Technical difficulty 4 You should know what http means and how to play a flv file.

Wireshark is my new Toy. Let me tell you why.

Ever try to save a Youtube video?

Save a streamed song or lecture?

In Canada, both actions usually are protected as long as it is for private or personal use. Practically, saving flash embedded content is a pain.

Aside It is possible to examine the browser cache directory or install plugins to intercept the embedded content. If that works for you great.

That is where Wireshark comes in. It is a cross platform network protocol analyzer based on Ethereal.

What does that really mean? Well it lets you examine the traffic coming into your computer, including the embedded content.

First grab Wireshark here: http://www.wireshark.org/

Next, install it and fire it up.

The following are instructions for capturing video from Youtube:

1. Start capture on network card.
2. Navigate to youtube video page, wait for video to completely load into the cache.
3. Stop caputure on the network card.
4. In the ‘Filter:’, paste ‘frame.len == 1434′, this should match the length of the segments of the video as it was downloading.
5. Right click on one of the segments and click on ‘Follow TCP Stream’.
6. This will assemble the TCP stream of the video with the headers.
7. Click on the ‘Save As’ and save locally.
8. Open a editor, like textpad and strip all the headers out of the top of the file.
9. Test it in a player like vlc.

Similar steps are required for flash files.

For more details see my Wireshark notes.

So it has be been a rough couple of weeks, but finally I am ready to break radio silence.

My iPhone app is in the home stretch, finalizing the name and getting the art work completed. It isn’t rocket surgery, but functionally it scratches an itch I had, so I though I would have some fun with it.

If you are interested in beta testing send me your UDID and I can send you a copy.

Recently I completed my migration from Xen / Fedora Core to KVM / Ubuntu. I have been a long time Redhat user, but I felt that Fedora was no longer stable enough for me. I was tempted to move to CENTOS but it didn’t feel right, not quite an ‘official’ Redhat release. So I decided on Ubuntu with KVM virtualization.

The transition was reasonably painless, a few adjustments to make, like using init.d instead of service. I made some notes for myself that others might find helpful:

Ubuntu Notes

Ubuntu KVM Host notes

Ubuntu KVM Guest notes

Photographer Chase Jarvis published a book called The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You. All the pictures in the book were taken on his iPhone. The premise is that the ‘best’ camera is the one you always have.

With apologies to Mr. Jarvis, I would like to suggest that The Best Computer is The One That’s With You. For me that is my new Macbook Air.

I bought it as a refurb from Apple’s website, it is small and light enough that I can carry it around and don’t really notice it. The multi touch trackpad is so much better then my old Powerbook’s single touch trackpad.

In addition, using my tethered iPhone to get Internet access lets me be online anywhere. No more scamming WiFi signals.

There are some short comings; only one USB port and no built in Ethernet jack. But those are minor gripes.

Of course it is the best computer for me because I am always able to get online and do a quick bit of work and ‘good enough’ that I am actually productive.

Want to use an existing mp3 file as a ring tone for your iPhone?

In a few steps you can.

1. Choose your song in iTunes, right click, choose ‘Get Info’.
2. Under the ‘Options’ tab there is a ‘Start time’ and ‘Stop time’, edit your song so that it plays only what you want. Don’t worry you can undo the Start and Stop times when we are done.
3. Click ‘Okay’ to save changes to your Start and Stop times.
4. Right click the song again and choose ‘Create AAC Version’. This will create a new file and add it to iTunes. You should see it right below your old file.
5. Right click the old song and under the ‘Options’ tab reset the Start and Stop times.
6. Right click the new song and choose ‘Show in Finder’ (or equivalent PC option).
7. When you find this new file, rename the extension from m4a to m4r.
8. Now delete the new file in iTunes, right click on the new file, choose ‘Delete’, then ‘Remove’ but choose to ‘Keep File’.
9. Now drag your .m4r file back onto the Library icon in iTunes.

You’re done!

Reminder: make sure you are syncing your ringtones to your phone.

My dad’s ring tone is now Yakety Sax, I figure Benny Hill would be proud.

(Tested on iTunes 9.0.1 for OS X.)