Author: vanevery

Archive.org – Movies

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
Everything from the Prelinger Archives to Open Source Movies (created and uploaded by the community).
From the site:
About the Movie Archive
This collection is free and open for everyone to use.
Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films.
By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.

Linksys WVC11B Redux

In an earlier post here and on unmediated I talked about how I hoped that Linksys WVC11B and WVC54G wireless cameras that claim MPEG-4 support lived up to their promises.

Well, I was given one as a gift and sadly out of the box they don’t support true MPEG-4 streaming. What they have is an Active X control that displays some variant of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 codec. After doing some port scans, as suggested in the comments of one of the posts, I can confirm that they do not have any network services running other than httpd (port 80). Also strange is that I am unable to view the streams from Windows Media Player on the Mac or PC but I am able to view the stream via mPlayer on the Mac.. Otherwise, IE on the PC is the only other way to view the streams (no Mac support for the ActiveX control).

Thankfully the firmware is open source! Let the hacking begin!

Zend Studio, Zend Development Environment Personal Review

Zend, a great force in the world of PHP development has what I think is the only IDE for PHP related development. All in all I think this is great and I am glad that this company offers such a product. It certainly helps the PHP cause and probably drives adoption in the corporate world. It also has features that I am sure can’t be found elsewhere in the PHP development world such as debugging with variable watching and break points and so on.

Unfortunately, (speaking as a MacOS X user) this software has not lived up to my expectations. It is just a bit too rough around the edges for me to get to the point where I am willing to try the more advanced features.

Here is a list of what is wrong which I will update as find problems:

  • The pop-up menus that are shown when launching the program (Auto-Update and Tip of the Day) have checkboxes which seem to allow you to choose whether or not you would like the program continue showing them, or not. Unfortunately, no matter what I do, they always show.
  • I am unable to create a new file by choosing the File::New File command. The only way I am able to create a new file is by pressing the new file icon at the top of the IDE.
  • I am unable to save a project file of any sort. This causes me to have to reload each and every file in a project each and every time I start the program to work on that project.
  • The application does not maintain it’s appearance settings. The windows that I have hidden are back each time I launch. Not a program that I am happy about quitting and starting up again.

    • Of course the program has many good points as well. The syntax highlighting is great. The error underlining as you code is very worthwhile and the command completetion is great.

    Overall, it seems to be beta quality software on the Mac. I may continue to use the free version (despite the ugly messages about not being able to do things in this version) but unless the edges are more polished, I can’t justify paying more than $200.