My wife gave birth to our first son on Saturday: Benjamin Andrew Wolfe. He was a very healthy 8 pounds and 21 inches long. He has been eating and sleeping very well. Sleep is at a premium in the Wolfe household and we take it whenever we can get it. Our daughter, Eden, is 14 months old, and does her best to keep us both up all day to play with her!
I’ve been attempting to keep up with email while at home, but Andy has been fighting me for computer time!
This seems fairly simple in hindsight, but I had a difficult time finding an answer to it, so I putting it down here for posterity’s sake.
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0
I put this as the first changeset in a liquibase xml file. This disables the foreign key and constraint checking in mysql. This would work for other db’s as well, but I haven’t looked up their syntax just yet.
After futile searches and a lot of old pages, I finally found a linux screencast tool: recordmydesktop.
Using the synaptic package manager, I installed recordmydesktop. Eventually I discovered that this was not the gui part of the program and installed gtk-recordmydesktop.
I’ve been very happy with the results.
Kenya seems to loathe alarm clocks. Ubuntu’s clock screen saver is sub-par, so I wrote a quick javascript clock to open in my browser and display all night long.
After opening the file in your favorite browser you can press F11 to hide all the toolbars.
I struggled with getting the mpeg2 movies from my JVC Everio HD camera into a smaller file and up onto a video sharing site with high quality.
My first attempt was with Handbrake. That converted the MOV to an MP4 very nicely. However, I wasn’t able to upload those to Blip.tv and have them convert successfully every time to an flv. Blip was timing out on the longer videos and poorly converting the smaller ones.
I then decided to try the command line ffmpeg. There weren’t any gui tools around it that I found in the repo’s, so I just tried the standard
ffmpeg -i inputfilename.mov outputfilename.flv
but that did not work. Apparently JVC doesn’t put all the right properties into the mpg2 for ffmpeg to automatically pick up the properties because I kept getting a Floating point exception.
I assumed I needed to just manually set the full command with all the different video and audio settings, but I didn’t know what those should be.
After a bit more googling I found winff. From that app I copied the command line arguments over, tweaked them a bit, and came out with this:
ffmpeg -i INPUTFILENAME.mov -vcodec libx264 -deinterlace -vpre hq -crf 22 -r 29.97 -s 960×540 -aspect 16:9 -bf 2 -b 2000kb -ac 1 -ar 22050 -ab 96k OUTPUTFILENAME.flv
The trick is to use the libx264 codec instead of the flv one. After uploading these converted movies to Blip.tv I was pleased with the results.