BiggieStylin

Well, today I made a decision… even though I’ve known about the site for quite a while, and tried to do it once before, I’m starting tomorrow doing the One Hundred Pushups challenge. Lately I’ve been wondering why I live like this, lazy, not doing anything, and just letting myself get more lethargic. I’m tired of it and I want a change, so this is one of the ways I’m going to do it.

I’m posting here not for self validation, but for accountability. I want people to know I’m doing it and hold me accountable. I’ve also setup a logger page to help me and everyone interested keep track of my progress and if I’m sticking with it. If you’d like to follow me through this challenge, then please go to my logger page and check it out. I’ve already updated with my inital exaustion test, which didn’t make me feel that great about myself, but the point is to work at it and get better, so I will.

I encourage anyone reading this who has though about doing this to start with me and let me know. If you’d like, we can hold eachother accountable for it, its going to be hard for me to do this by myself and I know it. Anyway, I’ll keep updating my logger every day, and hopefully see some results!

I figured its time to post about my plans this summer. I’ve been talking with mah hunnies about moving this summer, and I think we’ve finally made a decision on who what when where how. We’ve been talking for a while to move back to my home town St. Joseph, MO and we’ve finally decided to do that this summer. It will most likely be at the end of the summer, but we’re looking for a house to rent. I’m really excited about it and really can’t wait. I don’t have an exact date yet, but we’re thinking around the end of August.

We’ve been looking for houses to rent around the area and have found some decent places, I’m just hoping that there will still be good places around the time that we’re wanting to move too. I can’t wait to move, it’ll be exciting to have a change and be somewhere different from the past four years. We’ve both decided though that a couple of her sisters are going to make the move with us, that way its easier for her to adjust without her whole family there, and they get to experience something new and exciting too. I think it will be an exciting experience for everyone and I can’t wait! I’ll update more as the time gets closer.

Well, as most of you might have noticed, my blog has been down for a bit. My server got comprimised through Apache and I had to shut it down until I could take the time to figure everything out. I’ve found out how it was comprimised and have taken care of it. That’s all I have to say for now, just wanted to let everyone know what’s been going on.

For all of you that know I keep a bot miniE, I would like to announce his death. I have somehow through the art of moving files around, lost his old working source code. I have been trying a rewrite, but just haven’t gotten enough there to replace him. I’ve been down a bit lately and just haven’t really spent the time on re-writing the source code for it yet. I’ll see what I can do soon enough though to get miniE going again.

IF anyone has the source to the old miniE bot, I’d greatly appriciate you letting me know. I wouldn’t mind getting the source back until I take the time to rewrite him.  Until then, miniE will be no more… so hopefully I can get it done soon.

Well, I’ve been tagged by Lig to write seven things about myself. This should be interesting… Here’s my seven things:

• I’ve been coding for about 10 years now. I started when I was about 15 by learning HTML and Perl. Shortly after though, I picked up on PHP3 and the journey began. I used to love being an admin on the EvilWalrus website, and actually gained most of my knowledge while coding on the site. Now I enjoy languages such as PHP, Python, C/C++ and C#.
• I’ve been with my girlfriend Kelsey for over four years now. She is my everything, and I plan to spend every minute of my life with her. I want to travel the whole world with her and see everything we possibly can. She is the most amazing person and the most amazing thing to ever happen to me. I honestly can’t wait to make her my wifey
• I’m actually adopted. I love my parents who adopted me very much, and I’m also so happy that they were able to give me more than I ever expected as a child. I don’t know my birthmother at all and I don’t have any desire to. I have a paper with her name and her mothers name on it, but there is no name or any information for my birthfather.
• I’ve been to over twenty states during my childhood while traveling with my parents. I’ve also been to Cancun Mexico three different times, to Hawaii four times and Pearl Harbor twice. I’ve been able to ski in Colorado, snowmobile in Wyoming, and watch hot air baloon show in New Mexico. The thing I remember the most from all the traveling though is in Hawaii when we went downhill mountan biking. We had to get up at 4am in the morning and take a bus ride to the top of a mountan where we watched satallites orbit above us, and then the sunrise.
• I don’t get along with my family very well. I’m very close to my parents and grandparents, but not at all with any of my aunts, uncles or cousins. It’s partially because I’m the second youngest out of 25 cousins and partially because I feel like an out cast and not accepted into my family.
• I was home schooled from 7th grade all the way through high school. This was for a couple of reasons, one is because of all the traveling I was doing with my parents. Another is because the kids at the private school I went to loved to pick on me and I hated it. While I enojyed home schooling, I feel like I missed out on a lot by not going to high school.
• I actually know how to do a lot more than use computers and program. My dad is a developer, so while growing up I learned a lot from him. I can operate several types of equipment like tractors, backhoes, loaders, bulldozers, and skid loaders. I’ve also had to lay sod, pour and curve concrete curbs, and do lots of odd jobs for him. My favorite thing is when he would get new land and there would be buildings that we had to tear down and destroy. I’ve seen some of the hottest and biggest fires from burning the debris. My dad has shown and taught me a lot of things that I’m very thankful for.

Well, there’s my seven things.I hope its been as interesting of a read as it was for me to write. Now for my seven people… ok, only five, but I’ll add two more later.

