Year: 2005

dvdrip problem on Fedora Linux 4

I said it before and I will say it again – dvdrip is by far the best graphical user interface for ripping and encoding DVDs on Linux.

dvdrip provides a user with simple, but powerful means of controlling a whole bunch of command line utitilies that have a gadzillion options each. Instead of scrolling through the manuals and Googling for examples, one could just click around with the mouse and use many sensible defaults.

I’ve been using dvdrip for a few years now and I never had a problem. That is until I tried to run it on Fedora Linux 4. I have to say that I installed dvdrip with all the requirements using yum. I guess most of the software came from FreshRPMS.net, but I am not very sure.

Anyway, when I tried dvdrip on Fedora Linux 4 I ran into problem. It was ripping DVDs just fine, but it didn’t want to encode them. I was getting all sorts of errors mentioning absense of codecs that I knew I had and segmentation faults that are always not so easy to explain.

With a few Google queries I found out that the problem wasn’t in the dvdrip itself. It was in the transcode utility. You see, yum installs transcode-1.0.0 for Fedora Linux 4. This version of transocde is not very stable yet. The solution to the problem is to downgrade to transcode-0.6.14, which comes packaged for Fedora Core 3. As soon as the old transcode is in place everything works smoothly as always.

iPod got it wrong

Let me say this once – I’ve never had an iPod and I’ll probably never have one. I appreciate the fact that some people find it convenient, modern, groovy, stylish, fashionable, and whatnot. But for me it brings nothing new, so I’ll just stay to my own set of gadgets.

Looking at how many people gladly use iPods on a daily basis and praise it as the best thing since sliced bread, I feel like bringing in this negative comment. Even without using iPod once, I can point out to one thing that is so very wrong with it. And that is:

Meters of wires.

C’mon people! It’s the 21 century. Wireless communications are blooming. Technology is making yet another circle to become even smaller. Why is it that the coolest and newest gadget has two meters of wires a piece? It is inconvienient, looks terrible, and plain dangerous. Haven’t we already learned this lesson with headphones for cell phones? Apparently, we didn’t.

Small vacations

This year is slowly coming to the end. I managed to go by without taking any vacations, except for a few days of when Maxim was born. That seems so long ago now…

Anyway, I still have about two weeks of paid holidays that I have to take or lose. I don’t think that I can disappear from the office for the two weeks straight. And I really don’t want to lose all these days when the new year comes. So I decided to take them in small bunches.

For this reason I requested a small vacation for today and tomorrow. Two days out of 12 or so that I have. Maybe I’ll take a day or two next week too. I’ll see how it goes.

The second one

Well, I guess they will be coming out a bit slower than I though… Maxim’s second tooth appeared today. It also came out of the bottom gum.

I hope that this tooth was the reason for his crazy behaviour during the last couple of days. As far as I remember, we went through something similar about a month ago. I wonder if all of his 32 teeth will be causing him to misbehave. We’ll see…

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-11-13