Insanity Part 2.0

HandBrake

Hooray! HandBrake development has moved forward, notably with the addition of things like a newer x264 build and newer interface (it still has some stupid interface defaults, but if I ever get around to playing with IB maybe I can even do something about this , but that’s the optimistic me talking). Nice to see that this pretty awesome app is getting some life again.

I’ve set up a few redirects and things on my website in order to make various aspects of my life easier. Being a nice guy, I’m going to share them with the Internet, and presumably friends that would read this blog

Cornell uses Deep Freeze so that upon every reboot, every file and program that was added since the last known good state (a “freeze”) is removed. I’ve seen some hacks around this, but by and large it works pretty well. It’s pretty cool because it means that all the public lab machines don’t have any of the crud you’d normally associate with a lab machine (eg shitty programs like Limewire or something equally useless that some other person installed).

Unfortunately, the default image doesn’t include Mozilla Firefox, which means that upon every reboot I have to download the installer so I can get some Mozilla goodness. There’s a couple of ways around this:

1. Re-Download from mozilla.com every time. This’ll work, but it has the added downside of artificially inflating their download numbers.
2. Put the installer on a USB Key. Kind of slow because Windows has to do that whole “Installing Hardware” song and dance before it’ll even let you use the installer.
3. Put Portable Firefox on a USB key. Same deal as above except it’s even slower, but you get the added benefit of having your saved passwords and bookmarks

My solution has become “download directly from FTP server because the network is faster than a USB key, and download a nightly because those could always use some testing goodness.”

To that end, here’s the links I’ve been using:

http://stealthgenius.com/f.exe – latest released version of firefox
http://stealthgenius.com/f/ – latest branch nightly (not changing frequently now at 2.0x)
http://stealthgenius.com/f/t/ – latest trunk nightly (frequently changing)
http://stealthgenius.com/putty.exe – latest putty, so I don’t have to google search for it every time