Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category
If anyone has attempted to watch H.264 video on an older PC you know what a frustrating experience it can be due to the ridiculous amount of CPU the decoding eats up. CoreAVC is a Windows codec that dramatically reduces that load. Being a Windows codec we Linux users are left in the cold (we’re getting used to it) - but I just discovered a project that rectifies that situation! The aptly named CoreAVC for Linux is a set of patches for mplayer, etc to allow them to load the CoreAVC codec through DirectShow emulation. Or something.
I haven’t tried it out myself as I watch all my videos on my desktop, which is more than capable of handling HD H.264 videos, even with inefficient decoding. Someone give it a go and let me know if it works!
Now that Leopard has been released a few people are commenting on the usability of Time Machine as a backup system for “ordinary people”. As is usually the case, what Apple have done here is slap a GUI on functionality that Linux and UNIX systems have had for years. Naturally though, because Time Machine looks so pretty and is grabbing more headlines that the humble rsync, there are some efforts to bring a similar system to Linux.
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The debate about using tabs or spaces for indenting code. Which to use?
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Stylesheets and script files can often get quite large. Although they will be cached by the browser there is still the time delay (and bandwidth hit) of the first loading, which according to Yahoo! is more often than you think. Here’s a quick and dirty method of using PHP with gzip compression to send your CSS, Javascript and whatever else compressed to browsers.
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Organising a repository takes on several forms. The most obvious, and important, is how you organise the directory structure and name your files. Secondly, you need to make sure all the metadata used by your VCS is organised and effective. Finally, you must have some sort of process in place to ensure that these things are kept tidy and manageable.
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