[Do Not Fold, Bend, Spindle or Mutilate]

GreenFuel Technologies

2007-06-21T01:58:00.000-04:00

There is something so incredibly amazing about a power plant that burns carbon based fuels, but reduces emissions by generating bio-diesel, ethanol, and food-grade protein. Check out GreenFuel Technologies or read about their work with the Arizona Public Service Company, then, I don't know, write your representatives in congress. If this technology could be used to produce spirulina... well, great things could happen, that's for sure.

Sanctuary!

2007-05-15T01:15:00.000-04:00

The fist episode of Sanctuary (http://www.sanctuaryforall.com/) was released today, a low resolution video to follow. The episodes are a little heavy on the CG, but I think it is well done. It's a little short, at 17 minutes, so I hope that they keep to a fairly quick release cycle. From the Sanctuary Wikipedia entry:

Amanda Tapping stars as 157 year old Dr. Helen Magnus, one of the first female doctors in the Royal College during Victorian England. She was engaged to Jack the Ripper, and also has a daughter by him, Ashley. However, Ashley does not yet know that Jack is her father. Dr. Magnus's father started a sanctuary for supernatural creatures, collected from all over the world. In her work with these creatures, Dr. Magnus has acquired her great longevity.

neat is simple is neat

2007-05-14T04:46:00.000-04:00

Found this on Brass Goggles:

All done with still images and some panning.

OMFG zombies.

2007-05-12T02:36:00.000-04:00

or, HAH part 2. a movie trailer mashup of "A Hard Days Night" and "Night of the Living Dead" really nice work, I think. Off to check my supplies of canned food and shotgun shells... It still looks like the earth itself is burning out my back door.

HAH

2007-05-11T07:35:00.000-04:00

Hah. HAH. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Well, maybe it's the clouds that tint the earth like yellow sporting glasses, or the constant ash falling like snow, but these forest fires have me in a decidedly post-apocalyptic mood. Prepare for zombie content!

fun and games. and great reflections.

2007-05-10T01:26:00.000-04:00

I usually don't prattle on about games, but a demo video for a new one really caught my eye. I found this on the Ubuntu Gamers Arena; It's called Nosferatu and can be found here: http://www.nosferatuthegame.com/ The video is below.

Gritty

2007-04-30T14:57:00.000-04:00

One of my all-time favorite works (in any form of media) has just released an update. The online/print comic Platinum Grit now has issue/episode 18 "FOR A PAIR OF FINE CARROTS pt 1" up for your viewing pleasure. This is also the first issue to bear the ominous yet intriguing NSFW credentials. As always, the ever increasing size of the issues, the latest 208 pages, still seem entirely too small once finished. I am now eagerly awaiting the next installment... Damn you Trudy Cooper, I love you.

New Google Reader Firefox Extension

2007-04-24T10:51:00.000-04:00

Saw a link to this little beauty on the Mozilla Links site. It is just a simple little unread article counter that resides in the Firefox status bar. The original article can be found here, the extension here.

Well, a post a day

2007-04-23T21:20:00.000-04:00

was good while it lasted. Just finished a tremendous meal of country fried cube steak, jasmine rice, green beans cooked with onions and bacon, poached baby carrots with butter and brown sugar, and a hot, crispy loaf of white mountain bread. Dear God that was good. I never can seem to time the gravy so it is ready with everything else though... oh well.

Someone who will not be named had to remind me of the release date for the seventh and final Harry Potter book... you macadamia nut... so it is unfortunately right at the forefront of my thoughts. It's so bad that I have even took a step into the world of fan fiction and read the remarkably satisfying "Harry Potter and the Seventh Horcrux" by Melindaleo, a 34 chapter novel which, while certainly not written to the standards of J.K.Rowling, attempts to maintain a level of consistency with the original works that surprised me. This book is in fact making the rounds on torrent sites, claiming to be a leak of Deathly Hollows.

