Thursday, August 27, 2009

Finally someone else noticed it

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8223611.stm

Finally, some one has noticed over population might be more important than global warming.

I had that concern a long time ago, when I first went to US, in my geology class, I wrote an essay on that, saying building abortion clinics should be on the priority when US is sending humanitarian aids overseas. Of course at that time I didn't realize US doesn't like abortions.

(I recently stopped believe in global warming, as in this post)

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

MTS, Youtube and FFMpeg

I bought a Canon HD Cam a couple of month ago for my daughter (HF20), and it has been great except it always produce .mts files. They are huge to upload to youtube, and recently sometimes after upload a video, I found the sound sometimes trembles and became very unpleasant.

So I tried to google some conversion software, and alone some pre-made commercial ones I found ffmpeg. Since economy is not good, I decided to give it a try first.

So I got ffmpeg tarball from ffmpeg.org, followed part of their build step then decided to just use cygwin. I always uses cygwin for grep, so all I have to do is add the gcc compiler, libtools, autoconfig etc. Build was simple (./configure and make).

Tried a mts file, it can't understand what x264 format is. So I grabed x264 package from videolan.org. The zip version is not good, can't configure at all. Took me a while to figure that out. Also make sure take out the -mnocygwin link option.

Tried again and it complains can't find faac. So I went downloaded faac, failed compile couple of times (__STRING not defined, and u_int32_t not defined, just define them).

Tried to compile ffmpeg again with all options, failed again. Turned out you need to remove a double defined entry in faac.h (forget what is it now).

Oh make sure you use this to config ffmpeg:
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --enable-libfaac

Finally got it running, right now the best conversion I found is with this:
ffmpeg -i input.mts -y -target film-dvd out.mpg

Hope this helps you, and enjoy the $$ savings from video conversion software (I was going to buy one just to do mts video conversion). Big thanks to the ffmpeg team!

Monday, August 17, 2009

Starcraft II Zeratul/Kerrigan Intro Cinematic

Nice one Blizzard! I always loved their CGI Movies.

This is posted by HDStarcraft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_0UdfQuSQQ

And a nice JD vs Fantasy fight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkOoe0KqAcs&feature=related

Friday, August 14, 2009

The Murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair

I was reading a complete different story, when a comment on Madalyn Murray O'Hair got my interest. It was the comment of her own son. And I want to see who this women is, and a google search turned out this interesting link. The story itself has so many turns, if William Shakespeare is alive he can probably make a great novel out of it.

If you are interested, see the link below:
The Murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair:
America's Most Hated Woman

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Some cute stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysTmUTQ5wZE&NR=1

and this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY3o1o3LFBY&NR=1

Oh that is cool

This is a video showing some rich kid building a super faster computer. I am not affiliated with Samsung in anyway, but this is just sooooo cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

SC match, BoxeR vs Flash

BoxeR is the greatest Starcraft player ever, but post his prime. Flash is the current ruling Terran player. I missed this game but it is a great watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ptEQZrDj4

Monday, August 10, 2009

AC repair

One of my Air Condition Unit failed last Friday. I came home and found the out side heat pump fan not running, and initially thought it was a broken fan motor.

However after some googling, I started to think it might be the starter capacitor. I checked my upstairs AC unit, it has a slightly different capacitor but both AC unit are the same model, so they should be interchangeable (the broken capacitor is 5/30 and the other one is 5/35). So I swapped the capacitors and the broken AC unit started to work.

Both me and my wife were very happy, because if we call in a service man it could be easily hundreds of dollars.

So here are some of my findings:
1. If the fan stops working, but you can start it by spin the fan (try both directions), it is most likely a capacitor problem.
2. The capacitors has a voltage. It is OK to use a capacitor with a higher voltage rate in place of a lower rated one (i.e. a 440V cap can replace a 370V cap, but not the opposite).

I am still studying the way the motor starts. According to what I could find, the capacitor is used to start the motor, but I can't understand why adding a capacitor there could help reduce the start up current. I will try to consult some of my PHD friends :-)

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Perfect Reaver Micro

Check out this youtube Starcraft match: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rBqN33TVMs&NR=1

All commentary are in Korean, but I don't need to understand their comments either :-)

He is the Michael Whitman of South Korea.