clefru's Blog

After the most expensive car check and maintenance in my car owner history few weeks ago, my car died. Right in the middle of nowhere. And even worse, on my way to ICFP07. Unfortunately, most of my planning rests on having a car, as my accommodation is not within Freiburg. Taking a plane/train to Freiburg and renting a hotel is simply way over my budget. I hope to have a working car by tomorrow, so I can make at least 50% use of my registration. Otherwise the registration fee will become a write-off in my books. As I got home (from the middle of nowhere -- story on its own), I was so frustrated that I started to hack C. Here is an updated XFT patch (aka anti-aliasing support) for ion-3rc-20070927. Check the changes the patch does to your system.mk. Yes, yes, I will switch to XMonad soon.

Using the recent Adobe Flash plugin in Firefox is a two edged sword. On one hand, it gives you the never ending joy of useless YouTube videos, but on the other hand it crashes your browser every 24h on average (only if you are also using Flashblocker which reduces flash content activation by 80%, namely all the annoying ads). Presumably because of Flash, nspluginwrapper was invented to wrap up software of vendors that are incapable of producing 64-bit version of their product. nspluginwrapper works by providing a proxy to Firefox that acts as regular plugin, but actually spawns off a separate process that runs in 32-bit mode that links in the shared object of the plugin. We can use this construction to remove Flash from the intimate dlopen embracement of Firefox and move all negative side effects of beta quality software into a subprocess. The following trick works for all 32-bit browsers, whether the rest of your distro is amd64 based or native i386. If you are using a 64-bit brow...

My last drive-by-software-hacking turned out to be useful at the end. I hacked up a basic QT RLE (aka Animation) encoder for ffmpeg, sent the patch to ffmpeg-devel but without further intentions to work on merging. Thanks go to Alexis Ballier for stepping up and refining my patch until it was polished enough. With recent version of ffmpeg, you can create a 1280x1024 screencast for your running X session at display :0.0 with ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1280x1024 -i :0.0 -f oss -i /dev/dsp -vcodec qtrle /tmp/lala.mov after running configure ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-x11grab --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac Unfortunately rgb555 encoding was removed, so you are only able to create videos rgb32 video streams (aka 24-bit color depth).