I just finished my latest web application project: TweeFlood. For those of you on Twitter, TweeFlood is a way to see how much you and your friends tweet. It displays statistics for how often your friends tweet per year, month, day and hour. Try it out and follow @TweeFlood.
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Two weeks ago a new health care bill, H.R. 3962, passed the House. Many prominent democrats voted it down saying it did too little while health insurance companies denounced it claiming it did too much. Between this mess includes several awkward provisions and amendments which include removing funding for abortions from publicly subsidized plans while allowing medical reimbursements for prayer services.
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I’ve been using Media Temple for web hosting for a while. Like any other host, they have their advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest problems with Media Temples is that their basic grid-server (gs) package only allows for very simple statistics gathering using Urchin. It is so simple that it combines hit counts from all websites into one graph unless users purchase additional grid-server units. Although Media Temple provides raw access logs, the way virtual hosts have been setup causes difficulty when attempting to use their logs with a log analyzer.
The following tutorial goes through how to install and configure the free and open source web statistics program Awstats to be used with Media Temple’s grid-servers to provide analytic data from the Apache logs per each individual domain.
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I spent a couple of hours getting a proprietary software H.264 codec working in Linux and even published a writeup to help others. A day later I learned from one of the people I sourced in my article that nVidia started releasing Linux drivers last November for the hardware high definition decoders found on the 8xxx series of video cards as well as a customized version of mplayer to support the new drivers.
A mixture of emotions came across as I realized I wasted an entire day on a software decoder when a hardware solution was available for $30 to $40. The software solution was fairly disappointing, so I decided to try one of these new cards, an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT, to see if it provided a better solution. It took some work with my setup, but the results were worth it.
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I’ve got an old Pentium D 920. Over two years old, with the right ffmpeg options for mplayer and frame dropping enabled, this CPU can still play H.264 720p video at amazing quality in Linux. However, all 1080p and 1080i60 (camcorder M2TS files) choke horribly. The video drags, audio skips and the video is totally unwatchable. In my search for a better video codec, I came across CoreAVC, a closed source commercial codec for Windows, as well as the coreavc-for-linux project: an attempt to use those closed source drivers with various media players in Linux.
Unfortunately, the installation documents for coreavc-for-linux were months old, out-of-date and had few corrections for new bugs. The following are some of the common errors I found as well as the solutions I’ve found to get the trail version of the CoreAVC codec working on my Gentoo Linux system.
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There has been considerable media attention given to the amazing job of Captain Sullenberger in his ability to safely land a US Airways Airbus A320 into the Hudson River in New Your City. The response of the New York ferry service and emergency response crew insured that there were no fatalities with the only major injuries involving hypothermia. Still the media coverage of this events seems to have overshadowed the still ongoing bloody conflict in Gaza, and ever further, the nomination herrings of Eric Holder for the position of attorney general.
During his confirmation hearing, Holder unequivocally held that the interrogation technique of “waterboarding” is illegal. Furthermore, Holder refused to accept the premise that torture could be acceptable if there is an impending attack (known as the “Ticking Time Bomb” scenario). Holder is also against the policy of “rendition,” the practice of handing detainees over to countries where they could be subject to torture.
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