Meat Leasing

More Meat for Less

High Quality Video Encoding for the Web

I recently had to reencode a seminar a client had produced for DVD. They wanted to stream it from their own server on the web at 640 x 480 pixel size. Their attempts using Quicktime could only be played on 10Mbit/sec DSL not on 1.5Mbit/sec DSL. The symptoms were a blue Q showing, a very long wait for something to happen then a black rectangle but nothing playing (and more more network traffic).

Archive Email With Postfix

I was asked if I could figure out a way to archive all email going both in and out of a whole domain. They wanted one giant mailbox with all the emails in it.

It took 4 steps:

  1. Create an archive email account (which can be in the same domain)
  2. Create a bcc map file
  3. Edit postfix’s mail.cf file
  4. Reload postfix
  5. Test

Octopress Hidden Features

There are several features of the theme I didn’t see in the documentation but did spot in the code.

Asides (the sidebar)

You can include a bit about yourself of the blg by editing source/_includes/custom/asides/about.html and then adding custom/asides/about.html, into the default_asides in _config.yml.

_config.yml
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default_asides: [asides/recent_posts.html, custom/asides/about.html, asides/twitter.html, asides/github.html, asides/googleplus.html]

From Mephisto to Octopress

Because I have so little to do… Ha! That’s not right… Because I haven’t done a project for my own curiousity in a while, I decided to move one of my ghost-town sites (this one) to Octopress 2.0. It writen in ruby so what could go wrong?

The whole move took me a fair bit of a weekend. Most of the time was spent figuring out style changes using SASS. Tried out a couple Google Fonts and then cut back to two due to page load time going up. Amazon deployments are not supported yet even though there is jeje’s excellent code out waiting to be merged back into octopress.

Weird Error Running Rails3 or Bundler

If you see this error:

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$ bundle list
Could not find gem ' (>= 0, runtime)' in any of the gem sources.

Then you probably have a line like this: gem "", :group => :test at the end of your Gemfile, auto inserted by some install step. Just remove that line to fix the problem.

In my case, I suspect rails g machinist:install made the mess.

Whacky Backwards Typing

A client had this problem. Everywhere there was an open text box their typing would come up backwards. Firefox, Excel, etc. They also reported that excel could not be scrolled to the right.

The problem was their mouse was sending scroll-left signals all the time even though there was no horizontal scroll wheel on the mouse.

openVZ Debian: Unable to Open Pty

If you are getting an error like:

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$ sudo vzctl enter 777
enter into VE 777 failed
Unable to open pty: No such file or directory

Get your quick fix here.

Libxml-ruby With Mac OS X 10.5

Several feature of libxml-ruby seemed to be missing. In particular, reader.line_number was undefined. It turns out that libxml-ruby silently removes features that aren’t in your system’s libxml2.

Rdoc doesn’t seem to reflect what is going on locally.

I wasted a 2 hours on this until I read the source code and saw this:

Pushing a New Project to a Remote Mercurial

Just doing hg clone ./local-repo ssh://me@remotehost/hg/repowon’t work if you’re using hgwebcgi.

To create a clone on a remote that is NOT a server, you can use the method detailed in k4ml

hg clone ./local-repo ssh://me@remotehost/hg/repo

You have to watch out for user:group permissions problems if other users need to get at that repository.