gCountDown is a very simple alarm countdown timer. It sits in your system tray where you can click it to set an alarm. Once the time runs out, you will be alerted.

This release adds the ability to play a sound when an alarm goes off pops up a menu on right-clicking the icon so you can quit the application and has some minor bugfixes. A Debian/Ubuntu package is now also available.

Recording the desktop

Recording the desktop is fairly easy. We can either record the entire desktop:

recordmydesktop -o /home/todsah/out.ogv

or we can record a single window. For this we need the window id, which you can get with a commandline tool called xwininfo:

$ xwininfo
xwininfo: Please select the window about which you
          would like information by clicking the
          mouse in that window.

Now we click on the window, and xwininfo will give us the window ID:

xwininfo: Window id: 0x9c00003 "[root@eek]/home/fboender$"

Now we can tell recordmydesktop that we want to record just that window by giving it the window ID:

recordmydesktop --windowid 0x9c00003 -o /home/todsah/out.ogv

Once you're done recording, simply press ctrl-c in the recordmydesktop terminal, and it will start encoding your recording to out.ogv.

Sound issues with PulseAudio

Okay, so far so good, except for the sound, which is simply missing. We can see that recordmydesktop did record some kind of sound by looking at the output of the encoding:

Done.
Written 1967932 bytes
(1845110 of which were video data and 122822 audio data)

So why isn't there any sound in the video? The problem is PulseAudio (again and again and again). PulseAudio acts as a layer between all the applications, all the different sound architectures (ALSA, OSS, etc) and between the hardware. In my case, the problem was that recordmydesktop was recording from the incorrect device. Of course the default Sound Preference of Ubuntu 10.04 didn't list any Recording devices, which is why it took me so long to find out what the problem was. To fix this, install the PulseAudio Volume Controller:

# aptitude install pavucontrol

You will now get a PulseAudio Volume Controller in the menu:

Start it up, and select the 'Recording' tab:

Now, make sure you've already started recording your desktop, or the application that's trying to record sound will NOT show up in this list! You should also start playing a song or generate some other audio so it's easier to spot when things are working. As you can see, it shows per application where that application is recording sound from. Select the source it will record from by clicking on the button that says 'Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo'. A list will appear with options. Try each option until the volume bar below the application comes to life. I have not yet experimented with microphones, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the place to select that as a recording source.

recordmydesktop will now probably record sound also. You may have to tell it which channel to record sound from. This command at least worked for me:

recordmydesktop -o /home/todsah/out.ogv --fps 15 --channels 1 --freq 22050 --device pulse --v_quality 63 --s_quality 10 --workdir /tmp

You can also configure 'pulse' in the GTK front-end for recordmydesktop by going to Advanced → Sound → Device. Enter 'pulse' there.

Converting to other formats

Converting to other formats is, frankly, a real pain in the ass. There are basically three applications which you can use:

• mencoder
• ffmpeg
• vlc

The main problem with encoding is codecs. A movie contains video and audio, and both of those are basically stuffed into a single file. Such a file is called a container. Examples of containers are Ogg, AVI and mp4. The video and audio files in these containers are called streams. The streams are almost always encoded in order to compress them or to allow for additional information to be embedded in the streams. Encoding these streams is done with codecs. And this is where we get in trouble. You see, most codecs are patented, trademarked, copyright and generally completely unsuitable for Free Software usages. This is why mencoder, ffmpeg and vlc usually have trouble with them.

Any of the above programs may not support the input container/codecs (Ogg container, Theora video, Vorbis audio) or may not support the output container/codecs such as the TS/Avi/Ogg/MP4/ASF containers which contain the Theora, Mpeg-4, Mpeg-2, WMV, etc video codecs and the AAC, MP3, etc audio codecs. VLC can usually play just about everything (because it provides many illegal decoding codecs), but it has trouble encoding in many format.

To my great regret, it's up to you to find out which combinatation of containers and codecs works for you. You can check the Medibuntu website for instructions on how to add illegal codecs to your Ubuntu installation.

For me, it seems mencoder works the best. For instance, to convert the out.ogv file to an AVI file:

mencoder -idx out.ogv  -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o output.avi

SQuirreL SQL

SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical Java program that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc

It's Java, so it's slow, but it does everything I want, and more:

1. Syntax highlighting
2. Multiple query tabs
3. Multiple queries in the same tab (select the query and press ctrl-enter to run it)
4. Export results

It has tons of options you can tweak, and it's got plugins if you want to extend it. It supports just about every relational (and some non-relational) database out there.

Awesome.

Templum is an extremely lightweight, simple yet powerful and fast templating engine for PHP. It re-uses the power of PHP itself for rendering templates, but provides additional features making it easier to write templating code. Rendering templates using Templum is very fast; it approximates native PHP rendering speed for include() statements.

This release features:

• Some small bug fixes
• Documentation updates
• The ability to include other templates in a template

Download instructions here.

HIrcd is a minimal, hacky implementation of an IRC server daemon written in Python in about 400 lines of code, including comments, etc.

It is mostly useful as a testing tool or perhaps for building something like a private proxy on. Do NOT use it in any kind of production code or anything that will ever be connected to by the public.

Direct link to the source code, for those interested.

Software Bashing: We hate software. With a passion:

Fact: All software sucks. We're here to show you exactly why, and just how much it truly sucks. We don't discriminate against vendor or development model; all software sucks. We are relentless. We show no mercy. If the software exists, we will find its suckage, no matter how much it leverages synergetic business potential. Be prepared.

Hopefully we can reach some software authors and make them see the light. If not, at least I was able significantly reduce my blood pressure through the site.

From the Templum homepage:

Templum is an extremely lightweight, simple yet powerful and fast templating engine for PHP. It re-uses the power of PHP itself for rendering templates, but provides additional features making it easier to write templating code. Rendering templates using Templum is very fast; it approximates native PHP rendering speed for include() statements.

You can install it using PEAR:

pear install http://templum.electricmonk.nl/releases/templum-0.1.0.tgz

For some examples, check the website.

MyQryReplayer is a tool which can read the MySQL query log and replay an entire session's worth of queries against a database (SELECT queries only by default). While doing so, it records the time each query took to run, and any queries that failed including their error messages. MyQryReplayer can be used to inspect query performance, and to check a log of queries against a database for possible errors (when upgrading to a new version of MySQL for example).

Get version 0.1 here.

I've searched for a replacement for a long time, but was never able to find one. Now I finally have: Terminator.

Here's a screenshot:

.