Video

While I’ve been home for the weekend, I realized that my webcam was here. Ah yes, my beloved webcam that I bought earlier this year to use with the video/phone program Ekiga. What happened to it?

When I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 in April, I encountered some changes the Ubuntu developers made to the way sound works. I couldn’t get sound working with Ekiga. My microphone wouldn’t work with any application. So that was that… until I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.

All the sound issues seem to have been sorted out, so I’m taking out the old webcam and microphone again with the hopes that someone might call me. You don’t have to be using Ekiga; you should be able to use any SIP client. So hit up sip:jordon@ekiga.net if I’m on Ekiga. This status indicator will say “Call Me!” if I’m online and “Offline” if I’m offline.

I’ve also been having fun with my webcam because I can now use Cheese to record videos with it. And with that, I’ve been delving into the magic of ffmpeg. (We’re getting into some serious Linux stuff right now, so you can just skip ahead if you don’t care.) I was bored and I figured out how to crop a 640×480 video to the ever popular 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.

ffmpeg -i input.ogv -sameq -aspect 4:3 -croptop 60 -cropbottom 60 -aspect 16:9 output.mpg

Explanations: input.ogv is the input file, -sameq indicates that the output file should be of the same quality, -aspect 4:3 forces the aspect ratio to be 4:3 (in case ffmpeg acts up, which I’ve noticed that it does), -croptop and -cropbottom take off that many pixels from the top and bottom (60 in this case), and -aspect 16:9 ensures that the new aspect ratio is indeed 16:9 if ffmpeg doesn’t understand that from the cropping (which it doesn’t). output.mpg is the output file. If you were using a different sized video, you would take off a different number of pixels from the top and bottom.

Turns out that ffmpeg can’t write to Ogg Theora video. But there is a similar tool called ffmpeg2theora that can. The equivalent command for ffmpeg2theora is:

ffmpeg2theora input.ogv –croptop 60 –cropbottom 60 -o output.ogv

This is simpler because ffmpeg2theora doesn’t screw up the aspect ratio while it’s working.

I’m going home soon, and I’ve got another busy week ahead. Let’s get to the links.

Too weird: Anti-Terror Law Requires God Be Acknowledged.

Maybe you’ve heard that “piracy” of “intellectual property” causes 750,000 lost jobs. Where did the number come from? Find out.

And finally, here are 10 Weird Psychology Studies.

People is sometimes kind

So yesterday I had some pretty harsh words. New Yorkers “the worst people on earth” because they are all extremely rude? I said that.

I was wondering how fast I could get a discussion (or flame war) going. The answer: pretty quickly. Casey wrote: “I honestly find it really close minded when someone who has never been to the city says such terrible things about it. Everyone who I have met in new york has been nothing but nice and helpful.” Other people said similar things.

Aw man. What are my impressions from TV and the Internet when someone has lots of actual experiences? Nil, I say. Nil. I was being closed-minded, and I didn’t even know it. This sucks a lot. So the rude New Yorker might be… a stereotype? What the heck, guys. Can we please stop having stereotypes? People are actually probably pretty good everywhere. And that is the end of that.

Here’s something else I have been wondering about: Twitter. It’s rapidly becoming popular. If you don’t know what Twitter is, you’re probably not cool, but I’ll tell you anyway. Twitter is about microblogging, which means writing brief descriptions of what you’re doing at every moment. So basically it’s like Facebook minus everything except the status feature. Kind of.

With many up-and-coming things, I take a look, ask “What’s the point?”, and then eventually decide they’re cool anyway and start using them. But I haven’t gotten on Twitter yet. MySpace and Facebook are one thing (well, two things), but I don’t think anyone should know what I’m up to or what I’m thinking all the time. What’s more, I don’t feel like flipping out if I remember I haven’t updated my Twitter status in the past six hours.

It seems like everyone is using Twitter these days except for everyone I know. But some of you I don’t know. How many of you use Twitter? What do you think of it? How is it useful? I’d like to know what you think.

In case you didn’t already know, here’s why Ticketmaster Is Evil and Must Die.

There are a lot of dumb names for web-based companies, but few are dumber or less pronounceable than these: the 15 Dumbest Names for Web 2.0 Startups.

