Movie madness

By Jim, on April 19th, 2010%

Outside of YouTube, MP4 is probably the most popular video file format available online. MP4 videos exist inside a container format that’s also widely referred to as “the MP4 container format.” Honestly, I’m not sure what the correct name for the format is, but it’s described by a standard identified as ISO/IEC 14496-12: “Information technology . . . → Read More: Movie madness

Comments are closed   Computers, Internet

Rules of bicycle commuting

By Jim, on April 12th, 2010%

I’ve done a fair bit of bicycle commuting over the last 10 or 12 years, and have developed a few rules that by now are strongly ingrained. I don’t think about them often: they’re just part of how I ride. Still, it’s beneficial to write them down.

A few things about these rules:

This list . . . → Read More: Rules of bicycle commuting

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Cycling

Bike happenings

By Jim, on April 7th, 2010%

For various reasons, I haven’t been very active on the bicycle the last three years. When I finished my birthday ride back in 2006, my bike computer read 15,795 miles. That’s cumulative mileage since I got the computer in 1999, I think. I’ve not done a whole lot of riding since then. When I dusted . . . → Read More: Bike happenings

Comments are closed   Cycling

Command line XML processing

By Jim, on April 7th, 2010%

Today I got a big XML file full of yummy audio and video links that my Web crawler will just love to slurp up. Not thinking, I wrote a quick grep command to extract some of the links and send them to the crawler. Later it dawned on me that some of those links are . . . → Read More: Command line XML processing

Comments are closed   Programming

GNU tools for Windows

By Jim, on April 2nd, 2010%

I got annoyed with Windows today. I had this HTML file that contained a bunch of links to RSS files I wanted to download and examine. The task before me was to extract the URLs, remove duplicates, and then download. It’s basic text processing that you can solve trivially with a bare-bones Linux distribution. It’s . . . → Read More: GNU tools for Windows

2 comments - (Comments are closed)   Computers, Programming

Bad laptop USB ports

By Jim, on April 2nd, 2010%

My USB mouse on the laptop stopped working the other night. I replaced the mouse with a known-working one and even it didn’t work on the laptop. I wasn’t prepared to debug the thing at the time, so I continued my work using the built-in mouse stick. But the computer was slow and Task Manager . . . → Read More: Bad laptop USB ports

4 comments - (Comments are closed)   Computers