This past week has seen the release of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and Ubuntu 6.10. A warm kudos to all the contributors who helped make these releases a success.
The last few days I have been working with Bastien to fix some Mozilla plug-in bugs in Totem that have been annoying me for a while. Especially in adding the features required to get some embedded video on some sites I’ve been frequenting lately working. Just about all the video links I can find on Around Central Florida now load properly. The traffic videos still do not work but I believe there is GStreamer backend work to be done there. While I was focusing on particular Central Florida news sites, the same fixes will likely help an exponential number of sites using similar embedding methods work better as well. Unfortunately these changes probably won’t get merged into the 2.16 branch so folks will have to wait until GNOME 2.18 or a try a 2.17 development release. But I’m excited that we are already on the way to a release that will really make Totem and it’s Mozilla plug-ins shine.
I was looking up some historical weather data for December 7th, when I’ll be chilling (literally, it turns out) on the NASA Pkwy Causeway watching Space Shuttle Discovery’s launch at 9:38pm.
- 2005 - Low of 67 degrees with winds averaging 17mph
- 2004 - Low of 65 degrees with winds averaging 7mph
- 2003 - Low of 40 degrees with winds averaging 10mph
- 2002 - Low of 50 degrees with winds averaging 11mph
- 2001 - Low of 66 degrees, no wind data
- 2000 - Low of 53 degrees
- 1999 - Low of 53 degrees
- 1998 - Low of 57 degrees
- 1997 - Low of 37 degrees (!)
That’s a mean of 54 degrees. Yikes. But it will be worth it to see my first night STS launch in person. I’ve driven past the Cape at night when a shuttle is on the pad, when the beautiful xenon lights bathe the launch vehicle and its glow can be seen for many miles. Being 6 miles away should be a treat. Even better is that the 7th is just a few days after a full moon, so the moon’s visible disk will be 91% illuminated. Here’s hoping for clear skies and a successful countdown on the 7th!
An annoying issue with MPlayer is that it does not do runtime detection of the display’s aspect ratio. It always assumes 4:3. This makes videos stretched when played full screen on my 16:10 widescreen notebook. I recently discovered the monitoraspect= configuration option.
I added monitoraspect=16:10 to my ~/.mplayer/config file and now videos are properly scaled!
The fact that Kirk’s Starfleet pin in the new DirecTV commercial is not straight drives me batty. Unless its supposed to be an homage to Star Trek VI I’m missing. The uniforms look rather cheaply done but they could at least get the pin straight!. Maybe Shatner did it on purpose just to get a rise out of people like me…