RSS feed for InstantSpot site Aaron Lynch

Reencode videos for Blackberry 8100

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:35:00 GMT

After much searching/trying stuff I have found a way to successfully re-encode videos that can play on my Blackberry Pearl.

mencoder -vf expand=:::::4/3,scale=240:180 "[entervideohere]" -o "[enteroutputhere]" -of avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=230:acodec=mp3:abitrate=64

Obviously you need to have mencoder installed

I am not completely sure what other dependencies there are, since I tried installing so many different tools....but I THINK you need the following: lame, ffmpeg .

Windows and Linux...at the same time!

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Be prepared ... cool geek stuff ahead.

I think I came across this blog entry on digg, but I can't remember for certain. But wherever the original source, it is awesome.

Long story short, you can run a virtual Windows machine (with vmware server) and connect to it via seamless rdp allowing you to interact with your windows applications right on your linux desktop.

Here is a screenshot example. You can see my Gnome panel at the top of the screen, and the Windows taskbar at the bottom.

While this is cool in a gadgety sort of way, it is also going to be so much nicer for IE browser testing and who knows what else.

Here is a blog post detailing exactly how to get your own symbiosis up and running.

NOTE: in the example below the "\" in his examples were removed for some reason... your launcher should look like this

rdesktop -A -s 'c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe c:\windows\explorer.exe' WindowsIpAddressHere -u YOURUSERNAME -p YOURPASSWORD

Windows-Linux-Symbiosis-Not-a-Dream-Anymore

Hardy Heron: First Impressions

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:42:00 GMT

Recently, Hardy Heron Alpha 3 was released so, being curious and an avid distro-installer I decided to download the iso and create a virtual machine to see what was new.

I am currently running Ubuntu Feisty (one version older than Gutsy) since I encountered some behavior with Compiz-fusion that I just couldn't stand. (I'm really picky about my OS!).

Get the Alpha 3 - 386 ISO HERE

Installing Hardy Heron Alpha 3

First I created my virtual machine using Vmware Server. And set the CDROM device to boot from the hardy heron installation iso file.

Once past the boot menu, I encountered this message: "Unable to register AppArmor" Not sure what the deal was but after hanging at this message for a couple seconds it went on through to boot into the live cd session.

[AppArmor is an alternative to SELinux, (which is pretty difficult to configure btw)]

Live CD: As you can see, this is pretty generic Gnome live cd.

From within the Live CD session, I choose to install Hardy Heron to my virtual hard drive. One thing of note here, the max screen resolution was 800x600 and the GUI for installation was slightly larger than that. So I had to guess my way to the "Next" buttons by tabbing and hoping :).

Eventually we got to a real session:

As with any of the previous pre-release Ubuntu's, you get to enjoy PLENTY of updates to your software. In this case we were greated with 199 updates available.

After clicking on the update notifier and selecting to install the updates, we ran into another little quirky issue...this is Alpha right?! ;) I was able to begin pulling the updates by going into terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

After a reboot, once the updates were all downloaded and installed, I found out why the update manager didn't want to install these updates.

My Impressions

So, what do I think? I think it's just to early to really tell anything about the new features that Hardy Heron plans to offer.

I was really hoping to see the new enhancements to the desktop effects but I could not enable them for some reason. I did not see any Restricted Drivers Manager that would allow me to install the appropriate video card drivers.

So, if you are new to Linux and want to try out Ubuntu, be sure to try out a stable version (Gutsy is the current release version, go download it HERE). I on the other hand, am going to keep this little VM around and see what the next round of updates brings.

Upcoming Features

Among road-mapped features that I'm looking forward to in Hardy Heron:

hardy-desktop-effects
- To ensure the smooth operation of compiz as the default window-manager the integration work into the desktop has to be emphasized. The tools for controlling appearance, workspaces, keyboard and sessions have to be made more compiz-aware. The default behaviour (actions triggered via keyboard-shortcuts or by popping up dialogs) of compiz is not to be different from metacity. It has to be taken care of that shortcuts of applications are not overridden by compiz. Interaction with the underlying framework (RandR) provided by Xorg has to be ensured so hotplugging of displays, screen-rotations and resolution-changes work without causing compiz to quit or crash.
Kubuntu Hardy KDE 4
- Handle the 4.0 release, merge with Debian and get it in sync with Ubuntu features.
- I am really looking forward to this. I enjoy switching back and forth between Gnome/KDE/Fluxbox/e17. So a nicely integrated KDE 4 will rock!
Fix the Linux audio mess once and for all
- Currently audio on Linux is a mess. Sound servers like Esound, Arts, Jack, PulseAudio constantly fight for exclusive access to the sound device. Applications usually support only a small subset of the available sound server/device APIs, and need to be configured for their use. Sound APIs are generally incompatible. Audio applications usually come with a messy plugin systems to support every API available. Several abstraction APIs exist, however, none is good for all use cases. Professional audio usually requires shutting down all non-professional sound porgrams. On the other hand Apple managed to define a common sound system (CoreAudio) which makes nearly everyone happy - desktop users as much as professional audio people.

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!