I've installed the latest official Ubuntu release 7.04, Feisty Fawn, and must say I am quite pleased. The new Restricted Driver Manager made installing the proprietary ATI driver a snap, it seemed to have a problem replacing the original xorg.conf file when i disabled it. Simple enough to fix, however. After making my way past the error messages, I logged in to the text console, sudo'd to root, and replaced the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the backup copy: xorg.conf.original-0

For some unfortunate reason, the ati driver decides to max out my video's contrast settings about 5 minutes after booting up. Have to see about fixing that... At least the power management for this notebook seems to be far better supported in this release, and it's always a pleasure to see all of the extra polish in each new release.

1922-2007

2007-04-13T01:52:00.000-04:00

I just can't believe Kilgore Trout is dead. Between this, and the death of Raul Duke, I have no heroes left.

Human Interface Guidelines for Command Line Applications

2007-04-12T23:59:00.000-04:00

Human Interface Guidelines for Command Line Applications. I've always wished that Command Line apps were a little more usable. I think that a few guidelines, if followed would make the command far more approachable and intuitive. The GNU habit of using single dashes for abbreviated arguments and double dashes for full text is handy, but can often be confusing when described in man, info and simple descriptions. I am sure that there is documentation on these design standards for GNU tools, but until I find it, I wanted to post these ideas, based on what I have found useful in the command line apps I have used. * All programs, when run with no arguments, should not execute but display a simple description and list of common commands.
Example:

$>foo Description:
foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.
Examples:
To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

* When running in a non-interactive manner, a command to stop the program should be displayed.
Example:

$>foo --start
To stop foo, press control+x at any time.

* If the program is passed an argument that it does not understand, it should produce a "friendly" error message and display the simple description.
Example 1:

$>foo --bar
foo does not understand your request to "bar"
Description:

foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.

Examples:

To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

Example 2:

$>foo bar
foo could not find a file named "bar"
Description:

foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.

Examples:
To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

My Top Five Google Complaints:

2007-04-12T10:45:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the missed update yesterday. I was picking my mother up from the hospital. Selfish bastards. You, not mothers. Mothers are wonderful people. Well, most of them. Selfish bastards. So,I actually worked on this stupid list. I have quite a few complaints, as anyone who has met me could tell you. These five, however, are places where I really feel google dropped the ball. things that they absolutely should have implemented, and just didn't. Or haven't yet. With the exception of #2, there is no excuse for these features to be missing. So, without further non-sense, My Top Five Google Complaints:

There is no search function in Reader.
I still can't collaborate in Pages.
Publishing from Docs to blogger does not transfer title or allow you to add blogger tags.
I can't export single Note's "nodes" to Docs, only whole Notebooks.
Reader doesn't have an option to display _unread_ news from oldest to newest.

Created in their image

2007-04-10T01:28:00.000-04:00

Ever since enrolling in a crappy high school pottery class, I have had a love for sculpture. I always regretted my lack of skill with pencil, pen, and brush, but clay was my bitch. I blame an early affair with play-dough. While not having a readily accessible kiln has hampered my ceramic works, I have continued with my three dimensional diversions. Don't get me wrong, it's all crap. But I don't do it for acclaim or fortune (fortunately) I do it for me. Since I mainly work with found materials, I found the works of the following artists to be quite... um diverting.

Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan has used materials as mundane as fishing line, clear plastic drinking straws, paper plates, office supplies, tar paper, and even styrofoam cups to create ethereal, friking breath-taking organic structures. I seriously want "Untitled 2003" in my dream house(tm)

Lockwasher

"Lockwasher" creates ray guns, robots, and rockets in a wonderfully anachronistic 1950s style from random junk stuff you could find at most flea markets. This reminds me all to much of how I passed many a bored night while my father wrenched away in our garage.

Andrew Smith

Andrew Smith creates some wonderful and touching sculptures, both kinetic and static, with what I feel are strong steam punk influences. I have a particular fondness for his figurative works, and feel quite inspired to try a few of my own.

So whats up with the name Sunergos anyway?(Pt.2)

2007-04-09T01:46:00.000-04:00

I mentioned in part one that Sunergos was supposed to be an operating system. That's not completely true, but we'll stick with that for now. I didn't describe exactly what Sunergos was meant to be, and there is one reason for that: Mission Creep. It is the bane of all project leaders, even when that project is naught but vaporware.

