Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Wall•E

Some friends and I went to see Wall•E last night. It is definitely the funniest movie I have seen all year and I’m glad to see that Pixar hasn’t gone too far downhill. I was afraid that Disney would attempt to destroy them, but it seems they haven’t succeeded quite yet. On the other hand, the movie did have a lot of technical point which were severely wrong. One scene had a space ship traveling through a large sphere of satellites to get away from Earth.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, June 28, 2008

Xcode Filling Log Files

If anyone has ever used Xcode, and tried to debug an app through console messages, then they know how annoying this can be without the development tools getting in the way. An example for me is debugging a frontrow plugin, where sometimes it is easier to print debug info to the console rather than the trouble of using a second machine to fire up gdb. Anyway, Xcode is very good at spewing lots of extraneous and effectively useless information to the console log, such as the following: 6/13/08 5:19:17 PM Xcode[32580] Xcode(32580,0xb0103000) malloc: free_garbage: garbage ptr = 0x456bee0, has non-zero refcount = 1 Of the past 4000 messages in the console, over 3500 of these were xcode.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, June 13, 2008

Rescuing videos from AVI

As I wrote in a previous entry, people have used avi for things which it was never designed. One of the more notable examples is multi-channel audio bitstreams. In addition, the people who make such files went as far as to do in the completely wrong manner. So, as a result, I looked for a way to rescue data from the avi format so it is actually usable. Basically, use mkvmerge from mkvtoolnix to convert the avi file to an mkv file.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, May 29, 2008

Expensive Hotels internet access

Well, Infocom is over and I am back home. While I was there, I often used my iPod Touch to do quick things on the net when pulling out the laptop would have taken too much time. The only issue is the wireless AP there required a web based login where one would have to enter in the email address they used to register for the conference. This can be annoying at best on the iPod when all I really wanted to do was look up something really quick and this stage takes 50-80% of the time.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 21, 2008

The Hall of Shame

So, the good folk over at FFmpeg have stared a Hall of Shame. Basically, it is a page of projects which are using FFmpeg in direct violation of its license. The developers have asked that people link to that page, thereby increasing its ranking in Google. Well, here’s my part. Why should I care about this? Simple, if you look at the list of projects using FFmpeg, you will see Perian listed.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 21, 2008