ffmpeg and FLV on Ubuntu

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 …

in Linux · Tue 22 September 2009

Git and checkouts by date

Cheers to this very handy post for posting details from Nabble on how to check out a git branch based upon the date it was commited.  If I haven’t modified Wordpress to turn off the character replacement, then watch out because the double-quotes and double-dash will need to be checked before running the command:

git checkout `git rev-list -n 1 --before="2009-07-27 13:37" master`

A very easy way to flick back to a given revision.

in Git · Mon 07 September 2009

Buildout: the biggest problems have the simplest answers…

..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).

in Buildout · Thu 03 September 2009

Deliver me from … Deliverance?

Always one for being on and beyond the bleeding edge of new technology, I’ve (with the help of colleagues) been setting up a new technology for applying themes to web sites.  In particular, I’m applying Deliverance to Plone and whilst I’m not the first one to venture out into the wilderness this way, I’ve got to be thinking that I could be one of the few people documenting their experience.  Ah, but where to begin?

in Themes · Wed 02 September 2009

Migration complete (mostly)

Well, that’s always a good reason to let out a sigh of relief: I’ve managed to migrate most of the content from my previous blog over at Wikidot (which wasn’t really a blog so much as it was a hacked wiki). So, you’ll find a lot more content here than before, which is good, because it makes me look like I’m actually dedicated to creating content ;-)

I’ve also relaxed restrictions on comments (and added CAPTCHA security) so comment away people, if you’re reading this.  Just don’t expect much love if you spam …

in General · Thu 20 August 2009

Plone: Re-ordering Viewlets

Just responded to a post on the Plone Nabble forums (here) about how to re-order viewlets.  In particular, this one is little different (but not terribly so) because the original poster wanted to put the breadcrumbs above the global sections (global tabs in Plone).  Normally, this is straight forward because you just use a Generic Setup profile (viewlets.xml) and use an order manager to move your viewlet.  This, however, is a teeny bit more complicated because you’ve got one viewlet that’s outside of another viewlet manager.

Without further ado, my post from the forums:

Check out http …

in Plone · Wed 19 August 2009

Creating & distributing a new Plone/PyPI product

It’s amazing to see how technologies can be so smoothly integrated these days.  I’m talking, at least in this instance, about how setuptools works with PyPI (and then Plone.org’s Products section) and allows you to distribute your product(s) to the world.  So far, I’ve just got the one — collective.portlet.googleapps — but I’m sure time will pass and I’ll have some more useful things to contribute. Here’s a summary of what I did:

1. Create the product.  ZopeSkel is a wonderful help here for Plone products. [I lie a little bit in …

in Python · Mon 17 August 2009

Virtualenv, Plone, and Centos 5.x

EDIT: Watch out for python-ldap 2.3.10, the latest version at time of writing. Seems like there’s an issue with it and Centos 5.4. Forcing python-ldap to be version 2.3.8 works, though. (easy_install python-ldap==2.3.8)

Previously, you might have read about setting up a Virtualenv on Ubuntu Jaunty. Now, that was reasonably painless since python-virtualenv and python-setuptools is in the Ubuntu repo. Whether it’s my Centos servers and their misguided repos or me just not being able to find such a related rpm packages, Centos just needs little more love to get …

in Plone · Thu 09 July 2009

VLC Has Turned 1!

I may well be late to the party and a little late to celebrate, but I’ve just made the startling discovery that VLC 1.0.0 has now been released.

I’ve been using VLC since (before, actually) I thought there had to more to playing videos than needing extravagent codec packs like K-lite or anything similar to be installed on your system.  It’s been that long that the first version I used, if I remember correctly, wasn’t actually being specifically used for client-side file playback and was supposed to be geared towards video streaming over a …

in Software · Wed 08 July 2009

Find and replace across files - Linux command line

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 (replacing ‘search’ with your search term and ‘target …

in Linux · Mon 06 July 2009