Playing .avi files under Linux

Ronald Bradford
January 22, 2006

Got myself some .avi files but didn’t have a player under CenOS 4.2. MPlayer would appear to rate well as a media player for linux.

<br /> yum install mplayer<br /> yum install lame<br />

Unfortunately mplayer while registered could not be downloaded, tried the hard way

wget http://rpm.greysector.net/yum/4/i386/mplayer-1.0pre7try2-2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh mplayer-1.0pre7try2-2.i386.rpm

lame wasn’t needed via the manual process, but just in case

#wget http://rpm.greysector.net/yum/4/i386/libmp3lame-3.96.1-4.i386.rpm
`

Surprisingly, it’s not a GUI interface, but mplayer on the command line is more then adequate.

Tagged with: General Linux

How easy is it to use the VillageSQL MCP extension?

Ronald Bradford
October 2, 2026

VillageSQL published Access MySQL over MCP with vsql-mcp . The extension serves the Model Context Protocol from inside the database, so an agent talks to MySQL over Streamable HTTP without a sidecar holding a credential.

Getting VECTOR capabilities in MySQL 8.4 using VillageSQL

Ronald Bradford
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For this quick verification of the 0.0.7 development branch of VillageSQL with the new vsql-vector plugin. Recreate the VillageSQL Percona Live presentation using MySQL version 8.4 and SVECTOR. Demonstrate a more detailed example using SVECTOR(1024) string embedded data.

Improving container security in your CI/CD pipeline

Ronald Bradford
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At PyCon AU 2026 , the presentation Your Python container is 90% stuff you didn’t ask for by Scott Norris at Chainguard really exposed the impact of being lazy in container management for security purposes.