Irreverence is Justified

I wanted to get ffmpeg working on my mac so that I can convert videos easily, mainly to put on my iPad. I have discovered it’s actually pretty simple, or as with most things, you can make it complicated.

Here’s the simple way:

Install the XCode apply developer tools @ http://connect.apple.com/

Install Macports @ http://www.macports.org/install.php

Run “sudo port install ffmpeg” in a terminal.

It’ll go off and download lots of stuff, and when finished, ffmpeg will be ready to roll.

I tend to take the easy option when using it:

ffmpeg -i file.avi -sameq file.mp4

-i is the input file, -sameq makes the quality the same, and then you stick the filename that you want to generate at the end. So I’m converting file.avi with the same quality to an MPEG-4 file called file.mp4 with that example above.

I have yet to give in to the iPhone, and still stick with my trusty Nokia, but I have now got an iPad. And I’ll be honest; it’s pretty awesome. No, it’s not an adequate replacement for a laptop, and if that’s why you’re getting it, you’ll be disappointed. But I didn’t get it to fully replace my laptop; instead, I got it for easy browsing, mail checking, spotify listening and game playing. And it ticks all those boxes and more.

I’m sorry to say that I’ll probably be posting a bit more about the iPad for the next few days.

I think I might have found a bug with the EGit tool when you try to use Eclipse on a Windows workstation, and have your Eclipse workspace on a remote linux machine. I created a new git repository with a new project I was going to work on, put it on my linux server and was wanting to check it out on my Windows workstation upon which I run Eclipse, y’see. It was all going swimmingly well until, well, it didn’t work. Eclipse successfully connected to the linux machine such that it looked like it was quite happy to check out of a remote git repository, but it couldn’t manage to create the files within my workspace (on linux). It worked quite happily if I had my workspace on the local Windows disk, but I don’t roll like that.

I’m going to guess that it’s down to file locking, but I’ve filed the bug and will see what the EGit people come back with.

I’d been having problems with my wireless router for quite some time, like about a year, and I really needed to get a new one. The old router was really quite old, probably about 5 years, and it just needed physically rebooted at least once a day, sometimes up to three times, to get the wireless function to work again, which was quite annoying. I have quite a number of devices throughout the house that use it, so the constant complaints about it from family members was getting to be a right pain.

After much deliberation, I decided to buy a Netgear WNDR3300, which is capable of 802.11n. Not only that, but it also dual band, which seemed cool, although ultimately wasn’t really going to bring me anything extra. What it did do, though, was make it clear to me which of my devices (PC, Xbox etc) was capable of the ‘n’ band, as it basically runs as two separate wireless routers with different names, so when I connected a device to the wireless router, older devices could only connect to the ‘g’ band while the newer ones preferred the ‘n’ band. So this was useful just so that I could see which devices supported ‘n’.

What a bad decision that was.

The problems were made very obvious by the fact that it was dual band – the faster band, the ‘n’ one, worked perfectly. I only have about 2 devices capable of connecting to the ‘n’ band, one being my main desktop, and they all connected no problem to it, and stayed connected to it.

However, the devices which couldn’t connect to the ‘n’ band, which accounted for almost everything else, had the problems. They could all connect to the ‘g’ band fine, but they then disconnected from it within a few minutes, and although they reconnected themselves again within a couple of minutes, then disconnected again. And so on. I know the problem was with the wireless router because I had six separate devices all having the same problem, and it was a wide range of devices, too (multiple PCs, Xbox, PS3, Nokia N97).

So back to the shop it went, and PC World were good enough to just believe me that it needed returned, they didn’t even ask what was wrong with it. Maybe they had seen many coming back before.

Another couple of days research then made me consider a different device. While the Netgear one had been £110, I discovered one by a company called Edimax, model BR-6574n, which was only £50 but supported ‘n’ band. It doesn’t have two bands, but as I say, that wasn’t really bringing me anything; we don’t run video feeds over our connection much, if ever.

So I got this Edimax device and all I can say is that it is one of the best IT purchases ever. It was fairly simple to set up, the instructions did not quite match the questions that the installer ultimately asked, but I guessed at what to do and it was a breeze from then on. It’s been running for many weeks and I’ve only had to restart it once, and even then I’m not sure that it was at fault, because I reckon it might have been the cable modem behind it. It even allows me to set static DHCP leases based on MAC addresses, which is something that no other wireless router has allowed me to do before. I find this handy for reasons that I’ll not bore you with; 99.9% of you won’t need this feature so don’t worry about it.

The bottom line therefore is that if you’re looking for a new wireless router for a broadband connection, then I thoroughly recommend the Edimax BR-6574n.

If you’re used to using Windows, a Mac is a bit of a jump. If you know your way around linux or unix, it’s not quite so big a jump, but it’s still a jump.

I say this only as advice if anyone is considering getting a Mac and has been a Windows user up to now. Expect a learning curve. Basic things that you’re probably used to won’t work. Like copy and paste. Or your keyboard having such things as a delete key. Or your mouse having a right mouse button that reliably works.

