gnurou.org Just your average bearded geek

My 250Gb external hard drive (a Seagate Barraccuda, which I was expecting to last at least for many years) just died a couple of days ago after less than two years of service. No matter the reputation of the manufacturer, hard drive failures can happen any time, so it's better to be prepared and not rely on only one storage for your important data. Fortunately, that was my case and nothing critical has been lost in the process.

Well anyway, now I just bought a new, 500Gb Western Digital Caviar drive, and the first thing I want to be sure about is that it is safe to store things on it. So, before even creating a new partition, let's make a complete surface check with badblocks!

Lately I have been trying videoblogging on my blog in Japan, namely sequences of 15-20 minutes. I required good video quality because showing the landscape/events were important to me. Due to bandwidth limitations, I cannot host the videos myself, so I had to look for a video hosting service. The video service of my dream would :

Update: Nick just sent me an email to put his great website to my attention. It allows you to enter a Japanese address in romanji and will locate it for you on Google Maps. So you probably want to try it before going through what is explained here.

Check out http://diddlefinger.com. Thanks for this great work, Nick!

During my latest trip to Japan, I bought a Sanyo Xacti C5 camera. This hybrid digicam/videocam device is rather honest, and what I especially liked was that it directly records videos in Mpeg 4 format. Pretty nice, that you can save almost 1 hour of quality video on a 1 Gb flash!

However, I quickly noticed that something sucked about it. When I wanted to watch my recorded videos on my PC, I could only see the top-left corner of the video. Although the device records videos in 640x480, mplayer, xine, or vlc would invariably show me a 320x240-sized window with only the top-left part. Only ffplay would play them correctly (but without sound). I know my videos sucks, but this way they suck even more now.

It is no surprise that the feature is actually a bug: for unknown reasons, the video size is not correctly written in the MP4 file (it seems the Olympus C-770 is also affected). So, here is how to fix it. I have found two ways, one bad, one better.

The numerical age has brought us new ways to preserve information. By allowing infinite copies of the same quality as the original, and to concentrate large amounts of data on tiny devices, electronic documents are clearly the way to go if you want to keep a book forever.

Any person who tried to write SQL code that is compatible across different databases probably had to renounce after going beyond simple "select" statements. Recently we have been trying to support both sqlite and MySQL for gwtd and it's amazing how awfully un-standardized SQL is. It's really a shame to have to write another abstraction layer because one database recognizes AUTO_INCREMENT and another AUTOINCREMENT. So it's no surprise to see that the "Shitty" denomination is actually recognized by search engines:

Update: There are now official packages for Edgy . Therefore, this post and its content are now obsolete.

Picard is a great tool that automagically tags music files (be them mp3 or oggs) using an acoustic fingerprint and the big Musicbrainz database. It's as easy to use as dropping music files and letting it do the work. And it's especially great if you are a Last.fm user and want your files correctly tagged.

If you own a personal server, you are probably using it to perform many useful things: fetching your mails, hosting your personal web pages, connecting your local network to the internet, ... Now, you can also take advantage of its heat to make your own yoghurt.

Running a multilingual site can be a real pain, depending on what you exactly want to obtain. Drupal 4.7 comes with an internationalization module that does a real good job on most cases. However, mine didn't fit within its features. Some of my content is written in English, other in French — exclusively. There is no use to translate every page to both languages.

What bothers me more in the current i18n module is that it always prefixes all your local URLs with the current language. That is, instead of having '/my/node', you'd have '/en/my/node' or '/fr/my/node'. This is not really serious by itself, but I started worrying when I realized that pages without any translation were both available under '/en/' and '/fr/', and that the only difference between the two versions was the language of Drupal's user interface. Having the same content referenced under different URLs is not a clean design to me, and it becomes objectively very bad when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

Finally, I've put some decent site here. After trying many CMS solutions, I've decided to use Drupal.

Drupal is actually the only one (of those I have tested, at least) that supports all the features I wanted:

• Combines static pages with blog posts. I like to rant here and there but the main purpose of this site is to publish static content.
• A comment system, trackbacks and ping, just like any blog software. To combine the best of both worlds.
  
• Total control over the layout of the site (not that I did anything big about it - the current theme is just a slightly modified version of the Pushbutton theme). Oh, and standards compliance is a must too.
  
• WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) for both content and comments, also offering an easy way to upload images and other files. I'm fine with wiki-like syntaxes, but a good editor just gives another level of comfort.
• Powerful control on what is authorized or not. Ability to disable unwanted engine mechanisms (user registration, etc.).
• Nice URLs with explicit names. The URL alias mechanism is really powerful.
• Page caching to be easy with my poor server, although this is not turned on right now. Surprisingly, and although the pages are generated on-the-fly for now, the site performs rather well.
• Tags for anything that is published. I love tagging.
• RSS feeds for tags, content type, and so on. Drupal support RSS feeds as-is but more personalized feeds can be created using the views module.
• A strong and large community.
  

Now that the site is up and running I'm really satisfied with it. Although it has plenty of features, the modular design of Drupal let you use only those that are strictly necessary. You can really and easily tailor a website to your will. Drupal is a very active project, able to cover a wide range of needs. I've also closely considered Geeklog, which was very close to my needs too. But in the end, Drupal seems to have a much wider community and zillions of more-or-less useful modules, so I finally decided to use it.