Chanel’s Blog

For the longest time, I’ve had terrible luck with sound and video problems with Ubuntu on a Dell Dimension E521 with nVidia sound and video cards. I thought it was terrible support by nVidia. Everytime I would update my computer, it would totally trash my video settings and sometimes, my sound settings.

Today after doing a bunch of updates, both my video and sound went to crap. With the help of my favorite Linux hacker, Travis, we figured out that I was actually running the server version of the Linux kernel. Next, I uninstalled all instances of the server kernels, uninstalled all nvidia drivers and modules, and rebooted. From there, I followed the basic steps to install nVidia drivers, configured my screen settings and now I am able to run all of the fancy Compiz visuals and my Ubuntu install has never been better.

I’m a really big sports fan, especially soccer. Living in the United States, this means that most international games are always 7 or more hours earlier than usual, and sometimes, they don’t even broadcast locally.

Using Sopcast and TVAnts, I’m able to watch any game I want, when I want. Granted, this is streaming P2P video so it is not the best quality and due to the latency, images can get choppy. For popular content like the current Euro 2008 or most UEFA Champions League matches, speed and quality can rival that of Vimeo or Youtube.

After painstakingly getting Sopcast to work on my linux box, I found this really easy to use tutorial on installing both Sopcast and TVAnts:
http://simonsmess.blogspot.com/2007/11/watching-sopcast-tvants-on-ubuntu.html

For TVAnts, get a link from a website or open the program under wine, double click a channel and write down link from popup box. This will start the stream on your local computer where you can use VLC or other capable media programs to view that stream.

With Sopcast, the method to start the stream is very similar. You can download the actual program and run it under wine or use the command line version which also creates a stream from your local computer like TVAnts.

Now that you have a link and you are streaming, use your favorite media play to stream or record that link. My favorite, VLC, makes it fairly easy to open and save that link. To just open the link, VLC has an option under “File” >> “Open Network Stream”. To save the stream is the same except you specifiy where you want your stream to be saved.

In order to provide Tivo-like recording, I use my crontabs to start and stop the stream. Here is a pretty good tutorial on using crontabs. Of course it would be much easier to use MythTV if the content was available on your tv, but Sopcast and TVAnts provide a way to accomplish almost the same functionality with a more work.

One of my biggest pet peeves about Firefox was the inability to see the entire title attribute of a DOM element. The title attribute is the text you see in a small pop-up box when you hover over an image, link, or anything on a page. It allows the site to give further information about any element on a page.

The developers at Firefox decided to truncate that text to 60 characters so the user won’t get a huge text box covering their screen whenever they hovered over an element with a long title attribute. In most cases, this would be just fine but I happen to be a big fan of xkcd, a geeky internet web-comic which uses the title attribute to add funny quips.

Using the Long Titles extension, you never have to dig around to read the entire title attribute again. Being such an open browser, I find it rather annoying that Firefox developers refuse to make it an option in about:config to change the cutoff limit for title attributes.

The good folks at jQuery just released a new version of UI library. For the uninitiated, jQuery UI is mostly a visual effects library that allows one to create AJAX-style user interfaces and interactions really quickly and easily.

I’ve used the older versions and they were pretty buggy and unstable. Since then, the jQuery team has received corporate backing and really improved the core jQuery library. If the new jQuery UI lives up to its billing, it might push Mootools out of being my favorite Javascript library

Today a co-worker of mine, Travis, made a really good remark which is the title of this post. Before AJAX, there were only two main components to the site: 1) dynamic server-side processing, and 2) static client-side elements. With AJAX, there is now a third layer that manipulates static elements to make them dynamic and is able to make requests from the server with or without user interaction. Client-side Javascript always has to account for the capabilities of the user’s browser and how certain browsers renders elements even though HTML/CSS also has to handle this. This added complexity, plus the regular bugs that always crop up while coding, makes debugging an AJAX application twice as hard. Despite the extra work for developers, the rich interaction that the Web2.0 era is built upon makes for a much better overall user experience.