xenoveritas.org

Seriously, screw Theora. None of the tools work. Really, there's no reason to go beyond that at all. ffmpeg can't create working Ogg Theora files for no discernible reason. The makers of Theora don't provide an encoder, so it's not like you can just use theirs! The only working Theora tool appears to be ffmpeg2theora - which is completely useless because it can't be used to remux streams.

The one thing Xiph does provide, a tool for creating Ogg streams, doesn't create working streams. Making it completely useless as well.

The Barnes & Noble nook has had a web browser added to it in the 1.3 update (along with sudoku and chess and a bunch of other things).

And the web browser actually works pretty freaking well. The nook’s design of a small touch screen along with an e-ink display means that you get a full-color small view into the website on the bottom and a very nice black-and-white view on the top. You can scroll through the website using both the touch screen and the page back/forward keys, meaning that all-in-all, it works very well for simple surfing.

Slashdot has a very interesting story about a poor system administrator who was fired for running SETI@Home. You see, the evil management types found it to be a waste of their resources, claiming that it caused $1 million worth of damages!

Doesn't sound very fair, does it?

Now let's throw in the part where he downloaded porn at work and stole equipment. The SETI@Home thing was just one part of what was apparently a pattern of shoddy work.

But "man fired for stealing and doing a poor job" really isn't news, is it? It's only interesting to people who live in the local community.

Claim that it's all about SETI@Home, though, and you can probably get some good nerd rage going.

Man, I managed to completely miss this, but Geocities has shut down as of today. I remember when I put my first website up on ... OK, not on Geocities, but on a local ISP. Using hand-written HTML.

But still with a bit too much annoying-graphical flair. (Specifically with the over-patterned backgrounds. Yes, I know I did that here last Christmas, this Christmas will be better. I hope.) So, here it is, my tribute to Geocities closing down.

I mentioned it. That's my tribute. The end.

This is a simple JavaScript library to support the HTML <video> element, along with offering the ability to add fallbacks for browsers that don't support <video>.

It's not currently released, but I do plan on releasing it eventually. There's a demo of it elsewhere on the site.

I've been playing around with the HTML5 <video> element. This is a test of a script that should - hopefully - use the <video> element first, and then fallback to a Flash player if that isn't available. You may recognize the video as one of the Omnislash Version 5 videos.

Read More for the video.

This is one of those things that turns out to be incredibly easy, if only I had realized that ages ago.

First: do not use Maven! It will not work. Instead, use Ant. (This is an important note, because I'm trying to create the Maven artifacts to include in a local repository. More on that later.)

Next up, because the build process uses JetS3t, a library for accessing Amazon S3, the usual configuration method of setting the "http.proxyHost" Java property will not work. (Grr.)

So instead, go to the projects/spring-build/lib/ivy directory (of course!) and edit the jets3t.properties file.

Google Chrome currently isn't available for Mac OS X.

However, you can download Google's open source project, Chromium, and build that. And, I have to say - it's pretty freaking slick.

I'm currently writing this post in Chromium under Mac OS X. It's working fairly well and looks fairly promising. You can rip off tabs, and it does the same neat window effect that it does under Vista. For a test build, I've only had it crash once on me.

So, looking cool.

While I'm not really going to cover the entire video, I did find this bit amusing:

Not facebook, not the "b" one, NOT ON ANY OF THEM.

The "b" one being, I'm assuming, 4chan. (Specifically, /b/. Note I'm not linking to it...)

Which I wouldn't have called a social networking site.

But I find it hilarious that she called it "the 'b' one."

Play Scramble directly from your browser!