redemption in a blog

VLC 0.8.6 - full screen controller panel

December 26th, 2006

VLC media player 0.8.6 (changelog) was released a few weeks ago so this may be old news, but I am clearing my backlog of drafts.

Mac OS X users, if you watch videos in full screen mode (like I do most of the time), you’d be delighted to know that they added a full screen controller à la the video player in iTunes:

That was one of my pet peeves with VLC when I was still using Windows as my main desktop OS, and I’d stayed true to Media Player Classic right to the point where I switched to OS X. Media Player Classic is Windows-only, so I had to switch to VLC as well (QuickTime player never impressed me and I wasn’t willing to pay for the Pro version). The lack of a full controller in full screen mode and the inability to move to specific spots in the video timeline with sufficient granularity seems to have been fixed with this new full screen controller panel.

And while they still haven’t made it possible to pause a video by clicking on the video output (which was the case in Media Player Classic), I’ve mostly compensated for it by hitting the space bar. Now that they’ve added a right-click context menu to the video output screen, the same can be done but in 2 clicks with just the mouse - not optimal but it does feel better to see a context menu pop up when right-clicking. I guess that’s the Windows user in me talking - I still feel that almost everything I see should have a context menu or it just feels wrong.

Oh and they added support for the Apple Remote Control. Works great, I just have to remember to take out my remote control and use it next time I’m sitting back watching a movie or anime.

Posted by Chu Yeow at December 26, 2006 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (4) | Category: Applications, Mac, Open Source

Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo cake for sale

December 26th, 2006

Saw this on a Christmas brochure while buying some pastry from the local Delifrance cafe:

I immediately thought of Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo (of South Park fame).

While the resemblance is not uncanny, I’m pretty sure that’s one log cake I don’t want to eat.

Posted by Chu Yeow at December 26, 2006 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (2) | Category: Fun

Tomorrow.sg has an entry with a photo of glue sniffing girls on a MRT train. This picture is tits (as Eric Cartman would say). (0)

Mind your MySQL update syntax

December 22nd, 2006

Just noticed an insidious “bug” in MySQL when you use “AND”s instead of commas to separate the fields you are updating in your SET clause. Being a little rusty in SQL, I entered something like the query below while trying to make a quick fix to some records:

UPDATE characters
SET alignment = 'Neutral Evil'
AND last_name = 'Majere'
WHERE first_name = 'Raistlin'

Much to my consternation, the record appeared to have disappeared when I tried to query for it. After much bewildered cursing, I came across MySQL bug #15928: update syntax error not detected (this is not an actual bug though). As it turns out, MySQL does a logical AND and the result is that the ‘alignment’ field is set to ‘0′ since 'Neutral Evil' AND last_name = 'Majere' results in false. And MySQL casts it to ‘0′. Grrr. Luckily I was able to revert the changes by finding the record again with the new ‘0′ alignment value (was using an auto-committing MySQL GUI client, no ROLLBACK available).

Posted by Chu Yeow at December 22, 2006 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (0) | Category: Fun

Firefox Secrets on Google Book Search

December 19th, 2006

A GoogleAlert (not the Google Alert) email arrived in my inbox today alerting me to the Firefox Secrets entry on Google Book Search (that’s a book I wrote, for the uninitiated). It’s listed as a limited preview so only the first few pages of each chapter are available. If you’re interested in previewing a Firefox book circa 2005 (virtually the Mesozoic ages in the tech world), just maybe, check it out.

Posted by Chu Yeow at December 19, 2006 SGT | Permalink | Comments and TrackBacks (0) | Category: Mozilla, Personal