Jump breaks? What?

Long time no see! Happy way-belated New Year's and whatnot.

So I just discovered that blogger finally supports jump breaks. This is the stuff that some news sites/blogs have where they say "More after the break" and there's a link with "Read more" or something. I've always wanted that for this blog, because coding stuff tends to take more page real estate than I want it to, and now I can. So, maybe I'll post more. Who knows.

I've been up to various things since the last I posted. Some more latte, lots of coding.... In particular, I've been working on my own custom forum software. Its purpose is not to be more sophisticated or even as sophisticated as, say, phpBB, but to be lightweight, quick, and with nice features. It's tailored to forum-based role playing, which I do with my friends. To this end, it loads new replies to topics in real time (more or less) and supports drafts of posts, so you never have to worry about losing your post again!

I also finally went through and abstracted the network stuff from my series tracker, so I'm one step away from freeing the thing from my old, crappy TCP library which it had been entrenched in. (Also, it should be a bit more efficient and quick, though not noticably so.)

I'm sure there's more, but that's enough for now

PS: The more on the jump breaks here: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/09/you-might-as-well-jump.html

Latte art 29 & 31

These are fairly old, but I'd forgotten to post them, and randomly decided to go ahead and do that.

Enjoy!



Latte art 29 -- Rosetta

Latte art 27

Poured 27 Sept 09 -- Rosetta.

I finally have my camera, so after a long break I was able to snap a shot of some latte art. Great timing, because this might be my best one yet :)

Enjoy!

Start your Mediatomb transcode where you want!

One issue with using Mediatomb and transcoding to watch videos on the PS3 is that, if your network cuts out, the video stops, and you have to start all over again. Oh yeah, and Mediatomb doesn't support fast-forwarding for transcoded files.

Luckily, both programs I've been using to transcode support a "start offset" setting. For VLC, the commandline flag is "--start-time" and for mencoder it's "-ss".

Sure, we could edit our transcoder script every time we want to start somewhere other than the beginning, but that's a pain in the butt, especially if it's in a write-protected directory and you have to sudo.

Mediatomb + Mencoder

In my previous post on Mediatomb, I was using VLC to transcode the videos with the subtitles attached. This works the vast majority of the time, but sometimes the subtitles contain non-standard symbols, such as the curly quotes (They are the ones that are curved inward toward the text, unlike the standard quote symbol which is strictly vertical; I'm not sure what these are actually called) or an ellipses character, that you might see when using Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, VLC doesn't seem to support these characters (at least, my version doesn't) and instead of silently ignoring them, it leaves off any line containing them. Consequently, some shows end up with lots of un-subtitled parts, which can be a problem if I watch a Korean show, for example, as I don't know much more than the very basics.

What I'd been doing was using a script to temporarily strip out these characters into a separate file, keeping a copy of the original to be replaced fifteen or so seconds later, once the fixed file had been read. This works pretty well, but then of course you're often missing quotes, apostrophes and ellipses. Furthermore, this also sometimes failed miserably, resulting in the subtitle file being completely erased. In addition, I came across several videos that VLC simply refused to play.

My solution? Switch to mencoder. It was temporary at first, but now that I've uncovered the subtitle options and gotten them to display as I like, I'm much happier. So far, I've had no problems with videos not getting playing, and it even reads the characters that VLC choked on!

Enough talking, let's get down to business!

Using Thinkpad Dock Events

I've been using this for a while, but I always seem to forget to post up my coding stuff, so I thought I'd go ahead and throw this one up now.

If you don't know, I use a Thinkpad T61 laptop with one of their docks, into which I plug my external harddrives and mouse, etc. The nice thing about this is that it's really easy to just take out my laptop when I need it for class -- I don't have to unplug the ethernet cable, the usb drives, etc. one by one. The downside is that when I take it out, all of the entries in the Mediatomb database disappear! (I mentioned this in an earlier post when I discussed my Mediatomb config file.) Since I have the directories saved in the config file for Mediatomb, I need only restart the server to have it add them back in. But, it got to be a pain to call up a terminal and reset the server, so I decided to look into automation. Check out what I found after the break.

SHRPG - Major update

I've just posted the biggest update on my SHRPG project over at the SHPRG Development Blog. It's some pretty exciting stuff, as it means the game will soon be in a privately testable state. Check out the post, if you're interested.

In other news, I just got back from a vacation with my family to Deep Creek in Maryland. It was a blast, but I'm glad to have internet again. It's not that I really missed it -- I was having a lot of fun hanging out with my parents and siblings and playing with the nieces and nephews -- but I'm still glad to be able to check my email and stuff again!

Probably the most memorable thing we did was a Kayak trip on (I think) the Savage River Reservoir. It was about four hours, with a break in the middle for a picnic lunch. I'm not usually a fan of picnics, because you have to be eating with the bugs -- and we were, let there be no doubt -- but I still managed to enjoy it, and the food was actually quite good. Right after lunch, before going back out on the water, the guide took out his spotting scope and showed us a bald eagle's nest. One of the eagles was waiting right there next to it -- how cool is that?

Anyway, that's about it. Maybe I'll post more about the trip later, but probably not. Oh well ;)