Gl.ib.ly

Earlier today I got a massive SCORM object that contained lots of mp3 files. They were all high quality files, so I wanted to cut them down in size for web use. For this purpose I am using ffmpeg which you can easily get for Windows, Linux or Mac. I tried the following on a Mac, but it should also work on Linux (paths permitting) and on Windows if you are using something like cygwin.

I highly recommend you get familiar with ffmpeg as it is amazingly useful. Just check out the man pages; swf to avi, avi to something that works on ipods, all a breeze!

Continue reading "Encoding audio and removing file extensions from files"

From time to time things tend to go wrong and systems tend to go crazy. Sometimes these errors are more of nuisance than anything else, an intermittent annoyance you'd prefer not to investigate -- trawling through logs is a pain in the backside. Now you need to take a peak at those compressed Apache error log files, ugh! Well before you look for suitable places to hang some rope try running some expressions across a certain number of files. Normally you'd only want to look at logs for the last 7 days, so lets give that a go.

Continue reading "Searching compressed Apache logs"