Author Archive for Tyler

MySQL Workbench on Debian Squeeze 6.0.6

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I spent about an hour compiling MySQL Workbench from source earlier today. After about 20 newly satisfied dependencies and an hour of actual building, I fired it up and discovered I wasn’t able to connect to any MySQL server through an SSH tunnel, which I have to be able to do.

I was able to find a deb package, mysql-workbench-gpl-5.2.39-1ubu1004-i386.deb, that seems to work quite well on Debian Squeeze 6.0.6. The package was mentioned in this forum post at debian.net. The package itself was the MySQL-provided deb for Ubuntu 10.04.

After I installed that deb, MySQL Workbench was able to connect to a MySQL server through an SSH tunnel. I must, must remember this for future Debian Squeeze installs.


Cyanogenmod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with Full HWA on Motorola Devices

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Hardware Acceleration on some aging Motorola devices has been a long time coming. My Motorola Defy is one of those aging devices. Last week, Quarx2k and Epsylon3, our wonderful Defy developers, released builds for the Defy and Defy+ with full HWA support. However, this wouldn’t have been possible without the work of Kabaldan, who discovered a method that could bring full HWA to any locked down Motorola device, such as my Defy and the Motorola Milestone.

Not sure what HWA is? It’s short for Hardware Acceleration. Here’s HWA as explained by the folks at XDA:

Hardware acceleration for Android is (in the most basic of terms) the use of the GPU to aid in the drawing operations done by a given application or view. Aside from allowing the CPU and GPU to work simultaneously, this also allows the drawing operations to be done on much more specialized and efficient hardware for the task. This results in a better overall user experience.

Quarx2k released his first full HWA build on July 6. There’s since been another build for both Defy and Defy+. You can find all builds by Quarx2k here.

The best part of having HWA for me, is having a fully functioning Chrome in Android now. Something I’ve been waiting to have on my Defy for quite some time.


How-To: Watch H.264 Encoded MP4 Videos on Xbox 360

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I use some software called ushare to stream video from my pc to my Xbox 360. I won’t go into the details on how to set that up, it’s pretty straight forward. Chances are good that your linux distribution already has a package for ushare built.

If you find yourself with a video encoded in H.264/x264 (it’ll probably have a .mp4 file extension) you will be frustrated to find out that the Xbox 360 won’t play it. There is an incredibly easy workaround to this. Just change the .mp4 filename extension to .avi.
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Not sure exactly why this works, but I have a feeling it’s simply due to the .mp4 filename extension. The Xbox 360 must assume it doesn’t know how to play mp4 files, without actually checking to see what codec the video file needs. But that’s total speculation on my part.


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