Archive for November, 2005

Given my expansion into video for xmeltrut.com I decided I needed to get a little syndicated. So I signed up to the Google Video program and have submitted one of the videos to see if it is acceptable. I couldn’t get the format they wanted, I tried but when I tried to play my mpeg-2 video there was audio and no video and that was like 8mb for a 2 minute minute video. If I am submitting all the videos that would take longer than forever to upload them all.

I’m also thinking about MRSS which is media RSS, a format both used and developed by Yahoo so that they could do their whole video search thing. I’m going to try and work that one out and put a feed up on xmeltrut.com so that, that can be spidered too.

I’ll probably have a flick round to see what else is spidering video content too. Suggestions on a postcard. And by postcard I of course mean the comments section ;).

Really starting to get into Adobe Premiere Pro now. It seems to be much simplifed from the older versions which is generally a good thing although I didn’t like the look of the audio mixer when I took a quick glance at it. The DV camcorder control thing is cool though.

The Adobe Media Exporter or whatever it is called is by real bug bare though. It errors out a lot and each time I even want to change the metadata for my video it asks me to save it as a preset name and you don’t appear to be able to update the presets other than typing in the exact name which is just stupid. Hopefully there is a way round it.

Oh also, every time I start a new project it makes the timeline really far zoomed out again which is annoying.

I feel the need to blog. I’m just browsing around random sites and not really sure where I was going with it but I want to start up a new site, maybe for The O.C., maybe just expanding Insterstate.nu, every time I come up with something it leads me on to something else.

What I really want is a community. But a community without a real site isn’t much good as I want a more fully rounded site as a lot of ad networks don’t take community based sites and I want to expand my options rather than being reliant on one or two income sources.

The O.C. would be a good choice as I really do love the show. I got through seven episodes yesterday which maybe wasn’t the best thing to do considering I had coursework that needed to be handed in at 9:00 am this morning but you try tearing yourself away from that show just as the Alex Marissa story arc develops. I’m thinking about getting a remote for my PC but that’s a different story.

So anyway yeah. The O.C. rocks! But there are already some major O.C. sites out there that would be really hard to compete with. The OC Show is now boasting 25,000 members although The OC Forums seems to have fallen to TheTVForums.com. The OC Files is still going strong too.

I have quite a payment coming up late next month though and although it would be useful in paying off the money I’ve blown so far at uni or indeed my on going costs, I really want to invest it in a vBulletin licence for a community :P.

Video news updates are now live! Britney Planet is the first site to benefit from the new feature. Plus xmeltrut.com has a whole new system for posting (including uploading and storing video files) and editing videos (well the information at least) to deal with it. Playlists, etc are all in there too.

This is a result of finally getting my camcorder at Bod which works great with my new desktop which has a proper 6 pin firewire port and even more importantly, it’s frontside.

I also now have Adobe Premiere Pro which looks awesome. It has been redesigned and the tools seem a little wierd at first but I think I am getting my head around it and it has title overlays that can go over video and a whole new encoder, it’s pretty sorted.

I have a real urge to make a film now. I actually missed a film making meeting today but I think I might start scripting a horror movie that I can film here at Bod.

You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammels so let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel. To non-Bloodhound Gang fans that is probably all you will know of them but others will recognise classics as The Ballad of Chasey Lane and The Roof is on Fire.

They were playing today at Leeds Met. I only found out a few days ago and reminded on Monday night (possibly Tuesday morning actually, it was pretty late) so I went down to Leeds Met’s union and picked up a ticket, in the rain I might add, earlier today.

I turned up at the gig and met up with Tom and Ian from Grant house (aka, the house I’m in) and Matt from Seton house as well as a few girls that were hanging with them.

The gig itself was billed with two support bands but only on one website, the promo stuff just listed Electric Eel Shock who were the only support band that played in the end. They came on at like 8:00 and played a 40 minute set.

They were pretty good. They’re a Japanise band and all pretty mad. The frontman was entertaining and got the crowd going and the bassist was just wasted. He climbed on top of the piles of amplifers a few times. The drummer was cool too, he started just bashing the drums with his hands then playing the drums with two sticks in each hand.

