Thoughts and Ramblings

So, I’ve been running Google Analytics on this site for a few months now. It is interesting that about a 1/4 of you are coming to this site directly, another 1/5 are linked here from other sites, and the rest of ya’ll are coming through search engines. More people are finding me through searches than I would have expected.

The search engines was interesting: First is the proportions. Google has the highest with about 95%, then comes yahoo. Rounding up the bottom is 4 searches from aol, and one from altavista (ah, I remember those days). Not one from live, hmm. I would normally attribute this to the very mac nature of my pages (which accounts for the searches on ac3 on the mac), but then I must consider the top searches which land them on my site. For some reason, people are finding me by searches for “female friend”, “girl questions”, and “dating friend”. I am not the top search result for any of those searches (thankfully considering that I am by no means an authority on the subject), but people seems to go far enough down to reach me.

• I have hacked my ATV and installed Perian.
• I also have installed Sapphire to play back the content.
• And lastly, I have installed the USB kernel extensions to allow use of an external hard drive, but this piece is not a necessity.

The second piece I used is Handbrake to actually rip the DVDs.

Most people try to make the choice between AVI or MP4 file formats. There are problems with both of these approaches.

I visited my parents again this past weekend just to get a quick trip away from school. The outdoor kitties are acting much the same, with Guest Kitty lying around as usual for most of the day. I swear she is still too fat, but she may be getting better about that. OC (Orange Cat) has become much more friendly. He loves to be scratched, but he still hasn’t fully learned his name. Although, those who know cats will agree that he could have learned his name and is just not responding to it. Anyway, he posed for me to allow this photo:

It has been a while since I updated this. I promise a followup to my previous post about open source attitudes is coming up. I realized from the comments that a few of my statements didn’t come across exactly as I had intended them.

Well, with the Perian donations, Chris and I went to buy some AV equipment. This enables us to test out Perian in other situations than we had originally intended. Each of us got an AppleTV and a 5.1 system. As a result, I have already figured out a way to do AC3 passthrough in a much less hacky method, which means it should be more reliable. However, I found out that with some decoders, like the one my dad has, even this method still fails. Apparently, some decoders require that the SPDIF header specify that the data is encoded digital audio instead of searching for a correctly formatted header in the PCM data. Oh well.