Ergo Letter Bag

This is more a note to myself than anything else, but perhaps someone else will find it useful? I certainly find it useful to transfer DVDs over to the kids' OLPC XOs running teapot's Ubuntu intrepid distro for XO . On OSX using VLC , the following will transcode a video stream/file down to something that will play well without skipping on an OLPC XO 1.0. I.e., a theora/vorbis file named w/ the ogg extension using a 320x240 resolution at 15fps. -You'll wind up with an out.ogg file in the current working directory. Open an editor and save the following to a file named vlc2xo: #!/bin/sh /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy -vv "$1" \ --sout='#transcode{width=320,height=240,scale=1,vcodec=theo, \ vb=768,acodec=vorb,ab=64,channels=2,deinterlace, \ audio-sync}:standard{access=file,mux=ogg,dst=out.ogg}' \ vlc:quit Make it executable: chmod 755 vlc2xo.sh Now, you'll be able to open terminal and execute the script with an argu...

Work and life have been keeping Perl mostly on the sidelines this past week. I've been following Gabor Sazbo's blog posts on Padre since he first asked for suggestions for a name. But I haven't actually used it. The idea of a cross platform internationalized open source editor written in Perl is actually pretty exciting. Especially with all the pluggins available and promise of better syntax highlighting. I've always heard that only perl can parse Perl. So it is nice to see a lot of developers actively developing a best of breed editor in Perl. I noticed that the instructions for installing Padre on OSX would have had me running a massive update of the system's perl via cpan. I've always been a little risk averse. The idea of upgrading the operating system's perl sounds like a recipe for trouble. So I tried installing padre using my local install of Perl 5.10.0. Unfortunately, Padre requires a Perl compiled with -Dusethreads. So... why not... I recompil...