The New ODTV

Several people have been wondering what's going to be happening to ODTV with the introduction of bitgravity. Currently the hope is to completely automate the system using Amazon's EC2. This shouldn't be difficult to implement. We already have a working implementation running on a virtual machine (Ubuntu 8.04) and pretty much all it uses is ffmpeg 0.5.

What we're going to do is set up ODTV to automate the conversion to an mp4. This will be done with cooperation from TWiT LLC who plan on making good quality flv's available to us to work with. This process will be considerably faster than the current method and will create a higher quality end product. I also plan on creating a wiki entry on The Official TWiT Wiki describing how this entire process is done which will hopefully allow people to do this from their own homes with ease.

Goodbye Browser, Hello ChoqoK

I've been doing a little more work on the search implementation in ChoqoK today. The goal is to be able to use ChoqoK as much as possible instead of having to open the browser to complete a task. Daniel Schaal improved this greatly when he submitted his patch to open a search query window when a user clicks on a hash tag, group name or user name.

The last annoyance I was having was with the "in reply to" link in the signature line of statuses. Currently this opens a browser window, so there is currently no way to view the replied to status (besides searching through messages to or from the user). I implemented a fairly simple fix which should help resolve this pet peeve of mine. It enables searching for single statuses in the search query window and allows this to be emitted from the main window when you click on the "in reply to" link.

Some ChoqoK Stuff

I contributed some code to an open source project called choqoK a couple of weeks ago in order to allow it to search both Twitter and Laconi.ca sites for statuses matching certain criteria. Yesterday during the shuttle launch I wanted to see how up to date the tweets were compared to the actual event. It was surprisingly current. I think this feature will make a nice addition to version 0.5.

I seem to like this project because before I used it there wasn't really a Twitter client for GNU/Linux that I liked. This was the first one I found that I felt actually made micro-blogging more convenient than just going to the websites. If you get a chance I recommend giving it a try.