Over Macho Grande

I'm a sucker for electronic kid gadgets, as long as they're on clearance. In our house we've got several Juice Boxes, a VideoNow PVD, and even a Disney MixMax video player. The MixMax hits the sweet spot in that it uses cheap SD memory and uses WMV as it's video format. My kids love to watch WordGirl . Unfortunately, there's no DVD of these shorts. The friendly folks over at PBS Kids have (intentionally or otherwise) put all the Flash video clips online in a directory of their web server ( http://pbskids.org/wordgirl/content/video ). It took me a couple of days, but I can now share how I converted the files so they work on the MixMax. My initial experiments centered on using ffmpeg on Linux to convert to a common format. It worked out okay on some of the videos, but not all of them. ffmpeg can encode in WMV/WMA, so then I tried that. Again, it worked for some videos but not all of them. As my Linux box also happens to be my Windows box, rebooting soon became

I'm reinstalling Solaris 9 OE and "smpatch" is running on the SB1000 right now. The following error message appeared on the screen: CRITICAL: The patch 112838-12 makes the kernel unstable, is obsolete or is forbidden by policy. How's that for automated patch management?

I compiled the latest version of MIT Kerberos for Solaris tonight. All in all not too painful. I hadn't done any compilation since December, so I forgot that it's best to use bash instead of tcsh as my configuration shell. For future reference, here's the configure options: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --without-krb4 --with-tcl=/usr/sfw --enable-shared

Not long after I implemented a UNIX to SharePoint Document Library transfer service at work we moved to a native Kerberos domain at work. The upside is that we're using Kerberos and can play with stuff like mod_auth_kerb . The downside is that the current version of HttpClient doesn't work in an AD/Kerberos environment.