A Man and his Penguin

I’ve had it up to here (points to neck) with Nero.

I’ve been digitising video on Windows for the past few days, and I’m not having a fun time. My video capture device only works on Windows, so I figured that I’d edit, transcode and burn the material in Windows too; but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around Nero.

Crazy, isn’t it? I never had this trouble doing those tasks manually on my old Macs, but in Nero (which does everything for you) I can’t figure out what I’m telling Nero to do. Its interface attempts to make the tasks as simple as possible, but in the end it causes the user to not know what the program is trying to do, or how to stop it from doing what it’s doing.

I had a number of clips encoded at 8000kbps. I put them into Nero, it told me that they were all 5073kbps and wouldn’t fit onto one DVD. Okay, so I used the Export function to downsample some of them to 3300kbps, then put them back into the project. Nero told me that they were still 5073kbps!

I couldn’t figure out what was happening, so I ended off burning the disc sans the last clip which didn’t fit on there.

But although they were a mixture of 8000kbps, 3300kbps, and 5073kbps (because I had tried various export settings in an attempt to figure out the problem), Nero was transcoding ALL of them to 5073kbps. That’s right: ALL of them. Even the ones which were already the target bitrate.

Hours later, after the disc finished burning, I looked back through the preferences and found a checkbox for "Enable Smart encoding of video". According to the tooltip, when it is checked, it gives Nero the meanial intelligence necessary to realise that a video that is the target bitrate does not need to be transcoded. The reason why all the video clips showed up as being 5073kbps was because Nero wasn’t telling me what bitrate they were; it was telling me what bitrate it wanted them coded at.

Not that you can mix different bitrates - there’s only a "global" setting for target bitrate, not individual settings as far as I can tell. But guess what? If "Enable smart encoding of video" is turned on, it ignores whatever bitrate settings you’ve chosen.

Are you confused? Good, ‘cos so am I!

I’m thinking I might capture the video and, if necessary, edit it in Windows. Then actually do the DVD authoring in Linux through QDvdAuthor and the Transcode package. Even if it’s something where I’ve got to use the command line, I’d still prefer that because I’d know exactly what the programs are doing, and exactly what I’m telling the programs to do.

Right now I’m burning a DVD in a program that came with my digitiser. My only quibble with it (apart from it not being very flexible when creating menus and the like) is that the progress bar when it’s transcoding only shows the progress of the current clip, not the entire movie. And it doesn’t tell you how many clips there are, or give an ETA. It’s slow and it doesn’t show the current frame it’s processing. I guess that’s more than one quibble, but I’ll be generous and say that for gratis software it’s actually not too bad.

Oh, an Ubuntu developer somewhere in the world feels like a complete fool.

Users who like to live on the edge (the Bleeding Edge) and set their computers to auto-update awoke to find that Ubuntu’s GUI would no longer start up.

Other people manually updated their xserver-xorg-core package, rebooted, and found out the hard way.

Somebody dropped the ball on that package update. Most users had trouble with it. It’s now safe to update the package, but if you’re running package version ubuntu10.2 there are no benefits. I know a number of people thought they’d done something wrong, and fiddled with xorg.conf for hours before reinstalling Ubuntu… then their newly-installed system updated itself and broke again!

It’s good that the developers are trying to fix bugs in Dapper rather than just fixing them for Edgy, but there really should be better quality control. And there should be a way of notifying all users if something bad has happened, rather than expect them to download a text-based web browser and go to www.ubuntu-forums.org.

As I have limited broadband, I only download major security updates and bug-fixes that personally affect me. For instance, CUPS (the printing system) didn’t really work at first, but two sets of updates later it works fine for me. Other things, like Openoffice.org, already work fine so I haven’t bothered to update them.

Let’s hope problems like these don’t happen again, to users of ANY distro.

Okay, so this isn’t really a "production system", but I’m sick of accidentally killing the XGL server while typing. I was 3/4 of the way through this blog post and accidentally hit "backspace" while pressing Shift.

However, XGL and Compiz behaved themselves during last night’s demo, except for the usual issues about darkening the screen during gksudo and the logout menu. Compiz has recently developed a nasty habit of randomly shifting windows off the top of the screen! I figured out how to get them back:

1. Move the cursor to the bottom-left to activate the Expose feature. (which I forgot to show my friend)
2. Click the window’s thumbnail
3. It will then move so that part of the window is on the screen.
4. Right-click its entry on the taskbar and select "move"
5. Move the window back where it should be then press Escape to stop moving.

But yeah, my demo went well. I expected XGL to crash my login screen when I logged out; but that didn’t happen, and I demo’ed KDE and XFCE. I decided not to show "two DEs running at once", because the demonstration was taking a little longer than I hoped.

It’s all good.

Today I had a strange Skype conversation. I got a message from some guy in the UK, asking if he could interview me on the radio. He claimed to be an early-morning radio host for a BBC station, and his show from 4 to 5 am was just calling people up on Skype and chatting to them, to see how far afield he could get.

