Forums are very popular software. However, by internet standards, they are a very old technology. Such software are popular because of their ease of use and ease of installation, but they do not serve well the communities using them. In some of the other articles in this section, I give hints as to why forums are more often than not ill-adapted to the site's objectives.

Instead of a traditional forum software, I suggest building web sites around 3 main content types:

1. Wiki: the end result of the collaborative effort of the community.

Since the launch of http://overshoot.tv/ in 2008, I have been using and promoting more and more the Blog + Wiki + Issue tracker community web site concept.

This section and the articles below is to explain a bit more this concept, and why community/activist/development web sites ought to consider adopting it.

To extract the audio from an .avi video file, use the command:

Make sure that the program oggenc is installed. I didn't know which package this program was, so I searched and found this nifty tool for Ubuntu: apt-file

Install it and update its internal database:

Then using this tool to search for oggenc told me I could find it in the vorbis-tools package:

$ apt-file search oggenc


As some of you may know, I am trying to scan a whole book written by my grandfather, as I plan to publish it on the internet. It is a very inspiring book which could change our society.

So, first thing first, I need to scan the whole book and use an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software as a first step to put it into HTML form.

This is the main documentation wiki for Ubuntu OCR.

I only had a test scan in .pdf format to test with, so I followed the instructions to use GIMP to transform it into a TIFF (.tif) file.

I mentioned earlier that after my last trip to Hong Kong and the aviary in HK Park, a silly manipulation mistake caused me to lose my most prized pictures, close up shots of exotic birds.

It seems I am more and more often responsible for migrating a web site from one host to another. Here is very general outline of the things the person I am working for needs to know.

Choosing a host

Personally, I like to use the services of companies who have ethical and caring practices. Unfortunately, I have not yet found my "ideal" hosting company, one that completely shares my values and combined with a complete technical offering at a reasonable (although not necessarily the cheapest) price.

Honk Kong is an exiting, legendary city, known for its extravagant skyscrapers surrounding the bay of HK island.

HK is the subject of many breathtaking photography. A friend even sent me the link to a day time view of Hong Kong turning into night time. Wait for the two images to load and then slowly move your mouse from the top to the bottom of the picture. Nice.

I wanted to change the location of the datadir for mysql. I had some troubles accomplishing this and the solutions I saw online were not fully accurate, so for the record, here is how I achieved this.

I installed Kubuntu 9.10 in my new computer, and wanted to move my old database data from my old computer. Also, I wanted to change the datadir to /home/mysql/ instead of the default /var/lib/mysql/.

Stop the mysqld server:

edit my.cnf:

This is my third blog post in a row about my new Linux box. See the two previous entries for details.

I asked on the Kubuntu forum:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3106998.0

Hello,

I am building a new Linux box which will be running Kubuntu 9.10.

I am not playing games. The most memory / cpu intensive things I'll do are: Blender 3D, compiz, file encryption with the archive tool dar, some simple video editing...

In yesterday's post, I decided to go with a nvidia video card for my new Linux box.

Since Blender is the main 3D application I'll use, I asked the Blender community how performant a card would be enough for blender:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1488613#post1488613

Hello,