Posts

Showing posts from December, 2008

Using ffmpeg to split MOD movie files.

Image
My wife and I recently purchased a Panasonic SDR-H40 for capturing video of our son and daughter, after our Canon MiniDV crapped out last year. It was disappointing when the Canon failed again...TWO times this thing decides to get tape debris caught in the heads. This was the most delicate camera ever owned, and captured excellent quality footage, but I will NEVER buy another tape-based machine. The Panasonic falls short in the quality department as compared to the Canon, and we knew that going in. The maximum video quality is 10mbps, which seems to be pretty good quality on a laptop. I haven't tried it on a analog TV yet. Image via CrunchBase I needed to post these clips on YouTube for family and friends located in various parts of the planet, and rapidly discovered that the MOD files stored on the SDR-H40 can be accessed easily as plugging in the USB card, and waiting for udev to automatically mount it on my shiny new installation of Ubuntu. I discovered that t

GFI LANguard 9 Review

Image
As a consultant, I used GFI LANguard (7?...it was at least 2 years ago) as a tool, in conjunction with nmap and some others, to perform security audits for our clients. Now I've an opportunity to use it again, and agreed to give it a review. Environment Dell Dimension 5150 P4 3ghz, 2gb Ram SLED 10.1, running VMWare Server 1.x 768mb allocated for XP SP2 Instance LAN, 2003 Domain in mixed mode The download from GFI's website was surprisingly small; only 50mb. The installation was straight forward, with only two questions; installation location, and initial credentials to use for scanning your domain. The UI is no different, very intuitive. I'd expect nothing else from GFI, since most of their products are the same way. The product is broken up into four components: Management Console - the central location for launching scans, view saved scans, configure options, and use specialized network security tools. Attendant Service - runs scheduled scans and patch deploymen

Chucky Cheese

Yesterday, attended a birthday party for our friends 2 year old at Chucky Cheese. My first thought was that this was going to be fun for our young son, who's not had this kind of experience before. We try to expose him to as many things (read: safe, reasonable. i.e. Not bungee jumping. Yet.) as we can. What we encountered can only be described as what we used to call in the Army, as a "cluster f$%k". It was 20 degrees outside. There were at least 30 people waiting to enter, most for parties. We were all freezing our asses off, half inside the building, half outside. Would that be "half-assed"? I digress. The young man checking guests in, appeared new, because he was not bothering to check if some of us were attending parties, or just looking for somewhere to drink while our kids spread our particular variety of bactiria and virus around. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally the manager comes over to do her job, and find out why we are all standing aroun