imeem on 64-bit ubuntu

Getting flash to work correctly on 64-bit Ubuntu can be challenging. By following various blog and forum posts I was able to get it to work, but never the flash player for imeem. Every now and again I would try to re-install flash and see if it would work for imeem but until last night I was never successful. 

It turns out that imeem will only work with the 32-bit flash player. After so much work to get the 64-bit player working in Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 I did not want to remove it so I downloaded Opera and installed the 32-bit player under its plugin directory and imeem works great!

• Download and install Opera
• verify that you cannot play music in imeem
• Close Opera
• download the 32-bit flash player in '.tar.gz' format
• extract the libflashplayer.so file from the archive
• then you will need to put this in the directory /usr/lib/opera/plugins/
• you won't have permissions to write to that directory unless you are in sudo mode
• open a terminal and type 'sudo nautilus'
• copy the file into the directory (you could do this from the terminal window also probably 'sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins/libflashplayer.so'
• Open Opera
• check the plugins - type opera:plugins in the address bar
• you should see Shockwave Flash and it should be pointing to the libflashplayer.so file under opera plugins, by default my opera installation was pointing to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ for the flash plugin, my guess is opera looks for plugins in its own directory and if not found then looks in mozilla directory
• you should now be able to play music with imeem!

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope by the way. Here are some links that might work to get the 64-bit player working for Firefox

• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1297385
• http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-adobe-flash-player-10-in-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron.html
• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1292438
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/install-flash-10-ubuntu-linux-64bit.html
• this last one is probably the best bet, check the comments there

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier. I watched a Railscasts on Factory Girl recently but had been putting off trying it out until last week. Glad I gave it a try - now I can say good-bye to fixtures and just write my tests!

• Factory Girl
• Railscast on Factory Girl

Factory Girl is developed by thoughbot; they have some great open source projects, check out Shoulda to make your rails testing even easier.

convert mkv files to dvd with ubuntu

Turns out there is a great program for this - my guess is it works well with other formats such as avi, mpeg, etc...

DeVeDe, if you are running 9.04 (jaunty) or higher it is in the repositories

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

enter 'devede' in the search and then install