Google's Little SSL Problem

I'm not a usual user of Google Chrome. But I must say that I find it slightly surprising that Google's warning for SSL misidentification popups when I attempt to use the Gmail domain as a shortcut to mail.google.com with the HTTPS protocol.

Chrome is quick to notice that Gmail's certificate is for mail.google.com instead of gmail.com.

Project AD2

Since the comeback of Al1enDesigns, my old code has been having a bit of a complication which I'm not entirely sure of the exact cause of, but I'm putting the blame to poor coding style.

At the current time I'm working on approaching my content management system all over again. This time, I'm approaching it from an object oriented angle. I've been referring to this little project of mine as AD2.

Progress has been slow at best thus far. I've been hacking away on the many problems that have been coming up lately and I seem to be slowly gaining experience with PHP's style of OOP (as prior to this I've only used OOP in C++ and Java).

AD2 OOP Tech Demo

Of course, right now at least, you can't see what's really going on, just that it works. Maybe I'll manage to get some screenshots or class hierarchy information put up for criticism.

MTP on Linux

Some surfing on the web reminded me to investigate developments in the area of using MTP on Linux. I had attempted this once in the past and failed to manage to connect to my MTP MP3 player. Some homework today led me to an article on mounting MTP on Linux over at abi.

At the first step I had to substitute the following command on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

sudo apt-get install mtpfs

The rest of the steps worked perfectly as is, and to my surprise, mounted my Samsung YP-P2!

A quick follow-up:
Since I'm incredibly lazy, I just wrote a couple scripts for mounting and unmounting my P2 on Ubuntu.

p2.mount

#! /bin/sh
sudo mtpfs -o allow_other /media/p2.mount

p2.unmount

#! /bin/sh
sudo umount /media/p2.unmount

Samsung YPP2 & SVI Video Format

Samsung's YP-P2 media player (available in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB versions) is easily a very good media player. The touchscreen menu system is fairly intuitive, and the device has good quality of playback of video and music.

First off the device in North America defaults to using MTP so it can be at best troublesome on Linux; although not impossible as there are MTP implementations for Linux and I believe I've read a little bit about converting the media player to UMS/MSC.

The next issue this media player gives shows up when you look at the default included video files. Their extension is .svi. I copied one of these files to my desktop and used abcAvi Tag Editor to examine the file as an AVI (which I had gathered they were from googling).

Some quick info, the Stream Header block shows its handler to be XVID and dwInitialFrames is set to 0.

I've only experimented a little with different video types, but I'll state that its best to resize your video to 480x272.

The audio stream's wFormatTag is set to 0x55, MP3. Other characteristics were 2 channels, and 44.1kHz.

Now, fire up Avidemux. Apply a resize filter to your video stream as 480x272. Set your video format to MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid4) then click configure and go to the Motion & Misc tab and set the Number of B-frames to 0. Set your Audio format to MP3 (LAME). Make sure your container format is still AVI. Now we should be ready to save your video. The filename needs to end with .svi, also for reasons I'm not exactly aware of the media player will sometimes reject having the video transferred to it. When this happens, I've found renaming the file (to something shorter usually) tends to get the job done.

Hopefully this will help someone else who's having trouble with getting video on their P2, good luck!