The problem was, many of the movies I had waiting to be watched on my computer were foreign films. And, as I quickly found out, the Xbox doesn’t look for .srt or other subtitles files. Ushare only streams one file at a time – the video file. So I was out of luck with those foreign films.

That is, until Stuart and I figured out how to encode subtitles directly into the video file. Then, of course, it was super easy. Here’s how to do it:

1. install mencoder and mplayer

sudo apt-get install mencoder mplayer

2. once installed, simply run the following:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -sub <sub_title.srt file> -subfont-text-scale 3 <video file> -o <name of output file>

so, for example:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc xvid  -xvidencopts pass=1  -sub Desktop/”Idi i Smotri 2.sub” -subfont-text-scale 3 Desktop/”Idi i Smotri 2.avi”  -o Desktop/”Idi i Smotri Pt2.avi”

3. Wait for the encoding to complete (takes about 40 minutes on my old Pentium 4 Laptop) and enjoy!

Note: mencoder doesn’t fix terrible English in the subtitles, unfortunately.

Second note: I originally tried to do this without installing mplayer, and mencoder will act like it is encoding the files, but if you look at the output closely you’ll see this about the 30th line down:

New_Face failed. Maybe the font path is wrong.
Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf).
subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.

It’s apparently looking for a font file that mplayer provides. If you absolutely don’t want to install mplayer, you can create a workaround via a link to the font file mencoder is looking for:

ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf  ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

If that doesn’t work, leave a comment and we’ll try to help you out.

You can read about the entire process on my other blog

Click to read on…

• Create a repository on GitHub
• Create a authors.txt file

The authors file is very simple it looks like this, you must use your name and email from github for this file to work:

# Example line: svn_repo_username = Name <email@address>
slayton = Stuart Layton <spam_me@quasicontrol.com>

• Create a new temporary local git-svn repository

mkdir temp_repo
cd temp_repo/
git svn init https://svn.repo.url/path/to/repo --no-metadata

• Configure the local repo

git config svn.authorsfile ~/path/to/authors_file

• Fetch the remote data

git svn fetch

• Add GitHub as a remote origin

git remote add origin git@github.com:git_user_name/new_repo.git

• Push to GitHub

git push origin master

You can now delete the temp_repo directory and clone the github hosted repository anywhere you want. You could keep the oriniglally cloned git-svn repo but you end up with svn related files in the directory. Creating a new clone of the github repository will ensure that your code stays clean and svn free.

I got some help from SimplisticComplexity.com. Please check out the link and thank them if you find this to be useful!

Next time you run an application in a terminal start it with screen:

screen <application_name>

Then you can close the terminal and the application will keep running.  If you want to regain control of the terminal running the application use the following command:

screen -R

If more then one screen session is running you’ll get a prompt like this:

There are several suitable screens on:
18771.pts-7.stockton-mini    (05/31/2009 07:21:39 PM)    (Attached)
18613.pts-4.stockton-mini    (05/31/2009 07:21:11 PM)    (Attached)
18551.pts-0.stockton-mini    (05/31/2009 07:21:08 PM)    (Detached)
8005.pts-0.stockton-mini    (05/31/2009 12:57:11 PM)    (Detached)
Type “screen [-d] -r [pid.]tty.host” to resume one of them.

In that case simply pick the session you want to resume and enttypeer the PID following the -R, use tab to complete the line and you’re all set.

This is really exciting because this means that anybody who implements this standard can stream video to an Xbox over the network.

I run Ubuntu Linux and discovered that there are several programs you can install that will setup a UPnP Media Server, the one I picked to use is uShare.  To install ushare I opened a terminal and ran:

sudo apt-get install ushare

After that I had to edit the ushare configuration file saved under /etc/ushare.conf

If you don’t feel comfortable editing the file you can run to help you setup the configuration file.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure ushare

Here is how I setup my file (I’ve removed the comments from the file for readability):

USHARE_NAME=Ubuntu_Media_Server

USHARE_IFACE=eth0 (the name of which ethernet adapter you’ll send the data over)

USHARE_PORT=49153

USHARE_TELNET_PORT=1337

USHARE_DIR=/home/slayton/Desktop/Shares (any dir will work just put your media there)

USHARE_OVERRIDE_ICONV_ERR=yes

ENABLE_WEB=no

USHARE_ENABLE_XBOX=yes (the USHARE_ is missing in the file you need to add it)

ENABLE_DLNA=no

uShare automatically starts a daemon upon boot, I don’t like this so I kill the daemon after boot with:

sudo /etc/init.d/ushare stop

Then I start uShare when I need it with:

ushare -x  (-x is for xbox compatible mode)

Start up your Xbox scroll the Video Library, select Ubuntu_Media_Server (or whatever name you picked) and begin the streaming goodness!

