During the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) 2011, I had the chance to give a presentation on the Dojo Toolkit, an Open Source JavaScript library that helps to ease the development of AJAX websites and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). At Univention, I am currently involved in a redesign of our extensive administration frontend for the Univention Corporate Server, our business Linux distribution. For this project, we strongly rely on Dojo in combination with a server backend written in Python .
I wanted to share a neat trick that I found to be working great for OpenOffice Impress presentations. I’m using the Presenter Console under Ubuntu, i.e. two screens, and wanted to show on mouse click videos at full screen resolution (on the video beamer screen, of course). In addition to that, I wanted to include videos with a relative path, i.e., relative with respect to the presentation (.odp) file. I finally managed to do this by writing a generic makro which calls a bash script that runs mplayer. For each video file in the presentation, I added an additional one-liner makro with the video path. Then, in the presentation, I would insert an image (e.g., sample frame of the video, but this can also be anything else, text, buttons etc.) and add a makro action (right click on the object or image -> interaction -> action at mous click = run macro) which would correspond to the makro containing the (relative) path to the video I would like it to play.
We needed lately videos that were compatible with Microsoft Powerpoint. From what I understood it seems that Powerpoint supports natively only MPEG1 and WMV video codecs. After some testing I figured the options for mencoder in order to produce videos that would work with Powerpoint. Here the command line hoping that this might help other people in the future:
I have never put this online so far, but why not. This is a project that I was doing during an internship at the Center for Vision Research, in Toronto, Canada, in 2001/2002 .. it was my first real computer vision project . The idea is simple, make music with your hand. It works as follows, the horizontal position controls the pitch of the note, with the fingers one can control effects (distortion, chorus, reverb, and pitch bend).
I recently encountered extremly slow compilation and linking times with g++ 4.1 and ld 2.16. Suprisingly, on a different (and slower) machine with g++/gcc 3.4 and ld 2.15 compiling and linking was much faster (easily with a factor of 10 to 20). Since it slowed down the development, it was really annoying. So I was looking around on the web to find some fixes or help. I also tried newer versions of ld and g++, but it didn’t really change anything. Interestingly the CPU usage during linking was down at 2-3%. So finally I found the bottleneck with our NFS which caused a slow-down when using the option -m32 during linking (I’m on a 64 bit machine compiling in 32 bit, so I need this option). I found another bottleneck with the assembler (as) also caused by using NFS. Compiling to a file in the network (i.e., not local) slows down the assembler quite a bit. So as a workaround one should try to compile intermediate object (.o) files as well as to link object files to executables to some place in the local file system (i.e., the file given by the option -o should be somewhere locally).
I thought I should just put this note online, it might save some of our time in case you’re experiencing similar problems .
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