Real World Computing

If you enjoy watching foreign films or if you're hard of hearing like me, then subtitles are a must in your movie collection. In my last post, I covered how to convert movies from DVD to AVI for playing on a portable player. In this post, I'll be discussing subtitles. There are two types of subtitles, burned in and selectable. Obviously the selectable type is best because you can turn them on and off and you can obtain different languages too. Within the selectable type, there are a few formats with the most common being sub/idx files, txt files and my personal favourite, SRT files. In order to get your subtitles to play in players like VLC VideoLAN and on player boxes like the WD TV box, you'll usually need to put the subtitles in the same folder as the AVI and name them the same. So if you movie is called "Return of the Scary Kittens.avi" then your subtitle should be called "Return of the Scary Kittens.srt". Some players allow you to have mult...

Forget the why and wherefores of what we're doing - That's part one which you can read here . Lets get started; Ingredients A computer with a large hard drive 20GB Free? Pentium 4 3GHz or Faster and a DVD drive A copy of DVD Decrypter - it's free A copy of AutoGK - it's free DVD Decrypter http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/ This software allows you to copy the files from a DVD to your hard drive. The project was shut down some years back but it's still possible to get hold of it on the internet. An alternative to this is DVD Fab. There's a free version and a commercial version. The difference between the two is that the commercial version handles more DVD protection schemes. http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm AutoGK http://www.autogk.me.uk/ AutoGK is short for Auto Gordian Knot which describes a knot so difficult to untie that it was cut instead. It's quite apt considering the purpose of this tool. It's not a single piece of software but rather i...

I'm very much a believer in the idea that "files" will be the next big format for video entertainment after DVDs. I guessed right from the start that blu-ray would win the format war against HD-DVD but I never thought that either would take over. About 15 years ago, after having ridden the music upgrade from LP Records to tapes and to CD, I stumbled across this "new" format called MP3. Back then, there were no MP3 players, just computers but I was enthralled by the idea that with enough storage, I could save my music collection in a way that meant that I could play them without ever having to get a CD out of the cupboard again. I emarked on a quest to convert my entire library of Music CDs to MP3. People thought I was weird but a few years later as MP3 players became more readily available, I reaped the rewards. I didn't have to convert anything - it was already done. I see video entertainment as following the same path. As with my early MP3 conversio...

I'm sure that most Domino admins have been doing these tasks regularly but if you don't have occasion to touch them often, you might this post useful. As I mentioned last week, we've been having issues with the JVE running out of memory on our server. One of the "solutions" (band-aids) was to restart the domino HTTP task. I've been experimenting to see how long I can leave it and the shortest it's been is about 30 hours. It seemed to be a good idea to stop and then restart the domino HTTP service on a timer. In admin-talk, that means a program document. Procedure The steps I'm using here are for Domino 8.5.2 but I don't think they've changed in years. 1. Start Domino Administrator 2. Click on the tab marked Configuration 3. In the left hand navigator,click on Server (and expand it) 4. In the left hand navigator,click on Programs This will take you to a screen where you can expand your servers and see what other regular tasks are scheduled. If...

A couple of weeks ago, we launched a new XPages app. Hopefully the first of many. It was very impressive and we got a lot of hits.... ...until the server crashed. Not a big deal. Our server is set to restart automatically, and it was up and running in no time. Then about 1.5 days later we had another crash. We've decided to tackle this on a few fronts, first of all we're rewriting some parts of the app to be a bit less intense and to take better advantage of the recycler. That's all cutting edge development stuff, so it's really not "me". On the admin side, I wanted to see if we could release resources a bit. I checked the server close to a crash but there's no indication on the Windows 2003 side of things. Of course, the Notes Logs tell a different story. HTTP JVM: CLFAD0211E: Exception thrown. For more detailed information, please consult error-log-0.xml located in e:/Lotus/Domino/data/domino/workspace/logs HTTP JVM: >>>> HTTP JVM: The XP...

I wasn't happy with the usability of my last post, so I've redone it as a presentation. You can view it fullscreen here; https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dgxzmfwk_82dp8t8gf5 or embedded below.

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher...