So later, when I want to convert html to pdf, I even can convert the post of “Lan Zhou La Mian” with video therein to a PDF file.

If you have a Adobe Reader with version 7.0, then you can take a look of this file CO_in_Hb which shows some protein animation.

This is made possible by Latex. I may give the detailed recipe later.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -target ntsc-svcd output.mpg

Sure, you need to install ffmpeg first, which is free&open sourse, largely distributed and even available for windows system. With this tool, you also can convert flv file (flash files, which is quite popular these days, if you have downloaded video files from google or youtube) to mpeg, avi or whatever and burn a vcd/dvd. I am sure mencoder can do the conversion as well. But the reason I choose this ffmpeg is that the “-target” option makes it very clear and easy. If I want to have a VCD format, then I just simply put it in the option and I can have SVCD/DVD format as choices as well. Meanwhile adding the information of NTSC or PAL before the “VCD”, you can make it suitable for American TV players or Chinese TV (not big problem for computers though)

Note: NTSC, PAL are just different standards for TVs. The distribution (green: NTSC, yellow: PAL) is shown below.

In the evening, I got several quicktime movies exported by iphoto and I intended to convert them to mpg so that I can create a VCD/SVCD. There seems solutions around when I am googling. However, I don’t want to use those CLI(command line) solutions because there seems too many options to choose for the “mencoder” command. And there was not a direct answer how to “convert .mov to .mpg”. So I want to use some gui/frontend for the “mencoder”, a sibling of mplayer.

I tried a lot of programs listed at “MEncoder Frontends“, and decided to go with avidemux. However, it failed during installing/compiling, as “SpiderMonkey” is required. This is the first time I saw “SpiderMonkey“, too spammer/virus-like to me. After consulting google, I learned it is the javascript engine, then no wonder the famous javascript control extension of firefox is called greasemonkey. And what you need to install in linux is actually the js, js-devel package, and I feel js/js-devel sounds much more friendly than “SpiderMonkey”. However, when compiling, a little extra step is still needed, as you need to specify the library path as following:

yum install js, js-devel

./configure –with-jsapi-include=/usr/include

make

make install

While the avidemux looks friendly, it couldn’t handle the audio track of the .mov file (as I checked later by qtinfo, the audio is mp4a format). I had to resort to some other ways …

In August you guys created about 56k blogs, 57k users, 1.2 million posts, 188k pages, 1.3 million comments, 3.5k support requests, 196k file uploads, and around 45 million pageviews. (Not counting admin section, images, CSS, RSS feeds, etc.)
The most popular theme is Regulus, about two thousand blogs are using the Meebo widget. The tag surfer is more popular than “my comments”, but both are dwarfed by the number of times you guys look at your stats everyday. About 4200 of you have added avatars to your profile.

WordPress.com August Stats by Blogging Pro

Blogging from Flock, a web browser based on mozilla(firefox). It has some nice features for news aggregating, blogging and photo sharing. I am just testing here. The reason I found this browser is that today I tried to search blog editor for linux and at the end, when I am tired of looking around anymore, I noticed this and just wanted to use it. So it’s not the perfect blog editor, at least at this moment. I guess at the current stage, my most wanted software from windows will be Live writer. And the reason I wanted the live writer so much, is that it enables you to download the CSS files from the blog and it is really doing the WYSIWYG job armed with the style file. It won’t be a big deal to have this feature for other blog editors, I guess. But it’s just whether people would like to make it real or not. Because there is certainly a big flaw if your post is too style-based on one specific CSS file, then for some reason, you change the CSS file for the whole site, how will the posts look like? But I still want to have this CSS-enabled feature. Since I like the idea to freeze the previous posts with the corresponding CSS file at that time. I will try to do this later or again search first

Meanwhile, don’t forget the stats shown at the very top for wordpress.com, I would like to take a look at these most used whatever ~

Blogged with Flock

最麻烦的还是对付baidu的搜索词。我本来还有些想谴责这个wp-slimstat的编写人不给baidu 面子，不把它列入搜索引擎的网站中，我还以为我就能轻松解决。结果却发现从baidu来的url里的搜索词全是gb2312编码（例如这个）的而不是utf-8编码 （例如google的这个），在这种全球化的年代还只守着简体中文也太爱国了吧。然后php也还没有正式的支持各种编码互换的功能，解中文码更需要些东西。 我就只能想出另一个偷懒的办法，就是把来自baidu的链接给硬新分了个版块，然后把搜索词抽取出来并保留它的gb2312编码，让浏览器去解决这个编码问题。

这时我就需要一个让浏览器知道我想它使用何种编码的命令。这个仿佛很简单，我就在html里加入了这一行：

< meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=GB2312″ />

可是浏览器却硬生生的忽略了我的请求，只能求助于google。 可是我却错过了google中马上能解决的方法，因为只见某人简单的一说，可以用php的header命令来发送http header。我硬是在那时错误的认为不就是html里的head那部分吗，我还不就这么干的？然后在各处瞎找，最后硬是去读了http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/tutorial-char-enc/，才恍然记起若干年前学的一些东西，http header原来是别的东西：

真的是感觉愧对了当年的一番学习，于是匆匆的加了这个命令：

header(”Content-type: text/html; charset=$charset”);

一切就都正常的显示了：）

Anyway, I managed the content part and then spent the whole last night playing with the style/format. It turned out a mistake-prone process to loop the content with the table element and I have to frequently refer to some HTML validator for correction. Now it was up there correctly.

The final step is to run the python script periodically, so it could gather new information itself. The slave is cron:

crontab -e (configure the job, example: 30 0,12,19,21,23 * * * pfeed.py)

crontab -l (list current jobs)

All set, but I will try to have image available inside the abstract part next time.

The 2nd year, I began to be toying with linux and set up our own web server (with url as scorparies.princeton.edu at first, then www.ohehlium.com). Along with that, I was attracted to the multifuntional tiki system and used it on our site. However, it turned out too slow to visit even hosted on a P4/512Mb machine (I know just a pre-P3/128Mb machine can already do a pretty good job for some other system; and currently this blog powered by wordpress is hosted on a P3/256Mb PC). So I had to disable many functions and gradually I lost interest managing that system. During that period, I was also learning perl so that I played some scipts on the server, but the web page functioned more like a GUI to me and rigorously I was not using perl to develop our website. Meanwhile, I read or learned something about php, which is quite perl-like but designed specifically for web scripting. Adventous I was, I even spent weeks building a small site for my research projects by php when my boss was away travelling. However, that site sort of sank with the slow progess of my project.

Time flies quickly and now it’s the 3rd year. I am playing with the web again. As I settled down the blog with wordpress, the wiki with the mediawiki and the photo album with gallery2, instead of intergrating all the functions together, I am turning to individual functional component for solution (though I don’t have a forum candidate now). Interestingly, as to some simple scripting, instead of perl, this year, I am learning and using python. I hope this time everything will be settled and help build a better site:)

Interestingly, I found the comsuption of cpu at this new linux kernel is quite low, just by judging the cpu fan speed. A year ago, it was terrible when I used the Fedora Core 3 then I had to go back to Windows system and this emachine seems renowned for its overheating problem. Now the sound of fan is even weaker than that in the windows. I hope this is not just because of the newly installation, let’s see how it is after weeks.

I just feel linux is really rocking now, the desktop environment, the office suite and the multimedia applications, we should all start to like it

And yet, I haven’t started to taste the features like beagle and tomboy. I’ll try to follow up but boss is coming back tomorrow, and tonight I need to do some serious stuff fisrt.

Blame me having not started perparing for the seminar…