Screenmovie 1.1 released

A quick note that Screenmovie 1.1 has been released. It’s still very crude, but adds some sound recording and the ability to turn it on/off. Postprocessing is not supported yet but should be there in the next version.

Features:

  • Record video
  • Record sound
  • Configure file format
  • Configure video codec + settings (5-6 codecs chosen for now)
  • Configure audio codec + settings (2 codecs for now)

I still have some problems, but I just found some info on how to possibly make some problems better at least.

Todo:

  • Fix some high cpu usage problems
  • Add global keybindings
  • Postprocessing encoding
  • Clean up and add some values specific for codecs (as required).

Regarding web browsers and User Interfaces

March 28, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net, Linux, Windows 

I had a discussion this morning with my wife regarding her new computer (Toshiba laptop). A few days back, I was contemplating the possibility to try and get rid of the Windows 7 license it came with the EULA disagreement argument and get my money back, but after much consideration and realizing that her school (Chalmers University) pretty much requires her to run Windows 7 and Office 2007 (all applications used are windows based with Unix/Linux alternatives only irregularly, and her lab professors more or less frowns on OpenOffice.org vs MS Office formatting problems), we decided to keep it. This is another story, how Chalmers went from being a very open University to a complete clusterfuck of a Microsoft bootcamp and something I’d love to write more about at some point, but not now.

The computer has arrived finally, and my wife had a little time to play around with Windows 7. I’ve personally not used Windows since Win XP and refuse to lay hands on it unless “forced” to at work. Her main gripes came with Internet Explorer 8, and I couldn’t help but laugh very loudly at her assessment of it. It incessantly keeps asking questions and giving hints and ideas like “How do you like this?”, “Did you know that IE plugin blah …?”, “We can help you do …?”, “Do you have herpes?” to the point where the only sane comparison she could make is a very horny and needy drunk boy at a club. It took her less than one battery charge to switch back over to Firefox. My guess is that they simply made the user interface a bit … too helpful, and tried to be too reactive to “possible needs in this context”.

So, on this topic, I thought it could be slightly interesting to see this months statistics and split between different operating systems and web browsers.

Operating systems

I can’t really say that this site is representative of the world in general, but I think it is interesting to see the level of windows users. I’m guessing this is a sign that many of the people visiting are reading about iptables and using linux for servers and firewalls, but aren’t using it as a desktop system (yet?).

Windows 59.1 %
Linux 31.3 %
Macintosh 6.4 %
Unknown 2.7 %

Web browser

Personally, I find this part the most astounding. That IE has gone so low is simply not something I had expected, and how big market share firefox has… incredible.

Firefox 60.7 %
MS Internet Explorer 16.4 %
Safari 11.4 %
Mozilla 4.5 %
Opera 4.1 %
Unknown 1.2 %

I will try to do some more work on this in the future, could be interesting to see this change over time. I know the reliability of my own source isn’t excellent and the error margin is probablythrough the roof, but it should be rather fun to dig in to.

Comments requiring login

March 11, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Frozentux.net, General, Personal 

Due to the amount of spam I receive in the comments fields of this site, I decided to turn on the requirement for all users to be logged in to post any comments. So far, there has been 770 spams posted and only 38 real comments. It’s easy to clean the spams out for sure (akismet, normal users don’t even have to see them), but just seeing the names of some of the links spammed are making me sick.

As a sidenote, with todays climate, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if I ever ran into a person with the “quirkiness” required to watch (or for that matter produce) what is spammed these days, I’d probably go completely ballistic and on a killing spree. I definitely don’t condone the type of filtering done and/or tested on national levels, such as in Australia and Germany, but I can definitely understand why less hardened people turn to those extremes. My main reason for disliking that filtering isn’t really the content it is supposed to target, but rather where it is heading. The step from no filtering to filtering extreme sex is much larger than  the step from extreme sex to “rough” sex, and who will draw the line in the end?

What is the difference between extreme and normal? Most humans like to see things in black and white, and we forget about the greyscales. This is trait easily manipulated by people with an agenda (christian and muslim extremists, politicians, law enforcements and so forth) by pretty much saying “Look here, look at that absolute abomination of a thing going on, we can not allow this to happen to XXX. Let’s do something, let’s ban everything remotely connected to it.” In all honesty, that shit scares the hell out of me. Not so much the rethoric used, but the fact that so many falls for it. This whole 0-tolerance, black and white and fight or flight mentallity.

Anyways, just some random thoughts on the matter.

Website downtime

November 30, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Frozentux.net, General, Personal 

As some people may have noticed, the servers was down for almost a week. This was due to several hardware problems at my host, which where very unfortunate. When I put up the new webpage a few weeks ago, we also moved the daemons/hosting to a new one running on a new machine. This machine has been misbehaving for several weeks, and we switched over to another identical machine to rule out hardware error. In the end, we managed to get it solved. Last week both servers where killed due to power fluctuations (I believe if I interpreted it correctly). As a replacement, two new machines where ordered in, and they where both DOA (Dead on arrival). On top of this, I was told they received a faulty 20x500gb harddrive batch a few months back, which has had a 50% failure rate so far.

All this being said, I want to also extend my gratitude to these people for hosting this site, and for the wonderful work they do in running it. In 7 years of hosting this domain/host, I have rarely had a single breakdown, and this is the first time any major problem has existed with the hosting. In short, the wonderful fellows in the Netherlands that keeps hosting this site has had a really rough week, and I really wish them the best of luck getting everything back in order. Until then, please be patient with the site if it’s down or something is not working correctly, or even better, throw a mail in my general direction.

