the frig blig

My friend A has reached her final week of preparing for a National Board Certification for teachers. One of the requirements is to submit some videos. She asked for help editing and burning the videos to DVD. I confidently agreed, since I’d found iMovie and iDVD on my Mac pretty easy to use when creating amateur videos before.

Ha.

The video files she gave me were AVI. iMovie won’t import AVI. Luckily, she brought her camera and I was able to import two of the clips directly from the camera. Preparing them for iDVD was simple, if time consuming. Disc one of two was complete.

Unfortunately the clips for the second disc weren’t on the camera, so I asked a coworker with lots of AV experience for advice. He suggested using ffmpeg to convert the AVI to MPEG-2, the standard DVD video format, then edit that in iMovie. I installed ffmpeg on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine and used it to generate the mpg file. The resolution was so bad I couldn’t use it, but my coworker performed the same conversion on his Ubuntu 10.10 machine and that one was perfect.

I copied the mpg to my Mac and discovered (surprise) that the dastardly duo iMovie and iDVD won’t import mpg files either! Drat, foiled again! Apple hates open formats, I keep forgetting.

Googling ‘imovie mpg import’ listed several third-party apps for conversion, but they all wanted money for their software. Bah, humbug, I’m only converting one clip for a friend and she’s a poor teacher.

So I fired up my Fedora laptop and googled ‘linux mpg dvd burn’ and quickly found a post describing how to do it using freely available open source tools.

The first tool is dvdauthor, which I used to create the DVD file structure from the mpg file. Then I used mkisofs to create an ISO image from the file structure.

The final step was burning a DVD from the ISO using good old K3b.

It’s not fancy, there’s no menu and I couldn’t edit it but the video plays perfectly in our DVD player. S delivered the discs to A and mission was (finally) accomplished.

1. I first heard Earth (Dylan Carlson’s band) when their CD A Beaurocratic Desire For Extra-Capsular Extraction was playing in Everyday Music on Capitol Hill. I had to ask the girl behind the counter what it was. I was intrigued even more upon learning that Carlson was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s from Olympia, and that the band was local.

Then a couple of months later my physical therapist mentioned he was a fan, and I decided to buy their recordings. I got The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull because the title and cover art is so cool.

Well, to an old fart like me this band basically sounds like heavy metal Eno. Slow, heavy riffs repeated endlessly. Nice ambiance, but not on my top ten list. OTOH they’re playing a new CD release gig at the Tractor on Thursday, and I’m sorely tempted — I bet they’re killer live!

If you do like this sort of thing, I suggest checking out Sunn O))) who do the same thing but are way more panoramic and less typical.

2. I wanted to scan one of Earth’s CD inserts and clip the band’s logo for illustrating this blog post, but couldn’t because my scanner is a Canon Pixma MP990 aka ‘piece of crap’. Anyone considering this multifunction printer/scanner/copier, beware! The only thing it does well is scan. But, if the printer runs low on ink, it won’t scan! Which is the height of stupidity because you don’t need ink for scanning. The paper feed mechanism the printer uses jams more often than not, and even when miraculously it doesn’t jam, it takes forever to print. Grrrr.

3. The server hosting this blog was running Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS until a few hours ago, when I upgraded it to 8.04 LTS. Support for version 6.06 runs out in April so I got in gear, gritted my teeth and upgraded the distro. Happily, it took less than two hours and I had no major problems (YMMV). I figured jumping two major versions was safer than going all the way to 10.04 LTS in one leap. This should make it easier to upgrade Apache2, PHP, etc.

I just published my first app in the android market: SFD Mobile. Since I work for the Seattle Fire Department, this was a natural idea for an app. Thanks to data.seattle.gov for making it possible.

Since it’s my first real app in droid-space, I’m very curious how folks like it and what they think. Of course it’s only of interest to Seattleites and/or fire buffs.

I certainly learned a lot of J stuff writing it, mainly JSON and Java. I’m looking forward to writing future apps, after our next home improvement project is complete.

Surprisingly, the Android Market category list does not include ‘public safety’ or even ‘government’ so I chose, pseudo-randomly, to tag my app ‘travel’.

OK, my first big lesson in android development is: don’t call getApplicationContext() prior to calling onCreate(), unless you like watching your app crash.

And another thing: just because you’re coding in java doesn’t mean you won’t have null pointer exceptions to deal with.

I can deny it ’til I’m blue in the face, and my standing may be open to question, but I most assuredly belong to the following families:

Seattleites, ex-Tallahasseans, musicians, sons of Jewish mothers who have renounced Judaism, U.S. white males, go players, pool players, geeks, freaks, coders, voters, married guys, homeowners, breathers, writers, composers, bloggers, sloggers, performers, workers, note-takers, list-makers, mammals, skeptics, smilers, pouters, doubters, losers, tip-toers, listeners, pluckers, fuckers, guys who say ‘wow’, sufferers, ecstaticats, questioners, shavers, bathers, distracted ones, dreamers, sleepers, weepers, insomniacs, cooks, lovers, the angry, the pissed, the clever, sneezers, wheezers, squeezers, schemers, the regular, eczemites, shitters, quitters, singers, whistlers, finger snappers, clippers, flippers, shouters, pooters, wankers, bicyclers, hikers, touch-typists, card makers, risk takers, jokers, and smokers.

To name a few. What families are you in, perchance?

Today at work I rewrote a SQL stored procedure, replacing code which used a cursor with code that does not. I did this because since last week when we upgraded the database engine, this stored procedure has been executing dog-slow. I’d heard that cursors cause a performance hit so I was very happy to see the cursorless version running at least twice as fast as the original.

The new version declares a variable as a table datatype, which acts like an in-memory table. This technique was new to me. So I was very pleased when my work paid off.

This seki showed up during my lunchtime game with JJ today. I can’t recall ever seeing one before which included two points for one side!

My ISP inwa.net was back up this morning when I tried it from work. So ‘nevermind’ my previous post, my normal email account is working again and I think I’ll keep it as my main point of contact for now.

However, the first thing I did after checking my email (I use pine) was to make a local copy of my addressbook. A quick google led me to a convenient, time-saving script to reformat my pine addressbook into a CSV file importable by gmail. This little gem saved me mucho time, so many thanks to Cengiz Gunay for writing his perl script pineaddrbook2csv and posting it on the internet.

If and when inwa goes down again, next time I won’t lose all those contacts!

My ISP inwa.net has been down since July 2 — at least 4 days, quite long in internet time. I’m not sure if they’re the victim of a malicious attack, suffered catastrophic hardware failure, or just pulled the plug. If it’s the former, I wish them well fixing the problem. If the latter, I’m disappointed that they didn’t give their customers advance warning.

Be that as it may, I no longer receive email sent to my inwa.net address. Until such time as they are online again, please use my emergency backup email address: frieda dot peeps at gmail dot com (translated into the standard format). If you sent messages to me between July 2 and now, please resend them to this address.

The main thing I’ve lost with my inwa account is my addressbook. Shoulda backed it up; I know better. Let this be a lesson to me.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.