XhochY

There was a webservice that made a chart showing which countries I listen to.

Some months ago it vanished.

Because I really like to see to which countries I listened to, I just wrote a similiar mashup using Last.fm, Freebase and Google Charts. I won’t go into  detail, just check your Last.fm nations. If a artist’s country is classified as “Unknown” feel free to add it as a comment here, I will try to get it fixed

Still I am messing around with the combinations of Icecast2, ezstream configuration and well encoded videos delivered from ffmped2threora. Depending on which flags I set on the ffmpeg2theora command line, VLC stops to play, does a 2 second pause between 2 tracks or just continues seamlessly. I hope I get it managed till next week Monday but I am at the moment really scared that I have write my own app which displays the video.

One important thing that I found out is that VLC always has problem if a theora video stops unexpectedly, so using the SIGUSR1 signal with ezstream to skip to the next track is something which I shouldn’t use, so I will change my strategy from playing an hour long track between 2 Videos to playing a short 30 second track in the breaks which gets often repeated since this may be producing more cpu usage on client and server, but there is no need to skip parts of a video which could cause the mentioned bug.

Releasing a Drupal site with a German community does not only consist of programming and coordination of the modules functions. Because there are a lot modules without any translations, this has to be done manually. I have just done this for some of them:

• YUI Drupal module translation
• YUI Rich Text Editor Drupal module translation
• Local Menu Drupal module translation
• Template Extractor (potx) Drupal module translation

Every year at our school there is the problem with the video presentation at the Abistreich (an event where we celebrate out A-levels in front of all pupils). This year we want to change this. As I am the person who is concerned with the computer infrastructure to bring the video synchronously to two video projectors and the audio to the speaker, I’ll write a report how it was done, so that following generations can benefit from our experiences.

After long evaluation of media streaming server I decided to use Icecast2, partly because I have already good experiences with it when I boradcasted some audio. Another point pro Icecast was that it was the only server where I manged it to stream video in less than 30 minutes. I am using ezstream as an utility to stream my videos to the Icecast server. Everything is running on an Ubuntu 8.10 system with 1 Gig of RAM. As this does not sufficent on software we need, I still have to develop some helper scripts that change the playlist ezstream is reading from, these will be published licensed under the GPLv2 at HSG Abistreich 2009 Utilities in Launchpad.