December 4, 2006 Archives
This is an African Violet that I bought last week. It's the first plant that I keep in my room since 6 or 7 years. My parents have been purchasing a lot of indoor plants in the past few years, in particular my father's orchids, to my mother's dismay. African violets are easy to manage, so long as you don't drop water on its leaves or flowers (they rot, as a consequence). There's even an African Violet Society of Canada!
On that freezing rain and raging winds showcase on Friday, a large section of this fir tree fell down on the driveway. Hopefully, it happened during the day, when all of the cars were either in the garage or gone. My father recalls a picture of me and my brother standing next to it as very young children of 3 and 1 year old. It's slated for dismissal sometime this week.
Well, last weekend, I finally "figured" multimedia out. It was, uh, downloading the Win32 binary codecs off the Mplayer website, which you un-targz and place in a directory called /usr/lib/win32 created as root. C'est simple comme bonjour. Because I like to keep my non-package stuff in /usr/local, I just made a symlink from there to /usr/lib/. I think that by default, a self-compiled version of mplayer looks in /usr/local/lib/codecs. However, the precompiled version of Mplayer in Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) looks in /usr/lib/win32, as seen when I tried to load a video w/o the codecs in the right place.
Typically, media players on Linux seem to use open-source and reversed-engineered codecs, but Mplayer is special, in that it may use native DLL files from Windows . You have to run a x86 operating system, which is the case of everyone. Formerly, I'd have so much trouble watching the simplest thing as Windows Media Player streams; for instance, Radio-Canada.ca and NHL.com streams would come out audio-only, and they now play as normally as it gets.
Totally defeats the purpose of using a free in the freedom sense operating system (if it's not free, write it yourself). To make it worse, I even installed RealPlayer and Flash Player on my system. At least, in the process, I'm not giving a cent to MS (which goes to Seattle, which garnishes Starbucks' coffers, and everyone knows that coffee is bad for your complexion). Playing videos while swirling your desktop cube, however, is so absolutely g33ky.