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YouTube Begins Transcoding All Video to WEBM

Ryan — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:28:16 +0000

According to the YouTube official blog post. All new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. To put that in perspective, nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day. So far they have already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on their site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM.

From the offical blog post:
To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

YouTube will continue to support the H.264 codec and Adobe Flash player, but they are committed to developing their own HTML5 video player.

Echo text without a trailing newline

Ryan — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:28:20 +0000

By default the echo command will include a trailing newline at the end of a string. There are many times when you may want to suppress this newline for example when you want to format text in a certain way.There are a couple easy ways to do this.

First you can use the ‘-n’ option.
$ echo -n "hello"

You can also use the ‘-e’ option which enables interpretation of backslash escapes. Followed by a ‘\c’ escape character to signal continuation (no automatic line break).
$ echo -e "hello\c"

Format output with the column utility

Ryan — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:19:04 +0000

The column utility is helpful for taking raw data and formatting it in a way that is easier for humans to comprehend. It can take a single column of data and format it into many equally spaced columns. Alternatively it can format multiple rows of data into tables.

In our first example we have a numfile which contains 20 numbers, one on each line, which we output with cat.

$ cat numfile1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

The output is long and you can quickly see with a larger example that the numbers would scroll off the screen. When we pipe this same output to the column command the output is broken into columns and is evenly distributed across the screen.

$ cat numfile | column1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

The ‘-t’ option determines the number of columns the input contains and creates a table. This is helpful when you have data where the fields have various lengths. A good example to demonstrate this is the white space delimited output from /etc/mtab.

$ cat /etc/mtabproc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0 none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0 none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0

With the same output piped to column. the resulting table is much more readable.

$ cat /etc/mtab | column -tproc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0 none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0 none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0 none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0 none /var/lib/ureadahead/debugfs debugfs rw,relatime 0 0 binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0

Insert a timestamp in your Tomboy notes

Ryan — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:35:19 +0000

At can be very handy to automatically add a timestamp to a Tomboy note but the feature is not enabled right out of the box. Fortunately it is very easy to turn on this feature.

Open Tomboy Preferences, click on the Add-ins tab, and select the Tools Add-in dropdown list. Select Insert Timestamp and click on the Enable button to the right.

You can also change the default timestamp format or create your own by clicking the Preferences button.

Now simply press Ctrl+d while typing a note and a timestamp will be inserted at the curser.

How to get Boxee to correctly identify local media files

Ryan — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:31:37 +0000

One of the great features of Boxee is that it can scan your local media collection and retrieves artwork and information from IMDb.com. It does this by doing regular expression matching on each file name to determine what movie, album, or TV episode it is. If you have a collection that is not well named or organized this might not work correctly for a lot of your media files. Fortunately there is a specific way you can name your movie, music, and TV files to give the Boxee the best chance of to correctly identify your media collection.

Again, Boxee uses IMDb.com to identify and retrieve information about your media files. If you are unsure of a proper title, or having problems with identification, check there first and make sure it matches what they have.

TV Shows

TV episode file names are usually consisted of the show’s name, the season (usually indicated by the letter “S”, or just the number), the episode (usually indicated by the letter “E”, or just the number), the episode’s title, and some more info regarding the quality and source of the file.

Boxee currently supports the following types of naming conventions for tv shows.

Show.Title.S##E##.info.extension
(double digits are required: S#E# will not work.)

Examples:

The.Sopranos.S02E01.avi Entourage.S05E01.avi

Please note: Adding the series’ release year in the file will help resolve remakes and TV shows with similar names
(please refer to IMDB.com to find the correct release year of the show)

Movies

Boxee currently supports the following naming convention for movies:

Title.(Year).extension Title (Year).extension Title.[Year].extension Title [Year].extension

It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.

Examples:
The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.(1951).avi The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).avi The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.[1951].avi The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951].avi

It is recommended that you add the movie’s release year for greater accuracy, especially when dealing with remakes.

For multi-part movie both part# and cd# are supported.
Title.(Year).part#.extension

Examples:
The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part1.avi The.Simpsons.Movie.(2007).part2.avi

Music

With music the filename is not as important as the id3 tags.

id3 tags hold all the information such as album name, artist, year, genre and even artwork. Whatever is there, will be presented in Boxee, so be sure to include as much info as possible in your id3 tags.

Renaming Files

You can always use a third party application to help you rename the files. Most media players such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, also allow you to edit those tags, but you can also Google for some dedicated ID3 editors.

