Sorry, I just couldn’t resist the sales pitch! Looking at this advertisement has made me desire just so much for this product, as it is clearly so professional.
“Click here for you free evaluation.” I mean, seriously. The ad was found on this page.
Making DVDs in a just few clicks in Ubuntu
26 August 2007Today, I stumbled across a wonderful program called DeVeDe. As the name suggests, it allows creating of DVDs with a very simple (although not GNOME-ified) interface.
Even cooler, it is written in Python, so it runs on various flavours of Linux, and even Windows. It uses MPlayer as a backend, so you can create DVDs of video files that are in just about any format under the sun. (I even made a DVD out of WMV files, which were automagically converted.)
Highly recommended. You can download it from the site, or use sudo apt-get install devede in Ubuntu, or not install it. (I pity those poor souls who choose the latter.)
ABC implements tagging
23 August 2007The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC to us Australians) has implemented tagging on their news site. Every news story has a number of tags associated, in true Web 2.0 style. They even have a tag cloud.
Lately, I’ve been quite surprised to see the ABC embrace web standards so well. All new pages on their website are valid HTML or XHTML, and they use CSS completely for layout — they’ve axed tables. They are also striving for accessibility — a few years ago, you would have seen Flash used absolutely everywhere on the site. Now, they’ve duped most of that in favour of JavaScript.
Not only that, the site actually looks good.
The only thing about their website now that I can still get annoyed with them for is the fact that a lot of their streaming media is only available in Windows Media or RealPlayer formats, which is a pain in the neck to use in Linux. Some is also available as MP3, but what would make it really cool would be them streaming everything in Ogg Vorbis/Theora.
Slow FTP transfers with Nautilus
12 August 2007I thought I’d just mention that using Nautilus to transfer over 1000 files over FTP is, let’s say, awful. It takes 45 minutes to upload a copy of WordPress, wheras only around 10 or 15 with gFTP.
I suspect it’s doing a lot of useless stuff, like sending extra CHMOD and UTIME commands, which aren’t necessarily necessary.
