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).

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.

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.

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!

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY) [nsIDocShellHistory.useGlobalHistory]" nsresult: "0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/browser.js :: prepareForStartup :: line 764" data: no]

photo credit: meantux

Symptoms: When you start firefox, it doesn’t take you to your home page. Your home button doesn’t work or takes you to a different site.

Try the following:

• Go to your profile directory ($HOME/.mozilla/firefox/99fjsklfs.default)
• mv or delete places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal
• Take a peek in the bookmarkbackups folder and remove any zero length files
• Restart firefox

It brought Robert Scoble to tears… and I can see why. This is the sort of software Microsoft should be releasing. The seamless integration, very similar to what Google Earth did for looking around our little blue-green planet, makes it that much more accessible. I’ve tried downloading those huge images from Hubble and never had a computer with enough memory to open one. Making those high resolutions accessible opens up worlds (excuse the pun) to everyone from any walk of life… not just a handful of super computers around the world.

I can’t wait to give this thing a spin, and I only wish Carl Sagan or Douglas Adams were still around to narrate tours around the universe.

In the old days, you worked with a 16×16 or 32×32 canvas and pixel by pixel painted your icon. Now, (at least in KDE… I’m not sure how Gnome, Windows or OSX handle it) you can design with SVG (scalable vector graphics) which I think is a huge step in the right direction but I don’t think it reduces the underlying challenge.

It literally is amazing how far Microsoft has sunk under its own weight. I know there have been a lot of examples of late to choose from, but this struck me as particularly appalling. The fact that Microsoft’s attempt at standardizing this crap has met with significant resistance is really a testament to how low they have sunk (and how often of late they have resorted to this sort of thing). I don’t remember how many thousands of pages the spec is but the fact that everyone knows they won’t even follow their own (there really is no way they could from a sheer engineering perspective) makes some of their outrageous antics (like trying to buy off the standards commission) laughable.

Just image a world where Office and Windows were separate entities — for the sake of argument, separate companies. Office would be available on every conceivable platform. Windows might actually innovate as an Operating System rather than a delivery platform for other Microsoft products. There was a non-zero chance that had the first Microsoft anti-trust trial not turned into a debacle, that world might exist now.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Open Office’s spec is a saint either, but at least it is an open spec in good faith and relatively simple. Though having tried to generate OO documents via their API, I can tell you it’s extremely clumsy. It’s really a bloated and obtuse API if you ask me. Why you would establish a client-server model API is really beyond me. Though to be fair, those complaints are directed at the OO API (specifically scripting), rather than the file format generation. The whole beauty of it is that some one else could come along and develop an intelligent API for file generation.

Given where Apple, Google, Linux/KDE/Gnome, Adobe and Sun (and to a less extent, Sony) have placed themselves, I think within ten years, Microsoft will become a pale shade of what it was in the late 90′s. Sure, they can have success in different arenas (Xbox for example) but their bread and butter is being slowly eaten away.

Ain’t competition wonderful?