Adam Horvath's blog

Ripping/Converting DVDs into H264 format on Linux command line If you prefer to use command line interface to deal with your linux needs, or simply do not have access to a graphical interface of your server, you can easily convert any DVDs into a very well compressed H264 format video. The following step-by-step was made on a Ubuntu server but any kind of linux distribution would behave the same way. The fist step is to install the Handbrake’s command line interface, so called Handbrake-CLI. To do this, you have to add a non-official repository to your software collection: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases after this, you can install Handbrake CLI using the well know process: sudo apt-get install handbrake-cli After this step, you have the tool to compress any video into H264 format. The following steps are required to rip (DeCSS) a DVD because Handbrake will refuse to work if the DVD is copy protected: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 This ...

My favorite database is slow - but it’s easy to tune it Lately I’ve begun to realize that the data in the systems I’m creating isn’t that important. Well, it’s a little bit of exaggeration but almost true: data is very cheap and all my efforts that were trying to make sure it’s safe are close to perfect waste.  Why? Let’s suppose I’m always planning to some catastrophic hardware failure so all my database operations are using redo logs, transactions and all the bells and whistles. Fine, what have I achieved exactly? If the machine or hard drive dies, I’ll have much bigger problems than worrying about the last transaction that was being served by system when it failed.  For instance, I’ll have to buy a new machine (or hard drive). That will take a while then comes the install, configuration, and boot... Only after all these steps (which might span across days) would I have to worry about my daily backups (if I had any) and whether they are restorable or no...