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We’re moving

[Update] This blog has now moved to the attic. Www.arnebrasseur.net is where it’s at.

Soon this site will get a serious face lift. I’m moving from the blogging platform Wordpress to the more flexible Drupal system. This site will contain both my blog in Dutch and various pages of interest in English.

For those who are subscribed to my RSS feeds, please note that the addresses will change. I will use the FeedBurner service in the future so feed addresses should stay the same from now on.

You can already see a preview of the new site at blog.arnebrasseur.net, its temporary home before moving to this domain. The old site will still be available as legacy.arnebrasseur.net.

The new site has currently only been tested on Mozilla Firefox, users of Internet Explorer can expect problems. Respectable browsers like Opera or Safari are expected to work.

The last post

I have decided to no longer continue to blog in English on this site. I will still be blogging in Dutch.

It’s been increasingly difficult for me to maintain a certain continuity here. It’s been a great experiment, and a lot of fun, but I feel it’s time to let this one go.

I’m working on a new site with a much more narrow focus, something this site dearly lacks. It might still be a while before it sees the light of day, so I’m not revealing too much about it yet.

A big thanks to anyone who has been reading this blog, leaving comments or just following what’s happening. It’s been great!

Getting subtitles in sync

As an early new years resolution I’ll start with sharing more of the snippets I code up to make my life easier. Here’s one : the SRT subtitle scaler. It’s a little ruby script to sync subtitles with a movie. I don’t know how often one needs this, but I got some English subtitles on-line for a Chinese movie and I just couldn’t get them to properly line up with the movie.

Mplayer has an option to set a delay (possibly negative), but that didn’t help in my case. You can also set the subtitle fps (frames per second), but that only works when the subtitle format uses frame numbers, while SRT files use timestamps.

If you have this problem this script can help. There are usage instructions in the comments.

Enjoy!

Do what you can’t not do

By accidentally using the right four-word combination on Google I stumbled upon a 2002 article by Mark Pilgrim, and somehow it prompted me to use that good old blockquote tag once again. These are the closing words of the article, citing himself two years before that. Spot on Mark, spot on!

As I write this, the year is 2000, and the Internet is a battleground of intellectual property disputes. Some people would like you to believe that, without proper financial incentives, music, literature, and computer software would disappear. After all, who would make music if they can’t make money on it? Who would write? Who would program? I know the answer. The answer is that musicians will make music, not because they can make money, but because musicians are the people who can’t not make music. Writers will write because they can’t not write. I’ve been programming for 16 years, writing free software for 8. I can’t imagine not doing this. If you can imagine yourself not doing what you’re doing, do something else. Do whatever it is that you can’t not do.