This is where most of my posts will be
The latest Ubuntu release, version 8.04 codename Hardy Heron, has finally arrived! It’s the early hours of Friday morning here in New Zealand (and it’s a public holiday… which should really be renamed Heron day :) and my copy is toasting as we speak!
Argh, why didn’t I just use a CD-R??? Dang slow CD-RW!
Enjoy!
-Wayne
I just wanted to share my excitement at the latest Ubuntu desktop release. Fantastic! I have just downloaded and booted the 8.04 Release Candidate and the guys and girls at Canonical really seem to have covered their bases more thorougly. It’s almost as if they read my complaints post ;-)
The last time I actually managed to even boot the live CD (and this was not even normal mode, it was safe mode) was with 6.06 LTS. Every release since then just gave me a blank screen including in safe graphics mode and using the alternative CD. Now not only can I boot in full normal mode, I also get full 1280×800 widescreen resolution! Woohoo! I truly expected support for older, weirder graphics adapters like mine to to become worse and worse but I am absolutely thrilled at the work that has gone into this release.
I can’t wait until Thursday when the full official version comes out so that I can hopefully blow away my Windows installation for good. I have a great feeling that this is it.
-Wayne
I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find an e-mail in my inbox from a website called “Uptodown.com” informing me that they had tested Tubecaster and thought that their visitors would find it useful and so had written a mini review for it and provided a download link on their site. Apparently they get over three hundred thousand hits on their site every day, and Tubecaster is linked on the front page at the moment. I’m really flattered and hugely pleased that even in this reasonably early stage of development (although it already “Does what it says(TM)”) people are finding it useful. Thanks guys!
The review (in Spanish only) and link can be found here.
-Wayne
P.S. I’m proud to report that Tubecaster is the only Free & Open Source YouTube video downloader on the Uptodown website :-)
I’ve been doing a lot of research into design patterns lately, Model-View-Controller (MVC) in particular. I do most of my coding in Python and I found some useful links long the way if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
For those people using my Tubecaster application: That is undergoing a major MVC overhaul at the moment so watch this space for updates.
-Wayne
I’ve just released a new version of my Tubecaster application which allows you to download YouTube videos and converts them to MP3. Get it from the Tubecaster homepage.
It was broken for a little while thanks to YouTube changing (or at least changing the access to) their video caching mechanism. When I first created the app in October the Google caching backend site easily allowed you to paste the video id onto the end of a certain URL and returned the video .flv file which I then used Tubecaster to grab and convert, fetch the title from the webpage etc. Now that caching site is unavailable and I had to find a different way to do things.
I found a little script called youtube-dl (link on the Tubecaster homepage) which is a command line utility (also written in Python thank goodness) which really downloads the videos the correct way. It basically creates a proper HTTP request in the same way that the Flash video player does and retrieves the video that way. This means it is far more stable and likely to keep working long-term unless YouTube makes major changes.
This release is pretty basic at this stage, but new features coming soon depending on how much time I can put into it this weekend.
-Wayne