An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.

Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.

To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.

Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320×240.

The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the “original” was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.

After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.

The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.

Dale Dougherty

Saw this at O’Reilly Radar, and other “hands” are at Book Patrol

I saw in the newspaper that today opens in Mexico city the movie Hot Fuzz, which is a good movie to see but the reason of the post is to point the time it took to get this to movie theaters in Mexico.

This movie was released in Ireland and UK on February!, obviously is a British movie but was released in USA and Argentina a month later, then why took 8 months to be released here??

I saw this movie on May, because since April I found out about this movie from a video of The Fratellis (Baby Fratelli) which shows parts of the movie and the song is part of the soundtrack. after the trailer I decided that it was a movie I definitely wanted to see.

The DVD was out in July and I ordered it for around $14 plus shipping, about a month later I saw it in a store here for more than $45.

As you can see I’ve seen this movie (more than once) and it is going to be released today here in Mexico, I don’t get why everything is late in this country, and the post I did about Dragon Wars is getting significant traffic from search engines because people want to know when is this movie going to be at theaters in Mexico, I guess that we can assume that we will have to wait at least 6 months to see it in theaters (I saw it a week ago).

Some of the shows are hilarious and some are a bit scatological in nature.

More videos after the jump

I wonder why the shows here (Mexico) still use the same format of more than 15 year ago and not evolve into something more entertaining, I’m not saying that they should copy these shows but in case the producers do that at least would be an improvement.

When you think on a feed reader you assume that it will show the articles in a chronological ordered list, because we are used to see the information in 2 dimensions, but, what happens when we add a third dimension?.

That’s what they did with Voyage a feed reader made in Flash. This is the type of application perfect for Flash, maybe you can do something similar with Java but I don’t know if it would be as light in resources as this one.

You get the latest articles at the front and moving the mouse up or down the titles move, scrolling moves you in the third axis which is the time line. To read an article you only click on it and the content will show while the rest of the titles fade.

You can add your favorite feeds and use it as your feed reader, there is no need to create an account because the app stores your preferences in cookies. Or you can just play with it as something new and cool, because it lacks some features that at least I like to have (mark/tag articles, search, folders, etc..) that some other readers include (web or desktop apps).

To make the wait for the release of Halo 3 more tolerable you can try to build this papercraft model of Master Chief.

The model is 13″ tall, has close to 2100 faces (over 800 faces for the gun), and is composed of 42 pieces (+ 10 for the gun).

The PDF files with the model and instructions are here

This is the creation of billybob884 and looks like it’s not the first creation, in the gallery you can see other papercraft models like Conker, Mr Satan, the RingWorld and more.

This books are of the cyberpunk genre and although it’s fiction the stories and what happen to the characters or what they do is based completely in real techniques and risks in the computer security area, which is one of the areas I’m really interested in and is part of my day job even when nobody in the office has any idea of what is possible and the implications if we where attacked by some. And I won’t even mention the procedures that are recommended to be followed in such a case.

If you are interested in this area I’m sure that you will like this books, even if you don’t and just want to read a novel, after reading this series you may began to think different about computer security and your habits in your work or personal life and that will be good enough.

While the first books of this series are somewhat old, the latest is from this year.

Stealing the Network:How to own the box

This is the book that spawned the series, This one is about short stories of hackers and crackers and the techniques or tools used to gain unauthorized access to computers and information.

Stealing the Network: How to own a continent

While the first book focused on individual stories, in this book is a single story and some of the characters introduced in the first book return to form part of a group but most of them doesn’t know that they are part of it and the main objective.

Stealing the network: How to own and identity

Third book of the series, is focused in identity theft and continues the story from the previous book with the same characters.

Stealing the Network: How to own a continent

This book continues the story from the previous 2 books and the chase of the master-mind shadowy figure from previous books, who is tracked across the world and the Web by adversaries with skill to match his own

All of the authors/contributors of this series are computer security experts and in each book there is some sort of behind the scenes of how this series began and the work involved in the creation of the books.

This is just part of the books I read in the last 3 months, later I’ll post some more books that I think are good enough to recommend. Not all are fiction, some are technical and some are about business.

The theme (dragons) is not new or original, one recent movie about the same was Reign of Fire and it was a really disappointing movie, so I hope this korean movie is good.

Here is the trailer:

Direct link to video at Youtube

The first one is the Rock Paper Scissors World Championship which got a post in Techcrunch , I’m still thinking the reason why it’s on that site but, that leads me to the other contest I want to write about.

This is the video of the contest:

Link to video

When I saw it I couldn’t stop laughing and my favorites were the fourth and sixth participants

I guess this one was spontaneous and does no have a website (as far as I know) yet, but it’s only a matter of time for someone to create a whole organization around this, the market is there in every comic and anime convention/expo.

And in Mashable they have the top 15 (so far).

A few examples:

The Void

The internet sucks

Legs

Soon we will need something like this:

More images in Streetviewr