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So the Halloween season is upon us and I am left on my own this year to decorate the pumpkin – my youngest seeing fit to reside in Toronto and my two grandsons off doing their own thing as well ( okay so they are actually in school but you get my meaning….)

So step number one was the acquisition of a pumpkin…. which my lovely wife diligently delivered to me with the words “you carve it”….

I’ve never been one for the ghoulishness or glammer of Halloween, I just like seeing all the kids and watching them have fun…. so in my mind I thought a goofy face was best, and not being the best of artists, I thought I would see what I could find for free… This lead of course to my #1 resource Google, and searching the web for pumpkin face templates and this lead me to the writing of this article ( and for those of you who were wondering…. it’s not that I don’t have things to write about …. I just can’t find the time to put it down!!!! )

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So as you may, or maybe not, have noticed. I was off the air for a few days…. almost a week…

The short story was, I didn’t pay my bills on time…. and if that were the only reason I wouldn’t be writing this… so…

The rest of the story is my service provider ( the company that actually sells me server space for my, and other websites that I maintain ) locked me out of all my websites, because I hadn’t paid. Unfortunately, I never received any notice of any renewals due, or pending lockouts.

I’ve had an ongoing “discussion” ( albeit it seems one way ) with my provider regarding the fact that NONE of their notification emails ever get to me. I check my spam filters carefully and trust me if they had fallen in the cess-pool I would have found it, but they don’t. They just “kind of” disappear…

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So I’ve been experimenting a bit more with the avisplit utility that I talked about in my last posting.

I’ve been trying to transfer over an old ( 15-20 years ) TV War Movie video that I had originally recorded on VHS tape. It’s called “Life Line to Victory” and while it isn’t a bad movie, it is impossible to find available from any online source any where. So I couldn’t buy it, or download it if I tried!

This meant that I had to copy it from my tape, onto my DVD recorder and then transfer it into avi format for archiving/future playing on my digital player and/or DVD player that plays AVI’s.

I prefer AVI formats because they are more compact and more portable/useable than any other format out there, yes I may lose “some” detail, but I am quite happy with the video and audio quality that avi has to offer and don’t plan to ever have an 80″ screen ( or even a 46″ for that matter ) where there might appear some degradation.

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A friend of mine recently had a problem with a couple of avi files he had of a movie of his. The movie was actually in two parts and he wanted it combined. Plus, he also had two subtitle files to the movie and was wondering if I could embed them into the finished avi file ( it was a foreign film. ) So he called his local help desk…. me.

I thought that I would tackle the subtitling first and found that one of Ubuntu’s main utilities mencoder did that for me quite nicely. I put the command into a little script ( I find it easier to help remember this gems if they are written down in my local bin directory… ) to make my life simpler

#!/bin/bash
mencoder -o output.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -sub $1.srt -utf8 -subfont-autoscale 0 -subfont-text-scale 15 -subpos 98 $1.avi

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So I mentioned yesterday that when I fwent to write my article about “fglrx” that I ran into another/new problem. That problem was that I could no longer log into the Internet, nor could I even access other computers on my home network. It was as if the network card became unplugged – only it wasn’t!

The main, and only clue to this problem ( that jumped out at me ) was when I tried to ping ( send a test signal ) any computer on my local netwrok or the Internet, that the message was always the same.

sndmsg: Operation not permitted

No matter where I searched or what tests I ran, I could find no clue as to what the problem was, nor how to fix it. After beating my head against the wall I was no further ahead than when I started and I was beginning to think that I would have to do something that I have never, in all my years of computing, had to do. To reinstall an operating system just to fix an unknown problem.

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