Cinelerra – not ready for prime time

I enjoy editing video.  I have used several home packaged typed software as well as a professional video editing suite and I have to say Sony Vegas has been my favorite so far.

I wanted to give Cinelerra a try on my laptop which runs Ubuntu Feisty (see this link).  I did, and I was quite impressed, but the program is just not stable enough.  It crashed on me several times.  After choosing a in/out point to play (for quickly reviewing a section of the video to play), it played normally at first, then after a few seconds it began to slow down and the playback speed began to crawl.

Now the tough decision.  Do I make this laptop a dual boot, putting Windows Vista back on it? Purchase the new Sony Vegas and edit my video when I want to on Vista? Or do I just limit my video editing sessions to the home office where one Windows XP machine is used for gaming?

I really hope Linux matures even more than it has, and products like Sony Vegas make their way to the Linux desktop.  I doubt that Vegas will however, as it appeared to be written in Microsoft’s .NET framework.  The new version did ask for permission to install C++.NET libraries.

Mono you say? I hear you, but I am guessing Sony leveraged Microsoft OS specific graphic layers.  I don’t know for sure.

What state?

I am playing Mr. Mom this week as the real mom is off on a girls trip/cruise. I hope she is having as much fun as I am with the kids.

In order to keep my daughter content with just “dad” being around, I give her things to look forward to (i.e. I pull crazy ideas out of my head). One evening she brought up giants. She had wanted to hear a story about giants, so the other night I obliged.  I gave her the best giant story I could think of.  I even acted out several scenes.  The second night, she wanted a scary story…so I told her one, where mom was the hero in the end to save us all.

Tonight, she asked where we live. I told her ….. street, Marietta, Georgia.

Then she asked, “Where do giants live?” I responded giant street, giant town. I stopped.

I was tired, so I didn’t notice if she was thinking hard or it just came out.

What state?

Huh? I thought. I quickly responded GiantState. We continued on with the story. But I can’t help but wonder how a four year old mind can pick out such a detail. Sure she knows Mickey Mouse lives in the state of Florida. We live in Georgia. But when/where did she figure this all out?

Debug=False & !404.html = 500.html

I like the Django web framework.  No really, I do!   But I wish the maintainers handled getting out their strong beliefs a little bit better.

I rolled some code to a production web server.  The website itself was not yet in production (it was a beta version awaiting sign off by the customer), but I had turned off the debugging stuff in the settings.py file.

The problem that existed is in my settings.py file I had:

DEBUG = False

If you set this global variable (setting) off, and you do not have a 404.html or 500.html in one of your template paths, a server error (500) is thrown.  Great…try debugging that one, it wasn’t easy…honest.

Google found it with these keywords:  DEBUG flatpages

Which returned Ticket #3335 (Flatpages with DEBUG = False requires 404.html)

Good design practice to follow? Yes!

Better way to stress the message of why you should create your own 404 and 500? Absolutely!!

Apache2 and PHP5 using mod_fcgid

Wanted this Apache combination to keep a server light on memory/cpu;  stay off the Apache2 pre-fork. I am switching out my server from lighttpd to apache. I liked lighttpd, but I have been using apache2 so much lately that it doesn’t make sense to figure out how to set up xyz on two different http servers.

To get Apache2 and PHP5 working you have two options. Either use Apach2 pre-fork (similar to the way Apache1.3 ran), or use fastcgi. I chose the latter option.

I followed these excellent instructions, except for one change:

I put:

FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 .php

Under my <virtualhost><directory> for the specific site I am hosting that uses php.