Category: Blog

Can’t put it in words…

After months of using Archlinux on my system I just want to say three words: Thank you, Debian!

I can’t put it in words but using Debian is just such a gratifying experience; the vast amount of packages and the great tools make this my absolute favorite GNU/Linux distribution. What makes Debian so attractive is the fact that a lot of non-free software (like Adobe Air, NoMachine’s NX etc.) has packages for it.

And yeah, I’m a fanboy.

FLV Embed Modification

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.

Woot!!

You know, by now I’m a little reluctant to upgrade my OpenSolaris installation. b116 didn’t boot, b117 crashed all the time… really not a good omen, so I was stuck with b111 which has it’s own share of problems. But 122 seems to work rock-solid and for the 2 weeks I have it up and running from the dev repositories it didn’t give me any tears, crashes or drama of any sort.

All bugs that plagued me before have been fixed: The CIFS server is running fine, multiple VirtualBox machines do not bring down the system anymore, the NICs stay up and there’s no more boot issue. I’ll probably wait a few more weeks before upgrading my pools, though. You know, I trust you, SUN… but I have learned from past mistakes 🙂 .

On a exactly as bright note: Haiku has it’s first Alpha out in the wild. While the system apparently doesn’t like to be booted from a USB thumbdrive + GRUB2 right out of the ISO, it works great when actually burning the ISO to CD-ROM. The USB stack works great, networking is a joy; the Alpha recognized nearly all devices of my Vostro 1500 laptop, only the touchpad didn’t want to work (USB mouse solved that), the webcam was identified but when trying to connect it through Cortex the output module went a little haywire. Sound, graphics adapter (+ resolution), NIC – all in working order.

Haiku R1/Alpha screenshot
Haiku R1/Alpha screenshot

This is just great, awesome work! I’m still waiting for the day when BeOS makes it’s comeback onto my desktop 🙂 .

Solaris lashing out

If you’ve been following my twitter feed you probably know that I’m not in a good mood when it comes to OpenSolaris:

Not only does 2009.06 ship with a notoriously broken CIFS server, effectively rendering zfs set sharesmb=on useless for me, it also doesn’t play nice when upgrading to snv_118 from the dev repositories. On 118 I’m getting hit by some strange xc_free_msg stuff that has apparently been fixed in 119 (which I can’t use because the SXCE build for 119 has severe problems, apparently).

Now, VirtualBox on the other hand is only a minor pain in the buttocks. For the entire 3.x series VirtualBox constantly locks up OpenSolaris (preferrably in the middle of the night so I can get to work first thing in the morning). The fix is available (again), you only have to build VirtualBox from source. Since this is not an option for me, I simply went back to the last version of the old 2.x series. Yes, this does fix the problem but it leaves me somewhat unsatisfied.

Makes me hope that Sun fixes a load of things in it’s products till the 2010.02 release, so it’ll be a pleasant upgrade 🙂 .