yunt.net

Registered users can now upload images to this web blog. On the “Post/Edit” screen where you compose blogs, just click “upload a file/image”.

The uploaded pictures are auto-thumbnailed and viewable here.

Please don’t attempt to upload a file larger than 1MB. If you think you need to do post a larger file, you have serious issues. I think this feature was originally developed for ad-hoc images people needed in the body of their posts, but we can also use it as an idiot’s photo gallery.

Here’s a sample:

Since this is all opensource software, I’m obliged to give credit where it’s due – although I had to fix more bugs than I’d like. Someone assumed the relative path of my blog directory and didn’t test it out in a virtual host environment with filesystem restrictions, but I digress.

Copyright (c) 2003 by Michal Soukup aka migon
   mailto:migon@boule.cz | migon@openheads.org
   home: blog.openheads.org  (pages in czech only)
Copyright (c) 2003 shockingbird.com
Copyright (c) 2003 Joseph Fung

Here’s a really cool article I found on Linux Journal
which walks you through basic digital video capture. editing and production in Linux. I hadn’t even considered throwing a 1394 (firewire) card into a Linux box, but now I want to try.
The only real disadvantage appears to be lack of DVD burning support. Linux just doesn’t have the wide range of options for this, (yet) so VCD is the target media for home movies today.
I’ve been wanting to build a new workstation for a while now, but can’t justify it. I don’t work from home, don’t have extra space and won’t have time once the baby arrives.

Back at our old place in Issaquah, I did keep a few linux machines running all the time, one of which I used almost exclusively for MP3 ripping. It was the coolest setup, using garbage hardware. I was using grip to rip the CD tracks, encode to mp3 format and had a unix script scp the output files onto my NFS/Samba server for archiving. I kept a stack of audio CDs next to the machine waiting to be ripped. Every hour, or whenever we went into the room, if the little old Apple 4x SCSI CD-Rom had ejected, we knew it was ready for the next CD.

Here’s a project idea – distributed video transcoding! Just like 3D graphic rendering, use a cluster of machines to split up the processing of digital video encoding. To anyone who’s tried to encode 10GB of raw AVI footage to mpeg4 using a 700mhz Athlon knows how nice this would be. If this processing could be broken into chunks, this would be very feasible. (think of SETI or RC5 cracking).
I would be inclined to either create a common API/protocol or write this in a platform independent language. java, mono/.net. But there’s no reason it couldn’t use TCP sockets for speed, publish the format and let everyone go nuts coding their own clients (think of peer 2 peer Gnutella programs).

Assuming I had the time and brains to code such a project, who’s got a bunch of fast hardware to loan me for testing?