Initially, Sunergos was born on windows, when I worked for a tech support company and nearly every application I used was web based. At this point, I'd had almost five years of web development under my belt. After setting the windows shell to use Internet explorer, I set about creating an interface for all of the resources I used for my day to day work. With that an idea borne of a bit of ambition, normally absent from my psyche, reared it's ugly head: A browser-based desktop. Not a new idea, I know. but in that idealistic turn of the century, it was certainly something I had never seen.

Working on a windows based platform (first 98, and later 2000) posed some serious stumbling blocks, not the least of which was the availability of free information. While I was far from an expert with *nix, my experience with Openbsd and later Mandrake 7.2 led me to the (correct) assumption that the open source community was the ideal outlet for this nearly all consuming idea. With an open source operating system as a base I could customize the entire environment, tuning everything to my purpose, and distribute the whole thing.

This put me at a serious disadvantage, though. As I have previously indicated, I had limited experience with this environment. However, that great electronic oracle-- the Internet-- could provide all that I needed and I set myself to achieving a state of complete saturation with my newly adopted obsession. Unfortunately, during my journey toward enlightenment, to a zen like oneness withTeh Source, the infamous bubble did it's infamous bursting. Instead of using my new-found free time to advance my cause, I took more of a chicken little approach and started stockpiling rice, beans, and 12 gauge ammunition...

Hmm, starting to get flashbacks here. I'm going to go and make some plywood squares to mount over my windows, clean my guns, and check the canned food stocks. But, I promise to be back soon for another exciting installment of "What the Hell is Sunergos." Now that the history is essentially explained, I can cover some of the stolen inovative ideas that, when combined, would have made Sunergos "The Best OS Ever"

Newmans Own

2007-04-08T05:56:00.000-04:00

I just finished watching Cool Hand Luke. Other than being really impressed with the (admittedly heavy Christian) imagery, I have to wonder if the bespectacled antagonist from the Cohen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou was intentionally modeled on the "road boss" in Cool Hand Luke.

Like a Rare Jewel

2007-04-08T01:19:00.000-04:00

So, I've been looking at Ruby on Rails for developing a combination blog/wiki/forum/cms solution. Seeing as I am a poorly expereinced programmer, Ruby was an obvious choice. This is seriously a... well, for lack of a better word, Zen programming language. For anyone who interested in an incredibly easy to learn language that still has the power to take over the world, I recommend Ruby. It is well documented and portable enough that I will give you a personal money-back guarantee that it will work on your computer. There are many resources available for free, as I have come to expect from open source projects. I have included a quote from one that I am enjoying far too much for it to actually be programming "manual."

why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 2. Kon’nichi wa, Ruby
Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

So you’re like, “Wow, this book comes with an onion!” (Even if you don’t particularly like onions, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual.)

Then you ask yourself, “Wait a minute. I thought this was a book on Ruby, the incredible new programming language from Japan. And although I can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual: Why an onion? What am I supposed to do with it?”

No. Please don’t puzzle over it. You don’t need to do anything with the onion. Set the onion aside and let it do something with you.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

You really must sob once. Or at least sniffle. And if not, then the onion will make it all happen for you.

For more fun and games, I highly recommend why's blog as well.

and then your mother tells you

2007-04-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

the ekg indicates a heart attack. she seems to be doing well.

Napster is Dead! Long Live Napster!

2007-04-05T21:13:00.000-04:00

Well, the spirit of napster, anyway. Sorry, I know I said that there would be something of substance, but thanks to the following article on Techcrunch, I've spent the last two days watching scrubs on GoFish... I mean, just looking at the listings. I'm not confessing anything here. I'm not under oath. God, don't you pigs have anything better to do?

Forget YouTube: Go To These Sites If You Want Hard Core Copyright Infringing Content Michael Arrington 97 comments »

YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void.

Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh...

So whats up with the name Sunergos anyway?

