I have a large stack of unencrypted (well, they are now…) DVDs. Each one contains several short video clips, correctly separated with chapter marks. I want a new DVD containing a subset of those clips, arranged in the order of my choosing, with a simple menu structure, and without re-encoding any of the videos. A mix disc, as it were, with no quality loss. So far, every Open Source or free tool I’ve tried has choked.

I’ve tried three different VOB-splitting tools. All of the available author-from-VOB tools choke on them, because they’re missing the embedded tags that make it a real DVD-compatible VOB (e.g. muxed with “mplex -f8”). Demuxing (either directly from the DVD or from split VOBs) produces an audio track that none of the tools can read, not even the same tool that just demuxed it; they all claim it’s unsupported. mplayer, ffmpeg, ffmpegX, mjpegtools, dvdauthor, transcode, etc, etc, all the same. mplayer cheerfully plays the DVDs (and the single-chapter VOBs), but it only successfully demuxes if the audio is AC3 or MP2; mine are all PCM.

[side note: ffmpegX and HandBrake both have a tendency to produce garbage in either audio or video when used to transcode and compress DVD video; there are options that work correctly with both, but many things that should work don’t.]

It seems the only realistic solution is to rip to DV and drop them into iDVD, accepting the quality loss from re-encoding. Everything else involves spending more money than the task is worth.

Despite my lifelong admiration of the female breast, I can honestly say that this never occurred to me:

Other Japanese men engage in the all-too-common handshake scam, where a friendly man pretends to want to shake your hand Western-style, then fondles your breast at the same time.

This comes from the “Women Travellers” section of the Lonely Planet Japan guidebook. Their stuff is generally reliable, as long as you ignore their fondness for treating alternatives to Western medicine and logic as simple fact, and it’s no secret that groping is a significant problem in Japan, so this is probably an accurate and necessary warning.

By the way, their World Food Japan book is excellent. I have a slight preference for What’s What in Japanese Restaurants, but more for the presentation than for the content; more kanji, and they don’t keep using the phrase “traditional restaurant-cum-bar” to describe izakaya (their other Japan books just call them pubs, like everyone else does).

WWiJR is also slightly harder to lose than WFJ; I know I’ve got a copy of it around here somewhere, but it must be hidden under a CD or DVD. I had to use Amazon’s search-inside feature to look up its euphemism for pub. Which, by the way, appears to be censored on some pages, or else their scanning/viewing software has an odd glitch that accidentally deletes the “-cum-bar” part about half the time without affecting anything else on the page.

[and now I dread the search-engine referrals I’m going to get for having those two words in close proximity…]

Well, at least in the area of configuration, maintenance, and release management, the current version shows its dark roots. Before anyone speaks up, I’ll say that I’m generally happy with using FC5 and RedHat Enterprise on our servers at work, but someone had recommended Ubuntu server as a possible base OS for virtualizing my personal machine with VMWare Server.

It installed correctly, but wouldn’t boot. The solution I located required the following steps:

1. boot from the install CD
2. discover the command-line option for booting in rescue mode
3. guess the partition name to mount as / for rescue
4. open a root shell
5. manually add a nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf
6. type apt-get install linux-686
7. say yes to all the dependencies this requires
8. watch and wait
9. reboot

“Fixed in next release,” supposedly, but between that early-warning sign and some of the obvious eccentricities I tripped over, I don’t think I’ll bother with it.

YouTube stopped working a while back on my Quad G5. Videos played, but with no sound. All other forms of video worked fine, and the exact same video would work if I downloaded it manually and ran it from a different FLV player.

I reinstalled Flash, I wiped caches to make sure I didn’t have an old version of the YouTube flash player, grabbed the latest version of Firefox and tried it there, etc, etc. No change. It wasn’t a big problem, since I usually don’t surf from that machine, but I finally spent a few minutes chanting Google incantations and found the answer:

Run the Audio MIDI Setup utility and change the Audio Output Format back to 44100 Hz

I got a ticket yesterday. More precisely, I got a fake ticket yesterday, because it was the only way for the cops to get the crazy angry person to shut up and go away.

