Archive for August, 2006
spherebox re-launched!
Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Web on August 28th, 2006
As posted by Han Kern earlier, we finally got spherebox completed 2 days ago. All credit to him for the writeups. ;) This page should be a good start if you’re wondering what it is all about.
For those interested in the nitty-gritty technical details, the site was designed based on a WordPress installation with numerous changes to the CSS and templates of the theme it’s based on (MistyLook). WordPress Codex was an excellent resource for all the stuff I did and has everything categorised pretty well.
As expected, IE decided not to display some things as how the other 2 browsers displayed it (stuff just above the header images were misaligned or got ‘covered’ by the image below it) and I chose to use the conditional comments method to get around this. The site now shows up appropriately in Firefox 1.5, IE 6 and 7, Opera 9 on Windows.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server setup guide
Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Open Source on August 25th, 2006
About a month ago, I got some old computer parts from Kah Wai which weren’t in use and set up a headless server using the latest Ubuntu server edition. I stumbled upon this guide which was excellent in guiding me through the process of setting it up and I would highly recommend it if you are new to setting up a server from scratch.
I’m pretty impressed by the Debian derived package management system which makes it very easy to add, remove or update almost any application available for it. I remember the times when I had to deal with all sorts of dependency errors when attempting to install stuff on Mandrake 9.0 (now called Mandriva). Besides the server services such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, I got Samba installed as well so it’s now also functioning as a dump box besides its primary function as a development server (not much so recently though..). :D
How software development works
Posted by Benny Chew in Coding/Development, Humour on August 20th, 2006
Pretty true to a certain extent. :P
via digg
Coincidentally, I found another pic lying on my hard disk of a similar vein:
I do not wish to prove this true during the usability testing session with my project’s client in 2 days time though.. It’s going to be a pain if that happens. XD
Reducing file sizes of videos captured using digital cameras
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, Tips & Tweaks on August 18th, 2006
During my last trip to Mt. Hotham, I discovered that the videos I took with my IXUS 55 digital camera took up fairly substantial real estate on my 512MB SD card. For example, a 12 second clip took 21.9MB which when compared to videos available on the net these days, is extremely bloated (e.g. a TV show of about 40 minutes in length is about 350MB).
Checking the user manual of the camera reveals that it uses a Motion JPEG format for the video. This format stores each frame of the video separately which results in the much larger overall file size. Here are some results from the conversions which I did with the clips I have using VirtualDub‘s default XviD settings:
Before:
12 seconds, 21.9MB
1 min 3 seconds, 84.2MB
50 seconds, 57.3MB
7 seconds, 13.5MB
48 seconds, 75.0MB
After:
12 seconds, 1.75MB
1 min 3 seconds, 6.08MB
50 seconds, 3.67MB
7 seconds, 0.95MB
48 seconds, 5.61MB
As you can see, the results show quite a large reduction in size. Before following the steps below, you would need to ensure you have the XviD codec in your system. I’m using the K-lite mega codec pack which bundles all the various codecs (including XviD), but you can also download XviD standalone here. Steps:
- Download the latest VirtualDub from here.
- Extract the zip file that you have downloaded to your location of choice on your hard disk (e.g. C:\Program Files\VirtualDub).
- Run VirtualDub.exe from the directory you extracted to (e.g. C:\Program Files\VirtualDub\VirtualDub.exe).
- Open the video file you wish to convert using File->Open File or just drag and drop the file into the VirtualDub window.
- Click ‘Video’->’Full processing mode’ (ensure there’s a dot on the left of Full processing mode).
- Click ‘Video’->’Compression’.
- Select ‘XviD MPEG4 Codec’, then click OK.
- Click ‘File’->’Save as AVI..’
- Choose the directory you want to save the converted video to, enter a filename and click ‘Save’.
- The transcoding should now be in progress. The time taken for it to complete would depend on the speed of your processor and the length of the video.
It is possible to get even further file size reductions by tweaking configuration settings to sacrifice on quality. This usually requires some time in experimenting with various settings to get the best tradeoff which you want. You can read more about transcoding/encoding over here.
Do note that different camera manufacturers may use a different format for capturing video (for e.g. Quicktime MOV) which may already be optimised and would not attain the same amount of reduction in file size. ;)
Blocking bad data (and peers) in BitTorrent
Posted by Benny Chew in BitTorrent, General Tech, Tips & Tweaks, Web on August 14th, 2006
As BitTorrent checks the integrity of every piece of data it receives, some parties have resorted to ‘swarm poisoning’ popular torrents which attempts to flood the peers with bad pieces of data which slows down the propagation of pieces as the client will have to re-download the pieces which failed the verification (hash checking). This leads to heaps of wasted bandwidth which is quite precious in some places like Australia where download quotas are enforced on most broadband plans. ;)
The following are the steps for Azureus and µTorrent. I believe these are the best 2 BT clients at the moment which you switch to immediately if you aren’t using one of them already. :P
Azureus (v2.4.0.2):
- Start Azureus.
