This is painfully obvious with AAC and the formats that use it (think mp4).

Luckally, playback can be assured by using a nice arrangement of plugins that are downloaded just in time to play the offending file on your computer (thanks ubuntu).

This help doesn’t extend to re-encoding though, so for those of you lucky enough to have an mp4 capable phone (like the sony erricsons), you can find that putting the latest Bleach on your phone to be an exercise in frustration.

The reasons for this are numerous and complexe but come down to the simple fact that if cannonicle put aac encoders in Ubuntu they’d be sued to kingdom come in the states (thank god I don’t live there ).

Help is at hand though, since even if the versions of the enncoding tools included with Ubuntu don’t come equiped, you can re-compile them so that they work as intended.

First up: ffmpeg

FFmpeg is one of the many swiss army knives used for video encoding available with Linux. It’s probably the easiest to use, and like it’s cousins, the ubuntu version comes cripled.

What to do?

First of all, make sure we have what’s needed to re-build it

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg

Then add a few libraries (that add the magic support)

sudo apt-get install libfaac-dev libfaac0 libfaad-dev libfaad2-0 libfaad0

Finally, get the source code to ffmpeg

mkdir ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
apt-get source ffmpeg

Now the fun starts, you should have 3 files and a directory before you.

Cd into the directory.

Now let’s move this thing arround a bit:

Open: debian/rules

This file tells dpkg how to build ffmpeg, we want to add a config flag so go to the lines that start with “confflags” and add on to one of them:

–enable-libfaad –enable-libfaac

Save, and quit, now all you have to do is re-build the package

dpkg-buildpackage

go have a coffee while it builds, and then install the result:

cd ..
dpkg -i ffmpeg*

To use, something like this is needed:

ffmpeg -i Source.avi -vcodec h263 -b 400 -s 352×288 -acodec aac -ab 64 -ar 48000 -ac 2 -f mp4 Dest.mp4

Update:

For the lazy, here are the debs that need installing:

The only problem came from the kernel, which now calls  ide drives ’sd…’ instead of ‘hd…’ so hda1 becomes sda1.

Update grub or face the consequances.You have been warned!

And because spammers seem to love them :-[

In a nut shel, you can use this code for your project, but any modifications that you make to ring_log must be published under the Gnu AGPL

This weekend, I had an urge to catch up on one of the umpteen projects that I’d like to start, so I attacked a ring logger.

Basically, a ring logger, keeps the log messages in a ring buffer, which can be dumped when interesting circumstances arrise.

The particularité of this one is that it’s pure javascript, and dumps as a ‘POST’ request to a url. This allows for much improved debugging of js-rich web pages, whilst not filling up the web browsers memory with useless logs.

It depends on ToutouJS but doesn’t have a lot of calls, so it should be easilly portable if anyone finds the need.

 Usage

First off, you have to include the relevent files:

<script src="js/toutou/toutou.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="ring_log.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then you just log away (the mores the better):

js.ring_log.log(js.ring_log.DEBUG,'Test','Test message');

Finally, to retrieve your log, ie dump the buffer:

js.ring_log.dump();

Et voila!

For testing purposes, the logger is pre-configured to call a script log.php in the same directory as it is in, and has a buffer size of 10, both parameters changeable in the source. The different parts of the log messages are seperated by a ’splitter’, by default ‘==|==’, this is also configurable.

js.ring_log.requestUri='log.php';
js.ring_log.log_data_size=10;
js.ring_log.splitter='==|==';

And that’s just about it, hope you find it usefull

Update: forgot to add the .tgz, oups :$

That’s what happened to me with Zabbix yesterday. I was going through some items and cleaning up, when suddenly, 4 hosts went off-line. Except that they hadn’t.

I couldn’t understand why Zabbix refused to see them (the agents were responding fine).

I finally found out that it was because of the way that Zabbix calculates the ’status’ item, which has a value of 0 if alls well, and 2 if the host is off-line.

Zabbix looks at the first item to be taken of the host, if that item returns an empty string, Zabbix decides that the host is dead and raises the alarm, even if the host has 150 other items all working perfectly. This bizzar to say the least, but workable. If this happens, a quick fix is to deactivate the offending Item, so that the first Item checked returns a value, then the host comes back

Any how, I thought I’d just document this in case anyone else starts loosing hair over the issue

OTOH, here’s a couple of quotes for the day:

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

- Mark Twain (attributed)

OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

- Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

La Maison des Etudiants (1991-2003) était une association d’aide aux étudiants, qui grâce aux emplois jeunes, entre autre fournissait divers service aux étudiants adhérants de l’association. Notament les copies et l’informatique (principalement ce de quoi je m’occuper):

J’y étais entre 2001 et 2003, et l’expérience était pour le moins formateur,

-Premier Boulot
-Premier Linux
-Premiers projets aussi

Vers la fin j’avais même fait un premier déploiement sur les posts disponibles ‘grand public’, qui aurait pu être pire point de vue désastre ;).

Malheureusement, pile au moment où mon Emploi Jeunes arrivait à term, la fac à décider de faire couler l’asso pour reprendre l’activité, et c’est ainsi que s’est terminé une expérience que je n’oublirai sans doute jamais.

Un coucou à tout ceux qui se reconnaîtront de cette époque (y compris l’Afev et Velocampus, dés assos nés de la MDE et qui battent toujours de leurs propres ailes): Xavier, Claire, Laurent….