I love Yaosan Yeo’s FLV Embed WordPress plugin. In fact, while here on TnH I use a variety of plugins, on my new site it’s exclusively FLV Embed.
Now, the plugin ships with an old version of JWPlayer that doesn’t support subtitles. This is bad because that’s just the feature I needed. So, I updated the player version shipped with the plugin and also added a few more tricks to the otherwise great plugin:
- You can now specify a default size in the options. If you don’t give a size in the flv tag, it’ll automatically use the ones specified as default.
- There’s a few more parameter combinations, most notably you can now add subtitles to the parameter list (filename, sub, poster, width, height).
What does this mean? You now have the following possible combinations:
- (filename) Plays just the filename with the default size, no subs or poster
- (filename, subs) Plays the filename with the specified subtitles with the default size
- (filename, subs, poster) Same as above, just with the additional poster
- (filename, subs, width, height) Same as above but without poster and with custom sizes
- (filename, subs, poster, width, height) Same as above but with poster.
Yeah, I don’t really need the poster. If you’re interested you can grab the file here. Be advised that you need to download and unpack the player.swf and yt.swf from the new JWplayer to make this work. Also, you need the original plugin.
Vector Magic is pretty cool. I loved the project back in the days when everyone could use it for free and was happy to see that they started providing a desktop client after going commercial. Even better: The client is utilizing Qt so we have a Windows and a Mac version. But nothing for Linux.
Don’t fret, of course you can run this application with Wine:
The only thing to notice here is that you need to set your Windows version to Windows 98, otherwise the application will always go haywire when loading a picture.
All features are working perfectly, no native DLLs needed.
If you’re using a recent KDE version you’ll notice that Wuala’s Copy & Paste feature doesn’t really seem to work anymore. Instead of using the contents you specify within the application (say, files and folders) it’ll always use the contents of Klipper.
That’s pretty annoying if you don’t know that the contents does indeed come from Klipper. So, just clear your Klipper history and you should be fine.
Despite all my bickering, Visual Studio 2008 is great. It was well worth the money to upgrade.
There are a few things missing from the Professional version, though. The lack of a powerful profiler for everyone still makes me shake my head but I’m using Red Gate’s ANTS profiler anyway, so who cares.
Let’s talk about some updates, add-ins and extras you should definetively try…
- Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
This service pack adds a plethora of new features, enhancements and bug fixes and should be installed right away. Data scaffolding, new WinForms controls, an entire new data modelling framework, countless WPF enhancements… you name it, it’s probably in the SP already.
- PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008
This package contains numerous nifty functions that’ll improve your sourcecode and workflow. Remove unnecessary usings, open command prompts on the fly, way better undo… just read about the features on the homepage and try it, you won’t regret it.
- AnkhSVN
I don’t like SourceSafe. For it’s requirements it gives back very little. In comparison Subversion performs great: You don’t need a server or anything, just create a repository on your local disk, check in your files and start branching, merging and keeping book of your changes. And best of it all: It’s free. Now, that’s where AnkhSVN comes into play – it adds TortoiseSVN’s power into Visual Studio. Don’t know how I worked without this.
So, what’s missing on this list? Let me know 
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I think I just spent more time in Windows than the last 2 years together. GTA IV is fun, easy as that.
I don’t know why people keep nagging at the game, it’s great and just what I’d expect of a new title of the franchise.
The only thing I can really get mad about are the horrible DRM-esque copy protection, the need to register at least 2 accounts (1x Rockstar Social, 1x Windows Live) and the massive memory leak that brings down the performance after a few hours of play.
So, come on Rockstar… Instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars to keep the game copy-protected, spend a few thousands on debugging the PC version – for Pete’s sake. It really isn’t funny and the fact that the game doesn’t even start with ATi graphic cards is… ok, that’s to be expected 
.
Okay, now this is really really bad, starting with MySQL 5 there is a strict mode. What does that mean? The strict mode will not silently swallow all your data and just cut off what’s left but throw an exception back at you when you try to insert more data than the field type allows.
Sweetcron is really vulnerable for this kind of problem. It always stopped fetching the feeds to complain about a single post. Now, while fixing the problem on the software side would be preferrable I opted for a simple configuration change on the server side this time.
All you really need to do is altering the my.ini line that activates the strict mode:
sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”
will either become
#sql-mode=”STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”
or
sql-mode=”MYSQL40″
Simply restart the MySQL service afterwards and sweetcron should eat the posts without complaining (I don’t even want to think about the loss of data here, but who cares?).
Gee, there I am, not updating my installation for ages and now I’m wandering the path of nightly-builds again.