And in case you didn’t already know why copy protection was bad, here are 25 Arguments for the Elimination of Copy Protection.

I don’t want to be a part of it

I’ve always been interested in going to New York, even with a foreign-language guidebook that I could only kind of understand. The sights of the city speak for themselves… or so I’d like to believe. I’ve never actually been to New York, but I do know how many amazing things there are to see and do. I don’t even know how long it would take to “do” New York. I’d say a week at the very least.

I’m sometimes wary of feeling like a tourist, although I don’t worry about it too much. Whenever I’m traveling anywhere, I like to look around like I’m seeing everything for the first time — because I usually am. (It’s a funny thing, if you’ve never noticed. I noticed this the other day. You can tell if someone’s walking into a room for the first time because they have to scan the whole place, often with their mouth hanging open. If they’ve been there many times before, they know there’s probably nothing new to see, and they keep their eyes in front of them.)

Anyway, I’m not afraid of looking around in wonder and taking pictures of things. Of course, I do it all the time anyway. (Speaking of which, I should probably set up a Flickr account to share the photos I’ve taken over the years.) Even sights that should be familiar to me still invoke awe. I’m talking in particular about Century Tower on the UF campus. I walk by it a lot, but I still find myself glancing upward. At apparently 48 m tall, it’s simply imposing.

Of course, New York (and any other big city) has buildings that are much taller. I would gawk at them shamelessly. I know from reading Overheard in New York for years that tourists do too. But I don’t really want to go to New York anymore. In fact, I’m convinced that New Yorkers, as a whole, are the worst people on earth. They don’t care about anyone but themselves, and they don’t mind letting you know that, tourist or not.

Sure, I wouldn’t wear a Hawaiian shirt or ask for directions to 9/11, but I still wouldn’t feel welcome as a tourist in New York just because I know that the New Yorkers would not provide a friendly answer if I did have a question. If I sat on the subway looking around, I know they would sneer. As interesting as Thoughts of a Crazy RedHead is, I can’t help but wonder what this world is coming to when the titular blogger boasts about elbowing visitors and kicking things that they drop. If I were in New York, I would probably get elbowed and have my stuff kicked.

We’ve all heard of New Yorkers being rude to tourists and each other, but now I realize it’s true. And of course, I could dedicate another whole post about nosy, small-minded people in small towns. (I have a feeling I got some strange looks at a country butcher shop the other day.) With city dwellers indifferent and small town folks too interested, where is it safe to go? Probably the ‘burbs, where there’s minimal human contact.

And now, the links.

As border security agents increasingly become copyright cops, and as auto manufacturers increasingly claim copyright over people’s photographs of their cars, you had to figure this would happen: “Keene Valley resident Jerilea Zempel was detained at the U.S. border this summer because she had a drawing of a sport-utility vehicle in her sketchbook.” It’s not even a good drawing.

I’m glad someone is leading a campaign like this: Don’t Say “That’s So Gay”.

Here are some of those contradictory literary rules. Avoid clichés like the plague!

[Update Sat Nov 29, 2008 15:18 EST (UTC -5): Read my follow-up post.]

Thanks given

I’m at my grandparents’ house, and it’s Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday that may or may not be about gluttony. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, which means that people get the Friday after off and sometimes the Wednesday before also. Even if they don’t have the day before Thanksgiving off, they act like they do. I’m talking about everyone at my school, which was basically abandoned yesterday. I had one class on Tuesday which was dismissed early because I was one of the only people there. Yesterday, one of my classes was canceled and the other one wasn’t. There were only 8 people there when there are normally 50.

What can I say? People love their Thanksgiving. They love the four-day weekend, and would love to have a five-, six-, or nine-day weekend if they could. That leaves me. I wanted to go to my classes, and I also wanted to work and make that money. With my job as webmaster for the Dean of Students Office, I’ve been working on updating a web site for a biennial event that will be held in the spring. The person in charge of the event keeps telling me that Google’s listing for the page hasn’t been updated. Hey Google, go check out the Florida Hispanic Latino Collegiate Forum 2009. You might also want to see how I replaced an ugly JavaScript drop-down menu system with a beautiful, mostly-CSS, screen-reader-and-search-engine-friendly drop-down menu system. Don’t ask me how long it took to make it work on Firefox, IE7, and IE6. Please don’t.

