Embedded Video Support in ePubs
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | No Comments
Videos in ePubs? Are you serious?
Well, eventually our books will look like the newspapers in Harry Potter movies (MPal, 2010). Just imagine, not just static images to embellish the text, but also the motion pictures and sound of people screaming and yelling in Azkaban.
But are we there yet?
This is what I found from a short googling on the matter. This is what I know to be true by Summer of 2010.
- Video and audio files are not part of the core media types that are supported per the current ePub standard (IDPF – OPS 2.0.1). However, the standard allows for embedding non-core media if an alternative core type is specified as a fallback. The result is that currently some readers support media types that other readers don’t. See the standard page.
- Apple iBooks can play embedded video in 3gp and m4v using HTML5 notation. See:
- Bookworm is web-based reader, and it supports ePub with embedded flash video. See: http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/14/using-flash-video-in-epub/
- Sony Reader doesn’t support video.
- Comprehensive report on video and audio support on different readers are not yet to be created. This issue is tabled for later.
- Linking to resources outside of the ePub bundle is not suggested, but may not be fully restricted, if alternative media available. I know from previous experience that Bookworm and Calibre allows external media. However, iBooks on iPad crashed on some sample with external links without alternative embedded media.
Transparency
Posted on | May 19, 2010 | 1 Comment
Successes should be celebrated
Mistakes should be corrected
Failures should be learned from
Cover-ups should be punished
Simple Recipe for PDF Stitching
Posted on | April 28, 2010 | No Comments
I found this little recipe on how to merge several PDF documents into one, using Ghostscript. Super simple:
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf . . . pdfx.pdf
Several other recipes can be found in here: Putting together PDF Files.
Cloudy, with a Chance of Fish. Literally !
Posted on | March 3, 2010 | No Comments
An interesting reading I got this morning was about a small town of 700 in Australia, Lajamanu, that had an interesting rain. A fishy rain!
While quite freaky, apparently fish rain is not too rare, a documentary video below accounts about 600 occurrence in a year. The interesting thing about this one is that the nearest body of water the battered town is a river 326 miles away! You can follow the complete story from this publication.
Git resources for svn users
Posted on | March 2, 2010 | No Comments
Many Subversion (svn) users are jumping the wagon to the coolest new kid in the source code management tool block, Git.
Git does provide a lot of improvements over svn, but it can be very unintuitive at times. These two are more different than they are alike, so it’s just wouldn’t work to simply use git while thinking in svn mindsets.
Git is first and foremost, distributed SCM, while svn is a centralized one. When you clone a git repository, you’d get a complete repository, not just a working copy! Since your local copy is a full repository, you’d commit your changes locally too! Only when you need to share your changes to the world would you push to external repository.
A few documents have help me ease the transitional pain. Hope these helps you too:
VMWare Server 2.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.10
Posted on | February 25, 2010 | No Comments
Last night I downloaded the latest VMWare Server from Vmware website, it was version 2.0.2. I needed it because I was trying to experiment with several Open Office server solution, and I need to simulate tiered environment.
First attempt to install it in my Kubuntu 9.10 host, running kernel 2.6.31-16-generic-pae didn’t work, VMWare server fails to build with several build issues:
Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.31-16-generic-pae/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.31-16-generic-pae'
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:31:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:78: error: conflicting types for ‘poll_initwait’
include/linux/poll.h:70: note: previous declaration of ‘poll_initwait’ was here
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/vmware.h:38,
from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:99:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/vm_basic_types.h:108:7: warning: "__FreeBSD__" is not defined
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/vcpuset.h:103,
from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/modulecall.h:37,
from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./common/vmx86.h:33,
from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:29,
from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:101:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/vm_atomic.h:329:7: warning: "_MSC_VER" is not defined
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/vm_atomic.h:333:7: warning: "_MSC_VER" is not defined
Apparently, VMWare server 2.0.2 would not compile with my kernel. Upon quick Googling, I found that similar issues has been around since version 2.0.1 with kernel 2.6.30 and up.
Luckily, the ‘g33k w17h p45510n’ at Radu Cotescu has provided a patch, and even better, an install script! I tried his script, and everything is fine in my virtual world. Installing two Xubuntu 9.10 virtual machines now 
Radu claims that he always finishes what he started. Well, I’ll tell you, there is no reason to doubt him!
Thank you for the script, Radu!
Ezra at Sourceforge
Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments
I was looking for my exact username in Sourceforge, so I searched for ‘ezra.’
