I recently needed to burn some video files (h.264 MKV) to DVD such that the disc would work in a standalone player. After an hour googling for a set of commands to pass to ffmpeg to convert my files, I then started looking for batch scripts. It occurred to me shortly thereafter that Ruby could help. I had found a command that worked beautifully with a single file, so all that was necessary was to automate it.
It only took one line to accomplish the task:
It’d be a cinch to generalize for input video format.
In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind.
I posted a shortened version of this on Twitter, but the full version helped me at the end of a very trying day. It’s worth repeating at length:
Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
“The ZFS team has produced a game-changing file system/volume manager. The chance to get it into the hands of 10s of millions of Mac users – and to influence Redmond’s file system strategy – seem to this outsider an opportunity of a lifetime.
If the ZFS engineering team opposed this – and I’d love to hear their take – I encourage them to reconsider. Marketers often ask the question ‘would you prefer 100% of nothing or 40% of something huge?’”
