Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

I’ve been meaning to write about the Linux codec problem for a while now but didn’t have a good enough reason, but I recently listened to the (not-podcast) The Linux Link Tech Show, episode 233 where one of the guys (apparently Dann, but for the life of me I can’t distinguish between them on the broadcast) discusses his new Eee PC (the tiny Linux laptop that has taken over the world or at least the blogosphere), and how it handles video playing.

To sum the Linux codec issue for people who haven’t been listening – it is one of the major hurdles for “Linux on the desktop” (the effort to have Linux operating systems be a viable Desktop operating system for everyday users). One of the key parts for providing a good desktop experience is being able to play multimedia files that users get regularly through email and the web. To be able to play a video or audio file you need a good player (and that Linux has plenty) and the software codec (“enCOder/DECoder”) that understand the file format and can play it. Different file formats – such as MP3, AVI or WMV – require different codecs from different manufacturers, and for legal reasons these are not always available out of the box with your choice of Linux operating system.

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(I’m not sure if the first such rant was on this blog, or it was just on a comment in another blog, but it was about the incredibly navel-contemplating project “god“).

I like Ruby and I think its a neat little language. Although it still suffers from some childhood maladies (such as very bad performance), it has a very nice syntax and uses a lot of common development paradigms mixed-in in a very interesting and useful way. I’ve wrote a few programs (small and large) in Ruby and I keep it in my arsenal of programming tools on the same shelf as Perl (and not on the same shelf with Python which is stored in some box somewhere).

But I keep noticing the same problem – it used to be that we would joke about C programmers saying “when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail”, but its becoming more and more apparent that Ruby programmers fall into the same category. Everywhere I turn theres someone who is trying to use Ruby (or misuse it as the case may be) in a situation where it is clearly the wrong tool for the job.

The above mentioned “god” is a good example, but here’s another one:
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(at the bottom of the sidebar to the right) that I found in Firefox’s affiliate button section. Kawaii!!

While I’m on the subject of Firefox, Firefox 3 beta 3 is scheduled to be released soon, so I took the liberty of checking the Mozilla beta “splash page”¹ , and while last time I checked it was 404ed – now it shows something, but not what I expected. If you’d click the link after the beta 3 was released, then you’d get the real page and not what I saw, so here it is for posterity:

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1. The page that will be displayed when the browser starts. [↩]

So I’m writing a web application again, and again I need it to work with Internet Explorer, so of course I can’t anything fancy – or I can try but everything breaks:
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In short – no, and as I’ve seen people get baffled by that more then once – and the interesting effects that occur when programmers assume that it works, here’s a short explanation of what is multi-dispatch and why it doesn’t work in Java.

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There’s a lot of Wii hacks going around (mostly by this guy) – which I’ve mostly managed to ignore, but this last one is so cool. You wouldn’t think so just reading the title, but watch the video:

This is definitely cool, and as Johnny Lee says – if any Nintendo Wii developer is watching this: bring on the games!

(I’m not buying a Wii just yet, but if a game that uses this technique comes out, I’d be hard pressed not to buy one).

רוטב לפסטה הוא משהו די פשוט, אבל אפשר לעשות אותו מעניין בקצת יותר עבודה – אז הנה וריאציה שלי על שיטת הכנה לרוטב פסטה שהעתקתי מג’יימי אוליבר (“השף הערום”¹ ).

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1. ולא, הוא לא באמת ערום [↩]