A while back, I was looking around for a way to tunnel an SSH connection over an HTTP proxy. This seemed like something that would be easy enough to accomplish, but I had a very difficult time finding a solution. I had given up on the whole idea until yesterday, when I found a link to the home page for Corkscrew. Corkscrew does just what I wanted: it allows an SSH connection to be established through an HTTP proxy. And from what I’ve seen so far, it will easily run on any popular OS. This is one I’ll be adding to my travel toolbox.
Today I stumbled upon some missed episodes of a certain TV show that I like to watch. Once I finished downloading them, I realized that they wouldn’t play on my PC. It turns out that they were encoded with XviD, an open source MPEG-4 codec. As it took me a while to find the resources for playing these files on my computer, I thought that I’d pass along some important links. Doom9 has an XviD guide. And Koepi was gracious enough to offer XviD binaries for your downloading pleasure. After installing the standalone DirectShow filter from Koepi’s site, my videos played flawlessly.
Simon pointed out an excellent essay on the differences in the cultures of the Windows and Unix programming camps. If you’ve ever been involved with software development, this is a good read.
Simon pointed out a new method for grouping tables. He states that there are problems in IE, but it looks very slick in Firebird. This builds on the sortable tables technique mentioned here previously.
Thanks to Jon’s 2003 Linkdump, I’ve got a new link for the blogroll: EXP. EXP is a well-designed blog with a picture to accompany each post. I haven’t read many of the posting yet because the pictures are so good.
Today I upgraded four Red Hat 7.3 machines to 9.0 (Shrike). Everything was going fine until it came time to rebuild Apache. Every time I typed make, the compile bombed. I was very fortunate to find a quick solution over at Fixing things. If it weren’t for Randall Lucas and Matthias Saou, I’d have a serious migraine right now. Thanks guys!
For your downloading pleasure, here’s a BitTorrent site directory. On the sites featured in this directory, you will find thousands of torrent files for downloading just about anything. Enjoy!
Dave Hyatt published a Safari progress report yesterday. He mentioned many fixes and additions to the latest version of Safari’s WebCore. Of the many features, I’m particularly excited to see that they are already adopting some of the new CSS 2.1 features. This makes the next release of Safari look like a winner!
Jeremy gives us a look into his crystal ball to see what’s going on next year. The list seems fairly complete, featuring innovations in search, widespread RSS adoption, social networks, and ‘net reputation systems. The only thing missing is the inevitable WiFi craze that’s certain to explode next year.
I must confess: I don’t have a TiVo. But I’ve been wanting one for a while, but several complaints with the technology have kept me away. Most of those have been resolved by third-party upgrades, such as larger hard drives. However, I believe that my final complaint, the slow access to the database, has finally been resolved properly.
From what I’ve grasped from the forums, when you have a large database of recordings, it takes quite a while to access this database at times, especially when you are trying to view one of those recordings at the same time. We’re dealing with IDE drives after all. The solution to this problem for many has been to solder on additional RAM. With this additional memory, the database is cached, and access becomes much faster. I’ve never quite liked that idea, though, because it seems like the fastest way to either kill your TiVo our just completely void your warranty.
The TiVo CacheCard from 9th Tee makes this fix much simpler. This card is plugged into the internal expansion slot on the TiVo. The card provides one ethernet interface and one DIMM slot. The user provides, say, a 512MB DIMM, and the TiVo CacheCard drivers go to work caching the database in that memory.
The ethernet is there because that’s what people normally use the expansion slot for. This upgrade wouldn’t be practical to most without also including that. And I see this as an added feature as well, since this would be combining two upgrade steps into one.
Anyhow, you can preorder these babies right now. They are said to be shipping mid-December. [via PVRblog.]
