Jan 18 2013

Easily validating your Varnish cache VCL file and other quick tips

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

I’ve been playing around with varnish lately and had to make a change in a VLC file to perform URL re-writing before following with “hashing”, lookup, and if necessary forwarding to tomcat.
For anyone wanting further information on the varnish pipeline, as well as why someone should use varnish I recommend the following two articles:

1) http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/using-varnish-so-news-doesnt-break-your-server/?smid=tw-share
2) https://www.varnish-software.com/static/book/VCL_Basics.html

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Nov 22 2012

Dealing with FFMPEG Error while opening codec for output stream…

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Quick post about the ffmpeg error message: “Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height” .

We received some video files from a partner in the Safecity project, which did not play in all media players.
We tried VLC, windows media player, and a variety of other players but nothing worked.

Checking the file with a hex editor, I saw there was data within the video, and thought to try converting with FFMPEG using commands such as:

ffmpeg -i “damaged_file.avi” converted_file.mp4

However, ffmpeg  failed with the following error message:

Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

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Nov 20 2012

Logging in VLC 2.0.3 not working in Windows 7 and Fix

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Working on a project, I noticed that I could not access the VLC 2.0.3 log (or even see it).

I had followed the instructions related to the Tools>Messages dialog, and changed the Verbosity level to enable the logging but it was not working.

After some thought I realized that as these configurations are stored as files within the VLC program files folder.

VLC must be run as administrator for the logging to actually work due to the windows 7 security restrictions.

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Nov 1 2012

Google hiding search parameters in referer address

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Greetings,

While checking my statscounter/analytics today and noticed that the number of links starting with the following had increased:
www.google.gr/url?sa=t&rct=j
OR
www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j

What I don’t like with these links is that I can no longer know what search was used to land the users on my page, in order to be able to tweek my SEO, and know what content is more demanded.

Reading a bit more about this I found out its’ google’s new policy to hide the search parameters for users privacy – Ok I can understand that.

There is however the opinion that this data is for sale if your an advertiser who is paying them (I have not confirmed this).

More information on this from designer Tim Minor in his blog post: Deconstructing Google url search parameters .

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Oct 19 2012

Remove duplicate entries from mysql table

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Was writing some code, and dealt with this problem…so posting about solving this problem with 1 command (or more) depending on your decision.If you want to remove all duplicate rows with the same combination of N number of columns.

I’ll talk about two options in this post:

Add a unique key constraint that drops all duplicates

This one will remove all duplicates (based on the combination of columns you give) with one line.
The approach works by altering the table, and adding a unique key. Applying this unique key, causes all duplicate rows to be dropped leaving only one.

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Oct 15 2012

Quick and dirty PDF translation using Dropbox, and Google Translate

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Hey all, quick non-programming post here about how to quickly translate a PDF doc with formatting from google translate (and keep most of the formatting).

Specifically, I wanted to translate a manual for a professional oven to Greek. My example though will use a preliminary version of my MSc thesis:

http://www.aitdspace.gr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/273/MBAKOPOULOS_thesis_final_.pdf?sequence=1

Google translate supports uploading documents via the translate a document link, but the result is not always very good with formatting.

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Oct 3 2012

Lightcouch Pet Peeves, Features, and Insights

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Introduction

We’ve been using lightcouch over at AIT, and over time have come up with some specific requirements and general insights about lightcouch. I’ve decided to make a list (and add to it over time), as well as implement a type of utility class which builds upon the original lightcouch functionality for the features we would like.

On to the list…

1) What if a user wishes to insert a JSON string directly instead of creating a JSON object and adding overhead?

I’ve asked the original author on the lightcouch google group (hope the links works) about this, and the answer was for architectural and error checking reasons, specifically:

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Sep 29 2012

How to search all columns of all tables in a microsoft sql database for a keyword (including any data type)

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Hey,

I’ve been working on a very large unknown database (over 45 tables) where the reverse engineered schema diagram was quite chaotic. Having the task to find several needles in the haystack I searched the internet and found the very useful script at:

http://vyaskn.tripod.com/search_all_columns_in_all_tables.htm  (pasted below).

However, one limitation I noticed was that the script only searched (‘char’, ‘varchar’, ‘nchar’, ‘nvarchar’).

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Sep 21 2012

More good posts coming…after 1,397 Unique Visits

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Just checked the commutative statistics on statscounter.
I suggest for everyone to use some kind of analytics/tracking (google, statscounter).

Call me a happy camper…it’s nice to know the blog has an increasing amount of visitors.
I’d say a direct relationship with the number of posts, though Week29 is quite an outlier.
Also, having the post about PHPSecLib on the featured page for #php of wordpress is quite coo, even if it may have been automated (not too sure about that).

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Sep 19 2012

Helpful video for VLC streaming on youtube

This specific content was written 14 years ago. Please keep this in mind as it may be outdated and not adhering to best-practices.

Hey,

Thought to link to the specific video as it was a bit helpful. For sure, many written tutorials as well out there :=)  , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R08q2wzGpzk .

I got opencv to read from an RTSP stream yesterday produced by VLC, in my eigenfaces recognition project which I am working on. I will post the code soon related only to the RTSP part.

This is part of the work I am doing for Athens Information Technology in the Safecity Project.
Kudos, or κῦδος ;),  to Nikos Katsarakis, as we were testing out the streaming capabilities of VLC.
They ran into the issue of consuming RTSP streams from VLC about two years ago at the AIT AGC/Smart group so it was an interesting find.

Now to solve issue with which encapsulation and encoding are the most optimal!

 

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