smorgasbork

I've always considered myself very good with regular expressions.  This one drove me crazy for a little while, but it turns out to not be a problem with the regex so much as the way the PHP PCRE engine was applying the regex.

I've had this ridiculous user manual sitting around for months now, and I couldn't stand the thought of such an amazing piece of literature wasting away in the data closet.  I just had to scan it in for the world.  I've seen some bad documentation in my life, but this goes beyond bad.  Most people who have little command over another language will try to write as little as possible to reduce the chance for errors.  This guy just kept on going for 8 pages.  Mind you, this is for a USB disk enclosure!  How much freakin' documentation does that require?   Maybe 4 bullet points?

I now present to you in its entirety, the USER MANUAL for the USB PORTABLE HARD DISK (some no-name product I bought from Tiger Direct last year).

I love the fact that my Airport Extreme can serve as a "poor-man's NAS" by making USB drives available as Samba shares.  But when I wanted to back up one drive to another, I ran into terrible problems.   Here's how I solved these problems.

In my previous article, I discussed good ffmpeg options for encoding MPEG-2 video.  This worked great when encoding relatively low quality clips, like the 3 Mbps example in my article.  When you want to encode much higher quality (like full 1920x1080 HD video at 20 Mbps or more), you start to run into some performance issues that you have to address through selection of the appropriate command line options.

If you're like me, you don't like to do hundreds of tiny updates to live servers.  We batch up our RHEL updates so that we perform them every couple of months (or whenever a serious security issue crops up).  When you take this approach, you may end up with hundreds of packages requiring updates.  Just downloading those updates can take a long time, and if you're trying to update systems in a small off-hours maintenance window, this can present problems.