Watching the ‘Paul’ trailer from Apple on Linux

January 6th, 2011

Hi, Simon Pegg fans! If you have Mplayer installed, copying this into your console (gnome-terminal, konsole, xterm, etc.) should let you watch the Paul trailer in Linux!

mplayer -cache 200000 -user-agent 'QuickTime/7.6.2 (qtver=7.6.2;os=Windows NT 5.1Service Pack 3)' http://trailers.apple.com/movies/universal/paul/paul-tlr1_480p.mov

It will queue up to about 20% before playing. Give it a bit of time :-) .

Once the video is playing, pressing the ‘F’ key will go fullscreen. Alternatively, you should be able to use your favourite Mplayer front-end like SMplayer or GMplayer instead of plain Mplayer to get a pretty interface.

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Online RAID Level Migration

March 2nd, 2010

I recently decided to shell out for a somewhat pricey RAID card for my home NAS. It wasn’t an easy decision, but I really wanted a card that supported Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM) and Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) at the hardware level.

Do I really need this at home? It turns out that I do. I am currently migrating my original two-disk RAID 1 array to a three-disk RAID 5 array, which will non-destructively double my usable space.

I don’t really have anything else to say about this; I just think it’s really cool. Good lord, I’m a geek.

Posted in Geekery | 2 Comments »

How many is too many?

February 26th, 2010

We’re nearing the tail end of the Vancouver Olympics.

Canada’s women’s hockey team has won the gold medal and the IIHF has freaked out over their on-ice celebrations. The Internet has largely said that the IIHF is being silly and that female Canadian hockey players drinking beer and bubbly while smoking stogies is pretty cool. They’ve earned it, after all.

Our men’s team hasn’t won anything yet, but if they beat Slovakia (it’s currently 2-0 Canada in the middle of the second—make that 3-0) they’ll be guaranteed at least a second place finish. Good for them.

Here’s where my concern comes in. Why are the Olympic officials ignoring too many men infractions? When Canada played Russia earlier this week Russia definitely got away with one, and many people think there was actually a second. Tonight Slovakia even more obviously had too many men, and again the officials did nothing.

Is this typical of international hockey? Is it happening in Olympic games that don’t involve Canada? Am I making a big deal out of nothing? I don’t know.

Aside from this gripe I think the officiating has been very good, and I’d like to offer our Canadian Olympic athletes continued luck. You guys are making Canada proud.

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Disco

February 12th, 2010

Today we had to have Disco, our pet ferret, put down.

She was old and this is something that we’ve been expecting, but it still sucks.

Disco was a wonderful pet and we will miss her very much.

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Perl Advent

December 8th, 2009

As a happy Perl coder it feels like I’ve been looking forward to Perl 6 forever. This latest version of Perl has been in development for a very long time, and some pessimistic folks have suggested that it will never be done.

But progress is being made. Check out the Perl 6 Advent Calendar for daily updates between now and Christmas time. There are some really good practical examples on that site, including simple directions to download and build Rakudo, the most well-known (and probably most complete) implementation of Perl 6.

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Kubuntu

November 3rd, 2009

I’ve been seeding the latest Ubuntu release since it came out last Thursday, and I’ve noticed something interesting: I’ve uploaded almost twice as much Kubuntu as Ubuntu.

This isn’t a scientific test by any stretch, and may not be significant, but I do find it interesting. A year ago I think the results may have been very different.

I’d be interested to know if these results are typical.

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ZFS now supports synchronous block-level deduplication

November 2nd, 2009

This post has a great write-up.

So awesome.

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VPS hosting

October 27th, 2009

I’ve been wanting to try Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting for a while now and I finally found some time this past weekend to get going.

After looking into my options (and there are lots of them) I decided to go with Linode. It has a good balance of features and cost, and there are a number of very positive reviews online. The biggest drawback is that you have to take care of your own backups, but I can deal with that. I suspect that automated backups are coming since several customers have requested this feature.

I’m on a month-to-month plan for now so I can test it out. If I like what I see I’ll think about migrating all of my shared hosting from A2 to Linode.

Posted in Geekery | 1 Comment »

Terminal colours

September 16th, 2009

The default dark colours in most terminal emulators (e.g. gnome-terminal, konsole, PuTTY) don’t work so well for me. In particular I find it hard to read their blue-on-black.

I have found a palette that I like; I think these colours originally came from xterm, but I can’t remember for sure. All I know is that every time I set up a new box I have to dig up a small piece of paper where I’ve written these numbers down (or find a backed up configuration file from an existing machine).

No longer! I’m posting them here so I can easily find them in the future. Maybe they’ll be useful to you too. Without further ado:

  1. 000000 (0, 0, 0)
  2. CD0000 (205, 0, 0)
  3. 00CD00 (0, 205, 0)
  4. CDCD00 (205, 205, 0)
  5. 1E90FF (30, 144, 205)
  6. CD00CD (205, 0, 205)
  7. 00CDCD (0, 205, 205)
  8. E5E5E5 (229, 229, 229)
  9. 4C4C4C (76, 76, 76)
  10. FF0000 (255, 0, 0)
  11. 00FF00 (0, 255, 0)
  12. FFFF00 (255, 255, 0)
  13. 4682B4 (70, 130, 180)
  14. FF00FF (255, 0, 255)
  15. 00FFFF (0, 255, 255)
  16. FFFFFF (255, 255, 255)

Enjoy!

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Jonathan Cheechoo is an Ottawa Senator

September 12th, 2009

Bryan Murray has traded Dany Heatley and a 2010 fifth-round draft pick to the San Jose Sharks for Jonathan Cheechoo, Milan Michálek and a 2010 second-round pick.

It remains to be seen whether this is a good trade for Ottawa, but I’m really excited. Cheechoo brings some badly-needed toughness to a team that has been pushed around a little bit the last few years. He’s also a talented scorer who won the Rocket Richard trophy in 05-06.

I don’t know much about Michálek, but he looks like a talented young guy who has good on-ice chemistry with Cheechoo.

Considering that Ottawa also acquired Alexei Kovalev over the summer there could be some very interesting offensive hockey in the nation’s capital this year. The Sens also have a new goaltender in Pascal Leclaire and some talented young defensemen, so they should do alright on defense as well.

I’m going to come right out and say it: I expect that we’ll see Ottawa back in the playoffs this year. If they don’t make it you can blame me for jinxing it :-) .

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