Introverts

So I just stumbled across a video about introverts and thought I'd share it.

Creating a DVD

Creating a DVD is easy but also harder then it needs to be. I wish I could just say "I have an NTSC TV. I have an .avi over there. Make it so." But alas there are all sorts of fiddly bits that need dealing with. So I need a GUI front end that understands the fiddly bits. But installing on CentOS one can get complicated.

First you need CentOS 6.

Then you need ffmpeg 0.7, available from the NauLinux school repo. You might already have ffmpeg 0.6.5 installed, in which case you'll need rpm -e ffmpeg-libpostproc --nodeps before doing yum --enablerepo=naulinux-school install ffmpeg. (If you skip this step, you end up with an error that looks like Unrecognized option 'vf'. Or at least you will if can find stderr, which might be in ~/.xsession-errors).

Finally you install devede, which is written in Python but is surprisingly non-fail. Linux tech has a repo. Set up that repo, then run yum --enablerepo=linuxtech-testing --enablerepo=rpmforge install devede.

Vixie is a smart guy

I found out something interesting the other day. A crontab entry has a DOW (day of week) column and a day of month (DOM) column. Because I'm a bad sysadmin, I'd never read the full manpage and assumed that if you specified both your entry would be run once every 7 or 14 years. I also suffer from NIH, so I'm writing a cron replacement in pure-perl that includes all the stuff I think a cron should have, like watching a directory for new files. So I finally read the full man page. And it turns out that Vixie was a smart guy. Having an cron job that runs every 7 or 14 years isn't useful so the DOW and DOM columns don't affect each other.

I other words

0 0 1 * 0 do-something

is in fact the equivalent of

0 0 1 * * do-something
0 0 * * 0 do-something

which is so much more useful.

This is another formulation of the "don't allow the user to do stupid things" principle I talked about a while back.