At 9:00 (probably later actually, maybe as late as like 9:20) the Bloodhound Gang came on and with the acceptation of like a 10 minute break they played through until almost 11:00. They played pretty much everything they had with the exception of The Lap Dance is Better when the Strippers Crying.

They were awesome. They invited the audience to spit on one of the guitarists and to celebrate Leeds being “the binge drinking capital of Europe” (or so they claimed but it’s not impossible as nobody binge drinks like the British and nobody parties like Leeds ;)) he downed an entire bottle of alchol – not one of those alcho-pop bottles, a propper spirits bottle. He later threw it all up over Jimmy Pop’s ass, at Jimmy’s invitation no less.

I spent quite some time trying to get VNC working between my laptop and desktop. Didn’t work. Actually I didn’t spent that much time but with only about 40 minutes to set something up I opted for the Remote Desktop tool that is built in to Windows XP. And it actually worked.

The next step was to get it working in the wider world. IE, configuring my firewall and port blocking to allow the connections. After that step was done all I needed now was something to deal with the possibility of a dynamic IP address. Luckily NO-IP Duc came to the rescue combined with a scheuled task to run the application even if I wasn’t logged on at 8 am, 1 pm and 6 pm every day.

So I got home and tried to test it – it actually worked! The frame rate is of course aweful but that is to be expected. The point is I can log in and access all my stuff which I did last night when I needed to check something and I can even stream music and stuff over it by opening up media player on my desktop and playing whatever. Awesome.

So it turns out my host wasn’t kidding about the IP changes. They cut them off last night as far as I can make out as Branch Planet was working yesterday lunch time and wasn’t working when I tried it today.

I’ve been busy going round and making the changes and I think I have most of them but the reason I didn’t make them before is I simply don’t know what makes connections and what doesn’t. It’s only really now where I can see if a site has died or not that I know if I need to make an IP change and that is going to take me a while to complete the process at that.

I went into Headingly to get a new Serial ATA cable about an hour ago. Looking back I think the old one may have been working but this one is shorter so less messy in the case and Dell says a maximum of 450mm. I think the one I am using now is 450-500mm whereas the old one was 1,000mm.

Anyway so I went into bios and it was picking it up and it was even listed in device manager, it just wasn’t set up. So I downloaded the Seagate DiscWizard thing which does it all for you. It quickly formatted the drive and by the time it had exited the program, it was appearing in My Computer. Now I can begin transfering things over, item one, my music.

The reason my blog hasn’t been working properly recently was that my tmp folder was full. That has now been fixed so I can blog again but I wouldn’t have figured that out from the WordPress error message. I only worked it out from problems with my other sites. Hunting down other problems now but as a general guide – upgrading a server is not good. I’ve lost my GD functions now!

Yeeha! It’s sorted – finally both my computers can view the workgroup and each others shares! I have restarted my laptop and it still works, I’m too scared to restart my desktop and see if it still works though lol. Seriously, I can see it not working when I start up next time which I am really dreading.

Still for the moment I need to focus on other things. I am moving my printer over to my desktop as a the moment it is an extra wire on my laptop and this way I can just run it as a network printer to my laptop via my desktop. I am also thinking about doing the same thing with my external hard drive although once I get my new hard drive (250 gb Seagate, ordered today) I am going to use that as my storage drive and use my external hard drive as a backup drive I can take with me when I go home or whatever.

I really want to minimal the things attached to my laptop so I can pretty much to plug it in to my network cable when I get here and use it with all the network or I can take it away without having to detach a million cables.

The other thing I need to do is set up remote access to my desktop so that when I am at home and all my files are here I will be able to access them. It will still probably be limited by the transfer speed of the internet but I will still be able to get the important files like word documents and website code which I need.

Stuff like my emails and things are going to be staying on my laptop anyway as these are things I am going to need wherever I am and I am going to be going between Bod and home or wherever I am so I need anything I need with me always to be on my laptop. Then the other stuff goes on the desktop.

There are a few solutions for remote access I am thinking off, the main contendors are VNC and Citrix. VNC is good and free, I’m not sure if Citrix is free but the school of computing at uni use it so it looks pretty good.