How to find a YouTube video on blogger.com

When you want to add a video to your blog post on http://www.blogger.com/ the search mechanism may not be able to find it on YouTube. For example try to search for string Cisco 1 - VXLAN and the Nexus 1000v with Han Yang.

Problem

How to add video from YouTube to your blog.

Solution

• Add a random video from YouTube and copy the HTML code (example bellow)

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/lU1GXLSVQOk/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/lU1GXLSVQOk&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/lU1GXLSVQOk&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></div>


• Find your video id on YouTube 





• Replace in the HTML code the 3 places with old id lU1GXLSVQOk with the new ID l4JCBq1aXKE

Google trends visibility

You can't see Google trends graphs on web pages if you are not logged in to your Google account. That means that his example code from Google trend may be invisible for users.

 
<script 
    type="text/javascript" 
    src="//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=Chef+automation,+puppet+automation&date=1/2011+28m&cmpt=q&
       content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=500&h=330">
</script>

Example screenshots showing the the page when the graph is and isn't visible.

References

1. http://rtomaszewski.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/popularity-of-automation-and.html

A simple GIMP snippets for graphic files manipulations

In MS Windows we can use Paint [1] program to manipulate graphical files. In Linux the most famous and often recommend alternative to is is GIMP.

The problem with GIMP is that as it is a very powerful tool it isn't intuitive and simple to use like Paint. Below are some tricks I use when work with GIMP.

How to draw a square or border line

Once you create a selection you can draw a line to make it visible. An example is shown below.

You can do it from GIMP by using the options: Edit -> Stroke Selection.
More info about his can be found here [2].

How to create a new image from a selected region

With a help of it we can for example extract from an original picture below the Ubuntu logo only.

Original picture:

After extracting and croping:

You can do it from GIMP by using the option: Image  -> Crop to selection
More info about his can be found here [3].

References

1. http://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson03.htm
2. 
   http://pbs01.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/145/
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZXLkB82cI
   http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Borders_On_Selections/
   
3. 
   http://gimp.open-source-solution.org/manual/gimp-image-menu.html
   http://gimp.open-source-solution.org/manual/gimp-image-crop.html
   http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/plug-in-autocrop-layer.html
   

After server virtualization there is a time for network to be virtualized

Virtualization become today de facto a standard in almost every company. What about 10 years ago was a revolution in computing it has become a mature product for everyone. But when we look at the history how it was evolving we can see one component to remain unmodified: the network, one of the very few unvirtualized technology bastions.

But today the market is changing. To understand the changes and what all this means I recommend to read at least these 2 blogs:

VMWARE BUYS NICIRA: A HYPERVISOR VENDOR WOKE UP
VMware’s Acquisition of Nicira – VMware confirming the hypervisor is dead

The changes the blogs describe are already happening. As a practical example is a Rackspace Cloud Network product, a hybrid network that was created to leverage the potential in software defined network that data center provider can benefit from.

Further reading & references

1. http://www.chriscolotti.us/vmware/nicira-nvp/nicira-nvp-virtualized-networking-primer/
2. http://www.chriscolotti.us/vmware/nicira-nvp/the-nicira-nvp-component-architecture/
3. http://nicira.com/en/frequently-asked-questions 
4. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

How to highlight source text on your blog

There are many time situation when you would like to publish a piece of code that should have a special formatting for the viewer.

This blog describe one of the possible solution base on the javascript library: SyntaxHighlighter

To integrate it with your blog follow the description there:

Adding a Syntax Highlighter to your Blogger blog

The list of brushes (javascript scripts) that you have to copy to your blog design template depends on your needs. If you want to use these 2 like 'plain' and 'bash' brushes you have to extend the list.

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushPlain.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/current/scripts/shBrushBash.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script language='javascript'>

The list of all brushes can be found at Bundled Brushes.

To convert the 'raw html' into the 'escaped' html code you can use this convert tool .

A basic example use in your blog post can look like this:

<pre class="brush:text; highlight: [1];">
<h2>This is an example.</h2>
</pre>