I signed a new contract back in January so I was locked in with verizon for 24 months (until Jan 2011).  I get discounted service through my work so I called up verizon to apply the discount. To get the discount however, the contract needed to be in my name (it was previously under my wife’s name). It was an easy switch to make, I had to provide social security number and and verbally recognize that if the bill doesn’t get paid its my credit that gets hit.

Here’s the trick, because I made the change over the phone I wasn’t able to sign a paper contract, rather I agreed to a verbal contract.  Verizon will only sign a 1 year if done verbally. My 2 year agreement got cut down to a 1 year agreement! My contract that should have expired Jan 2011 now expire April 2010.   I don’t qualify for a free phone until Jan 2011 but my contract is up May 2010!

If you want to do the same its simple, get someone who trusts you to accept the contract in their name. If you have a family plan like i do just switch the primary account holder to another person on the family plan!

Here is how I did it.

I figured that I could create a connection from my home computer to my work computer and then tell my work computer to forward data down that connection back to my home computer.

This isn’t ideal as I have to initiate the connection from home but it will work until I get a better ISP, or figure out something better.

The solution is fairly simple to execute and it only requires two simple commands. The first one I must execute from my home computer before i go to work.

On my home computer I run:

ssh <work_ip_address> -R <work_port>:localhost:<home_port>

When I do this SSH creates a connection between my home and work computers, but this connection is special because any data that arrives on <work_port> (I chose 21080) gets automatically forwarded to <home_port> (22) on my home computer.

On my work computer I run:

ssh localhost -p <work_port>

SSH then tries to open a connection with my work computer on port <work_port> (again 21080) but because of the existing connection from my home computer that connections gets forwarded back to my home computer on port <home_port> (22) where my ssh server is listening for incoming connections.

The exact commands I use with port numbers are:

@home:ssh work_ip -R 21080:localhost:22

@work:ssh localhost -p 21080

UPDATE:

SSH eventually times out and closes the connection if no data is being sent over the connection so after I connected to my work computer from home I ran top. This means a constant stream of data and that SSH won’t timeout.

Question: Do the moments and products of inertia represent anything in the physical world?

Answer: In short, yes. But not intuitively.

It’s best to think of moments and products of inertia in terms of the inertia tensor, which is a mathematical concept – it’s a matrix of inertias for a given 3D object.

The moments are the diagonal values of the inertia tensor and the products are the off-axis values. Keeping the tensor in mind, you can think of an object’s moments of inertia to be the rotational equivalents of the general concept of inertia. Ie, as inertia is the resistance to change in motion, moment of inertia is an object’s resistance to change in rotational motion about some axis. As there are three dimensions, any physical object’s rotation can be defined about 3 axes. It is these axes that form the basis of the inertia tensor. If it took 4 axes to define rotation, the matrix would be 4×4, not 3×3.

In the real 3D world rotation is quite complex – for most real-life objects, you are not going to be able to find 3 axes about which the object will rotate in a stable manner. Ie, most objects don’t have mass distributed symmetrically about all 3 axes at once. Thus, you get off-axis moments of inertia, also known as products of inertia. POI’s can be thought of as measurements of dynamic imbalance of an object and basically represent asymmetrically distributed mass. Note that mass can be distributed symmetrically about one axis but not another, leaving you with products of inertia.

If you see an inertia tensor and the products are zero, there is no dynamic imbalance – the object will rotate perfectly about the defined axes. In such a case, you can call these the principle axes.

Ugh. This is complicated stuff and is often not covered in undergrad engineering or science. What I’ve written is only going to be a piece of the puzzle to understanding, but I hope it has helped. Let me know if any of you see errors in what I’m saying.