On the weekend Anji and I purchased a LG DVD recorder. We had several reasons for wanting one:
- It’s cool
- So we can make family movie DVDs featuring our daughter
- So I can backup my favorite DVDs to keep with my laptop (I don’t want to carry around the originals in case I damage them)
After several hours surfing the Internet for Linux software I realized that was just too much work so I tried for Windows software and struct paydirt. The site doom9.net has tonnes of good documentation / software for freely dealing with DVDs.
I specifically wanted to copy DVD-5 and DVD-9 DVD’s to a blank DVD-R. This is really easy for the DVD-5 DVD’s but for the double layer ones, not so much. I came across a solution involving ripping the DVD to HDD, recompressing it to fit on 4.7GB, building an ISO and burning it and it actually works. Here is a copy of the instructions and software I finally found that worked (all free stuff).
I wonder how long until we have something similar for Linux. As it is I can burn DVD images using cdrecord-dvdpro, and I believe transcode can do the compression scaling stuff but I have no idea how to put all this together to seemlessly convert DVDs (if you know please let me know) with the menus and whatnot intact.
Alrighty. My server now moved from my crappy Telus ADSL connection where I could get upload speeds of around 50K and download of 150K to a new colo facility in Calgary where I’ve got 100M link both ways. I tried transfering some files between my machine and sunsite and was getting 4.2MB/s (yeah). So now I’m just waiting for the DNS to propagate and I’ll be up and running.
On the weekend some friends introduced me to a couple of really cool games. Truck Dismount and Stairs Dismount where basically you try and cause as much damage to the crash test dummy as possible. It’s unfortunately a Windows game but might run under wine.
I’m currently working on a fairly large website for a client that’s basically a searchable web based cataog and user registration system. The catalog side is reasonably simple since it’s just populating some templates from the database but the registration is much more difficult and consists of 100s of fields with fairly complex validation rules. My first version of the site, done under the crunch as usual, was using Python Service Objects (CGI) mainly because it has fairly nice form handling. Unfortunately this didn’t work because the load on the site was higher than expected and it bogged down the server. So here comes version 2:
This time around I have several goals:
- Make the application faster (applet / servlets / etc)
- Make the application code easier to work with for me and my successor
- Make the application easier to deploy
This job seems ideally suited to CherryPy, a python based web application development platform. It basically takes python code and bundles it into a standalone server which can run behind Apache and service the requests. The result is that it is really fast. Also it should be easier to deploy since it’s really just requiring Python on the target system. There is no reason why the app wouldn’t just run happily on Windows servers too.
For the database side of things, the dataset isn’t particularly large. I was thinking of moving away from MySQL and using Metakit. Metakit is a nice little embedded relational database I’ve used in the past and again it makes the application less dependent on the server. I’m wondering how well Metakit handles multiuser load and concurrency. From what I can tell it seems to do it well but it remains to be seen.
Here are some links on the topic:
All in all I think this will make for a faster more self contained application which the client can just plug into their website. The tools are different from the norm but I’m confident that any reasonable coder should be able to pick up python and CherryPy with very little effort.
