fusi0n
29Feb/12

HOWTO: Install VLC 2.0 in Fedora 16

It was quite a pain to get my system up to speed for the new VLC 2.0. Running under Fedora 16, VLC has a bunch of dependencies that are, as of now, only found in the Fedora 17 (Rawhide) repo. Since I didn't want to clusterfuck my fc16, I decided to manually install the packages VLC's configure script told me were missing.

Here's the command to get the packages VLC 2.0 needs to compile. Run them through zif or yum:

PyQt4-4.8.6-1.fc16.x86_64 PyQt4-devel SDL_image SDL_image-devel alsa-lib \
alsa-lib alsa-lib-devel avahi-devel dirac-devel flac-devel fluidsynth-devel gcc-c++ \
gnome-vfs2-devel jack-audio-connection-kit-devel libass-devel libavc1394-devel libbluray \
libbluray-devel libcaca-devel libcdaudio-devel libcddb-devel libdca-devel libdvdread \
libdvdread-devel libiec61883-devel libmodplug-devel libmpeg2-devel libmtp-devel libogg \
libogg-devel libprojectM-devel libraw1394 libraw1394-devel librsvg2-devel \
libsamplerate-devel libshout libshout-devel libudev-devel libupnp-devel libv4l libv4l-devel \
libva-devel mesa-libGL-devel portaudio portaudio-devel schroedinger schroedinger-devel \
taglib-devel twolame-devel zvbi-devel

As you might've guessed, some of them are extras. Should they not be present, VLC will simply disallow whatever feature it was using, such as Bonjour with avahi.

14Dec/11

Fanboy Advices

I realize the impending irony of writing this post right after my small hommage to Steve Jobs.. but somebody on the Internet is wrong. You know how that goes. Jim Darlymple recently blogged about his definition of an 'Apple fanboy':

Someone who is tired of technology being difficult and knows there is something better; someone that loves to get the job done instead of working on their machine; a person that isn’t afraid of breaking the status quo; someone that appreciates quality design and workmanship; a person that realizes cheapest isn’t always best. Apple fanboys are commonly confused with the sensible people of society.

I don't care much about his argument for quality design and workmanship, his affirmation that cheapest isn't always best or his stab at societal common sense. What transpires from the rest of his 'definition' is what I don't want to see happen with the world. Telling people to get an Apple product if they think technology is too difficult is how we'll end up enslaved to the fruit-people. It's supremely important in this day and age not to let technology become overwhelming. Technology, in the state it's in, is meant to be understood and played with, not merely consumed. If you have no understanding of what you're using, well first you're going to be in a world of hurt, then you'll have to rely on somebody who actually understands to help your sorry ass out. Technology isn't kind to neophytes. For every Apple fanboy there is, there's a geek who knows better.

6Oct/11

Here’s to the crazy ones

An Era ended yesterday as the mighty Steve Jobs, who recently stepped down as CEO of Apple, passed away at 56 years old after a long battle with cancer. It's sad. It's really fucking sad. For Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad lovers it's sad. For compulsive audiophiles, digital historians and designers, it's sad. For the millions of people he and his disciples championed and inspired, the tech reporters and the business analysts, it's sad... But most of all, we've lost a a pioneer, a leader and an icon.

29Jul/11

Big Commerce API PHP Wrapper

Big Commerce is a hosted e-commerce platform. You are given FTP credentials to access the few static files you are allowed to manipulate... and you have an API. For various reasons, I had to interact with the Big Commerce API and since there was a serious lack of code (and decent documentation), I figured I'd put together my own little wrapper. Should be pretty self-explanatory if you're here. Needless to say, this code comes as-is with no support from me whatsoever.

15Jul/11

Grey Hat Programming on Big Commerce

One of my clients has a website constituting of two platforms: WordPress and Big Commerce. I was mandated to, among other things, create a symbiosis between the two platforms so that users didn't have to register twice. The only problem with that is being a commercial platform, Big Commerce doesn't want you messing around in their proprietary database - their API really is only for read stuff, you never write anywhere. Understandable... but my client still wants user synchronicity, and to be honest I don't think he's exaggerating.

So... how do we remotely create users on a platform that doesn't let you create users with their API? After a bit of looking around for solution, I stumbled upon my client's store registration form (which is hosted, like everything related to Big Commerce, on a server you don't control). Different domains, different servers, no API methods... but I have a form. Have you ever heard of XSS? In the world of developers, it's a real annoyance. Essentially, if you fail to secure your forms properly, anyone can grab your form, put it somewhere else on the internet and submit bogus data (because the form still sends to you, get it?). Anyway, it's usually really only a security concern, but for this particular project, it became a feature.

22Oct/10

How to use Twitter @replies

Okay, I've had it with "Social Media Experts" being openly clueless about the way one of the main system of their field of expertise works. Let me explain to you how Twitter replies work, it's not rocket science.

Back in the days, @replies would simply be another tweet. The user you were replying to would see it appear in its @mention and the whole process was pretty much client-side. About two years ago, that changed. A lot of you "social media experts" apparently weren't around then. The way @replies work now is much better. When you @reply to a user, only that user will see it in its @mention tab, whether he follows you or not. Everyone else that follows you will not see it. That's a great implementation to avoid having your stream filled with customer service replies, among other things. The kicker here is that everyone that follows you and the user you're replying to will see it as well. It promotes discussion and people jumping in to comment on a "private discussion" you were having.

So please. If you want to reply to a specific user, the first thing in your tweet should be a @reply. Not a "Hi @user". Got it?

If you claim to be a social media expert, don't let anyone catch you doing this or this. Thanks.

16Sep/10

Thoughts on Diaspora

Diaspora, the open-source Facebook clone, was publicly released yesterday, September 15th. All technical stuff aside, it's interesting to see their strategy. They're a very small group of people, releasing a clone of something that literally revolutionized the Internet. Facebook is a weird target to go after, all things considered. The only motive anyone has of hating them all started from that whole privacy fiasco a few months ago. It all went down from there, to numerous privacy redrafting to compromising IM conversation Zuckerberg had years ago. Facebook had a decently good rep before that. Diaspora aims to be another Facebook, without the whole "we own your data and we can sell it to whoever we want" philosophy. Question is will they succeed? Aside from privacy-related mistakes (or rather bad moves), Facebook is (or should be) very respected in the open-source community. These guys have collaborated to several open-source projects such as Apache (with Cassandra, Hive and Hadoop) and PHP (with HipHop, phpEmbed, phpsh, XHP & XHProf), it'll be hard to eclipse that much contribution.

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