Mar14, Sunday, gardening

March 14th, 2010

Moss out 1 galon; 26 peas of 5 types.

Installing (and only installing) Cygwin X Server for “ssh -X”

March 1st, 2010

The following packages are needed: ssh, Xorg sever, twm. I am using  cygwin 1.7.1. Maybe something more … I installed everything under X11 to get it work by clicking the X/Win Server menu, which brings up an xterm window where I do “ssh -X” without problem….

English names of bulb flowers

February 28th, 2010

Tulip, Hyacinth, Daffodil, Calla lily, Iris, Crocus, Amaryllids.

Quick LAMP on debian

December 14th, 2009

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin apache2

Then visit: http://server-ip/phpmyadmin

Tip: Do not leave root password empty, as phpmyadmin by default won’t let you log on with empty password.

apt-get update with public key not available warning

December 14th, 2009

Question:

W: GPG error: http://ftp.us.debian.org sid Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 9AA38DCD55BE302B
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

Answer:

xguan@p4:~$ gpg –keyserver subkeys.pgp.net –recv-keys 9AA38DCD55BE302B
gpg: requesting key 55BE302B from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
gpg: /home/xguan/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key 55BE302B: public key “Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (5.0/lenny) <ftpmaster@debian.org>” imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)
xguan@p4:~$ gpg -a –export 55BE302B | sudo apt-key add -
OK
xguan@p4:~$

resort the files for my stupid mp3 player

November 5th, 2009

for /f  “delims=@” %i in (’dir /b /o:n’) do copy “%i” new_dir\

Moved to new home

June 30th, 2009

We bought a house on June 26, 2009. Did the move on the weekend of June 27, 28. I like the small south facing gardening space in the backyard. This always reminds me of the farmer days in my childhood, when my father and mother made their living on a small land, growing cotton in the summer and wheat in the winter.

June 28: planted 8 tomatos from Chi Shuang.

June 30: planted 4 more tomatos from Chi Shuang, a line of 14 garllics, one purple flower that we grew from seeds (I forgot name).

June 30: introduced myself to Julia across the street. Carol visited us with a card a flower pot. Helen and Joy visited us with a pot of rose. Refrigerator arrived in the morning. Spent a lot of time cleaning tap residues inside it (damn GE for not using better quality tap). Caulked most of the 90-degrees. Oiled the garage door. Padded two chairs and the dinning table. Finally we can sit while eating!  

Encoding DVD to a file with mplayer/mencoder in Windows

June 4th, 2009

Very rough cmd line and I do not know the right output file extension, but the output can be played by mplayer, which is all I need :-)

mencoder dvd://3 -alang en -dvd-device e: -o c:\dvd\3.avi -oac faac -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1200

Language explorations by our 3-year-old

February 1st, 2009

- 红薯叫什么?
- Sweet potato
- 应该叫Red potato呀。

- 狼的英文是什么?
- Wolf.
- 那Sugar wolf是什么?
- 糖狼.
(原来桌上有一只玩具螳螂…)

Encoding video for Zune 80GB using ffmpeg

January 10th, 2009

I am able to put an old 45min *.rm video file to my Zune 80GB, using encode-handheld-2.5.pl + a version of ffmpeg that supports x264 video and aac audio.

Building ffmpeg:

svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-libfaac --enable-libx264 --enable-gpl
make

Converting:

./encode-handheld.pl -t ipod -f input-file -n new-title-for-the-video-file-to-show-in-zune-ui