local NBC affiliate, for example has one HD channel and two SD channels (all digital). KBYU, BYU's PBS affiliate, has four SD channels and no HD channel. KUED, Utah's PBS affiliate, has one HD channel and one with Spanish programming. It's all over the map.
I found one channel (30.1 if you live in Utah) that seemed to exercise some bug in my TV and caused the whole thing to lock up and turn unresponsive. I had to unplug the coax to get it back to block the channel. Now that you TV is a computer, you get bugs like that I suppose.
That said, the clarity is good and when you get a good 1080i signal, it's as good or better than anything else you can get. One thing's for sure, as more people buy TVs with higher resolution, the demand for more HD programming is going to go through the roof.
I bought an HD Tivo to decode and record digital over-the-air signals. My old Series 2 Tivo just didn't cut it anymore. The new Tivo works great for recording over-the-air programming although that's not something you'd understand very well from reading the Tivo Website. I got it 15% off at CompUSA, which is closing, if you're in the market.
One thing to keep in mind when you're shopping for an HD TV--something else I'd failed to appreciate until recently--is that just looking at the resolution (e.g. 1080p) isn't enough. Keep in mind that you're not just buying a display, you're also buying the computer that renders the picture. They are not all alike and the rendering engine makes a big difference in overall quality of the picture. Also, be sure to check out the contrast ration--higher is better--if you won't be watching it in a darkened room all the time.
As an aside, what's with Best Buy and Circuit City carrying $100 Monster HDMI cables exclusively? You can get perfectly good cables for a third of that or less other places. When I think of all the people who've been snookered by expensive HDMI cables, I cringe.
At any rate, if you haven't done it, hook a good UHF antenna up to your HD TV or Tivo and give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised.
Okay, this time we found a better way to produce and release the UTOSC 2007 videos - YouTube! These videos are a great way to escape the in-laws (or watch while wrapping presents).
Because YouTube will let you create your own group, we’ve done so and are making the videos available on our group page. If you are interested in seeing more videos, you can sign up and watch the currently available videos.
Currently, there are only a few videos, and more will be coming everyday. A special thanks to Doran Barton (fozzilinymoo) and OpenSourceTV.tv for helping us out with these videos. We look forward to releasing more videos, and as we do so, announcements will be made here.
Cheers,
Clint Savage
Utah Open Source Foundation
This week’s Program of the Week is a bit ahead of its release. The package is Codec Buddy, and is currently slated for release in Fedora 8 tomorrow.
Codec Buddy, with a little help from the Fedora and Fluendo development teams has grown into something that could be great. I see Codec Buddy really helping those who want to use and play non-free media sources from within Fedora. If you are currently running rawhide, you probably already know about this, but very soon, many other people will start to understand how Codec Buddy works as well.
One of the goals of the Fedora Project is to be free of any proprietary software. Though I don’t see that many people using Fedora without at least a few proprietary components, media codecs, drivers, etc. Maybe one day…we can always hope.
To that end, I am a big media buff. I regularly watch TV shows and movies that use proprietary codecs. As an example, most people don’t realize that using the reverse engineered DVD encoding provided by DVD Jon could be considered illegal. Fedora doesn’t want to be encumbered by these risks, and truthfully, I don’t blame them one bit. Considering that my backlog of mp3s and DVD rips will require an additional bit of software not normally included with Fedora, I think this is a great software solution. Give the user what they want without compromising the integrity of the project.
Codec Buddy is provided to help the average Joe understand the world of media formats. Its job was originally to provide a short description of why Fedora doesn’t include this in its distribution. Then point to where one might find more information about these formats. Codec Buddy has been altered a little, but attempts to accomplish the same thing using the Fluendo website.
Fluendo is the company that employs many of the individuals that work on the gstreamer project. Its quite a noble project, providing media codecs (installable formats) for many of the audio and video we like to use every day. Its great to have open source companies like Fluendo helping open source grow.