Manually Identify a File

In a few cases the file won’t be recognized even with these formatting tips. In this case select the media file and click the “Wrong Video?” button. You can then follow the on screen instructions to search for and the correctly identity the media file.

Convert PDF file to text with pdftotext

Ryan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:56:14 +0000

In many cases it can be helpful to access text from within a PDF file but accomplishing this can be next to impossible. Luckily in Linux there is a command line program called pdftotext which is included with the xpdf package.

This first step is making sure that the xpdf package is installed. In Ubuntu you can use the following command.
$ sudo apt-get install xpdf

Now you can convert a PDF to text with pdftotext. This code will output a file named <filename>.txt
$ pdftotext <filename>.pdf

You can also attempt to preserve some of the formatting within the PDF such as columns and spacing by using the “-layout” option.
$ apdftotext -layout <filename>.pdf

Customize the BASH PS1 command prompt

Ryan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:45:22 +0000

The PS1 environment controls the appearance of the BASH command line prompt. There are a variety of default prompts but they usually include username, hostname, and working directory. You can easily customize your prompt to display information important to you as well as add color and style formatting.

Here we can see the default prompt is “username@hostname working_directory $”.

ryan@workstation ~ $

You can echo the PS1 environment variable and see the character codes which are used to create the output.

ryan@workstation ~ $ echo $PS1

\u@\h \w \$

Here is a list of all the special character codes you can use to build your PS1 command prompt.

Special Character Codes

\a – an ASCII bell character (07)
\d – the date in “Weekday Month Date” format (e.g., “Tue May 26″)
\D{format} – the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
\e – an ASCII escape character (033)
\h – the hostname up to the first `.’
\H – the hostname
\j – the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
\l – the basename of the shell’s terminal device name
\n – newline
\r – carriage return
\s – the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
\t – the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
\T – the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
\@ – the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
\A – the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
\u – the username of the current user
\v – the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
\V – the release of bash, version + patchelvel (e.g., 2.00.0)
\w – the current working directory
\W – the basename of the current working directory
\! – the history number of this command
\# – the command number of this command
\$ – if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
\nnn – the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
\\ – a backslash
\[ - begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
\] – end a sequence of non-printing characters

Lets try a simple change. Make sure you use double quotes so the escape characters get passed on to the variable and not expanded in the shell.

ryan@workstation ~ $ PS1="My Prompt: $ "

My Prompt: $

As you can see the prompt will immediately change to reflect the changes.

We can add the date to the prompt.

ryan@workstation ~ $ PS1="\d \u@\h \w \$ "

Sun Oct 19 ryan@workstation ~ $

Now lets add some color to our original prompt.

ryan@workstation ~ $ PS1="\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\h\[\e[1;34m\] \w \$\[\e[0m\] "

Let go over this in detail.

A style block will display all text that follows with the style it defines. The block contains 3 elements.

Lets look at the first block.
“\[\e[1;32m\]”

“\[" - begin a sequence of non-printing characters
"\e[1;32m" - the semicolon separated list of style/color codes (in this case bold;green)
"\]” – end a sequence of non-printing characters

The first block will display the following username@hostname text in BOLD green.
“\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\h\[\e[1;34m\] \w \$\[\e[0m\] ”

The second block will display the following working_directory text in BOLD blue.
“\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\h\[\e[1;34m\] \w \$\[\e[0m\] ”

The final block resets the colors.
“\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\h\[\e[1;34m\] \w \$\[\e[0m\] ”

Here is a rundown of all the color and style codes.

Color and Style Codes

Style
0 – default
1 – bold
4 – underline
7 – inverse
9 – strikeout

Foreground Colors
30 – foreground Black
31 – foreground Red
32 – foreground Green
33 – foreground Yellow
34 – foreground Blue
35 – foreground Magenta
36 – foreground Cyan
37 – foreground White

Background Colors
40 – background Black
41 – background Red
42 – background Green
43 – background Yellow
44 – background Blue
45 – background Magenta
46 – background Cyan
47 – background White

You can combine multiple codes to create the exact style you want.
“\[\e[1;4;36;47m\]”
This style block defines bold and underlined cyan text with a white background.

To make these changes permanent place your new prompt string like the one below in your ~/.bashrc file in your home directory.

PS1="\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\h\[\e[1;34m\] \w \$ \[\e[0m\]"

This file is sourced every time you start a new interactive shell.