Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 26, 2008
by sjvn01
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ABC, Fox and The CW Video Woes

Some friends of mine recently tried to view a TV show off ABC.com and ran into a problem: they couldn’t watch the show. The video appeared to be Adobe Flash, but even though they had the new Flash Player 10 installed, they couldn’t view it.

Around and around they when with first one combination of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Adobe Flash Player and another. No dice. That’s when I came in.

I looked into and discovered that while some of the site’s video is in ordinary Flash format, some of the rest, including the shows my friends wanted to watch though were in another format: Move Network’s Move-Simulcode..This format starts with Flash, but then it divides the source video into segments the vendor calls “streamlets.” These are created using a dual-pass VBR (variable bit rate encode).

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October 24, 2008
by sjvn01
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Real life Linux: The ASUS Eee PC 1000

For years, the mom-in-law had resisted getting a computer of her own. She just doesn’t like technology. Everyone knows the old joke about people who are so slow when it comes to using technology that they never managed to set their VCR’s clocks. She can’t use a DVD player.

Yes, I’m serious. Oh, I know she could do it, but she really doesn’t want to in the same way that I really don’t want to take class in calligraphy. Anyone who’s ever seen the illegible scribble I use in place of handwriting will understand where I’m coming from.

But, despite that, the combination of the allure of solitaire and the Web finally got to her, and she wanted a computer to call her own. So, what do you get someone to whom even turning on a computer is a challenge? You get them a Linux-powered mini-laptop. Specifically, I got her an ASUS Eee PC 1000 running a variant of Xandros Linux. I picked Linux, not just because I like it, but because its combination of ease of use, low-cost, and no maintenance requirements makes it ideal for a new PC user.

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October 23, 2008
by sjvn01
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An idiot’s view of open source

If he wasn’t so utterly wrong and, it appears that he’s taken seriously, Andrew Keen’s delusion that the economy is about to “Give Open-Source a Good Thumping” would be funny.

Keen, author of the book, Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture, argues that “One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the Utopian ideals of open-source radicals.”

Therefore, “Historians will look back at the open-source mania between 2000 and 2008 with a mixture of incredulity and amusement. How could tens of thousands of people have donated their knowledge to Wikipedia or the blogosphere for free? What was it about the Internet that made so many of us irrational about our economic value?”

The problem with his argument is simple: it’s a straw-man argument. There are almost no open-source radicals, and of those, few, if any, are working for free.

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October 22, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

JBoss selects Magnolia for CMS

When you’re a big-time Java application engine vendor like the community side of Red Hat’s JBoss, JBoss.org, picking out a CMS (content management system) isn’t a small deal. That’s why JBoss’ selection of Magnolia is not just another CMS deal. After all, the JBoss community sites hosts more than 40 different open-source middleware projects.

JBoss.org project leader Mark Newton explained in a statement that he picked Magnolia because “It was important that our project teams were not restrained by the CMS and that they had free reign to exercise their own individuality and control of their own web space. At the same time we wanted a solution that was simple to use and easy to extend. Magnolia was the perfect solution. Each project has complete control over the look and feel of their site and can even choose to use their own domain in place of jboss.org if they wish to maintain their own identity. Having the ability to do this but still having all the projects run on the same back-end system is critical for our requirements.”

Before this, JBoss.org had used its own in-house CMS to run the site. But, as time went on it was becoming more trouble than it was worth to manage and develop this CMS JBoss, is, when all is said and done, in the middleware business, not the CMS business.

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October 22, 2008
by sjvn01
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204.5-Million lines of code equals one great Linux distribution

Maybe, just maybe, the best things in life really are free. Take Linux, for example. It’s a great, free operating system that you don’t have to spend a dime on. You can use it to run the New York Stock Exchange’s servers; you can use it to run your desktop; and you can use it to run your mobile phone.

The latest Linux Foundation’s report, Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution reminds me again of just how truly valuable and remarkable this ‘free’ operating system really is. In this study, the Foundation analyzed how many lines of code are actually in Red Hat’s community Fedora 9 Linux distribution, and how much it would cost, in today’s dollars, with today’s software development costs, to have written it as a proprietary operating system.

The Foundation started by using Linux and security programmer David A. Wheeler’s methodology from his 2002’s groundbreaking study, Linux: More Than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux’s Size. The results of applying these tools to 2008’s Fedora 9 Linux came out to a total of 204,500,946 physical SLOC (Source Lines of Code) and a cost of $10,784,484,309. But, lucky you, you can download it for free from the Fedora Web site and you won’t need to spend a penny on it.

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October 21, 2008
by sjvn01
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Flash 10 on Linux: Better, not great, better

Let’s get this out of the way first. Adobe Flash is still a proprietary program and I, and a lot of other open-source people, wish that it wasn’t. That said, the latest Flash Player 10 on Linux is a lot faster than the last version and it opens up the doors to a lot of Web-based video content.

s is also, lest we forget, the first version of Flash to appear for Linux that showed up at the same time as the Windows and Mac OS versions appeared. It’s always nice to see Linux being treated as a first class citizen by a major software vendor.

So, to welcome it, I installed it on two different Linux systems. The first was my openSUSE 11 running on my faithful old HP Pavilion a6040n PC. This system is powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor and has 2GBs of memory and uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory for the display. On my second test-box, my Gateway 503GR, I was running Kubuntu 8.04. This system has a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA hard drive. Neither PC is what you would call speedy.

Despite that, using the GUIMark, a Web-based benchmark test suite designed to compare 2D graphics rendering systems, I saw 17.5fps (Frames per second) on the openSUSE system and 14.9 on the Kubuntu box. These results are somewhat misleading though if you take them at face value. GUIMark is designed to “heavily saturate the rendering pipeline.” Flash video over the Web tends to be designed to deliver the best possible video for the least amount of bandwidth and system requirements.

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