James Roeder

Blog

  • Mobi2Kindle – MobiPocket books on Kindle

    Another year, another blog post! If you’re not interested in reading backstory and just interested in getting MobiPocket DRM-protected books onto your Kindle, check out the Mobi2Kindle page at Google Code.

    Not too long ago, I won an Amazon Kindle while attending the CS4HS workshop at CMU (Yay Google and other sponsors!). Perhaps not surprisingly, I fell in love with reading on it. I quickly looked for all the free e-books I could, discovering sites like MobileRead and FeedBooks, with their ultra-sweet Kindle-based book browsers (Click and download right on the Kindle? Awesome!). However, their selections of recent works are certainly… lacking. Only a few authors have really embraced free e-book distribution, and while I do love Cory Doctorow, my brain really craved more.

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  • PEAR with XAMPP on Windows

    Alas, I find myself having to do some work on a Windows machine. I also find myself needing some additional PEAR libraries that don’t come pre-installed as part of XAMPP. I found the below commands in a comment at http://www.tohir.co.za/2006/07/pear-on-xampp-windows.html, and have taken the liberty to “re-translate” them. These instructions will setup MDB2 and the MySQL MDB2 driver on your Windows XAMPP system.Open up a command prompt, and cd to your XAMPP PHP directory. Assuming XAMPP is on your C drive:

    cd \xampp\php
    go-pear
    pear install MDB2
    pear install pear/MDB2#mysql

  • Dynamic vhosts with XAMPP on OS X (with special DNS sauce)

    I recently “refreshed” my Mac – I’d accumulated a fair amount of cruft in my attempts to install alternate versions of libraries, and decided that a fresh install of things would clear things up. I kept my wife’s user profile intact, since she hadn’t done anything funny in her user directories, but I decided to blow mine away and just put in the things I needed.

    Being a web developer (if only part-time at the moment), I found myself having to remember how I went ahead and set up my testing environment so I could do rapid virtual host set-up, and I decided to write it down for posterity’s sake. This is just my own desired set-up – your own preferences may vary, but perhaps you’ll find this useful!

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  • Final Cut Express Hates 12-Bit Audio

    I’ve been doing a significant amount of video work lately. This led to my recent purchase of Final Cut Express (It is so wonderful having a brother-in-law who’s an Apple Store employee), and with it many changes to my typical workflow. I’m used to using Sony’s Vegas Studio product for any editing that iMovie couldn’t handle, and while FCE shares many concepts, it also looks at them from a pretty different perspective.

    My most recent project involves editing a slew footage of which I was not involved in shooting. One out of five cameras that were recording during the event (a musical) was shot using 12-bit audio. This is my first experience trying to use footage with 12-bit audio in FCE, and frankly, I’m not impressed.

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  • GPS

    GPS

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