I had a little work project that was kind of important. Namely, I needed to get over half a million dollars worth of servers packed up and loaded onto a truck (the same ones that were supposed to be shipped out on Friday). To do that, we needed to park the truck. Unfortunately, just as we were pulling into the commercial loading zone that we’d been patiently waiting for for twenty minutes, some clown in an SUV whips around the truck and starts backing into it.

I stepped out into the street and waved him off. He kept coming, until his bumper was about three inches from my body. Then he jumped out and furiously accused me of trying to steal his parking space, shouted at everyone within reach (including a completely unrelated moving company that was working across the street), and then ran off claiming he was going to find a cop to take care of me, leaving his car blocking both the parking spot and the street.

We found a cop first. When he returned with his dry-cleaning (he later claimed he really was making a commercial delivery, but that box never left the back of his SUV, and the cop saw him picking up the suit…), she was already writing up his ticket, and informing him that he was two minutes away from being towed.

He shouted at her. He shouted at us. He shouted at her sergeant, when he showed up. He harangued the bums on the sidewalk, telling them what horrible people and criminals we were. He tried to get the cop to give my truck driver a ticket for blocking the road. He tried to get the cop to give me a ticket for illegally attempting to reserve a parking space.

He got several tickets, which he’ll have to pay for. To shut him up, they wrote out a phony ticket for me, which will be dismissed when the cop deliberately fails to appear in court (her exact words: “this is bullshit, don’t pay it”). He tried to get my name so he could go after me personally, and the cop patiently explained that he had no right to that information.

And to think that this was actually better than my day Friday, which involved the world’s most carelessly ambitious contract Unix sysadmin trying to get me to let him work unsupervised as root on a production server that I’m responsible for (“Hi, Mark!”).

Current stats across all my email accounts: 115 spams/day, 30 of them caught by Mac Os X’s Junk filtering, 85 ended up in my Quarantine folder (people who aren’t in my address book or email history).

Best news: 0 false positives in the most recent ten days worth of email. By its nature, the Quarantine folder will occasionally contain real email from someone who’s trying to reach me for the first time, but I have a variety of other rules that do a pretty good job of detecting common cases. I also create custom addresses for every new vendor and site membership, and a monthly disposable address for this blog, and all of those get filtered into special folders.

I haven’t set up anything more sophisticated, largely because the problem is under control. About twice a month, something makes it into my real Inbox, and that’s not worth the effort.

Tip for the day: when you’ve arranged for a professional computer moving company to relocate 30 critical servers from one state to another, and the driver shows up alone in a bare panel truck, without even a blanket to keep the machines from bouncing around on their way to the warehouse, do not let him take them.

The driver was as surprised as I was, perhaps more so. He thought we had a shrink-wrapped pallet of boxes that could be popped onto the truck and dropped off after he made a few more stops. The dispatcher tried to talk him into loading the stuff loose. The dispatcher tried to talk me into letting the driver load the stuff loose, swearing that it would be fine for the short trip to the warehouse.

Things went downhill from there.

[update: to no surprise, the rights-holders in Japan have finally caught up with Youtube, and forced the removal thousands of video clips. I’m not upset with them about it, particularly for things available on DVD (I own import copies of all of the concert and PV footage I linked below); I just wish it were possible to legitimately watch the ephemera.]

This is just a placeholder for links to random videos on Youtube:

• Aya Matsuura sells shampoo
• Ayaka Kimura gets relaxed
• Mari Yaguchi explodes into action
• trailer for the first episode of Gal Circle
• Mini Moni wa chicchai
• No, really, they are
• Aya Matsuura's Dokki Doki Love Mail, PV and live
• Nozomi Tsuji covers DDLM, with extra Nya's.
• Biyuuden and Tsuji want something
• Biyuuden gives their all
• When idols attack
• ...each other
• Mini-skirt-wearing Mini Hams

More:

• Hitomi Yoshizawa does impressions
• Aya Matsuura sells structural support