photo credit: justinsomnia

So what caused me to be up till 2 in the morning? Struggling with video encoding, conversion and HTML5 fickleness. Essentially, this is not a process for mere mortals. While video in general is complicated enough, most will and should rely on a site like youtube to share their videos (at least basic creators). However due to certain, ummm… how shall we say, “ambitious” music labels, music video remixes get flagged and punted immediately. It will be nice if we can get a universally supported video codec (stay tuned for Google I/O) as it will greatly streamline this process (or should in theory).

I learned recently that Handbrake has let it’s ogg/theora capability go stale and will not bring it back. Additionally, my video editor of choice, kdenlive doesn’t generate web optimized mp4 files (where the index is at the beginning of the file). Thus, after rendering I struggled a bit to find a combination of programs that would generate the necessary ogv and mp4 videos to support the html5 video browser ecosystem. Here’s what I came up with… Modify to suit your needs.

HandBrakeCLI

HandBrakeCLI -i input.mp4 -o output.mp4 --encoder x264 --vb 2000 --ab 128 --width x --height y --crop 0:0:0:0 --optimize

ffmpeg2theora

ffmpeg2theora -V 2000 input.mp4 #generates input.ogv

It also doesn’t help that ubuntu has decided it can’t ship an ffmpeg with aac support (which means I have to modify kdenlive’s profile.xml to use libmp3lame instead).

Windows 7

Since Windows still doesn’t support dual booting into linux, I starting laying down Windows 7. I choose the Home Professional Upgrade variant and chose to make the jump to amd64. First thing I noticed is that the install process took forever (more than twice as long as installing Kubuntu a few hours later). While in general this doesn’t rank high on discretionary criteria, I had become spoiled by how quickly I can reinstall linux after doing it every six months.

I was pleasantly surprised that it automatically found working drivers for everything (though there is still one unidentified USB device which is bugging me), which was nice having my dual monitor setup working from the start. I still had to download updates for the video and audio drivers, but everything else went smoothly.

It’s a little disheartening to have to relearn everything (especially trying to find things in the new fragmented Control Panel), but I’m assuming with the help of Google, I can figure most things out.

The Windows side of my install only gets used for games (Steam) and Photoshop CS3 work, so it really don’t have excel at very much =)

Kubuntu 10.04

Installation was fast and smooth. I installed the updated nvidia drivers (which borked the bootsplash screen, but that bug is already fixed pending release in the update repositories). Installed Flash 64bit and struggled with the same sound issue that happens every install (for some reason, the audio channels that Flash uses are muted by default in Kubuntu. You have to go into the mixer and fix the muting and volume and then everything works great).

I followed the nice tutorial here or here to get dropbox working without Nautilus.

Also, Ubuntu decided to move sun-java6 over to their partner repository (which unfortunately isn’t enabled by default). While OpenJDK might one day become an adequate replacement, I just don’t think it is yet, so in KPackageKit open up the Software Sources dialog and enable the partner repository under Third Party Software.

Additionally, there are some python-gtk imports that prevent nvidia-settings from merging the xorg.conf file (after you run nvidia-xconfig), so be sure to run it from the command line first to see the errors. It would be nice if Kubuntu included the python-gtk bindings by default.

There is also a rather annoying bug (which I filed) where the authorization window when installing software appears behind all the others. Frustrating, but no big impact.

In conclusion, I was surprised overall by how smoothly the process went (on both sides). There was a lot of prep that went into this in backing up everything to my network drive, so a quick process it wasn’t, but no catastrophes, which is always appreciated.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to display my lifestream as a single page (and on my own domain) in a way I could customize to match my own aesthetics. I tried Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few custom scripts for pulling data from Friendfeed. Everything was either too complex or lacked the ability to customize the way I wanted. For a while, I had been collecting my lifestream events using the Lifestream Plugin for WordPress and was really impressed in it’s stability and functionality. I wanted to display this data but outside of my WordPress installation, so I decided some PHP was necessary.

Custom Lifestream Display

The source is located over here on github. It’s a simple set of PHP files that uses the lifestream data from the Lifestream Plugin in your WordPress database and renders it grouped by event type.

A live demo (my lifestream) can be found at www.markphilpot.net

Features

• Attractively display your lifestream by event type
• Supports jQuery plugin imgPreview for posts with a thumbnail entry in the feed
• Supports jQuery plugin lightbox for Flickr images
• Supports ContentFlow (Cover Flow implementation) to display vi.sualize.us images
• Supports AJAX retrieval of more history for each event type

Installation

Very simple: Create a config.php file in the include directory that includes the necessary variables (See README) and customize feeds.php to point to all the correct feed IDs for your installation.

Known Issues

If you used a different prefix for your WP installation, you may need to update the tables in the queries.

There is some logic in content.php that may be particular to my feed set (logic to eliminate duplicate entries for example).

I’ve used a very minimalistic design, but it should be fairly simple to customize the CSS. If you find any problems or identify any neat features, please file an issue at github or send me a patch.

Mark Pilgrim announcement to switch away from OSX:

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was “free enough” to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn’t beautiful anymore. I’ve worked around it or ignored it for a long time, but eventually the bough breaks.