Look what I found: an open source project named after me!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezra/
I know, I know… It was probably not named after this pompous and megalomaniac Ezra…
koan = 10.5 x 4
Posted on | February 6, 2010 | No Comments
One of the rather bizarre classes I took during college was called ‘Spiritual Care and Healing‘. No, it wasn’t a religious class, but it was certainly a spiritual one.
In it, I learned things like drawing with your eyes closed, writing with your non-dominant hand, journaling for health, imagining white blood cells as members of elite death-squad, the chronicle of Andrew Weil, meditating on raisins, and this Zenic Buddistic maxim called Koan.
Sounds like a bunch of quacks, i am sure, but I actually enjoyed the class. It was very interactive, and full of activities. I sometimes partnered with this nice girl, who later became the wife of my ex-roommate. Oh, awesomeness!!
But also, from those daily journals that I wrote; from the incoherent rambles, quips, and frets, I was diagnoses with something! No, not insanity… I was diagnosed with something more significant: I need the sun! Yes, I was diagnosed that I need the sun, to thrive, and to be happy. I was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was living in a basement, and I was working in a basement, and it was during a dark Autumn in Indiana, and I was unknowingly depressed! No wonder, I used to hate the rains. I was very impressed that I was diagnosed by Madam Professor only from my writings. I was impressed that she connected the dots, and I was impressed that she could read my handwriting.
See, the class was not all quacks!
This thing about Koan, though, tickles…
I was told that Koans are these hard dialog puzzles. Enigmas of some sort. They are so hard such that the answers can be perceived irrelevant; so friggin hard, sometimes there are too many answers to consider. Or ain’t no none at all.
These could be silly questions like ‘does a dog have Buddha Nature?‘, to which an apt answer can be given: ‘who cares??‘
But there are real hard ones, like ‘why bad things happen to good people‘, or ‘why good things happen to bad people‘, or ‘why mommy and daddy could ever decide to live together‘, or ‘why the tsunami in Haiti‘, or ‘why miscarriages happen‘, or ‘why was I born ugly‘, or ‘why the HIV.‘ Well, you get the idea..
Pick one, and meditate on it for a second. And then a minute. And then an hour. Strange, huh, somehow you get sucked in to the question, and it’s hard to pull yourself out. Each time a candidate answer lurks, and then a better one, and then a better one still, and then you’d realize that the first answer was probably better.
But sometimes you have no choice, though, especially if you are experiencing one. Your life can be a koan. In fact, your life is a koan. Many people try to answer these questions. People even make careers out of them. Even a shrink need another. But a wise man, who has gone to the galaxies said that the answer could simply be: 42.
I sometimes ponder about this koan of mine, for a while, for a long time. Typically, I’d get quite far, but then I’d think, maybe it really is just 42. 42 is just so much easier.
Now, if you have some time, would you help me with this koan: “why would a blogger blogs ?”
Once in a New Year Blue Moon
Posted on | December 30, 2009 | No Comments
New Year Eve happens every year, but a Blue Moon New Year Eve only happens once in twenty years.
No, the moon will not turn blue. But the moon will shine brightly, for it will be a full moon; the second one in the month!
Tomorrow is such a night, guys! How special is that!!
May I remind you that Blue Moon is also quite a nice Belgian Ale? Maybe you would enjoy your Blue Moon eve with a fresh glass of Blue Moon.
Happy for Kubuntu 9.10
Posted on | November 17, 2009 | No Comments
It’s been about one year now from my ‘forced’ move from the Fedoras to the Kubuntus. And I didn’t give in without a fight 
.
Recently I upgraded my 2 Kubuntu 9.04 machines to 9.10, and I have to say that I am quite pleased with the outcome. I am happy to say, that this is my FIRST Kubuntu upgrades that didn’t pose any headaches for me.
My 9.04 upgrade was quite unsuccessful, I had to write a small cron job to kill wayward KDE processes. After I upgraded to 9.10, the wayward processes are no longer there, so my machine got snappier again. Furthermore, it didn’t use to automatically re-size the screen resolution when I plugged in my external monitor. And then, after I manually re-sized it, I had to restart synergy, because the screen boundaries were all wrong. All these issues are now gone.
I am pleasantly surprise that now Pidgin also notify me when I get new messages. Also, gone are the few hiccups that I had with the sound server.
One minor issue tho, GTK error spews!!
I fire up Firefox via a terminal because I run several versions for testing. To my surprise, I got a gazillion GTK error messages in my terminal, “(firefox-bin:2767): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead” at nauseoum ex vomitum. Good think that I discovered that it was a known benign issue. It was a problem that was shoved under the rug, and now exposed. I guess I either have to put up with them, or redirect them to /dev/null. Oh well, I shouldn’t really expect for perfection, right?
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