The image below is a small part of the scenery outside my balcony. Take a look at that wall. What purpose does it serve? It’s just a wall next to a building. I’ve been living here only for a year, so i don’t know the stories of this ex-village (It used to be a village but now it’s more like a suburb of Patras). My mother however grew up here so i asked here if shew knew what was the deal with this wall. She knew.
Here is the picture. Scaled down and painted for your satisfaction:



Here is the story.
There were this two women who where cousins. They had some differences , and one decided to get some revenge. They were owners of adjacent pieces of land. One had had built a house on her land, the other had not. The piece of land that had no house, covers two sides of the house (a wall and the side that has some balconies). So the lady thought it was a great idea to pay money and build a great wall and disable the other womans balconies. Priceless huh?
Their heirs thought it was too silly and took down the wall, but a small part remains to remind us of just how silly revenge can be.

I was recently given a Sony Handycam HDR-UX3 video camera as a present (yea!). This camera can record at in HD format ( 1080i ) and records straight to DVD. It’s a very new camera and not much info about making it work under linux, so here what i can up with.
First, reading the MemoryStick Duo that contains any images is straightforward. Just plug the USB cable, select the memory stick from the LCD and you get a new device that you can mount as usual.
I have not tested HD video. Just SD video using a DVD-VR disk. Again, plug in the USB cable, choose the dvd icon on your camera’s LCD and you get a new /dev/sr* device. (eg. i got /dev/sr1 sicne i already had a /dev/sr0). This can be mounted as a normal file system (i believe it’s UDF 2.0 so your kernel must support it, which it should).
Now, the tricky part is extracting the video. The only program i could find that does this is here . Just download, untar and compile (typing ‘make’ should be enough.)
Assuming you have mounted the camera at /mnt/mycamera you simply type:
/dvd-vr VR_MANGR.IFO VR_MOVIE.VRO
to extract the .vob files. Eg in my case:
./dvd-vr /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MANGR.IFO /mnt/mycamera/DVD_RTAV/VR_MOVIE.VRO
And that’s it!
It seems that if you are using 16:9 recording the ratio is not right, but i chose ‘anamorphic’ format under xine which fixed it.
It’s rather simple, and easy to use. You can even eject the disc by typing:
eject /dev/sr1
Enjoy.

I was invited to pownce.com today. It’s a hot new Web 2.0 messaging applications that is also developed by a really hot developer in a hot language using a hot framework.
It’s still in BETA and the new accounts are invite only. I suspect that most people have accounts and the whole ‘invite’ thing is a way to make it sound cool. After all, upon registration you get 6 invites automatically. It’s not like they are controlling how fast they grow like google did by giving invites using their own criteria to control growth.
Being in BETA it means there are bugs, and features missing. It seems that one particular bug is rather significant. My Greek friends tried to send messages in Greek (in unicode encoding) and all they got was question marks. Not being able to communicate in my native language is a major bug. I am also a little curious as to why this is happening. Django and Python have excellent unicode support, Mysql (horrible as it may be) has unicode support, so what gives?