To that end, I am planning on getting a bigger keyboard for the Mac, still a Mac keyboard since they come with that other key (hold on… aye, the cmd key) but one with a delete key, and maybe a page up and page down key would be nice. And I’ll switch to a normal mouse, because I’ve had it already with this Mac mouse and it’s tiny scroll wheel that makes my finger feel like the skin is being dragged under the plastic. It’s awful. But the Mac experience in general is going well to the point that I now sit at my Windows machine and wonder why I can no longer copy and paste and discover it’s because I’m using the Mac keyboard shortcuts.

I fully admit to being a keyboard shortcut junky, and I also know I’ve learnt about 0.3% of the keyboard shortcuts for the Mac, whereas I probably know about 70% of all the Windows ones (feels like I know 100%, but there are bound to be plenty I don’t know). Once I get a handle on them, I’ll be a lot more comfortable with it. That said, I’m actually quite comfortable with the Mac already and I’ve only had it for, erm, a week? I honestly can’t recall when I got it, last week was weird and I never knew what day it was. It would have been either Tuesday or Wednesday. Wednesday, that was it, I think. Anyway, less than a week, and I’m getting there.

Trying to get my external audio equipment to work reliably with it has been a struggle though. On Sunday, it just wasn’t working at all and a reboot solved the problems, so I don’t know what was going on there but it is in some way reassuring to know that rebooting does fix things sometimes on a Mac. The audio setup includes an Alesis io|2, a Boss DR-880, a Pod X3 Live, a Fender strat, a Yamaha bass (man I need to replace it), an Ovation, a Yamaha Clavinova and a Shure SM58. I have managed to get it all working together, with relatively little pain, aside from MIDI. That took some effort. But I did get there, I can now get Logic to play the piano. It even creates sheet music as I play something, it’s totally awesome.

So all in all, it’s been some week and I’ve learnt a lot. Still a long way to go, but I’m definitely getting somewhere.

I got myself a Nokia N97 yesterday. It’s rather nice, and I just wasn’t ever going to get an iPhone to tell you the truth. I’ve ventured away from Nokia in the past and regretted it, so I’ve been sticking with them solidly for the past couple of years and probably won’t go elsewhere unless there’s a really good reason.

So I got this N97. It’s so packaged full with features, I’ll never comment about all of them in one post, so here’s a post about the first main thing I’ve tried that didn’t work totally awesome – transferring music.

The thing comes with 32GB of disk space. Now that’s sweet. I don’t tend to carry about all my music with me, I currently have 17GB of music on my iPod so I figured I’d put that on my N97. The phone comes with various applications for your PC, one of which is called Nokia Music. It’s rather clunky, moreso than iTunes (no, really). And it’s not good at transferring the music over.

I started it going and after a heck of a long time it was still only 30% of the way through. I should have timed it, but the worrying part was that it said that there was 2 hours 42 mins to go, then later there was 3 hours to go, then later still 3hr 12min, then later still 3h 24min. It wasn’t looking hopeful. It got as far as transferring 1159 tracks, and I hit the cancel button.

At this point, those tracks were on my N97.

Later, I started it again, assuming that it would pick up where it left off. Except it seemed to start from the beginning. I let it get to about 73 tracks done and hit cancel – this time, no extra tracks were on the phone. Strange.

So I’ve given up and am transferring them by having the N97 connected as a mass storage device. It’s much quicker doing it this way – it’s transferring at around 3.5MB/sec. Which is still pathetic since USB 2.0 should allow 480Mbit/sec, but it’s massively faster than it was before.

The only potential is that it’ll transfer all the music over, but the N97 might not pick it up and I’ll have to use Nokia Music. I really hope not.

[ Added later ]

The transfer hasn’t finished yet, but I’ve spotted that this is a documented method of transferring the music, and if the N97 doesn’t immediately notice the music, I can refresh the library. Sweet.

I like things that make life easier. Therefore, I found Lifehacker’s “Top 10 Tiny & Awesome Windows Utilities – Windows” article of interest. I suspect I’ll use Texter to correct my typing, mainly because “the” often gets typed as “teh” because I’m hitting the keys so fast.

I have finally found some good instructions on how to convert videos to an MP4, such that I can play it on my iPod. Clearly, this works only if you’re interested in doing this on Debian, but since that’s what I use, it’s good enough for me.

I’ve been looking in to git quite a lot lately, and have started using it at home. It’s sweet. There’s a good website at http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ which lists various reasons (and comparisons to back up those reasons) why you want to use Git rather than anything else.

Understanding z-index – some good tips on CSS positioning here.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Some CSS is easy. Well, most of it is. Some just confuses the hell out of me. But not “position”, “float” and “clear” any more, thanks to Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps. Sweet.

And the document it references is pretty handy too.

