These girls have the most beautiful dresses. And so do I -- how about that?

Kaylee ,'Shindig'


Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


Tom Scola - Dec 03, 2008 6:22:20 am PST #8229 of 25501
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

It's probably not recognizing the ” character because the data is labeled with the wrong character encoding. If I were to hazard a guess, JavaScript is expecting the XML to be encoded as utf-8, but the file is actually encoded in cp-1252.

In any event, ” can be represented by the entity ” or ”.


Ginger - Dec 03, 2008 8:18:13 am PST #8230 of 25501
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda

Dear Microsoft:

I use your products. I have stood up for you. For the love of god, please stop auto-updating me and, in the process, wiping out all my display settings. The happy shiny XP displays and the lack of my Serenity desktop get on my last nerve, and I have to reset everything back to my nice soothing monotone.

Seriously, people. I have turned off auto-update. I have gone through various permutations recommended by persons on the web to keep it off. Somehow, auto-update keeps auto turning itself back on.

Also, I am not a PC.

Yours exasperatedly,

Me

(Any suggestions, techistas?)


omnis_audis - Dec 03, 2008 10:01:37 am PST #8231 of 25501
omnis, pursue. That's an order from a shy woman who can use M-16. - Shir

(Any suggestions, techistas?)
[link]

:: runs and hides ::

t /no help


le nubian - Dec 03, 2008 10:39:50 am PST #8232 of 25501
"And to be clear, I am the hell. And the high water."

Ginger, how are you turning off auto-update. Is that an issue? Maybe you need to turn it off permanently? I cannot remember what I did, but on my home computer, it won't auto-update, it only updates when I let it.


Gudanov - Dec 04, 2008 5:34:18 am PST #8233 of 25501
Coding and Sleeping

In geeky news, my open source application is getting packaged for Debian, making it packaged for at least Ubuntu and Debian now. I feel a bit guilty that I haven't worked on it in a couple of years, but the new developers that signed up have been doing such a great job I don't know what I would do.


Jessica - Dec 04, 2008 5:41:51 am PST #8234 of 25501
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

I want to pick the collective brain here for a moment.

My screener library here at work is currently about 4000 DVDs held in albums on my windowsill. They take up about 5' of space. Space which I will not have when our office moves downtown next summer.

Basically, I need to find a way to digitize the entire library so it can be held on a network-accessible server FOR FREE because I have no budget for this. The files need to be accessible over the corporate intranet for the sales team to screen (we all have VLC so almost any codec will do), AND I need to be able to lay them to DVD for our clients.

I'm open to pretty much any suggestion. The only requirement is it has to be dead cheap.


flea - Dec 04, 2008 5:43:30 am PST #8235 of 25501
information libertarian

Unpaid intern!

For the technology parts, I got nothin'.


Gudanov - Dec 04, 2008 5:49:30 am PST #8236 of 25501
Coding and Sleeping

I transcode my DVDs to MP4/MP3 packaged in AVI on Linux using Mencoder and acidrip to set up the transcoding script, it's free but awfully techy. You have to jump though a hoop to get the DVD decoder installed as well.

Mencoder might work on Mac but I don't know how to get the DVD decoder in the Mac world, or a Mac frontend application to set up the script. Though, I suppose once you have a working script you can probably use it generically for any DVD. You could also use Xvid instead of MP4.

I use tovid to make and burn DVDs, but I've never done it with one of my AVI files.


le nubian - Dec 04, 2008 5:50:38 am PST #8237 of 25501
"And to be clear, I am the hell. And the high water."

Jessica,

do you have network space for all of this, because that's a lot of space.

If you have network space, all you really need is time to rip the DVDs. I'm not sure what kind of machine you are on, but there are free DVD ripping tools on PC and Mac. If you do them while you are working on other things, you can probably do 5-10 a day.


amych - Dec 04, 2008 5:52:05 am PST #8238 of 25501
Now let us crush something soft and watch it fountain blood. That is a girlish thing to want to do, yes?

I think the technology part also comes down to "unpaid intern". I know Jess is familiar with the usual Mac ripping options and the amount of storage space it'll take, but the sheer repetitive drag of it, if you don't want to be spending the next freaking year ripping DVDs, is honestly one of the things that keeps a lot of archives and libraries and such from digitizing mass quantities.