getting wordpress to see torrents

By default wordpress only includes audio and video mimetypes when it reads your post to decide if there are any urls it should enclose. This means that if you want to enclose bittorrent in wordpress, it won’t do it without a little hacking.

edit wp-includes/functions.php
in do_enclose, around line 775, there’s the line:
$allowed_types = array( ‘video’, ‘audio’ );
change to:
$allowed_types = array( ‘video’, ‘audio’ , ‘application’ );

Note that any link to some application/* will become enclosed, so this is an awful, awful hack.

Noble eats grass

This is a video in a blog posting, but don’t get the idea that this is a “video blog” now. I see little point in posting a video solely of me talking to the camera, because that is what text is for. So when I want to say something, I’ll use text. And when I want you to see something, I’ll post a photo. And if I want to show something, then I’ll post a video. There’s no reason I have to stick to only one!

This posting is a bit torrent, the file is 16MB. You can read this enclosure with PenguinTV for linux, FireANT for Windows, and DTV for Mac. It’s an AVI with the Xvid codec, so the video will probably play on a Mac with VLC. On windows you should already have the defilerpak codec collection because you download xvid-formatted movies all the time. On linux it just works with totem, xine, mplayer, whatever.

libdvdcss bug that is totally undocumented

Summary: libdvdcss will happily keep using settings created for different hardware and fail silently after the user has upgraded to a new system with a different dvd drive.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. play dvds with laptop A
2. upgrade to a new thinkpad!!! with a new dvd drive!!!
3. try to play dvds

Expected results:
1. dvdcss tries and fails to use the old drive code, so it tries to figure out a new one just in case
2. dvd plays

Actual results:
1. motherfucking read errors for two hours, with the only error message being “maybe libdvdcss is not installed?”
2. searching google for firmware updates, css hacks, newer versions of libraries, etc
3. finding nothing.
4. finally running ogle –debug, and seeing it accessing a ~/.dvdcss library
5. deleting the motherfucker
6. everything works now.

jesus christ that sucked.

Announcing PenguinTV

I have made my first release of a project ever, called PenguinTV. It’s an RSS feed reader that supports enclosed media, which means you can download podcasts and video blogs with it. I’m a little worried that there’s going to be tons of problems when other people start using it, but it works well enough for me that I’m letting it out into the wild. I can’t wait for my first flame!

annoying words

“vlog” is the most annoying word since “blog.” When “weblog” was shortened, it wasn’t called “wlog.” So shouldn’t “video blog” be shortened to “olog?” Or maybe “deolog?” Is any of these any less ridiculous than “vlog?”