Web Sailor's personal blog - Programming

Home Video Editing

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:54:54 +0000

Finally done with backing up all my DV tapes. They had been lying on my table for years. Other than laziness, it was because I do not have proper software tools to do that efficiently.

This time, I found Exsate and DvDate. Exsate captures video from camcorder into separate files split according to date codes / timestamps. This way I can browse through the different scenes easily. Before using Exsate, everyone of my DV video was captured as a single big file (>10 GB). It is a pain to browse and backup this file into DVD.

Eee PC Keyboard Changed

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:56:00 +0000

I am a happy man today. I found a shop in Sim Lim selling OEM Eee PC 901 keyboard last week. I bought one. Unfortunately, that was a defective one. I went to Sim Lim again this afternoon, the sales girl willingly change it to a new one. It is now working flawlessly. For 27.50 SGD, I should not complain too much.

Visual C++ 2010 Express

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:36:31 +0000

Yeah ! I have setup Visual C++ 2010 to work with wxWidgets. The IDE is superb. Much easier to configure. The executable generated is smaller than the same one generated by MingW gcc.

I tried to compile wxWidgets 2.8.11 with Visual C++ 2010 using the IDE. Unfortunately, the project workspaces ("build\msw\wx.dsw" & "build\msw\wx_dll.dsw") conversion always fail.

The solution is to compile wxWidgets using the following commands in the command line prompt.

> vcvars32.bat
> nmake -f makefile.vc

Visual Studio 2010 Express

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:53:05 +0000

Hmmm.... Apparently Visual Studio has been available free for quite a while now. Although I am happy with MingW gcc compiler, it will be good to give Visual C++ a try. After all, this is the compiler developed by the inventor of its operating system.

Convert Chinese Sentences to PinYin Representation

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10:22 +0000

I have just written a simple tool to convert Chinese Sentences to their PinYin representations. It's here.

This tool work for both simplified and traditional Chinese sentences.

The original intention of this tool is to help me to convert my MP3 songs with Chinese file names to PinYin file names. For example, 一千零一夜 will be converted to YiQianLingYiYe, This is because my car audio player cannot display Chinese characters.

Emacs oh Emacs

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:04:46 +0000

I never imagine myself coming back to Emacs again. Under Windows, Notepad++ is just to good. I have not found anything come close to Notepad++ for Mac.

Using Emacs on Mac is really a pain, especially the MacBook. There is no Home, End, Page Up, Page Down. Even the function keys, It is such a pain to map shift or control function keys.

I guess Mac is not for techies.

However, I must say Mac OS has a very nice Apple Terminal. It runs without X11 and supports UTF 8 characters.

Mac Experience

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:37:27 +0000

5 days into using an Apple computer now. I have to say this is a beautiful machine. Sharp display and great UI. It surprises me with a build in Bash shell, Perl and emacs editor. The F3 key is a great way to switch application. And it comes with PDF writer, no need to install CuteWriter.

However, I am missing a lot of great PC applications.

Notepad++
Paint dot Net (GIMP runs but very retarded compared to in Windows)
Autohotkey
StarDict
FreeLaunchBar
AVG
Mp3Tag
Wii Game Manager

I am grateful that at least Firefox 3.5.8 (3.6 has problem running Java applets) is running. Otherwise, I would be very very frustrated.

Snow Leopard + Firefox 3.6 = Java Does Not Run

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:33:11 +0000

Has to downgrade to Firefox version 3.5.8. The problem has been reported here since Jan 24, 2010. No fix yet.

Wasted 1 whole day on this.

My MacBook

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:53:00 +0000

The MacBook came earlier than expected.

This is what it shows when running Windows.

Blogging from iPhone

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:28:00 +0000

Finally figure out how to do this with serendipity. I need to create a separate user, and set to NOT using WYSIWYG editor.

Fix the Incorrect Timestamp of my Serendipity RSS Feed

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:55:09 +0000

This may be a serendipity bug. The RSS feed is always tagged with incorrect time stamps. For example, if a blog post is created on 2010 Feb 08, 23:00:00, the corresponding feed will be tagged with a timestamp of 2010 Feb 08, 07:00:00.

I figured out that this is because I have set the time zone offset to +8 in serendipity. The RSS feed is adding this offset to the timestamp. In actual fact, there is no need for serendipity to add this offset, because the time stamp is in UTC format, any RSS reader will take care of this properly. I will find some time to report this to the author.

Facebook and my Blog

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:58:32 +0000

The fact that I have a personal web site sometimes makes thing a little complicated. How do I get my blog update into facebook ? Found an facebook app, "Social RSS" that suits my needs for now.

In the process, I have created a customized RSS feed for my photo album. It is not completed yet, but I have got the basic things working.

Chinese Character Search not Working on Serendipity

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:28:05 +0000

I have just upgraded my serendipity version from 1.4.1 to 1.5.2. The Chinese character searching through the quick search text box is still not working. This is not a new problem, it has never worked.

After some goggling, I now understand that this is the caused by the MySQL full text search feature used by serendipity. MySQL full text search feature cannot work with CJK characters.

More details here.

Enforce www in the URL

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:39:29 +0000

Implemented htacess rewrite to enforce the word "www" in my web site URL. I did not pay much attention to this. I guess this was giving me some problems. For the pages maintaining sessions, khngai.com and www.khngai.com are having two different sessions.

My method of resolving this :

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www\.[^\.]+\.[^\.]+$           [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   ([^\.]+\.[^\.]+)$
RewriteRule ^cgi-bin/php[3-9]?-cgi[^/]*/(.*)$          http://www.%1/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www\.[^\.]+\.[^\.]+$           [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   ([^\.]+\.[^\.]+)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$         http://www.%1/$1                 [L,R=301]

The first 3 lines are very specific to my web hosting company.

My web hosting company also complained that 2 of my scripts are loading its server. One of the scripts is to generate PNG image dynamically. I have to stop using that script and pre-generate all the images. I am not entirely happy, but I am glad that they bother to find out what are loading its server.

Authentication Check on My Web Site

nospam@example.com (khngai) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:11:27 +0000

I found reCaptcha by accident. The best thing is, it is free. My "Contact Me" page has been crippled for quite a while. I was forced to reject all messages with URLs because there are so many spammer out there. I had enough from them. I believe they were using some programs to post pornographic links everywhere.

My problem is now resolved with reCaptcha.