Added papers section

October 22, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

The papers section has been added under the Documents section of the site. It currently is rather empty with only 2 semi-old papers added and two more coming within a few weeks. This is one of the reasons I actually switched over to wordpress as it enables much easier updates and additions of new material. The first paper out is about lessons learned from a embedded linux project with Freescale MCF5329 running uCLinux. The second paper is an old but cancelled IETF RFC draft I made almost 6 years ago to enable connection state transfers between multiple firewalls and/or routers for failover, high availability and load balancing reasons. This was put on ice for various reasons, but I thought it may have some value to anyone who would be interested in doing something alike. If there is any interest in carrying on the work, I’m open for questions and suggestions.

Site update finally here!

October 15, 2009 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Frozentux.net, General 

I finally got around to finishing up a new site. As some of you may remember, I started over a year ago with rewriting the entire site from scratch after a year of pretty much not having time to fix the final touches. On top of this I realized that the site would still require a lot of time to update and maintain, which I realize was not in my main interest. So I decided to try out a few “pre-built” solutions and got hooked on wordpress. This is the final setup i’m going with. I will update the site more and more, but to get the site rolling, I decided to get it published as soon as possible.

To begin with, there isn’t much new material on the site, but this will change with some time. I have several papers and smaller projects I’d like to publish, and that I will have the ability/time to publish with the new site framework. Until then, I sincerely hope you will enjoy the new site. Any comments, please let me know!

Site updates cont.

September 22, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

I thought I’d make an status update available, to let people know. The updates are still ongoing, and I am working on them. The new site is POSH, lots of CSS and div’s, and… well, to be honest, it scares the hell out of me. From the looks of it, microsoft has never even heard of W3C, as badly as internet explorer is behaving. Yes, I’m actually trying to make the site follow standards, and work even on Internet Explorer. Ok, I admit it, Explorer 6.0 is most likely screwed. Anyways, for those that wish to see the new design, take a look at this screenshot. Design is pretty much done. Will start working on the simple bits this week, databases and so forth.

Iptables-tutorial explained

August 29, 2008 by · 8 Comments
Filed under: Frozentux.net, Iptables, Linux, Netfilter 

So, time to explain whats happened to the iptables-tutorial, it’s been rather dead for a long time now. This is kind of meant as an explanation on what and why things has gone downhill with it, but also kind of a try to define for myself what went wrong back then.

By now, it’s almost 8 years since I started writing on it. It all started as a short term project, a real tutorial if you wish. Due to the demand, I was rather amused at keeping it up, writing more material and so forth, but with time it took more and more effort to keep up to date and to add all the material I wanted in it. While the tutorial was at it’s high, I had 25 000 unique visitors per month on the main iptables-tutorial site alone, and all that traffic generated questions, and lots of them. At times, I received 70+ e-mails with questions per week, which required hours of attention. Also, Apress contacted me at this time asking me to write a book on iptables for them.

Having that burden on top of a project that was originally intended to have fun, learn and to get more experience makes a project much less appealing. Also, at the same time, me and my then girlfriend broke up, leaving me in devastation. In a sense, I lost my muse at the same time as I was the least interested in writing. I spent several weeks trying to get somewhere, but didn’t manage to get 2 pages out of me. This is where I dropped the tutorial the first time. I pretty much went MIA.

Either way, after a while (a bit over 2 years to be precise), I decided to give it another try. I had for a long time wanted to start writing again, and got around to it as I had the time and will. To make a long story short, I got too much to do with school and work and life in general for a while, but managed to get version 1.2.0 out before this happened. Another year later, I managed to get 1.2.1 out, and finally 1.2.2 which was the first printed version at lulu.com. Due to several minor problems, which turned out to become pretty large problems imho, I later decided to pull down the print version while getting my life together again so that I could focus on what needed doing again.

This is where the iptables tutorial is at this time and date. I’m not really sure what I’m hoping to accomplish with this post really, more than generally give people an idea what’s been going on around the iptables-tutorial and try to explain why it’s been … well, not keeping up with developments in iptables and netfilter.

I’m not exactly certain what will happen in the close future with the iptables tutorial. I’m currently working on a few other projects which are better defined and that should hopefully be possible to “finish” properly.. Ie, once I’ve done them, they should stay done. Once those projects are done, I might get back to the whole iptables-tutorial.

Site update

August 26, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net 

I’m currently working on updating this site. It’s going web1.9.9, it’s almost like web2.0. I got a ton of things I want to add as well, so I’m taking the opportunity to remake this whole site, hopefully in a logic way so that it will be easier to add small projects and texts in the future. For the time being, I’ve started a blog at http://frozentux.blogspot.com for those that wants to keep up, and twitter.com. I’m trying out pretty much every web2.0 buzzword or site I’ve heard about. I’m hoping to have a beta out within a week or so… hah!

Easy stuff

August 24, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net, General 

Ok, I started recoding frozentux.net today finally. It’s rather ugly and messy code, so i’m starting by cleaning it up a bit. It’s kinda nice getting a goal again, I’ve lacked a bit of it. Also, I must say, this feels soooo easy. PHP code is a breeze, and way to forgiving, especially without 10+ guys looking over your shoulder once in a while to make sure your code is good enough *cough* .

That said, I’m not planning to use too much cross site stuff or any other heavy stuff, so it will be easy to get it to a working state again. Basically, I’m going for a simpler design, with larger flexibility as I want to add a lot of small code samples and projects to the website in the future (I kinda locked myself down there last time).

Also cleaned the fan over the stove, built more on the model (wow, you can almost see that it’s an airplane body right now 😛 ). I got a lousy glue (so sorry mac and heather, it was an awkward glue you gave me :)), need a new one, and I also need some sandpaper. Taken a walk, looked at an episode of systm. A cool show about mythbuntu tbh.

Workweek ahead. See if i manage to get into a habit of writing here or not?;)

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