Category Archives: General

Ian’s Blog

Ian Farquhar expressed surprise the other day that anyone reads his blog. So I thought I would point out that his new blog is kind of nifty. I don’t know what backend software is powering the blog, though, and I’m mistrustful of all the Javascript goings-on. The page transitions frighten me.


My Nero logo

Anyway, he likes to talk about hard multimedia-type stuff. Which is apropos since he probably works for Nero (hey Ian: an ‘About Me’ page — about you — would do wonders). So you should check it out. We niche multimedia blogs need to stick together. I hope his blog stays fresh.

Dear Nano

Dear Nano: You know I love you. You are the GPL’d heir to the old UW-Pine-derived Pico editor, my text-editing savior when I was unceremoniously thrust onto the Unix command line early in my computer science education and told to write a program.

However, clever error messages may seem funny to you but are actually aggravating to the end user due to their failure to actually articulate what went wrong:


GNU Nano - Be Reasonable

This is not helpful when a user is trying to be productive and honestly has no idea what misstep just occurred. Fortunately, I have been using using GNU Nano long enough to know that “Come on, be reasonable” usually means that, rather than pressing Ctrl-W to search for text, I mistakenly pressed Ctrl-/ (go to line number) and entered a non-numeric value.

I wonder if non-English-speaking users have to put up with the same error message? Using my limited ability to interpret non-English languages, I delved into the .po files in the Nano source. Well, what do you know?

de.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Komm schon, sei vernünftig"

fr.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Allez, soyez raisonnable"

it.po:

msgid "Come on, be reasonable"
msgstr "Avanti, sii ragionevole"

This is especially egregious since “come on” is literally translated and I doubt that the idiom has the same connotation in other languages.

Thankfully, a brief perusal of the other msgid strings does not immediately reveal any other unintuitive errors. As a bonus, I just figured out that Nano must have a bracket-matching feature due the presence of such strings as “Not a bracket” and “No matching bracket”.

Multimedia Document Mirror

I started a new effort tonight: I created a mirror of multimedia-related technical documents. I found some documents on my hard drive that have no official home on the internet. Further, it is entirely possible that other documents could disappear at any time. So I am maintaining this mirror. Plus, I have tons of webspace and bandwidth to burn with my hosting plan.

The Wiki page will maintain links to both local mirrors and official links, if official links still exist. The primary Wiki page for a particular subject should link to the official link if it exists, and have a note about the local link as well.

So if you have any orphaned documents laying around that belong on this mirror, please let me know. Things such as MPEG drafts have always been fair game; final MPEG drafts — the kinds for which currency must be exchanged — are not acceptable.

WordCamp 2007, Day 2

The second day of WordCamp 2007 was far more technical than the first day, featuring presentations about things like optimization strategies WordPress to survive a possible Digg or similar network storm. Performance enhancements are always interesting from a technical perspective, but I rarely have motivation to set them up for the blogs hosted on this site. (For those in attendance, when the speaker queried why some of us weren’t using plugins such as wp-cache, I was the guy who yelled out, “Too lazy!”)

Try this talk title: Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems, delivered by one Rashmi Sinha. To be honest, a lot of it was very fluffy stuff about building online communities and well-known problems therein (think Digg mobs) and how unfair it is that the internet is quintessentially meritocratic vs. democratic. However, I did take away one very key item from her presentation: SlideShare— think YouTube, but for PowerPoint presentations. I had never heard of it before but the knowledge comes at a useful time since I still need to get that LinuxTag talk online. Further, it may be valuable to post my other presentations as well.

However, a few concerns occurred to me right away, chief among them is the fact that PowerPoint presentations do not do a terrific job of presenting things by themselves; they most often serve as visual aids. Indeed, if a set of presentation slides actually deliver a cohesive presentation without human intervention, they were not created properly. I wondered how this context-free principle would work on SlideShare, particularly for my recent FFmpeg presentation which was almost entirely pictures. Fortunately, it appears that SlideShare is smart enough to extract the embedded notes that presentation software allows you to make.

My very first practical concern is whether SlideShare only handles PowerPoint presentations. It turns out that it can also handle OpenOffice Impress presentation files (and PDF files). I uploaded my FFmpeg: Past, Present, and Future slides to the service to test it out. It mostly worked, except that I used a few special fonts which are not embedded in the file. I need to see if there’s a way to correct that. Plus, this was the first time that I saw the feature that SlideShare extracts and lists your notes– I need to expand those and re-upload the presentation.

Then again, it seems reasonable that OpenOffice can probably export a series of linked HTML pages with the properly rendered slide and all the accompanying notes. Maybe I’ll go with both routes, in deference to those on fringe computing platforms that don’t have a viable Flash solution.