May 18, 2005

Mplayerplug-in: It Just Works.

Wow. I just realized something - I'm an Open Source Nut. I've graduated from Advocate to total fanboy. My walls at work have the Business Week with Linus in a Penguin Suit on it, the Firefox ad we put in the New York Times and two Oracle-on-Linux ads. My white-board even has a crappy drawing of tux on it.

That said, I'm still rational and clear-headed about using what works. Although I run Linux at home, I'm fully aware that Sara basically just puts up with it because she loves me. There's just too many times when it should "just work" and I've got to tweak things to make them do what they should. It's not quite ready for the average "mouse-only" user.

The main place where this is evident is surfing the web. Yes, Firefox is great, but on Linux, good plugins are hard to come by. Apple and Microsoft have a vested interest in keeping their media formats to themselves, and I don't think we'll be seeing Quicktime for Linux or Microsoft Linux Media Player anytime soon. Thankfully, Macromedia and Real are putting out fantastic plugins for Linux, so at least for now, their formats are easy to play. We'll see what happens now that Adobe has bought Macromedia.

Mplayer to the rescue for the rest

Last night I installed mplayerplug-in, which handles any media that the full-fledged mplayer handles (just about anything) and it's amazing.

Installing was as simple as apt-get install mplayerplug-in on Fedora+atrpms. Be sure to follow the "for firefox" directions at the bottom of the mplayerplug-in page)

cp mplayerplug-in.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
cp mplayerplug-in.xpt /usr/lib/firefox/components
Restart mozilla

With flash, realplayer (which is great on Linux now!), and mplayerplug-in, the browser finally "just works" on Linux, and I'm a happy camper.

Linux is one step closer to being seriously "wife" friendly.

5:24 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Push to Talk

I just remembered a funny story from when I was taking Summer Classes at HVCC:

Excerpted from my comments at Joelle's journal:

My Psych teacher at HVCC was great. He was really down to earth, but didn't take crap in his class. One day some kid's Nextel went off (when they were still really new), the kid looked kind of thuggish, but the teacher was just like "give me your phone," and started talking to the guy on the other side in speaker mode, with those annoying Nextel beeps.

"Hello?"

do-bleep! "Who the f*ck is this?"

"Wow. Well, this is your friend's teacher, he's in class right now. Who is this"

do-bleep! "How the f*ck you get his phone, yo, give him back to me"

The professor still has the phone, and turns to the kid in the class.

"What's his name?"

"Murder"

Silence. The prof blanches a little, and then the class laughs. "You're serious, his name is Murder?"

The kid nods, embarrassed, but trying to maintain the thug machismo.

The prof pushes the talk button.

"Hey Murder, I'm going to give you back to your friend now, but he's in class, so he'll have to call you back"

silence again.

"Huh, I think he hung up on me! He's not going to kill me now is he?"

"Let me call him back" The kid said, and walked hurriedly out of the room going "yo yo, it's okay, he's just my teacher" His Nextel never went off in class again.

Classic stuff

That's what I'd want to be like if I was a teacher.

Wow, I just realized that I really miss teaching. Maybe I should start doing some tech classes in the city...

3:32 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |