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Archives for August 2010

WinFF A Free Video Converter

I spoke highly about FFMPEG in 3 separate occasions. Last night, I downloaded a program called WinFF, a Windows GUI for the command line video converter FFMPEG. The program will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert.

WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions.

This reason I was looking for a Windows GUI version of FFMPEG because I wanted to use Windows Movie Maker. I had a video in MPG4 format that was not supported by Windows Movie Maker. I figured I need to convert from MPG4 to WMV format.

So, I ended up downloading WinFF. The program is simple and intuitive. I was able to convert from MPG4 to WMV in no time. WinFF is an awesome program that anyone should have in their arsenal.

WinFF is published under the GNU public license. Download.

Custom Changes To The Sociable Plugin

Having spent the last 30 minutes recreating changes I made to the Sociable plugin, I’ve decided to post it here on my blog, so I can always look it up. The changes I’ve made were overwritten when I upgraded the plugin. In case it happens again, I have a note of it somewhere.

The code:

$permalink = urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID));

Is replaced with:

$ur_get_result = get_post($post->ID);
$ur_post_status = $ur_get_result->post_status;
if ($ur_post_status == 'publish' ) {
  $this_post_link  = get_permalink($post->ID);
  $permalink = file_get_contents("http://uly.me/create.php?url=".$this_post_link);
} else {
  $permalink = urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID));
}

That essentially replaces the permalink with my shorturl. If you look at all the sociable tags below, they all contain my short url instead of the permalink.

Changing Hostnames and Making it Stick

Nothing can be more frustrating in Linux than making hostname changes and learning after a reboot that your changes didn’t stick. Here’s just a few things that I did to make the hostname permanent while working in Ubuntu 10.04. This might work in other Debian-based distributions. Let’s assume the name of your system is ‘desktop.’

Edit your hosts file.

sudo vi /etc/hosts</code>

Add this. You can drop the domain if you don’t plan on using it.

127.0.0.1  desktop desktop.domain.com

Edit your hostname file.

sudo vi /etc/hostname</code>

Add your hostname. Domain is optional.

desktop.domain.com

Finally, change your hostname.

sudo hostname desktop