Wikipedia

So the other day while I was posting about my experience setting up SlimRio I found myself referencing Wikipedia as I often do while blogging.  I’ve always felt that Wikipedia is a great resource, but I had never really bought into the culture or gotten overly excited about its existance and what it represents.  At IBM’s Impact 2008 conference one of the ‘keynote’ speakers was Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, and one of my coworkers who was also there was very excited about being able to hear Jimbo talk about his part in helping create Wikipedia.  His talk was interesting, but it didn’t change my thinking about Wikipedia.

The event that did changed my thinking about Wikipedia, was my first attempt to edit and update a page.  I had noticed that the Rio Receiver page is tagged as an orphan – it only has 1 link and requires at least 3 incoming links to change this status.  After my edit to the SqueezeCenter page to add a reference about SlimRIO it now has 2 links.  I had assumed I’d need to register and all of that nonsense, but Wikipedia allow for completely anonymous edits so I was done in a matter of minutes.

We often forget the web is a scary place.  If you find it on the web news it must be true, like the recent United Airlines share plunge triggered by bad reporting.  Wikipedia does invest in preventing and reporting abuse, however the sense of responsibility when making an edit is still quite something.  Giving back to the community is one of the reasons I have this blog, Wikipedia is another outlet to do the same.  Where the two activities differ is in the scope.  A blog is effectively an indepedent news source, whereas Wikipedia is a community effort.

I think I finally “get it” about Wikipedia.  It has me thinking more about crowd sourcing and Amazon’s mechanical turk – I don’t think we’ve tapped the full potential of this idea yet.

My day so far..

My birthday started off pretty nice – waking up next to Jenn who whispered a “Happy Birthday” to me.  Soon after our daughter Alison came by and wished me Happy Birthday, and then explained in great detail as she is apt to do that she would sing the whole song later.

Many IM‘s while at work with well wishes (thanks everyone).  Ken was busy sending me charts and data for a conference call I was on.  Then he said: “Have you seen this?  Scary” and attached a presentation called “urgent funding issue”.  It contained one slide:

While part of me think that turning 38 makes me old, another (possibly wiser?) part thinks I’m just starting to get to the good stuff.  Of course, 38 in hex is only 0x26 – so creative use of another base might be the solution here.

AspireOne fixing MPlayer..

The stock MPlayer that is included with the AspireOne didn’t see to have support for very many codecs. It certainly didn’t handle the quicktime videos (.mov) that our Kodak point and shoot created, nor did it manage to handle a xvid encoded video I had converted from DVD using DVDRip.

Many users of the AspireOne simply install VLC Media Player, there is a pretty long how to thread on doing this in the aspireoneuser.com forum.  There are also plenty of comparisons out there on the web about vlc vs. mplayer – I’m not going to go there.  The reason that I didn’t immediately go the VLC route was that the AspireOne shipped with MPlayer, and it seems more reasonable to ‘fix’ it than simply throw it out and start fresh.  (of course, my end  solution was basically toss the stock MPlayer and install a new more useful one).

I can’t take credit for figuring out how to do this.  Some web searching turned up the answer posted with nice detail on another blog.  I would recommend that you review the comments to the posting before trying to upgrade your Mplayer.  I had some problems, all of which were addressed in the comments (and for the most part have been rolled back into the main post).  The only problem I had that was not covered in the comments, and is likely due to some of my previous hacking was missing dependencies, which was cleared up by issuing a “sudo yum update fedora-release” before trying the install.  Hats off to Mike Silva for posting a great how-to.

This now makes it possible to use the AspireOne to watch movies converted from our DVD collection, handy for when we’re travelling.  The updated Mplayer can also handle quicktime movies created by our camera, giving us another good reason to drag it along on trips.