If you ever find yourself needing to do video playback and format conversion with a wide variety of video formats on Windows, I have a few key free pieces of software to recommend:
VirtualDub: a video capture and processing tool that can very quickly read, manipulate, and write AVI files in many formats (VirtualDubMod, a spinoff, handles even more formats) (Wikipedia description)
VirtualDub filters: the other great thing about VirtualDub is that there are many plugin filters available that implement a varietyof video/image processing algorithms
ffdshow: a codec (decoder and encoder) package that installs as a native Windows DirectShow filter, enabling playback of many modern video formats in Windows Media Player
Auto Gordian Knot: a tool for converting DVD video content into XviD or DivX or x264 MPEG4 video
MediaInfo: reveals the codecs used for video and audio contents within a video file
The DOAJ lists scholarly journals that give free access to the full text articles. Some papers are pretty decent — I poked around and found the International Journal of Signal Processing interesting.
The IR & EO Systems Handbook — the definitive reference for Infrared and Electro-Optical systems — is available for free. For scanned PDFs, the quality is high. Unfortunately, the fact that they are scanned means that the text is not searchable.
Volume 1: Sources of Radiation
Volume 2: Atmospheric Propagation of Radiation
Volume 3: Electro-Optical Components
Volume 4: Electro-Optical Systems Design, Analysis, and Testing
Volume 5: Passive Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 6: Active Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 7: Countermeasure Systems
Volume 8: Emerging Systems and Technologies
For some reason, TiVo Desktop version 1.9.3 (008) for Mac OS X is a processor hog for me. Especially after I’ve committed the crime of actually running iTunes or iPhoto on a given day.
I’ve noticed that stopping and starting TiVo Desktop improves this situation, but I’ve also gotten personally tired of doing this, so now I offer you a way of automating an escape from this monotony. Use the plist file here:
saved in the /Users/uname/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder with a name something like com.QuickSilverWatch.plist in combo with these launchd instructions. Or, just use lingon as described is this Mac OS X Hint. Either way, you’ll need this applescript to actually reboot TiVo Desktop:
-- open Sys Prefs and wait for it to open
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
end tell
-- stop/start TiVo Desktop w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
delay 1
try
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Preferences"
-- set frontmost to true w/10 trys
repeat 10 times
try
click menu item "TiVo Desktop" of menu ...
"View" of menu bar 1
delay 1
tell window "TiVo Desktop"
click button "Stop"
click button "Start"
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
end tell
end tell
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
-- quit Sys Prefs
tell application "System Preferences"
quit
end tell
Babynamewizard.com has a tool called NameVoyager that shows a
graph of popular baby names over time. The data is massaged out of the
Social Security Administration’s records. The really cool thing is that
you can type parts of names and get instant feedback as the popularity
graphs change. It’s fun to explore — check it out.
The plots show the 1000 most popular names versus time whre the
popularity axis is the number of names per million babies. When looking
at the “all names” graph (the first graph that comes up as you visit the
website), it’s interesting to see observe an upward trend in name
diversity since the 50’s. This trend shows up directly as the thickness
of many name-lines decreases and indirectly because the overall number
of top 1000 names displayed goes down. In the 50’s, 95% of the names
were in the top 1000 while in 2005 only about 75% were in the top 1000.
Go find interesting trends.
A journalist goes undercover as a salesman at 2 car dealerships. Read
it if you’re considering buying a car (or at least look at the
recommendations at the end).
In The IDE Divide, Oliver Steele uses his analytical knife to split developers into language mavens versus tool mavens. What would you rather use on your next project?
Anyterm and Ajaxterm provide a way to use SSH (remote login) through any browser. Once this is setup, it would be slightly easier than downloading PuTTY.
Creating passionate users is becoming one of my favorite websites. Yesterdays post on why face-to-face matters notes how video chat is very close to face time but lacks in the eye contact department:
Video chat is better than any other form of non face-to-face, because you get facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, AND real-time responsiveness. But—he said there’s still a very unsettling feature for the brain because there’s really no way for BOTH speakers to make eye contact! … there’s no way to have the camera right in your face, in a place where you can still look into the other person’s eyes. Bottom line: You can see the camera or the person’s eyes… but not both.
I wonder if some fancy image processing could be applied so as to give the illusion of eye contact between both parties.
In most times, places, and industries over the past century, managers who worked their employees this way would have been tagged as incompetent — not just because of the threat they pose to good worker relations, but also because of the risk their mismanagement poses to the company’s productivity and assets. A hundred years of industrial research has proven beyond question that exhausted workers create errors that blow schedules, destroy equipment, create cost overruns, erode product quality, and threaten the bottom line. They are a danger to their projects, their managers, their employers, each other, and themselves.
I like iStockphoto. It’s much easier that looking through huge clip art galleries — you just search and buy royalty-free photos right on the website. I enjoy looking for burros, donkeys, and mules.
Luxagraf mates markdown and XeTeX (LaTeX with MacOS X fonts) to produce a wonderful offspring: hi-fi text. In goes clean, minimal markdown text. Out comes beautiful typeset pdf documents.
I installed Broadband Optimizer, a program that aims to increase network speed on Mac OS X by increasing TCP memory buffers, effectively making data come in bigger chunks.
I used 3 online bandwidth testers to quantify the improvement (clearing Firefox’s cache between each test). I took the best of three runs of each test.
Justin Williams of MacZealots.com gives some good tips on installing and using subversion on Mac OS X. I found subversion indispensable in keeping track of all the code and writing for my master’s thesis.
Haskell (a programming language) has no update operator. There is no order of operations. Find out more from this introduction to a “functional” programming language.
Face and text recognition for your personal photos. Upload, do little training, then search by face. “Hey computer, find me all the photos that have both Tim and Chad because I’m to lazy to browse my 30000 thumbnails.”
Try it. (only Firefox and IE6 currently supported)
Here’s a nice guide for using the mod_rewrite Apache web server module for making nice URLs. I use it to make my blog URL dailyburrito.com/blog instead of dailyburrito.com/blah/blah/morecrap/blosxom.cgi and to make www.dailyburrito.com map to dailyburrito.com (for some reason, I really hate that www).
I altered the configuration of Apache web server that comes installed Mac OS X in two spots to accomplish the above goals. First, I edited the main Apache configuration document by adding the following line at the very end of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, instructing Apache to look at my own configuration files.
Include /private/etc/httpd/users/*.conf
Then, I created the file /private/etc/httpd/users/alan_apache_setup.conf that looks like this:
# Blosxom script redirect
ScriptAlias /blog /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/blosxom.cgi
# Redirect visitor by domain name
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dailyburrito.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dailyburrito.com$1 [R,L]
A transcript of Robert F. Kennedy’s amazing speech about the some of the horrific things that we are doing to our environment. It touches on everything from coal-burning power plants to mercury in the water to strip mining to cultural values to draft dodging. Long, but well worth the read.
When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don’t add anything… you only take away. Dignity is deadly.
This feature is proposed in their issue tracking database as Issue 1256. It recently got bumped from consideration for version 1.3 and is now being considered for 1.5. For some reason, the fact that subversion doesn’t keep the last modification date of files under version control is very annoying for me.
Woo hoo! My final report for class is now complete and available in html and markdown text formats. The report describes the eigenface and fisherface techniques for facial recognition and includes MATLAB source code.
Sandvox looks to be a very promising tool for creating websites
that look great and comply with standards. You can download the public
beta now and try it out.
