I recently bought some dvds and they don't contain films but concerts so after the few plays I decided to extract the audio tracks, possibly keeping the highest audio quality permitted, to convert them later into mp3, ogg or flac as needed. I want to discuss the process.

The first tool I found useful was lsdvd, it tells you the number and length of titles, chapters and angles available on the dvd, which is important …

Do you still remember this? It was a good post about the OS X install via the network using a GNU/Linux install server. I went back to read and use it after a few days to install the version 10.5 (leopard) of OS X and it worked well but there's a couple of things missing in that post which I'd like to share here.

The problems were mainly in mounting the leopard disc …

For three years it was possible to do without it. But now it's become necessary again. This coming New Year's Eve, the radio controlled clocks will, after 0:59:59, instead of jumping to 1 o'clock at the next tick of the second, pause shortly in order to insert a small portion of extra time: a leap second.

The International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) in Paris has prescribed this addition to coordinated universal time (UTC …

I've finally built my first cluster on rhel5 using gfs2 and drbd8 :-D

drbd makes a network raid1 between two physical distinguished block devices (eg. internal disks of two servers) and from the release 8.0 it supports the active/active configuration.

gfs2 permits to the two server machines a concurrent mount of the network replicated drbd device.

rhel5 is the OS I've installed on the two machines.

Practically with this stuff the servers share …

Unfortunately my GNU/Linux box is a PowerPC and I had the privilege of finding all sort of strange Fluendo bugs... but apart from bugs, the gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 plugin consumes much more CPU (about 22% against 7%) than the standard mad plugin for gstreamer (found in gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly collection) and fluendo-mp3 is licensed under the MIT license while the mad library is instead GPL. Last but not least, I've no data to show that but …