Zhanga Redux

You're probably reading this because you received an email like this:

Hi [name],
You agreed to share your Yahoo! information with dzhang for contacts.
If you did not agree to share your information, stop sharing [link].

Regards,
Yahoo! Account Services

I'm just an individual with a domain name that happens to be the same as a string found in that email. While I'm not the one invading your address book, I can try pointing you in the right direction.

As much as I dislike Yahoo! Answers, it actually seems to have the correct explanation for this problem. It looks like Samsung is a culprit here, so if you want this to stop, don't access your Yahoo! account using a Samsung app and/or tell Samsung to fix their broken software.

Edit: Based on the comments here saying it's not Samsung-specific, I'm guessing it might be some third-party app that can be installed on these devices.

I've used MyDomain for domain names for about five years. Previously, I had my domains elsewhere but used their free nameserver service, and eventually decided they deserve some of my money.

Today at around 11 AM PST, all my domains effectively went down. MyDomain's nameservers inserted a bunch of bogus addresses into the A and MX (and possibly other) records, leading to things like this (bold indicates bogus entries):

$ host dzhang.com ns1.mydomain.com
Using domain server:
Name: ns1.mydomain.com
Address: 64.94.117.193#53
Aliases:

dzhang.com has address 63.251.171.80
dzhang.com has address 66.150.161.140
dzhang.com has address 69.25.27.173
dzhang.com has address 63.251.171.81
dzhang.com has address 208.99.198.83
dzhang.com has address 66.150.161.141
dzhang.com has address 69.25.27.170
dzhang.com mail is handled by 20 mxin.mxes.net.
dzhang.com mail is handled by 10 mail.icydog.net.
dzhang.com mail is handled by 0 m1.dnsix.com.

This of course breaks all my email since they added a priority 0 MX record, and it sends most web traffic to domain parking pages.

After spending exactly 30 minutes on hold, they told me they knew about the issue and gave an ETA of 3-3.5 hours + propagation. They set the TTL to 86326 (1 day), so at best this will be completely fixed in 27 hours. Great.

Time to find a registrar who isn't completely incompetent...

FFmpeg is an amazing tool, but I find myself searching Google and StackOverflow to do what seem like extremely basic things...

Extract a video clip of length x starting at y seconds

For example, to produce a 5-second video from the 10s mark to the 15s mark of the input video:

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -ss 10 -t 5 output.avi

Often you can do the above operation (and some others) without re-encoding. This results in output of the highest quality and also is very fast, but doesn't always work:

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -ss 10 -t 5 -acodec copy -vcodec copy output.avi

Rotate video 90 degrees

There are some pages out there that say to use -vf rotate=90 or -vfilter rotate=90, but that just gives me an error. Here's how:

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -vf transpose=1 output.avi

The options are:

• 0: rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise + vertical flip
• 1: rotate 90 degrees clockwise
• 2: rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise
• 3: rotate 90 degrees clockwise + vertical flip

Rotate video 180 degrees

It doesn't look like transpose has an option to rotate 180 degrees, so chain together vflip and hflip:

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -vf 'vflip [a]; [a] hflip' output.avi

Extract video frames

This creates files named output1.png, output2.png, ...

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -f image2 -an -sameq output%d.png

CameraSharp is now in the iTunes app store!

Featuring:

• Sound Activated Shutter Technology to allow picture taking completely hands free while still maintaining control of the photo
• Our Spot Exposure and Focus system gives the photographer the ability of capturing any moment in the highest quality (not supported on older devices like iPhone 3G/3GS)
• Bubble Level and AntiShake Activated Shutter are core tools that allow you to avoid tilted and frequently blurred photographs otherwise commonly occurring
• With Tactile Timer, the photographer can easily be in group photos too with the simple twist of your fingers
• Plus all the features you expect in a camera, like full EXIF, geotagging, digital zoom, front camera support, and more!

More info and screenshots are available on the CameraSharp website.

CentOS 5 doesn't have an initscript for udevd. To restart the service, do:

# /sbin/start_udev