The blog has moved to http://jessehouse.com/ ... Many google searches point here so I am leaving it operational, but there will be no new posts.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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


Saturday, October 24, 2009

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

Saturday, October 17, 2009

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