Hey, I did not post about this… one of our projects got published at last years British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC ’09) in London. And more than just a publication, our work was accepted as an oral presentation. Since all presentations from this conference were recorded and published online at videolectures.net, you can see me presenting on their site. Enjoy 🙂 !
I installed the current beta version of Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) on my Samsung NC10. It seems that some bad problems with the graphics card driver have been fixed 🙂 ! The compiz effects work now and also the graphics handling in general seems to be much faster. I tried to use Blender (a open source 3D modeling tool), on Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) there were problems with the display. With 9.10 this is also fine now (seemed to be a graphics driver issue). And in addition to that, so far I haven’t experienced any freezing after waking-up from suspend mode. That was a bit bothering. In the beta version, there still seem to be some minor errors, but these probably will get fixed soon! Good news 🙂 !
I was lately observing problems inserting images into OpenOffice Impress 3.0 under Ubuntu. During the presentation mode most of the images showed a light border. After some googling I found a good workaround: changing the background of the images to transparent (using GIMP) and saving it as PNG will make the borders disappear.
We needed lately videos that were compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint. From what I understood it seems that Powerpoint supports natively only MPEG1 and WMV video codecs. After some testing I figured the options for mencoder in order to produce videos that would work with Powerpoint. Here the command line hoping that this might help other people in the future:
mencoder video.avi -o video.wmv -of lavf -oac lavc -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts vcodec=wmv1:vbitrate=1500:acodec=wmav1
Update: I added the audio codec, this should help to make audio work in Powerpoint. And thanks a lot for pointing out that file names (including the full path) should not be longer than 128 characters in Powerpoint.
I have had my iBook G4 for quite a while now, but it got slower over the time (and with the new versions of Mac OS X). About time to get a new machine! Instead of continuing with Macintosh or saddling over to Windows, I chose freedom: A Samsung NC10 netbook together with the Ubuntu Linux distribution:
I’m free! No viruses, no need for proprietary software, no control, and instead plenty of free software a mouse click away for installation. I migrated my data and I have been working with now for some weeks, it feels very good. Ubuntu is a great distribution.
Looking through the net, I found a lot of music software for Linux, wow! I’ll put a list of useful applications online at a later point. I was also very happy to see that my Edirol Audio/MIDI USB interface worked right away with Ubuntu (9.04). So I can get back to home recording!
Of course Linux is not perfect so far. The duration of the battery of my Samsung NC10 is under Linux only about 4h15. Power consumption under Windows is super-optimized – there it ranges around 6h. Another issue are stability issues when waking the NC10 up, in 10-15% of the cases Linux hangs and the system needs to be restarted. This might get solved in the future, we’ll see. Otherwise it runs great.
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