Codec Buddy works by launching a small application when someone tries to access a media codec not currently on the system. For instance, I’ve attempted to play a show I’ve downloaded.
Launch Totem
Open the file
Start the video
As the video attempts to play, a prompt appears, indicating the media isn’t supported. Codec buddy then provides a few options to enable playback for this particular media format.
The available items are MP3 Audio Decoder, MPEG Playback Bundle and MPEG4 Part 2 Video Decoder. By default only the MP3 Audio Decoder, which is also the only codec that will be installed without payment, is checked. The other two codecs are available for a small fee, which helps Fluendo to provide these codecs.
Clicking the “Get Selected” button will immediately start the download of the MP3 Audio Decoder (if it was selected).
A license agreement then appears, make sure to read this and if you agree, click Accept.
Once the agreement is complete, its time to purchase the remaining codecs. Choose Start Web Browser and in a few moments, the Fluendo website should appear. This should allow you to purchase the remaining codecs needed for the video I want to watch.
The Fluendo website has a good list of available codecs beyond the choices available in Codec Buddy.
The purchase will seem similar to many others on the web, add things to the cart, and pay.
Fluendo is a good start. I’m sure there will be many people interested in purchasing these codecs here. However, I believe however, that the biggest problem is that most people can get these codecs for free on Windows, Mac and even other Linux distributions. So far, the thing I feel is missing here is the explanation for why charge for these codecs and who benefits.
Fluendo is a great resource and provides some kick-ass codecs. If there is no explanation as to why we need to pay for something that one can get for free. Potential customers who don’t understand the reasoning behind it might go elsewhere, or worse even, choose another distro or operating system.
I love fedora for the freedom it gives me to choose my path. I love fedora for its focus on making sure things are free and open, both monetarily and in liberty. I love fedora for trying things like Codec Buddy, I want it to succeed. I hope that with a few suggestions, both fedora and Fluendo can make Codec Buddy the informational tool that it was originally intended.
Cheers,
Herlo
Reporting from the 2007 Utah Open Source Conference! This has been a remarkable experience seeing the community of Utah open source fans gather for fun, enlightenment, and education.
I have not been able to attend too many conference sessions, unfortunately. I had planned to, but I’ve been distracted by a new role doing interviews for Open Source TV — a project being driven by KnowledgeBlue.
Yesterday, I interviewed Dax Kelson of Guru Labs and Jared Smith of Digium. Both interviews went very well, I thought.
Today, I am hoping to talk to Pete Ashdown of XMission, Christer Edwards of ubuntu-tutorials.com, Tim Riker, Tim Nicholes of Apache, and Scott Paul Robertson (spr).
I’m also giving my presentation on NetworkManager later this afternoon.
Episode 2 of Solitary World has finally hit the YouTube!
In this episode, I talk about NetworkManager which is software for Linux that makes connecting to networks easier and more intuitive. My buddy Dave Baker and I discuss a ridiculous press release that was released in June about research into teens and the Internet. The results will shock you! Well, not really.
Watch the episode on the Solitary World website or on its very own YouTube page.
Fozzout.
And here's the second part of that Sons Of Nothing concert I uploaded to Google Video. See previous entry for the others. This is Sons Of Nothing in Spokane, WA July 2006.
I went on a video-uploading rampage last night and uploaded a whole DVD's worth of video from a Sons Of Nothing show from last summer. We played at The Big Easy in Spokane, Washington. It was one of the nicest venues we ever played at and the whole experience was great fun. I really regret we didn't have two or three cameras capturing the event for posterity.
The audio comes off the soundboard and sounds great.
So, sit back. relax, slip yourself something if that's your thing. Envelope yourself in the music of Sons Of Nothing as they pay tribute to Pink Floyd (and play a couple of their own tunes.)
That's the first set from the show. I'll put putting up the second set as well in the next day or so.