Ah, Internet Explorer 6, the bane of every web designer’s existence. Fortunately, the percentage of IE6 users visiting the Dean of Students Office web site is at 15% and falling. (For this site, it’s about 12%.) But that’s still a significant number. Most of the computers in the DSO now have IE7, so what is a web designer supposed to do when he needs to test a site on IE6? I once resorted to going to the conference room and kicking someone off their computer to use IE6. But it turns out there’s a better solution. CrossBrowserTesting.com has saved my life. You can get free access to various testing environments for five minutes at a time, usually with little waiting. (You can also pay and skip the wait.) Java is required, but that’s no big. Except it doesn’t seem to work on my Ubuntu Linux setup at home; I think it’s the Java check that makes Firefox hang. Does anyone have a fix? (Please, nothing involving Wine.)

Anyway, right. Yesterday was quiet. The campus was practically dead. I could hear every footstep I took. In class, I could hear every stroke of my pen while I was taking notes. I hardly had to overtake anyone on the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a lot of traffic when there normally would have been. It’s a good thing, I guess. Everyone is with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving. And that’s really what Thanksgiving is all about.

Here’s a blog that’s counting down 1000 Awesome Things. It’s up to #886 right now.

Talk about quiet: the quietest place on earth is unnervingly quiet.

This article gives some insight on why cell phones work the way they do: Peering Inside a Mobile Phone Network.

Stuff that might have to do with football

I picked my spring classes last Monday. It’s getting to be that time where I’ll mainly be taking classes relating to my major, computer science. Next semester will be a test. Will I still like my major after going through three computer science classes at once? Hopefully. I also just found out that my major requires me to take a series of courses in some other discipline. I wish I had known about that earlier, but at least I’ll have some time to think about what else I would want to study.

I went to a volleyball game on Friday night with my friend Andrea and some other people from our floor. I had never been to a volleyball game, so I didn’t know what to expect. Andrea was practically incensed that I didn’t know the first thing about college volleyball (it’s played indoors). But still, I had a good time. We won the game too.

I haven’t actually gone to any football games this year. I went to two games last year, but I haven’t felt like it this year. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that I wouldn’t really have anyone to go with, or that I would get a horrific sunburn, or that I would have to spend money, or that I would have to be practically coerced into pretending that a god rules over our country. It would be nice to see the Gators pull yet another win in what could be their third championship season, but the last home game was on Saturday.

I did want to go to the conference championship in Atlanta, but I couldn’t find anyone else willing to go (and give me a ride). If we win the conference championship, we’ll probably make it to the national championship game, which will be held in Miami. Since I live close to Miami, I’d really have no excuse not to go (except maybe that the game is on January 8 and spring classes start on January 6… but whatever!).

I like football, okay?

This year’s elections are over, but they’re not really over. In Minnesota, where Norm Coleman and Al Franken ran for the US Senate, the race was so close that it will probably depend on how the ambiguous ballots are counted. Why don’t people ask for a new ballot when they mess up? Why do they select a candidate and also write in “Lizard People”? Why does each campaign try to claim ballots that obviously weren’t cast for them?

An analysis from the BBC: American v. British teeth.

Here’s yet another Google Maps mashup, this one showing where certain album cover photos were taken.

Dinner

I had a physics exam on Monday. Exams aren’t fun, but Monday exams are especially unfun. Especially when they’re one hour during the day instead of two hours at night. For the previous exams, I had studied for several days beforehand and got a 7/10 each time, beating the class average of 5.5. But when an exam is on a Monday, you have a weekend to study beforehand. Weekend? Study? That didn’t really, um, happen. I studied for an hour or two on Sunday night and another hour on Monday morning. I figured I would be happy to get a to get a 5 or a 6. To my surprise, I knew how to answer 6 of the questions, a figure in line with my previous exams. I made semi-intelligent guesses on the rest.

I got a 9. Apparently I am a good guesser. Now if I can keep my homework and quiz grades where they are, I need a 16/20 on the final to get an A in the class. (Yes, I do keep a spreadsheet to calculate my physics grade. Why do you ask?) But it turns out that even the professors think the class is too hard; they just announced that they’ll be adjusting the grading scale to make it easier.