A Double Handful of Programming Quotes is a reasonably short list of quotes, only two of which I’d heard before. The last one (well, the last one when I read it) was by Linus Torvalds, and while I’ve read some quotes attributed to him in the past that I totally don’t agree with, this one I do. There’s a development project that I know that was exactly this – massively over-designed and, to use a quote from earlier in that list, there were no obvious deficiencies. That’s because it was so massively over-designed in an “all or nothing” approach rather than taking the approach of a little at a time. I wish I could give you more detail, I really do, but I think I might get shot by the perpetrator…

I’ll be straight with you. I’ve been involved in the web environment for over 12 years, 10 years “working” for a major professional sports team in the UK and over 8 years working in (non-web design, but heavily internet-based) development. Yes, that’s 18 years, the sports team work was in my spare time, but took up a hell of a lot of my spare time such that it quite often felt like I was working two full time jobs.

Anyway, back to the point. I’ve spent a long time in the web environment, and I have always had a deep hatred for JavaScript, mainly due to the various browsers all handling things completely differently, and as such I really couldn’t be othered.

jQuery might change my mind.

I decided to read up on it today and knocked up a fairly simple example of how to get a nice set of forms which you can choose between with “tabs” at the top. OK, part of it was heavily nicked from jQuery’s documentation, but as they suggest, you take what they have and then brutally hack it to try different things. So I got the tab called “Two” to have another set of tabs within it, which is quite neat. Try it out for your yourself, why don’t you. Hitting the “submit” buttons do work, although it’s fair to say the resultant output isn’t that exciting.

I might have to read up a little more on this jQuery thing; a JavaScript framework is probably just what I’ve been waiting for.

I can only apologise to non-techie people for linking to this article; but if you happen to know about various Linux distributions, then What if Linux Distros were Women? will likely make you chuckle.

Unless you like to pull the wool over your eyes about your specific preference, in which case you’ll not.

You might remember that, a while back, I had problems getting my iPod to work with my computer. As it turns out, that post still generates dozens of hits each day to this blog, far more than all the other posts put together. Not that I’m complaining, mind; it seems to have helped a lot of people.

Anyway, I have now had another problem with a different device that turned out to be the exact same problem. I have a camera that uses an SD card to store images on, and I therefore use an 8GB micro SD card within an SD card adapter in the camera. Then, when I want to transfer the images to the computer, I take the SD card adapter out of the camera, take the micro SD card out of the adapter, stick it in a USB micro SD card reader thingy (not sure what they are actually called) and stick that in the computer in one of my free USB ports. That usually works just fine. That’s them in the picture, although I suspect you might have guessed that already.

Anyway, the problem is that yesterday, when I stuck it in my computer, instead of being able to read the data from the card by accessing it through a drive letter that Windows XP had assigned to it (usually F:, but this time K:), it wouldn’t let me. It showed the drive essentially as empty, but when I looked at the properties of the drive, it said there was no space available and nothing on it (screen dump as at left, click to see full size version).

At which point I’m thinking, “now this is odd”. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with it, suspected that the card had been nuked so I stuck it back in the camera to see whether it was now blank, but it still had the photos on it that I wanted to get off the card. At which point I’m starting to get suspicious.

Then inspiration; it couldn’t be the same problem with the printer now, could it? Since I’m using a USB device and it’s gone, well, nuts on me, I figure it’s possible, so I check the printer and yes, it’s on. I switch it off, then take the USB card reader out and put it back in to the computer at which point it gets allocated drive letter F: and Bob’s your uncle, it’s working fine again.

So; in summary, don’t leave your printer switched on unless you want certain USB devices to act all odd from time to time. I’m sure there’s a rational reason for this somewhere, but so long as switching the printer off resolves my problems, I really can’t be bothered finding out what it is.

This truly is how life in a software company works. Or, more to the point, doesn’t work.

If you’re in to your music and lyrics, and use WinAmp, you might want to try the lyrics plugin. It’s simple yet effective.

The worrying thing about this Dilbert comic strip is it actually happens. A previous CEO of the company I work for got 2 guys to come in and do exactly this; they literally came in, asked how we could make things better, so we told them the same stuff that we’d been telling the board for months. The consultants then put that in a Word document with huge amounts of padding and charged the company £15K. For two days work.

Seriously – this kind of crap actually happens. Scary stuff.

My ISP has never changed. Well, that’s not strictly true; let me re-phrase. I’ve never changed my ISP. It’s Virgin Media, previously known as Blueyonder, previously known as Telewest, previously known as something I can’t remember. I found out recently that my broadband had been increased to 10 Mbit/sec, which basically equates to a megabyte of data per second. I’d never found anything to download that would hit that limit, until right now. I just downloaded Sun’s JDK version 5 (yes, the old version; don’t ask) at 1.1meg a sec. So I got it (84MB) in just over a minute. Sweet.

Always worth trying some tricks to make Firefox ridiculously fast. I can’t get page 2 to load at the moment, though.