THis week I am on vacation, working in the yard and spending some quality time with my son. But, being the geek that I am, I have kept busy with other things too. I've spent some time looking at video compression software, working with sharing images to my Apple TV, and looking for an acceptable way to activate an iPhone without having to worry about monthly charges (I don't like cell phones period, even if it's really cool). So, here's a quick review of what I've been doing, for those who are interested.
The Back Yard
Since I worked for an obscure ISP that stopped paying me, I have been letting my back yard go wild. THis isn't because of any particular choice, more because I haven't had the money to really fix it up. Well, as we are started to get a handle on things, I have started to work on the back yard. I had a lot of plans for it (as documented in my blog), but zoning laws have been keeping them from happening.
Well, I decided to shoot a bit lower with my plans, and just go for your basic back yard. I started by tilling under the weeds that have grown with a vigor that has daunted me for years. I then set some bricks down in a rough patio on the side of the house. All this in 100 degree weather (37.778 C for those metric fellows). I dismantled the foundation to the greenhouse I was going to build, and will settle for a quick and easy one over the current garden area. That will be easier to set up, and simpler to build. THe cob project is still under construction, and will be completed by the end of the month.
VIdeo Compression
I have a lot of video that I would like to convert to an Apple TV-Friendly format. These videos are in RealMedia format. I thought I could do it with VideoHub, but it doesn't support a lot of RealMedia formats. The video converted just fine, but it converted without any audio. Ah, well, back to the drawing board.
Streaming Video to Apple TV
With the latest version of iTunes, you can now stream your photo content to your Apple TV, and it displays in a slide show with music from your iTunes library playing along with it. Unfortunately, it plays all your iTunes library, so those tracks that I have of my "Teach Yourself Gaelic" are playing along. This is turned on within your Apple TV section within iTunes, in the Photos pane.
iPhone Hacking
Yes, I admit it, I really want an iPhone. Any surprise, considering that I have been talking about Apple products for quite a while? But I don't really want a cell phone. I hate them, because it's an additional expense that is hard to justify when I have phones everywhere I go. What I really want is a PDA that can do network SIP phone work, or have Skype installed. Something like that would be perfect.
Well, as such, the iPhone would be great (if you could install Skype on it, or any SIP phone client). I honestly believe that it's on the way, and will worry about that when I finally get the funding to purchase the phone. But for now, I would just like to know that it can be activated without having to sign up for an AT&T; account.
Having partly answered that question, the folks at Hackint0sh have found a way to do it. In this post here, some one found out that you can activate one phone, and then activate the other without having more than one phone number. It was all by accident, and will probably be taken care of in future releases. THey are also working on a number of hacks to open up the phones to other services. I'll be happy if they can find a way to activate the phone without having to purchase a service. This was one step.
Local Government Blues
As many of you know, I have been actively petitioning the local governments here for various things. Now, I don't expect them to actually act on the things I petition for right away. After all, I'm not that important. But I would at least like the consideration of a response, even a form letter of some sort. As of yet, I have not heard from County Mayor Peter Corroon, or West Valley City Councilman Joel Coleman. Needless to say, I'm not going to even consider voting for these men without some sort of acknowledgment of my petitions. After all, one is for the betterment of the County, the other for West Valley City.
So, that's what I have been up to this week. I would like to send out a really Happy Birthday to my good childhood friend Marc Steffensen, who is turning the bid 3-1 today. I don't know if he is reading this, but perhaps he will. Happy Birthday Marc!
Here's a little bit of animation for the next Monster vs. Trakker spot. I didn't get to do as much animation as I would have liked on this spot, but I'm pretty happy with this. The facial structure is much more consistent than some of the stuff I've done in the past; the features aren't floating around on the face (as much). Plus, the follow through and details on this were fun.
I'll make a post next time about my process for animation.
The rough animation is all me, and the second clip features cleanup by Gibbs Rainock.
If its not playing smooth (like it only shows three or four frames) you might have to download them to see the full motion.
To download, click on the video screen after you've played it. It'll take you to the viddler page where you can click the "download" tab to the right of the video.