Georgi’s Blog

Jumper

Unlike the previous moviewe watched, I liked Jumper much better. I’m not saying it is the next Matrix, but I liked the idea. It is just that after watching it, I had this pleasant feeling an this desire in me. Of course I’m not even considering the possibility of teleportation, but the movie made me feel good and made me dream for a while about the possibilities (positive and negative) of one such skill…

Рейтинг 4 от 5

Cloverfield

I don’t know why but this movie was really bad! Maybe because of the constantly shaking camera, or because of the beaten to death idea of destroying Manhattan and everybody who didn’t manage to escape, or the bad ending, I don’t know. It is a fact that I hated the movie and that I angry with myself that I watched it. Boradt, at least, I managed to stop half way trough, but in this movie I expected something to happen at the end… however I was left with my hope.

Рейтинг 0 от 5

Exercises

For a while now I’ve been doing some martial arts exercises - an old passion of mine. This time, however, I decided to go the internal way, focused not on the Martial aspect but rather on the Health aspect. Even though I do practice Iron Palm, my focus is Yang style Tai Chi. I’ve learned a few chi gong exercises and the 24 form yang style TC and I try to perform them every day along with as much of the rest of the following routine:
Gentle warming up and stretching exercises.
Dynamic stretching of the legs (front, sides and back).
24 Form Yang style.
Iron Palm practice.
24 Form Yang style.
for time:
15 pull-ups , 15 push-ups, 25 crunches, 50 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups and 15 pull-ups.

I have to modify a little the last ones because I don’t have a pole for the pull-ups, but they are also the ones that I do least, because the whole thing takes at least 90 minutes.

I feel a lot better when I exercise ( even though everything hurts ).
P.S. If someone knows or has books or videos about the MiChuan Yang form I will be very happy to take a peak.

Iron Palm

I started practicing iron palm three weeks ago with both hands. I have my mung beans bag and I use Dit Da Jow every time after practice. So far I have no complains, which is very good. If I manage to keep doing it for 3 months I will try my iron palm on a wooden board or a small brick. I am using the Wing Lam method and I’m glad I don’t have to break my hands into rocks, iron shots or heated red sand.

iDiet

Today, according to our timeline, we have to release iDiet 1.0 Final. It has been one week since RC3 was released and nobody complained. According to the stats on SF.net I think we have enough downloads for someone to complain if something is broken. RC2 had a couple of big flows but we fixed them fast enough. Today we will release 1.0 Final and we will continue adding functionality slowly.

iDiet RC2

Today, we release iDiet RC2. If there are no complains this will most likely become 1.0. There are a couple of bug fixes and a small enhancement. The address is this one .

If someone tries it, please let us know what you think.

Happy Granny Martha?

Well, today is my favorite Bulgarian holiday: Granny Martha. We wear these red and white thingies called martenitsi for good luck until the first day of Spring. Also my cousin Marta has a name day(Month) today so I wish her all the best.

I’m Back

Finally I got a laptop. I can’t remember when was the last time I was without one for so long. It’s totally different to have all your stuff with you everywhere you go. What did I get? A Macbook. Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 4GB 667MHz DDR2, 200GB 7200rpm. Cool eh? :)Of course I didn’t buy the ram and drive from Apple, because their prices are astronomical.
After I spend 3-4 days installing and setting up software, the laptop now has everything I want the way I want it. No complains so far. I also got a Logitech V470 white mouse, which pairs with my laptop perfectly. The best part is, today Apple lowered the prices with 100 bucks and I managed to get a price adjustment
Now It’ll be easier for me to blog, because till now I either didn’t have a computer handy or it wasn’t a nice one… I admit I was looking for reasons, but now I have none

Last Semester

Well, my last semester at Dowling is going well. My last classes here are POCSR, Design with the Computer II, Construction of Personal Identity (Psy class) and Intro to Spreadsheets and VBA. My schedule is here. I wanted to register some biology classes, but there were none that were good for me. I hope that in May I will be able to get my diploma of B.S. in Computer Science.

Fun with mencoder and mkv

About a week ago I had to save two DVD disks on my hdd and instead of wasting 9GB of disk space I started playing with mencoder. I looked a lot on the internet, lots of options, lots of ways to do it… it not very easy. In the end I decided on the following:

• x264 video codec
• mp3 audio codec( in my case, the audio wasn’t important, otherwise I would’ve decided on AAC)
• mkv container
• mencoder, mkvtools and ogmtools for the procedure

Here are the commands.
Info about the chapters and ripping the title on the HDD:

dvdxchap -t 1 /dev/dvd > 1.chapters
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile 1.vob

First pass only analyzes the video and writes a log file for the second pass:

rm *.log #remove old logs
mencoder -v 1.vob \
-alang en \#language english
-vf yadif \#yadif deinterlacer
-ovc x264 \ #codec x264
-x264encopts subq=4:bframes=4:b_pyramid:weight_b:pass=1:psnr:bitrate=1800:turbo=1 \ #1800 bitrate gives a good size to qualit ratio
-oac copy \ #for now only copy the audio
-ofps 24000/1001 \#approx 23.9 fps
-slang en \
-o /dev/null


Second pass:

mencoder -v 1.vob \
-alang en \
-vf yadif \
-ovc x264 \
-x264encopts subq=5:partitions=4x4:8x8dct:frameref=3:me=hex:bframes=4:b_pyramid:pass=2:psnr:bitrate=1800 \
-oac mp3lame \ #mp3lame audio codec
-lameopts abr:br=256:vol=7 \ #256kbits bitrate
-ofps 24000/1001 \
-o 1.avi #write everything as avi for now


At this stage we have a perfectly working AVI at around 1800MB per 4.3GB DVD. I, however, want the chapter information from the DVD. The next step for me is to open the DVD and start going trough the chapters and editing the titles in the 1.chapters file from Chapter 01 Chapter 02… to something that makes more sense.

Then I merge the audio and video from the .avi and the chapter information in one .mkv file:

mkvmerge --title "Title of the DVD" -o 1.mkv --chapters 1.chapters 1.avi


After I make sure that 1.mkv works, I cleanup:

rm -rf 1.vob 1.avi 1.chapters *.log


That’s it. The .mkv file supports multiple tracks of audio, subtitles and many more.

There could be a better way to do all this, but this worked for me.