So yeah, I plugged in my microphone and called him, having no evidence that he was really a radio host. I don’t think he was. He coughed a couple of times and he didn’t talk like a commercial radio DJ. I thought it strange that an early-morning host would have a producer as he claimed he did.

But I got an idea for an interesting podcast: Call up people on Skype with the same story, and interview them just like I was. Only, pretend to go to a commercial break, and during the break tell the person that their interview wasn’t interesting enough, and that you were going to make up some harmless lies and that the person should just "play along" with it.

Then when you get back from the imaginary commercial break, introduce some ridiculous subject like:

1. "During the break, Rosemary told me that she also works at nights as an exotic dancer. So, how long have you been in the stripping game?"
2. "Please relate the story of how you were trapped in New Orleans during the hurricane, and how your dog led you to safety"

See how the person handles the ad-libbing, and you can ask follow-up questions that make the story much more difficult!

A friend who reads this blog is going to come to my place briefly and see Linux in action.

I will be demo’ing:

1. Tomboy
2. Beagle
3. Deskbar
4. Virtual Desktops
5. XGL/Compiz
6. Software installation
7. Multiple DEs
8. It’s Free

Here’s the specifics of this:

1. Tomboy: Creating and linking notes
2. Beagle: Searching for a phrase which is in multiple documents of different types (probably her name as it’s already in a Tomboy note and in the filename of an image)
3. Deskbar: Adding the Deskbar to the Gnome panel, using it to start e-mails, search the web, search with Beagle, run programs.
4. Virtual Desktops: Run different types of programs over different desktops and switch between them
5. XGL/Compiz: Wobbly windows, Cube, maximise, minimise, close, make windows transparent, Expose, how to crash X in 5 minutes
6. Software installation: Synaptic for searching, browsing, and how to install and update.
7. Multiple DEs: Log out of Gnome and log into KDE. Explain differences between DEs and that people prefer one over the other. Bash KDE mercilessly :-P  Do a "switch user" and log into XFCE. Switch between the two DEs. Do a Switch User and log into Gnome. Switch backwards and forwards between DEs. More KDE bashing.
8. It’s Free: Give her two Live CDs. One Ubuntu, the other I don’t know yet; probably something which uses KDE like Mandriva One. Wish I had a non-corrupt copy of PCLinuxOS. Wish I hadn’t given away my only copy of SimplyMEPIS.

———
In other news, I got this spam from someone I once mistakenly e-mailed:

From : tom_bond@censored.com using getitfree.net <tom_bond@censored.com> Sent : Friday, 11 August 2006 2:46:14 PM To : sg_defender_1@censored.com

hey, go here and we both get a free &lowercase_product_short_name;

pretty pretty please

http://www.getitfree.net/xpepsxbqq

————
Wasn’t it nice of him to offer me a free lowercase_product_short_name?

Sorry to post twice in a day.

I’m writing this from the Austrumi live CD. It’s a CD where you just put it into your computer and it boots up into the Linux environment without touching your hard disk.

This particular Live CD was propelled into semi-stardom when it switched from the Openbox window manager to Enlightenment E17… that is, the development version of Enlightenment.

Enlightenment is an excellent window manager/desktop environment for Unix and Linux, with two focii: It must run okay on older hardware, and it must look good.

Thus, Austrumi looks pretty good. It is stable, fast (the whole CD, being only 50 megs, is running directly from my system memory), and has enough features for a Live CD.

My only little quibbles are these:

1. It starts up in Romainian; you must switch it to English after the desktop has loaded.
2. Even after you switch it to English, the keyboard mappings are a little odd. For instance, if I hit the apostrophe once, nothing appears. If I then press the "s", this appears: š. If I want an apostrophe, I have to hit the apostrophe key twice. Obviously, this is how it’s done in Romainia, but it’s making this post quite difficult to write!
3. It doesn’t set up the Internet connection out-of-the-box - I had to explicitly tell it to use DHCP rather than it scan on startup like most other distros do. But then, when I first used Knoppix I was actually thrown by the fact that my connection was automatically set up; I was trying to set it up and being mystified by the "already in use" errors!
4. It didn’t want to run in Qemu.
5. If I try to bring up a menu too close to the edge of the screen, the menu opens off the edge. This is probably an Enlightenment bug though.
6. There’s no "man" or "info" commands, but then I think it would’ve been a tight fit to get full manuals onto the disc.

Other than these little things, it’s quite a nice little distro! It fits on a business-card-sized disc, and reportedly you can remaster it.

When I ran Compiz on XFCE, the machine became quite unstable. So I turned off Compiz, used the Koynacity window theme and the Tango icon theme and turned on anti-aliased text, and used XFCE like that. And now that’s my default session.

And while using XFCE, I figured out how to manually mount removable drives! Oh, and I downloaded Ivman which is an auto-mounter, but I only start it when my father is going to use the computer.

I’ve started an open-source project of my own, writing a "migration assistant" for Ubuntu. It will mount existing Fat32 and NTFS partitions, and import Firefox bookmarks and documents and music into Rhythmbox and all that kind of thing. Stay tuned for more details - I haven’t been able to work on it much recently but I hope to have it finished in time for Edgy, being available in the same way that Automatix is available today.