John Gruber’s response:

And the truth is I’m not entirely sure he’s making the right decision, even for himself. Forget all the niggling details he cites, and focus only on his central beef — that Apple is a company that does not “get” openness, and that this deficiency is going to hinder Pilgrim’s long-term access to the data he’s creating. But if that’s the case, and Pilgrim has been using Apple computers for 22 years, why hasn’t it happened already? Openness isn’t binary, a choice between totally open and totally closed, it’s a continuum. The question isn’t “Does Apple get it?”, but “Does Apple get it enough?” But from the perspective of someone immersed in the free software culture, where everything operates near the extreme edge of the open/closed continuum, it’s easy to see how things begin to look binary — not open/closed, but totally-open/not-totally-open.

And Mark’s counter:

I’m not claiming that either Free Software or open formats are a silver bullet. There are many risk factors, and Free Software mitigates some of them some of the time. There are many layers — data on top of applications on top of operating systems on top of hardware — and open formats can reduce the friction between some of them some of the time. They’re both lubricants that help you to slide out one layer and replace it without the whole thing toppling down. Apple would prefer that I not replace any of their layers, and they have gone out of their way to increase the friction between them.

Which brings us back to John Gruber’s oranges. His counter-argument — that lock-in hasn’t been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now — could not be further from the truth. It’s been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I’ve spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app “upgrading” me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format… and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It’ll be the last time they get the chance.

“To say that ‘either a device is user friendly or it’s open’ is a false dichotomy.”

From Mark Pilgrim’s post:

Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today. Anyone can develop! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a cryptographic key that (temporarily) allows you (slightly) elevated access to… your own computer. And that’s fine — or at least workable — for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the ability to tinker, some of them never will.

…and…

Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of “jailbreaks” stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers. There won’t ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won’t be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart. And that’s a real loss. Maybe not to you, but to somebody who doesn’t even know it yet.

From Alex Payne’s post:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents.

Like many of my generation, my first computer was an Apple IIgs. I learned to program in BASIC (back when you had to number every single line and predict ahead of time how many lines you’d need). Apple is preventing a generation of people (especially kids) from being creative, despite all PR to the contrary. It costs $99 to get the privilege of writing for the iPhone/iPad. Not all parents will do that for their 8 year old. The barriers (both technical and legal) for tinkering with devices you already own is prohibitively high. I can’t risk jailbreaking my iPhone because without a sanctioned process, I still need it to communicate with the world. With my desktop (and laptop to a slightly lesser extent). I have all the avenues in the world to tinker, all legal and encouraged.

I guess, to the extent it needs to be said, I really hope Freedom 0 wins out.

Searching pages

You can use Chrome’s Omnibox to search inside your Delicious tags:

• Right-click in the Omnibox and select Edit search engines.
• In the Search Engines dialog press the Add button.
• Fill the form as follows:
• Name: Delicious
• Keywork: d
• URL: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts&p=%s&lc=1&u=your_user_name
  http://delicious.com/search?p=%s&chk=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1&atags=&rtags=&context=userposts|your_user_name|

Press OK to close the form.

It looks like Eclipse is doing some nasty stuff advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3.5):

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse

iSuperGP

My first iPhone web application: iSuperGP. If you use supergenpass.com for your password management, iSuperGP helps you use it on your iPhone. Using HTML5 local storage, you can save your sites locally so you don’t have to retype them every time in the SGP mobile version. The application is fully offline enabled, so you can bookmark it as an application and access your passwords even when you’re disconnected. If you find anything wrong or have suggestions, the support site is @ here

The app is built using the jQTouch jQuery framework for mobile web development. It still has a few quirks, but it’s fairly spectacular at imitating native iPhone applications. Also, it’s extremely frustrating trying to develop an iPhone web application when the only place to reliably test is on iPhone Safari browser itself. I don’t have a Mac yet, so I’m not able to use the XCode simulator.

photo credit: Håkan Dahlström

Caveat #1 — Without Firebug, nothing replaces Firefox for web development. Period. End of Story. I’m focusing here on more casual browsing.

Mouse Navigation

Middle Click opens new tab — Firefox and Safari do this for normal links, however in Safari I can’t middle click on the home button in the toolbar to open a new tab to my home page.

Middle Click closes tab — Safari fails here. There apparently is a hack but the web site is blocked at work, so I haven’t tried it (note, that every extension for Safari is a hack… I have no idea how stability is affected, so I’ve been trying to avoid them when possible)

Keyboard Navigation

vim-like search — Firefox adopted vim’s style of quickly searching using the “/” key. I love this, and as a vim user it comes very naturally. Hard to give this up. However, Safari get’s props for dimming the window and highlighting what you’re searching for. I can do without this, but it I have the placement of the “OpenApple” key on mac keyboards — it forces me to contort my wrist.

Plugins & Extensions

Delicious — This is a big one. Delicious is my bookmark manager of choice, and this becomes Safari’s biggest failure. There are Safari hacks for Delicious support, but none add the Delicious toolbar where I can set my favorite tags.

Verdict

Sticking with Firefox. One of the reasons I’m not tempted by Chrome is there isn’t the same level of customization that Firefox currently allows. At least Google is moving toward supporting plugins — I don’t think Apple will ever allow that with Safari. I’m hoping for a high quality Firefox 3.5 release!