Yay, the new version of Ubuntu is out.  With it comes plenty of cool new features (how awesome does the start up and login screen look now?) and also plenty of opportunities for things to break when I’ve become so accustomed to having them working.  At least it’s not Windows though — I think I may just gnaw my own limbs off before I have to get forced to upgrade to Windows 7 for gaming reasons. (more…)

Wow, ffmpeg is really great for converting multimedia.  Unfortunately, the support for MP3 audio doesn’t appear available by default.  Sure, it can decode MP3 audio and write to an MP3 container, but what about having an actual MP3 codec available?

sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg

As a little bonus, there’s a number of other codecs that come along with it too (xvid etc).  I’m not too fussed on them but now I can use `-acodec libmp3lame` as my audio codec and have the FLV outputted with MP3 audio.  There’s a problem with either the default FLV encoder or VLC not being able to playback the audio with default settings, but this seems to work.

That said, it remains to be seen if this’ll cause any problems with FLV playback, but the players I’ve used so far (web-based) seem happy enough.

..and how true that is.  Today’s time consumer is directly related to just 1 misplaced line of a buildout configuration (and presumably something that’s changed somewhere else).

The result

After much hunting and hunting, it turns out my Zope2 Fake Eggs weren’t being generated. (more…)

Today’s interesting post concerns finding and replacing terms across multiple files via a simple command.  Thanks to this great blog post, it all comes down to one single line.  I had found a previously-useful line of code, but the problem with that one was the fact that it used the find command.  The problem with that is that if you do a wildcard search for * in a directory, it’ll give you back ‘.’ as a result.  Trying to work with that just wasn’t happening.

So, without further ado, the command:

grep -lr -e ‘<searchterm>’ * | xargs sed -i ’s/<searchterm>/<targetterm>/g’

Just remember, the first grep command is doing Regex, so escape anything Regex-y (dots, slashes, etc) or otherwise “prepare for unforseen consequences” when running sed.

What a complicated situation it is trying to use all of the above-mentioned pieces of software together. In all seriousness, Virtualenv is now appearing to be the best thing since sliced bread for me to help out with making Plone/Zope usable under Jaunty. (more…)