Author: Eric Mesa

  • First Impression: Theora

    On the face of things, Theora seems to be a better codec simply based upon the fact that the OGG file is 50 MB compared to the 185 MB MPEG file. I still have to do some tests to see if this comes at the cost of worse quality in the picture or sound, but…

  • Free Video

    To encode your video in a free codec (ie not proprietary), use Theora from Xiph.org. This codec is still in ALPHA stage (as in, not even beta!) so don’t use it for mission critical stuff just yet. However, xine and mplayer already play the codec. If you try to convert an avi to theora (using…

  • The Snow did indeed remain for a while

  • Mid-Feb Snow Haiku

    Winter’s Returning: Snow falls gingerly downward. Will you stay long, snow?

  • A great song

    “Dance, Dance, Christa Paffgen” She’s got the time says she got time on her side Running the rule Commanding the late boys eyes She runs around, knows all the streets by name So mysterious, shadows meet James Dean She’s intoxicating, soon your favorite drink Your black dress in disarray Only dance floor prayers can save…

  • And now for some entertainment

    http://www.ultimateshowdown.org/ It’s a mix of very funny and a bit juvenile. Enjoy!

  • Fedora on VMware Player Part 2

    The important thing about installing a multi-disc distro with VMware Player is that it will create a lock on the disc so that it will tell you to change discs, yet when you do, it says the same disc is still in there. The way to counter this is to hit the CD-ROM button at…

  • Linux on Windows without the Dual-Boot

    VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux…

  • Paying to get past the spam filters

    AOL and Yahoo have announced they will allow companies to pay them money to guarantee their emails will get past the spam filters and appear certified. I don’t like this at all. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s all too easy once this kicks in for companies who aren’t paying to get…

  • GRAMPS 2.2 development

    I have mentioned using GRAMPS for a few posts already. I decided to head on over to their site and see what was on the plate for the next release, version 2.2. I am extremely excited! The map view, if it’s included looks to be amazing! As you can see if you follow the link,…

  • Superbowl Sunday

    Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes. >>> li [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ‘example’,…

  • Becoming multilingual

    Today I started learning Python. I picked it because it’s not only one of the hottest languages right now (outside of C#/Mono), but because GRAMPS is written in Python. I haven’t explored this deeply, but I know for a fact that plugins can be written in Python, if the entire program itself is not Python.…

  • Happy Birthday!

    Happy Birthday Dan.

  • Happy Groundhog’s Day

    Happy Groundhog’s Day! I’ll be taking the server down this weekend for some upgrades. See you on the other side.

  • Been Busy

    So you may be wondering what’s up with the lack of posts. It’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about. I actually have a ton to write about, but I’ve been (nearly obsessively) working on my family tree using the FOSS Linux program GRAMPS. There’s a link for the page over…