Overall, the Esperanto Club is going pretty well. Our last meeting, on Monday, was a bust because even fewer people showed up than normal. We have one more meeting this semester, and then it’ll be time for our extra-special end-of-semester event. Many Esperantists celebrate December 15 as the birthday of L.L. Zamenhof, the originator of Esperanto. We’re going to have a general Esperanto-themed celebration at a laid-back restaurant-type place. I’m calling it Esperanto-Vespermanĝo (Esperanto Dinner), which kind of rhymes. If you happen to be around, you’re welcome to come.

Where: Tim & Terry’s Music & More, 1419 NW 1st Ave, Gainesville, Florida, USA
When: Friday, December 5, 2008, 8:00 PM

I was thinking that my Esperanto students (and I) would benefit from meeting and talking to a real Esperanto speaker. I’ve e-mailed about 30 members of Esperanto-USA in the southeastern US, and not one has said they’ll be able to attend. They’re all either too busy, too far away, too old, or something. One person in Miami asked if I knew his friend, so-and-so. The name didn’t ring a bell, but I looked him up on Facebook and I realized that I have a class with him and he lives in my dorm. Too weird. I’ll have to see if he’s interested in Esperanto.

The first stereophonic record was released in 1957. Here’s one of the very first stereo discs for your probably illegal downloading pleasure.

A Parallax Optical Illusion with CSS! This only works if your window manager dynamically redraws windows as you resize them (it probably does, and if it doesn’t, you’ll know).

It’s funny how different social networks are popular in different countries. What is up with that? Anyway, here’s a pretty up-to-date Map of Social Networks’ Popularity Around the World. Apparently the good old USA is the only country where MySpace is the most popular. And I’m surprised that Facebook is so popular in the Middle East. I didn’t know if they were even into that whole social networking thing at all.

I’ve got class

Classes are pretty demanding. At least, the latter half of this week has been pretty demanding. Before that, I was taking it easy, so I guess that just evens out.

Tuesday was Veterans Day, so we had no classes and I had no work. So I went with some friends to Lake Wauburg in the afternoon. The lake and the surrounding area are reserved for UF students and staff. I had never been there, but I found out that it’s a nice getaway. It’s far outside of town, and there are cool things to do. I kayaked. It was fun. We had a picnic too.

Wait. Is that really the only thing that’s been going on? Not really. I have been busy with classes, as I said. I gave a presentation today for my Indian Ocean class. It was, um, within the time limit? And I have a physics exam on Monday. And a tech writing project due Tuesday. And probably other stuff.

Man, this post is short. Maybe it’s the result of a historical trend. November 13ths 2003 and 2005 were similarly unremarkable.

These 100 Very Cool Facts About The Human Body are very cool.

Here are 12 Vintage Cigarette Ads They Would Never Get Away with Now.

From Reason Magazine, a 2.3-megabyte chart explaining the simple process of US immigration: What Part of Legal Immigration Don’t You Understand?

Yeah, computers

Who’s ready to rock and roll?!

Well, too bad. You’re reading a blog post instead.

Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named “Intrepid Ibex”) came out last Thursday, but I didn’t make the time to upgrade for about a week. I was a bit hesitant as I usually am, especially since my friend Mark told me that the update messed up his computer quite a bit. I forget what it did, but it was something scary.

Like last time, I decided not to rely so much on the servers for the upgrade because I figured they would probably still be smashed due to the traffic. While I was home for the weekend, I downloaded the alternate installation CD image via BitTorrent (which I can’t do from my dorm room). When I was ready to upgrade, I mounted the CD image as a CD (details here), thus eliminating the need to burn a physical CD. This saves me time and makes Mother Nature happy.

Still, upgrading your operating system is a little scary. I fear for the safety of my computer and my data the same way a parent might fear for his or her child. The horror stories, like Mark’s, do nothing to help. But usually, everything turns out fine, and things seem to have turned out fine this time. Each release of Ubuntu has a few annoying bugs that are (hopefully) fixed in the next release. Fortunately, Intrepid seems to fix more than it introduces.

