mariuss' weblog

Recently I wanted to save a Real Media video stream so I can see it later on another computer. I was using a amd64 Ubuntu and I could not even see the stream since there is no 64 Real Player (or codecs). After a bit of googling and some trial and error I managed to save the stream using mplayer. Here is the command:
$  mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://example.com/path/clip.rm -dumpfile clip.rm

Some servers allow http access to the same file, so first just replace rtsp with http and try this url in a browser or with wget.

The .rm url in most cases is wrapped in a play list with the extension .ram. Just save the .ram file locally and open it in an editor, you will see the rtsp .rm url there.

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An excellent presentation by Zak Greant:
The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Free Software

I think this is the best argument I have seen on why open source is tremendously important.

The Tyee started a new campaign, watch the movie and help them spread the word:

Some applications, especially editors and IDEs, allow you to add custom commands that will run an external application with the current document (or selection, folder, etc) as an argument. Also, file managers like Nautilus allow you to run arbitrary scripts against currently selected files.

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A new campaign from the Free Software Foundation: Play OGG

I always found it hard to follow either new or updated Drupal modules. Since I could not find an RSS feed for published modules, I created a Python script that periodically scraps the modules page and generates an RSS feed.

Eventually I did find the official feeds though:

• drupal.org - 4.7.x
• drupal.org - 5.x

They are quite useful, but:

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iCalendar files could be used for job scheduling, the same way crontab is. Instead of the five time and date fields you could specify an iCalendar file. Each event in the iCalendar file will trigger the execution of the corresponding command. Event attributes (like summary, location, description, duration, etc) could be passed as arguments to the command.

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From an email:

Participate in the biggest mobilization of Citizens Against Global Warming!

The Alliance for the Planet [a group of environmental associations] is calling on all citizens to create 5 minutes of electrical rest for the planet. http://www.lalliance.fr

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After going through several power outages recently I ordered UPSs for all our computers at home. The Linux boxes, running Ubuntu Edgy, ended with one APC ES 550 each.

APC UPSs are supported under Linux by the apcupsd daemon. Here are my notes on how I configured this daemon to work under Edgy. Make sure the UPS is all hooked up and that the USB cable is connected to your computer.

First install the package, its name is apcupsd. There is also a documentation package, apcupsd-doc, but the docs are incomplete and full of broken links. Just use the documentation from the official site if you need to.

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