- Click ‘Plugins’->’Installation Wizard’
- Select ‘By list from sourceforge.net’, click ‘Next’
- Scroll down to ‘Safepeer’ and check the checkbox on the left of it, click ‘Next’
- Select ‘Install plugin(s) for all users’, click ‘Finish’
- Click ‘Install’ in the dialog box that appears
- Once download and installation is done, you can close all dialog boxes and remove the downloaded zip file from your seeding list
µTorrent (v1.6):
- In µTorrent, go to ‘Options’->’Preferences’->’Advanced’. Change the ‘ipfilter.enable’ value to ‘True’.
- Go to this site, scroll down the page till you reach the ‘Other Lists’ column header on the left navigation bar. Look for ‘ipfilter.dat.gz‘. Download that file to your PC (right-click->save target/link as).
- Extract the file your archive utility of choice such as WinRAR. A file with the name ‘nipfilter.dat’ should be extracted.
- Rename that file to ‘ipfilter.dat’.
- Copy that file to ‘C:\Documents and Settings\your-username\Application Data\uTorrent’. If that file already exists, overwrite it.
Azureus’ Safepeer plugin automatically updates itself with the latest but you would have to do the steps above on a periodic basis for µTorrent if you wish to keep that filter file up-to-date. It’s probably not as critical as ensuring your virus definitions for your antivirus though, so you don’t have to do this on an extremely regular basis. :)
Edit: Updated ipfilter.dat links to TBG blocklists instead of BISS
ATunnel
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, Tips & Tweaks, Web on August 14th, 2006
Here’s quick fix if you’re having difficulty connecting to certain sites, which could be due to your ISP’s routing to the site or it’s been blocked by a proxy/firewall which you have to use. All you have to do is put the URL of the site you wish to access into the input box at ATunnel and hit the ‘Begin browsing’ button or the Enter key. You can also use this service if you’re paranoid about your online privacy and would like to cover your tracks.
Similar proxy services can be found here.
Finding a replacement for Bloglines (RSS reader)
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, RSS, Tips & Tweaks, Web on August 13th, 2006
After heaping praises on Bloglines in my previous post on RSS feeds, it seems to have gone through quite a fair bit of downtime which wasn’t particularly pleasing. :( Feeling disgruntled, I started researching (again) on the latest breed of web based and desktop based RSS (feed) readers currently available to find a worthy replacement of Bloglines.
By checking out the features as well as screenshots from the respective RSS readers’ websites, I filtered down the readers (aggregators) which I would be testing more thoroughly to:
- Feedreader (desktop)
- Greatnews (desktop)
- Newsgator (web)
- Pluck (desktop + web)
- SharpReader (desktop)
Email applications which have RSS feed management:
- Mozilla Thunderbird (desktop)
- Outlook 2007 Beta 2 (desktop)
Notable absentees from that list would be Google Reader, Firefox‘s live bookmarks. As stated in my previous post, I have tried Google Reader and I loath the AJAX interface for it as it just doesn’t work as efficiently as Bloglines’s two pane interface. Neither do I like Firefox’s current live bookmarks setup.
To ensure all the RSS readers are tested in the same manner I would usually use Bloglines, I exported the whole list of feeds from it (which came up to about 93..). You can do this by clicking on the ‘Edit’ link just under the ‘My Blog’ tab when you’re viewing the ‘My Feeds’ tab on the left pane, and then click ‘Export Subscriptions’ link which is right at the bottom of that pane (under the header ‘Extras’).
Read on for the details..
Read the rest of this entry »
Car advertisements
Posted by Benny Chew in Humour on August 11th, 2006
Creative and cheeky ads by Audi, BMW over here and here.
via paultan.org
Writely
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech, Web on August 7th, 2006
Yes, it’s another beta and invite-only product which was added to Google’s ever growing suite of web applications when they acquired the company behind it sometime back. From Wikipedia:
Writely is a web-based word processor currently in beta, and soon to be integrated into Google’s suite of web applications (following a 2006 acquisition). It can be used as a collaborative text editing suite, and features access controls. Writely’s user interface is a WYSIWYG word processor that appears within a web browser. Menus, keyboard shortcuts, and dialogue boxes show up in a way similar to what you would expect on a GUI-driven word processor, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org.
You can read a review on it here by HMMaster. And if you like it and want to try it out, post a comment here and I will send you one. ;) Once you’ve got an account, you can invite others by following the steps here.
Centrino patches
Posted by Benny Chew in General Tech on August 7th, 2006
Intel has recently released gargantuan patches for Centrino laptops which have network chipsets as listed here. This issue doesn’t seem to have attracted as much media attention as compared to Dell’s exploding laptops [1], [2], [3].
F-Secure notes that the vulnerabilities involving the drivers are “pretty awful” and that the patch can be troublesome to download and install because of its size, 129MB.
However awful the vulnerabilities are, I don’t forsee the majority of end users to download a patch of that size. Besides that, users generally only update their device drivers when it stops working or is required for something else they want to use to function properly as compared to day-to-day application software which we are all more accustomed to updating it. Furthermore, this patch is to a generic driver which may or may not be compatible with the drivers released by individual manufacturers.
I don’t own a Centrino based notebook as mine’s a generation before it (with an addon WiFi card), but if you ask me whether you should download and install this..
Security experts note there are no known exploits publicly circulating that have been crafted to take advantage of these flaws.
..let’s all wait till one appears and it might turn into a 1.29MB patch instead. :D
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