Apparently libdvdread only works with UDF file systems. I tried to point VLC to an ISO 9660 image file, but libdvdread only complained:

$ vlc dvd://foo.iso
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access
libdvdnav:DVDOpenFileUDF:UDFFindFile /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO failed
libdvdnav:DVDOpenFileUDF:UDFFindFile /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.BUP failed
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.
$ file foo.iso
foo.iso: # ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data 'CDROM

However, after I extracted the image file to a folder, everything went as expected. (Of course also with an image file containing an UDF file system

For one of my projects, I needed an application to display a web page in full screen mode. At first, I used Firefox with the AutoHide extension, but this solution was more of a hack and not easy to deploy to multiple machines — I worked with a pre-configured user profile that was copied every time the application started. Furthermore, after each update, Firefox would check for compatibility of installed plugins and displayed a nasty dialog in the meantime.

So I tried to move away from Firefox and do something on my own, something slim which did just what I wanted, nothing more, and do it good — according to the UNIX philosophy. But writing another C/C++/Python/whatever application from scratch was not an option (implementing an HTML renderer would be a pain, and I didn’t fancy reading extensive manuals about WebKit, Gecko or any other rendering engine).

After a while of thinking, which included thought fragments of Songbird and Conkeror, I decided to give XULrunner a shot (for those who do not know, XUL is the XML-based user interface language used by the Mozilla applications and the Firefox and Thunderbird extensions, and XULRunner is an interpreter and run-time environment for XUL documents).

So after a while of hacking (there is a good tutorial on the Mozilla Developer Network), I ended up with a few lines of code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="chrome://global/skin/" type="text/css"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="main.css" type="text/css"?>
<window
  xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"
  id="viewer" windowtype="viewer" title="Infopoint HTML View"
  hidechrome="true">

  <hbox flex="1">
  <iframe id="contentview" flex="1"
    src="chrome://infopointhtmlviewer/content/default.html" />
  </hbox>
  <script>
    // load URI given on command line
    var content = document.getElementById("contentview");
    var cmdLine = window.arguments[0].QueryInterface(
      Components.interfaces.nsICommandLine);
    var uri = content.getAttribute("src");
    alert("Default URL: " + uri);
    if(cmdLine.length > 0) {
      uri = cmdLine.getArgument(0);
    }

    if(content != null) {
      content.setAttribute("src", uri);
    }

    // resize to full screen
    window.resizeTo(screen.width, screen.height);
  </script>
</window>

The above code is in the public domain.

And that was basically everything. I was surprised that there was nothing more to it.

You can get the source code of the full application on GitHub.

I had to debug a machine that was behind a DSL-2000 connection, and had about 20 KB/s of upstream. For that, I needed to see what was going on on the X screen, but due to the low bandwidth (and a screen resolution of 1920×1080), VNC was about as fast as 2 frames per minute.

But I found a comparable replacement: The ImageMagick suite has a program called import that allows you to dump the contents of the X screen to a image file. So I took a few screen shots from the console via DISPLAY=:0 import -window root foo.png and then copied the files to my machine.