TinyMCE has a nice plugin called Insert Youtube that automatically insert the youtube video into your post. This plugin works well, however, you will need to add the following snippets into the list of valid_elements:
param[name|value|_value],
The next step will be to make this blog use syntaxhighlighter. That would be super sweet.
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New Age Music
With the recent problems at work where hours of debugging do not yield much more than irated google queries and keyboard slamming moments, I seriously need to blow some steams. Fortunately, I finally found the type of music that will not only pique my interest but also engulf me in a warm and pleasant feelings - New Age music. According to Wikipedia, New Age music is not directly related to the New Age movement (spirituality) but is a kind of peaceful music that is intended to create relaxation and positive feelings. Listening to these tracks from Secret Garden gives me a floating feelings (ahem, no I am not on drug. I don't smoke, drink or do anything that harm my body aside from drinking Coke). I would undoubtedly recommend you trying this type of music out in on of those days when your testTrue unit test fails and your server certainly, taking away its ssh response, because some *cough*innocent*cough* person tripped over the power cable.
You would find below a Youtube video that of Final Fantasy X that use Secret Garden's Gates of Dawn in the background. Enjoy.
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Vietnamese vs Cantonese
I came across this Youtube video today and found the comments to be quite disturbing. The commenters seem to group Vietnamese into Chinese simply by the fact that we trace our ancestry back to a province of China back in the day. While I do not refute this fact, the problem lies with the commenters' discredit of Vietnamese years of tradition. If all Americans can stand proudly with their short history of less than 1000 years, I fail to see why the Vietnamese cannot.
Some commenters admit that they see no difference in the language of Cantonese and Vietnamese. This is true due to their lack of knowledge. This should be taken as an informative fact and not a derogatory remark. Without years of listening to either of the language being discussed, a commenter do not have the qualification needed to remark about the difference between them. Just like how all Europeans appear the same to Asians and how Asians appear the same to Americans, a person perspective and differentiating power is constraint by his or her life experience. It is thus ignorant to utter such remark without considering one's own background.
I guess I am having a bad day today. Either way, check out the youtube video embedded below. If you pay attention you shall see that the repeating patterns of words are entirely different between the two versions. The Cantonese has repeating words while the Vietnamese one does not.
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For a conference that we are hosting here at University of Houston, we would like to stream the screens of the presenters and record them to disk at the same time. After trying several solutions such as Camtasia Studio, CamStudio and other more expensive solutions, we settled for a very easy to use and powerful tool called Wirecast 3. Wirecast 3 allows for simultaneous broadcasting and recording. It also allows for broadcasting at the different speed rate, resolution and format. The two formats that Wirecast 3 supports is Quicktime and AVI. The software was so easy to use that in 8 hours, we were able to set it up so that we can broadcast and record at the same time. The broadcast stream is announced to our Linux server running Darwin Streaming Server (Opensource version of Quicktime Streaming Server : free from Apple). For those who would like a good recording/broadcasting tool that works with both OS X and Windows, I highly recommend Wirecast 3. Not only did it make broadcasting much easier, it made broadcasting fun again.
One of the quirks that we spent some time with Wirecast 3 is that it does not record audio by default. So although we downloaded Desktop Presenter and were able to record the video, no audio was recorded in Wirecast 3. We finally found out that by double-clicking on the Desktop Presenter source, we can choose to also include Audio. Everything now works as expected and we are ready for our conference tomorrow. Thanks Vara Software Ltd for creating such an intuitive tool. The cost for the software is certainly justified.
One sidenote, however, the video quality of Wirecast when used with Desktop Presenter is quite bad. I believe that this issue is because Desktop Presenter grabs the screen in low resolution. I hope that Wirecast consider giving options for grabbing the screen at higher resolution so smaller text is more legible. However, for Powerpoint presentation, the text is generally large enough to be read comfortably from the broadcasted stream.
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