sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek » democamptoronto

mencoder rocks for editing movies

Sacha Chua — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:20:00 +0000

I used my Sony Cybershot digital camera to take a video of my presentation at Democamp last night. The file weighed in at 400+ MB! After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to use mencoder to crop to just me bouncing up and down and talking excitedly about Emacs. =) Here's the incantation I'm currently using:

mencoder -ss 111 -vf crop=275:300 mov07578.mpg \
         -of mpeg -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -o emacs.mpg

I might need to tweak it a bit more. Still, mencoder is fun!

On Technorati: democamp, democamptoronto, mencoder

Random Emacs symbol: w3m-w3m-retrieve - Function: Retrieve web contents pointed to by URL using the external w3m command.

Not among strangers

Sacha Chua — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 06:09:00 +0000

It's amazing, looking out over a crowd of some 70 people and realizing that very few of them are strangers. It was my first DemoCamp presentation. I jumped at the opportunity to wear my beautiful white suit (I *love* that outfit!), but neither the suit nor the stage (MaRS is big!) imposed any distance whatsoever. It felt as if I was sitting around a table with good friends who indulged me by listening to an enthusiastic demonstration of my latest cool hacks.

It helped that there was a low table that I could put my computer on so that I could do my demo without hiding behind the podium. (I hate podiums and other things that stand between me and the rest of the people!) The microphones were good, too. I left the podium microphones in place, and my natural presenting voice was strong enough to get picked up without effort. And of course, a warmed-up sympathetic crowd was just *wonderful* to work with... =)

I can't wait to work on a few more things. A lower voice might be easier to listen to, as long as I can still keep my warmth and humour. A slightly higher table would've been nice. More structure for the hacks, maybe a clearer message? But it was a fun presentation, and I'm glad I got the chance to show people something crazy and fun.

I'd like to refine this presentation even further. I have an important message I want to share with as many geeks as possible. I want people to push the boundaries, to imagine what's possible when software can be customized to that extent. Maybe the benefits will trickle down to everyone else, the way wild ideas in research prototypes can be taken into the mainstream...

On Technorati: democamp, democamptoronto, torcamp

Random Emacs symbol: emerge-revisions-with-ancestor - Command: Emerge two RCS revisions of a file, with another revision as ancestor.

Democamp a blast! Blew their brains to bits

Sacha Chua — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:31:00 +0000

I set out to geek the heck out of Toronto's hippest geeks, and I did. I showed them Emacs as they'd never seen it before—and even that was a tiny fraction of my config. Lots of cool stuff behind the scenes, too. When I showed them M-x doctor (the Emacs psychotherapist), someone shouted out, "Is Emacs talking to you?" I laughed and continued. What I *really* should've done was break the sequence of my presentation, hook up the speakers, and tell them about Emacspeak - presentation sequence be darned. ;) Oh, if they only knew how easy it was to make jokes reality under Emacs! I remember writing my 'bot implants' - the hippie-expand code I used to answer questions really really quickly on IRC...

Anyway. That was FUN. And it was relatively easy to get through, especially with the cue system I made (Emacspeak rocks!). I'll talk about that some other time. It's a really cool hack and well worth exploring.

SO. The democamp.ca folks will eventually get around to posting a vidcast. In the meantime, I have a 431MB MPEG movie that I need to either downsample or cut up in order to put online, maybe on YouTube. I don't have enough memory or hard disk space to play around with this (have you seen my computer?!), but I'll happily put the video up if we can figure out how to go about doing that.

If you enjoyed the talk, missed it, or just want to hear/see me bounce up and down about Emacs some more, come to the Linux Caffe on Saturday (Oct 28, 2006) from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. I'll be there, and we might even see about having some kind of mini-show / vidcast. I wonder if David has a projector. =)

That was fun! Can't wait to do it again!

On Technorati: democamp, democamptoronto, democamptoronto10, emacs, linuxcaffe

Random Emacs symbol: comint-input-sender-no-newline - Variable: Non-nil directs the `comint-input-sender' function not to send a newline.