• Adam Ward – Because he’s been an awesome friend over all these years.
• Joey Smith – Because he’s been an awesome mentor and friend, and he’s given me my start into Linux.
• Cody Brocious – He’s always been there to talk and help. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in Python without him.
• Philip Olson – Because we still need to get that windows site done!
• Graham Christensen – I know he’s been tagged already, but I haven’t seen anything yet and would love to.

Last but not least… the rules to pass on!

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

So I just installed Gentoo again because I miss being in linux. I am running amd64, so the first problem I had with totem is that it wouldn’t create thumbnails or play certian video files due to missing codecs. Some of codecs I was missing was MPEG-4 and some of the WMV codecs. If you’ve ever used the x86 branch, you know that by enabling win32codecs, you can get all of the neccisary codecs installed. Of course, this doesn’t work in the amd64 branch, but after a bit of googling, I tried installing gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg. Once I got that installed, thumbnails started showing up and videos started playing just fine. If you don’t really like totem, I can’t say I blame you, there’s also VLC which with the proper use flags works fine as well for watching videos.

Another issue I came across was when I was browsing around some files and realized that Nautalis wasn’t displaying thumbnails for .flv files. I remember coming across this a long time ago and never finding a solution for the problem, but today things have changed. One thing you will need is gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg installed. From what I understand here, thumbnails don’t show up due to Totem not getting the right mime type for FLV files. The comments mention that this is fixed in Totem 2.23.4, but amd64 only has 2.22.2. You’ve probably already noticed the XML file on the link, but I couldn’t make it work in its current format. So, I recreated the file using a format that worked fine for me. To load the file into your configuration just run the command `gconftool-2 –load flv_thumbnailerschema.xml`. Once I ran that command, I refreshed a directory with .flv files and saw thumbnails. YAY!

Here’s the download link for the XML file: flv_thumbnailerschema.xml

Anyway, I hope all of this has helped someone out.

So, recently I’ve been looking around for a new IM client other than Pidgin. I don’t have anything major against it, but the latest version 2.5.2 had quite a bit memory leak that cause it to consume memory like no other. That and the fact that its very limiting in what you can do with it look wise. Recently Kelsey showed me a post on lifehacker.com about free software. Most of them I’ve heard of or used before, but one I hadn’t heard of before was digsby.

Uppon looking into it further… I found that Digsby actually has quite a bit going on. Not only does it support all the major messengers, but it also supports other sites like Facebook and Myspace. Another cool feature is that it checks e-mail from IMAP servers for you, as well as gmail, hotmail, and yahoo mail. After seeing all this, I had to give it a try. I’m happy to report that I’m now using it as my IM client for.. well… everything. I’ve had it open for a full 24 hours now with absolutely no problems or complaints. It’s staying well within the expected memory usage and hasn’t been slow or laggy.

Well, that’s all for now, just thought I’d throw it out there that I found something cool I like So far they only support Windows and Linux, they don’t have anything for OS X, but I’m pretty sure they’re planning on something. Anyway, check it out, you might like it.

Edit: After looking around further, I realized Digsby is only available for Windows… sorry. Aparently there will be a OS X and Linux version available soon. Also, I found one thing I don’t like about it… it doesn’t parse /me messages

So, as most of you haven’t noticed, since no one really reads this thing… I lost my server over a week ago. Now I’ve finally gotten everything back and setup on a virtual machine, thanks to my friend Adam. Even though I was a wee bit (heh) behind on payments, he was still a good enough friend to hook me up with something that works for both of us. So now I can post all of my ramblings again that you probably won’t even read.

Nothing real exciting has gone on lately… I’ve caught a cold, that’s really it. I guess on another side note, I have been working on somewhat of a new exciting project. It’s a custom gallery I’ve built for myself. As it is currently it doesn’t really do much, but I have been working on the admin side of things to get everything going the way I think it should. Right now it adheres to a current directory layout parsing images and spitting out thumbnails. While I was developing, I figured… hey, why not do movies too? So I did… it also makes thumbnails for all kinds of movie files. I even added embeded HTML to allow for playing the videos, though I prefer the FLV method.

I’m not really sure when I’ll have a good preview available… I just kinda work on it when I’m bored. Anyway, I don’t have much to say besides that, so I’ll let you all get on with not reading this. Will post again soon, I hope.

Well, I’m sitting here today trying to think of new subjects to do a new tutorial. A few ideas are coming to mind, but if there’s anthing that anyone would like to see, please let me know. It’ll probably be a few weeks before I have anything ready, but I’d like to start on something!

Recently I was trying to watch a DVD on my laptop. I’m running compiz-fusion with my ati-drivers, and had a problem with the video showing up. I kept getting a blank screen with a few frames showing up once in a while. I fixed this issue in vlc by setting my video output to x11. I use Gnome for my desktop, and by default, it uses totem as its media player. I tried everything I could think of to find a way to change the backend settings for totem which uses gstreamer.

Finally, after some google searching, I found the solution. gstreamer comes with a configuration tool to change the audio and video settings. It’s called gstreamer-properties who would have thought? After running this I changed the video settings to use X11 for gstreamer as well, opened up totem and the DVD played fine! Just thought I’d share this little tidbit.