I’m happy to announce to readers of my blog that I’ve just launched a new music community. While branded as a service for Cincinnati musicians, it fundamentally is capable for providing a really rich community for musicians globally. Check it out — it’s free: http://grooveriver.com
Excited at the prospect of using Flip Ultra and Flip Mino cameras and uploading the video via Podcast Producer, I was disappointed to discover that both Flip cameras wrap their video in AVI files, and use the 3ivx codec, effectively thwarting my Podcast Producer plans. Videos uploaded via the Podcast Capture utility resulted in audio-only posts to the wiki/blog server.
That highlights one common complaint I’ve made and heard about Podcast Producer — that it demonstrates it’s heritage with a decided bias for Apple-endorsed wrappers and codecs (read: QuickTime).
In my quest to use these fantastic(ly inexpensive-but-handy) Flip video cameras, I recently found out that simply adding a QuickTime plugin to Mac OS X 10.5 server provides the capability to transcode far more file formats and encodings than the stock installation of Podcast Producer allows: AVI, FLV, 3ivx, DivX, MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, Flash Video, Indeo 1 & 2, to name a few!
The solution is drop dead simple (as any Mac OS X endeavor ought to be): Continue reading
Searching for GarageBand ’09 topics this morning, I noticed a pattern — one that’s virtually impossible to notice given Google’s new self-appointed role of protector of digital humanity.
Every link is flagged as “This site may harm your computer” — even trusted pages on the topic, such as pages on Apple.com. Any attempt to visit the resulting links are intercepted by Google, in effect preventing me from visiting the site. Sounds like a good idea, except it isn’t, because Google can’t seem to get it right, and Google isn’t interested in fixing sites that are incorrectly flagged.
Somehow this article didn’t get posted when I wrote it in May of 2008. Nevertheless, it’s still mighty cool, the whole notion of individual jet-powered human flight. Strap on wings, a turbo fan, and get your flight on!
The following is a transcript of the Barack Obama inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, which I thought was great:
Praise song for the day. Continue reading
Apple’s Teams Wiki Server supports very few HTML tags out of the box, in order to keep things simple. But, like Any Good Unix Ought To, Mac OS X Server gives you the ability to manipulated things, such as adding iframe, embed, param, and object tags to the Wiki/Blog server. Here’s how: Continue reading
Here is a handy collection of regular expressions, for use with PHP preg_match. If you need to check for properly formatted US states (two letters), US ZIP codes, US phone numbers, US Social Security Numbers, URLs for web sites, and properly formatted email addresses, read on: Continue reading
Changing domains around on your web server can leave you with a local DNS cache that doesn’t match your domain’s new settings. Flush your DNS cache on Mac OS X 10.5 by issuing the following command:
dscacheutil -flushcacheEdit 5/19/2014: OS X Mavericks has a slightly different method for clearing the DNS cache.
Sure, Firefox has a great plug-in architecture that has created a rich ecosystem of third-party add-ons, but Safari’s got a halfway decent development debugging environment as well. Here’s how to enable it: Continue reading
So, you need GD for your killer PHP web app, and you’re running Mac OS X 10.5? A quick look shows that GD doesn’t ship with Leopard. No worries. It’s pretty simple to install.