First, the new quirks. Intrepid relies less on the xorg.conf file, so when it reset my default keyboard layout, I had to look up how to change it. There’s a semi-graphical way to do this sort of thing now. You have to enter sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, go through every screen, wait while the computer thinks, and then reboot. Well, maybe you just have to restart X, but I usually reboot when that’s called for. I also wanted to edit my actual keyboard layout file. It had moved from /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

GNOME has a new “guest session” feature that creates a temporary account that doesn’t have access to anything important. This would be handy if someone needs to use your computer real quick. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. Good thing people don’t need to use my computer real quick very often, I guess.

Recently, I figured out how to enable gapless playback in Rhythmbox. In Intrepid, this gives me a problem when I’m listening to albums or playlists. Rhythmbox stops playing the last song of the album or playlist just before it’s over. The only solution I’ve been able to figure out so far is to turn gapless playback off.

During the upgrade, I was prompted about overwriting several files. They had to do with the fixes I implemented for this nasty hard-drive killing bug that I thought should have been fixed now. It turns out that the bug hasn’t been fixed, so I tried this fix suggested on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work.

And now some good things in Ubuntu 8.10, in no particular order:

• There’s an option to allow sideways scrolling with the touchpad. I don’t know if this is new, but I’ve never seen it before.
• Ubuntu 8.04′s infamous Adobe Flash/PulseAudio bug is no more. Now I can watch Flash videos without worrying about Firefox crashing. This is really, really, really good. Really.
• The new version of GNOME puts less space between lines when listing things such as files. This saves space in a lot of places, including Pidgin‘s “Buddy Details” view.
• Keyboard controls: I’m once again able to change the volume (I don’t even know when that stopped working), and some of the sensitivity in changing the screen brightness that was lost in Ubuntu 8.04 is back.
• The Wi-Fi light once again lights up if a signal is detected.
• Audacity isn’t at all sluggish or uncooperative like it was in 8.04.
• For the first time, the desktop effects actually seem to work. My graphics driver hasn’t been up to the task in the past, but things seem to be going pretty smoothly with this release. I haven’t had a freeze yet.

Overall, it looks like 8.10 is a big improvement over 8.04.

On Flickr, here’s a photoset of Barack Obama before, during, and after his election night speech. The behind-the-scenes photos are especially interesting. I like this one of Obama watching McCain’s concession speech on TV. The photos aren’t very large, but they’re licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

A probably out-of-date link from our own reader Daniel: Will You Go To Homecoming With Me? Aw, how cute.

Advice I should follow: How to Be Interesting. I already do two of those ten things, so maybe I’m 20% interesting?

Election ’08

It’s been a week since my 1,000th post, but all is not quiet. I just like to rest on my laurels.

I went home for the weekend. My friends Nick and Cristi were having a Halloween party on Friday night, and I couldn’t figure out what I should be. At the eleventh hour, I had an idea.

In seventh grade, Nick and I (and our friend Sean) dressed as (three of) the Beatles. We had light brown suits and black turtlenecks, which (I think) were supposed to be reminiscent of the Beatles’ Shea Stadium garb. We had cheesy wigs too. It was pretty funny.

So I dug through my old stuff and found the original coat and shirt (not the wig, alas, but my hair was long enough that I wouldn’t need it). It was a blast from the past… from the past. Oh, and the party was cool too. I spent the rest of the weekend mainly hanging out with Mike, Nick, and TJ. I wish I could have stayed longer, but Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

Okay, who isn’t sick of hearing about the election? Election Day is today, and I voted today. Yay democracy.

No, I didn’t vote early. I made the time to do it today, and there was hardly a wait at all… probably because everyone else voted early. It was smart of Obama to push early voting; clearly he knows that some of his strongest supporters are college students who are usually too lazy to go to the polls. (At least, that’s what I think the rationale was. A friend told me today that Obama was tacitly telling people to vote twice. What the heck?)

Obama has been leading by a significant margin in all the national polls, so it looks like he’s going to win. If he does, I will be happy.

Deletionpedia is an archive of articles that have been deleted from Wikipedia.

Grapes with an EULA (that is, an End-User License Agreement, like the one you agree to when you install some software).

Do you hate prunes? I Hate Prunes.