So I’ve been having this problem with certain video files downloaded from the Internet: the audio fades in and out for no apparent reason. Usually I just delete it and download another version but today I was determined to fix this.
The symptoms: the audio fades in and out, and peaks the first split second of voice audio, and then fades down after that. And this only happens in Windows Media Player. I figured it has something to do with the audio codec and something with surround sound because it swaps the voice audio and background audio throughout the playback. The first step was to find a program that shows the codec info of each video file. Microsoft Windows Media Player’s File>Properties just doesn’t show enough information.

My searching led me to this awesome application called afreeCodecVT. It’ll show you everything about a file’s codecs, both video and audio:

Codec : FAST Multimedia AG DVM (Dolby AC3)
Flags : None Set
Quality : 0
bps : 448,000
Codec Code : 8192
Channels : 5
SamplePerSec : 48,000

AfreeCodecVT codec info helped me track down the problem format to be AC3 (Audio Code: 8192, Codec: FAST Multimedia AG). It turns out that there are two AC3 codecs out there. One is the more common AC3 filter is available from SourceForge (ac3filter_0_70b). The second is the Dolby AC3 Audio (8192) codec, the one I was missing. After some Googling I found and downloaded AC3 Filter 1.11 (ac3dec124b). Problem solved!

Goodbye Kilroy! In my continued War on Spam I added captcha to my site. These past two weeks of random Spam messages in my contact section, with obvious Spam subject matter, has been pissing me off. It was fairly simple to install. I used Simon Jarvis’ PHP library from White Hat Web Design using up only a few minutes for integration.

Upgrading my blog software took less than 10 minutes, the majority of it backing up my database. However an upgrade wasn’t today’s goal — eliminating blog spam was.

Recently I’ve been getting more and more Spam bots posting home mortgage and penis enlargement comments on my site. Debt consolidation, gambling? Reminds me of that one Chappelle Show sketch. But not any more! After careful analysis of image verification solutions, the kind where you type in and match those goofy pictures (technically called captcha), I decided to go with the non-capcha fix, Automattic Kismet.

Akismet: Anti-Spam Wordpress Plug-in

The Wordpress plug-in, better called Akismet, installed in like two minutes. One minute was spent creating a Wordpress API Key. Super simple! Yes it comes shipped with Wordpress but installing a newer version only needs the uploading of two files. Auf Wiedersehen Spam!

Does anyone appreciate good nerd humor as much as I do? C’mon people!

Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says “I’ve lost my electron.” The other says “Are you sure?” The first replies “Yes, I’m positive.”

How about a really bad pun?

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and, with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

My homepage is obviously the omnipresent Google search page, particularily their personalized home page with RSS feeds and what have you. Upon opening my home page today I was surprised to see Google Finance, the most recent addition to a large list of betas.

They’ve ventured into yet another sector with their strategy making things better and faster. Reminds me of our company ’s Mo-Motto: mo better, mo cheaper, mo faster (I never liked it). One extremely interesting feature is the ability to adjust your date windows with their Flash-based stock chart. Additionally they provide links to appropriate news, companies, facts, and even blog posts for non-profit companies and privately held firms. Hopefully you’ll find this usefull. I wonder how a possible Google Wallet will play into this whole finance section…maybe not at all.

GEEK ALERT: So I spent a few minutes today translating my ASP album page into PHP. Can I just say that if you have the reference site and know Perl this shit is so damn easy? It really is. See for yourself:

ASP File-Directory Iteration
Set fso = Server.CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
Set objFolder = fso.GetFolder(Server.MapPath(“.”))
For Each i In objFolder.Subfolders
Next

PHP File-Directory Iteration
$dir = opendir(‘.’);
while (($file = readdir($dir)) !== false) {}

Query Strings
ASP: request.querystring(“var”)
PHP: $_GET['var']

Year
ASP: year(now)
PHP: date(‘Y’)

Executing Script Name
ASP: Request.ServerVariables(“SCRIPT_NAME”)
PHP: $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']