The adventures of Foo

My aggregated random tech blabber

Personal vim tip of the day

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.vala let g:netrw_sort_sequence = '[\/]$,\

Buchempfehlung

Walter Moers: Die Stadt der Träumenden Bücher.

At work I’m currently developing software which is supposed to run on openSUSE. I need to query the package database at some point which of course does not exist on my ubuntu machine. Here’s a quick setup how to create a fake local RPM database:

echo "%_dbpath /home/user/rpmdb" >> ~/.rpmmacros
mkdir /home/user/rpmdb
rpm -i --nodeps --justdb --force-debian *.rpm

And that’s it.

(Gnu-)Tar option of the day

--exclude-vcs

WTF? Eigener Vizekanzler?

Kann mir jemand erklären, mit welchem Recht die CSU jetzt einen eigenen Vizekanzler fordert? Herr Uhl sagt, “die Koalition bestünde ja auch aus drei Parteien”. Wenn wir uns an 2005 zurückerinnern, als die SPD verzweifelt versuchte, sich den Wahlsieg hinzudisktutieren, da konnte man CSU und CDU natürlich nicht trennen. Wir sind eins. Ich kenne ein super Lied, dass diese Situation schön zusammenfasst:

XBox 360 support of rygel

Short update on the XBox360 support of rygel:
What works

Streaming of transcoded audio and video to the XBox
Browsing through your music collection by album or artist works at least for the media-export plugin. General audio playback should work for every plugin (Using Music library -> Songs)

What doesn’t work:

Seeking in transcoded media. This includes stopping and resuming. Pause-resume is fine though
Photo browsing (this is due to a bug in rygel’s HTTP code)

What’s quirky:

The modifications necessary for the XBox to be able to actually see rygel should be added dynamically by evaluating the user-agent of the request. Currently they are hardcoded
Mime-types have to be modified for the XBox, like video/avi for xvid or DivX 5 videos

any to WMV

While trying to vamp up XBox 360 support for rygel, I also need a transcoder suitable for the XBox. While H.264 would work it is CPU consuming and hard to get right for the XBox, because it is quite picky. So I decided to go for WMV1/WMA2. Prototype gst-launch commandline:

gst-launch filesrc location=input_file ! decodebin2 name=decoder \
               asfmux name=mux ! filesink location=foo.wmv \
               { decoder. ! queue ! ffenc_wmv1 bitrate=1200 ! mux. } \
               { decoder. ! queue ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! ffenc_wmav2 bitrate=64000 ! mux. }

I know that the curly braces are not needed anymore but I still think they improve readability a lot.
Update:The resulting file works great for offline playback on the XBox, but live streaming does not work unfortunatly. I had to rely on ffmux_asf to make live transcoding working.

pmp 0.1 released

I just uploaded pmp 0.1 – Poor man’s prism desktop web application creator to github: http://github.com/phako/pmp

A release tarball can be found here: pmp-0.1.tar.gz

What is pmp?

pmp shares some similarities to Mozilla’s Prism. It creates a “standalone” app from a web application. Pmp uses Webkit as its rendering backend.

How do I use it?

To create an edge (that is pmp’s terminus for a captured app), run
pmp-create --url=<url to website> --name=<descriptivename>
You can also create a desktop icon by passing it the --desktop parameter. If you want to use the site’s favicon, use --icon=:favicon

To run the edge, call pmp-run --name=<DescriptiveName>

Known limitations:
It does not work properly with Google’s apps. Google does some weird URL redirects. I’m working on that. Apps known to work are Wordpress and TT RSS.

Making putty look nice on Windows

I don’t like the default look of putty on windows, so I usually do two things:

Download the DejaVu fonts
Get this PowerShell skript to tangoify the putty palette
Note: On Windows 7 you might need to enable yourself to be able to execute powershell skripts.

Rygel 0.4.6 released

Rygel 0.4.6 has been released. This is a big step forward to the XBox 360 support as it finally implements search! See the original announcement at Zeenix’ Blog