WordPress 2.7 is amazing. The new interface not only looks great but also offers a lot: You can collapse your toolbar to save space, the auto-updater has been improved and now supports updating WordPress’ core as well.
Quite slick, can’t wait for the final .
Far Cry 2 comes with a nasty copy protection. Actually, it’s more like a strict DRM variant that needs to be activated online and can only be used X times when not properly deactivating it.
You can manually revoke an activation without uninstalling the game by simply calling:
FarCry2.exe /revoke
Easy, huh? I’d prefer Ubisoft to not use any of these bugger DRM crap at all, but then again we all know the story of software piracy (note: pirates probably have a better version without this crap, so this whole thing is totally beyond the point anyway!).
Gee. I didn’t get around to post this but the stable wrapper v. 0.0.1.0 has been released onto Wuala.
Changes include the latest adjustments to the API (doesn’t include the changes to the thumbnail method, as this came later) and a little cleanup/documentation in the sourcecode itself.
I think it’s a nice, easy-going wrapper to work with that doesn’t make a big deal out of every little event (as a matter of fact, it doesn’t throw any exceptions whatsoever $me thinks).
Since there isn’t much demand for fast-paced development and I’m kind of absorbed into FarCry 2 at the moment, I probably won’t bother working on the Wuala Browser Sample (the application that should succeed ToyBox at one point) for a while — that doesn’t mean I won’t play around with it, though.
Wowzers, finally there’s a version of AIR available that has an (almost) equal set of features to it’s Windows and Mac counterparts.
Before you can install this new version you do have to uninstall your old AIR applications (as they won’t work with the new version anymore) as well as the AIR runtime itself. Both can be done through your package manager.
Features now include working trayicon support, kwallet integration and some other goodies.
There are many things vi can do, for instance invoke other commands to process files. That’s pretty cool.
Since installing Okteta isn’t always an option, here’s a small snippet on how to work simple capabilities into vi:
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vi -b myfile
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[in vi]: %!xxd
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[to return to previous view]: %!xxd -r
Pretty easy, pretty handy. Something to keep in mind. Another thing to keep in mind: Always open binary files with the -b switch, otherwise you’ll damage the files when saving them with vi.
NX is great. I’m deeply in love with it. Sometimes it’s acting like a real jerk, though. The NX Web Companion is installing a lot of crap into the active user’s profile. The NX client writes stuff in the active user’s profile. Both isn’t really convenient for me.
I prefer to have all my settings with me on a USB thumbdrive. So, in the spirit of PortableApps I’ll show you how to simply turn NX into a portable application.
First thing to do is installing NX client on a machine, if you have installed already – that’s fine. Copy the entire program folder to a new directory structure like NxClientPortable\App (I’ll follow the PortableApps schema here). In NxClientPortable create a new directory named “Data” and a batch file with the following contents:
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@echo off
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set USERPROFILE=%CD%\Data
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App\nxclient.exe %*
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reg delete /f /va "HKCU\Software\Cygnus Solutions"
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reg delete /f /va "HKLM\Software\Cygnus Solutions"
That’s it. Start the batch file and you’ll be fine. No need for installations, no files in some stranger’s profile. Everything goes back to your thumbdrive neatly.
This example also demonstrates why batch still isn’t dead: The USERPROFILE variable will be changed just within the scope of our batch file, all other applications will still use the path specified in the “global” instance of the variable.
The end of the world must be near: nVidia released a new version of their GNU/Linux driver that fixes some of the annoyances regarding RENDER performance. Given you apply some manual adjustments to the configuration the new driver performs in a somewhat usable manner.
It is still far from the beauty that ATI users can enjoy (in terms of performance) but it’s an immense improvement over the old, totally unusable slideshow.
If you’ve been a constant reader of my blog (and of course I know you are ) you could hardly have missed the ugly “0″ date in the archives.
Turns out that this 0 date was caused by all the old drafts I had saved but never published. Deleting the drafts would help, but simply assigning them a date seemed like a more sane solution. Voila, problem solved.
As Michael points out there’s a slight problem with the CoreAVC For Linux patchset that enable Mplayer to take advantage of CoreCodec’s h.264 decoder — with recent changes in the sourcecode the old build_patch.pl script doesn’t produce usable output anymore.
There still is a way to compile Mplayer with the modification, though: Mithun Diwakar altered a patch to work against current subversion checkouts. How long this one will hold… we don’t know. But I think it would be preferable to fix up the patchbuilder. Maybe I’ll hack around on it during the weekend (no promise ).
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