Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Vimeo Downloader 0.1 released

Published on November 30, 2008 in Open source. 78 Comments

Update (2010-11-13): Vimeo Downloader 0.3 is now available. Among other features, it will now download HD videos by default. Most people will prefer to use the new version (also linked below). But if you prefer to use version 0.1, which defaults to downloading standard definition versions of videos, you can get it here.

Here is Vimeo Downloader, a script I created to download videos from Vimeo:

vimeo_downloader.sh

The script should work on any system with a POSIX shell (such as Ubuntu, Mac OS X, or Windows with MSYS) and wget or curl (wget is in Ubuntu by default and also available for Windows, curl is in Mac OS X by default). To use it, simply run vimeo_downloader.sh with the ID of the Vimeo video you want to see. For example, the ID of http://www.vimeo.com/2373142 is 2373142. If you have any questions, please leave a comment on this post or contact me directly.

Thanks to Voinage on the XBMC forums for describing how to download videos from Vimeo.

This script is the latest in my attempts to help people depend less on Flash. For more details, see Why I haven’t installed a Flash player. For viewing YouTube videos without Flash, use Free Youtube! by Stephen Paul Weber. Hopefully this script will make it easier to incorporate Vimeo support into something like Free Youtube!.

Update: Free Youtube! now supports Vimeo, thanks to this script. Just install Greasemonkey, then Free Youtube! and you will have Flash-free Vimeo.

Flash required for Gmail voice and video chat

Published on November 25, 2008 in Intellectual property. 3 Comments

You may have heard about Google’s new voice and video chat plugin for Gmail, which lets you use voice and video through the Gmail web interface. You may have also heard that the plugin is standalone (does not require other plugins) or an alternative to using Flash for voice and video chat solutions. Like many, I thought that because Gmail voice and video chat was a plugin, it did not require Flash at all. However, further research showed that this was not the case.
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Why I haven’t installed a Flash player

Published on November 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

Since I installed Ubuntu 8.10 three weeks ago, I have not installed a Flash player. I don’t just mean I haven’t installed the Adobe Flash Player, I mean I haven’t installed any Flash player at all, not even Gnash or Swfdec. Those of you who know me as a free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) advocate may be wondering why this is. After all, I don’t need to use any non-libre software if I run Gnash or Swfdec. I’ll explain why having a FLOSS implementation of a technology is not enough for me to use it.
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Ideas for a better programming language

Published on November 8, 2008 in Discussing ideas. 14 Comments

When I look at the programming languages available today, it seems that all of them try to optimize execution speed or developer time at the expense of the other. For example, although compiled C code is extremely fast, it can take many more programmer hours to write a robust application in C than in a higher-level language. On the other side of the coin, a moderately complex problem can be solved by a Ruby programmer in a few minutes, but the resulting code is executed slowly, running on an interpreter (soon to be a VM, but still slower than native code) and requiring garbage collection and lots of runtime checking. Are these sacrifices necessary? I don’t think so. How is it possible to make a language that simultaneously optimizes execution speed and developer time? I believe the answer lies in static code analysis, particularly at the compiler level.
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StarCraft Power Saver 0.3 released

Published on November 6, 2008 in Open source. 6 Comments

StarCraft Power Saver has been updated to patch StarCraft 1.15.3 executables. You can find the new version on the StarCraft Power Saver web page. If you have any questions or if you are having trouble with StarCraft Power Saver, please add a comment to this post or contact me directly.