2007-04-04T00:29:00.000-04:00

It was never a nickname for me, although it has become one in some circles. Sunergos is a Greek word that I originally came across when looking for a synonym for the word synergy. Sunergos is the name of a Linux distribution that has been cooking on my back burner for the better part of a decade. I have no illusions as to my abilities as a programmer or *nix guru, so I have done little work on the Sunergos distro outside of theoretics and high-level planning. A few recent articles have put Sunergos back toward the frontal parts of my brain. While I doubt that I will ever see my baby birthed, I would at least like to share my vision with the rest of the world. So, over the next few days, I hope to describe some of the features I wanted Sunergos to have, as well as the articles that inspired my sense of rejuvenation. I have a feeling that logic behind my choice of a name will become self evident.

Enjoying the weather before the next storm (Pt.1)

2007-04-03T01:08:00.000-04:00

Or, a quick look at a few of my favorite pages which have sprung up with all of this web 2.0 nonsense. The Google "Suite" were just going to be a part of this article, but there are so many I've decided to split it up into two parts and devote the first half just to the big G:

Gmail - Perhaps the first mainstream appearance of the web too point oh, and frequently referred to as "web mail done right" Gmail features massive storage space (and seems to increase it at a rate of ~1 gigabyte per year) a great search function, handy dandy labels, an excellent filter system (and I don't just mean spam), unobtrusive advertising, free pop and smtp access, and idiot-proof integration with the google chat service, Google Talk, in an easy to use interface. Everyone should have gmail. Seriously. Call your congressman, send a letter to the UN, something. If you have more than one gmail account, I highly recommend the firefox plugin "Gmail Manager" which acts as an account manager and mail notifier, allowing you to monitor both accounts and access them quickly, in addition to allowing sendto: links to work with gmail.

Reader - Google Reader is an aggregator for rss feeds. In addition to plugin-free integration with firefox (2.*) this reader features a sharing function, allowing you to create your own rss or html feed of articles selected from your aggregated feeds. I swear, it's as neat as a snake eating it's own tail, and from what I hear the practically-trademarked super-slick minimalist google interface is up for improvements in the near future. I'm not sure how they intend to improve on perfection, however.

Docs and Spreadsheet - I'll roll these two together, even though they are two separate services. Spreadsheet was google's baby and docs, if I am not mistaken, was birthed after the acquisition of startup http://www.writely.com/. Regardless, this is stone simple office document creation right here, although simple may be a deceptive word. I admit that my needs are generally simple, but I have yet run into a feature here that I needed but couldn't find. I think that the sheer brilliance in this user interface, when compared to MSOffice, OpenOffice, or even my favorite, Gnome Office, comes from its inability to hide features in the menu bar. Everything just has to be there on the page. Again, collaboration and publication is built in so that it feels down right cozy. Have to wonder why Google Docs is missing the discussion tab that Spreadsheets feature.

Pages - I am sad to say that while I like Google Pages, it is the most poorly implemented service I have tried. As far as Google services go, I mean. The interface is smooth and clean and well thought out, everything I would expect, but the layout/editing engine seems buggy as hell. Seriously, it reminds me of Microsoft Word circa 1996. At least with Pages, I can go to the code and fix those little bugs as they arise. Still, I would expect more from a wysiwyg interface, even one as advanced as this. There is also a limited selection of templates, considering the tech powerhouse that is backing this home page service. What I would really like to see are theme generators, a la the proliferous myspace layout generators. The ability to make your Google page your Google Wiki should be there too. Not a full blown world-writable Wiki mind you, but an invite only affair. Google is really pushing collaboration in all of their other services, I'd like to see Google Pages catch up.

Calendar - This is a very functional, clean, standards compliant, and easy to use service-- Although I have to admit that sharing your calendar feed should be easier. This is another service made all-the-more valuable with a Firefox plugin. While there is no official plugin, the aptly named "Google Calendar Notifier" is quite effective and adjusts well to personal preference. Having said all this, Calendar is seriously hurting for some Gtalk notifications, a la Remember the Milk.

Notebook - If you have ever tried Microsoft's OneNote office application, Google Notebook will seem familiar. I'm really not using as often as I should. The Firefox plugin (recently overhauled)for this is the one thing that really makes it worth having in my opinion, although it can act a bit of the insect at times. As someone who constantly saves snippets here and there from various web pages, it should be essential for me. Still a little hooked on notepad though... this essentially makes notes into a scrapbook for the web, and like most of Google's other offerings, you can make your notebook publicly viewable and search-able.

Blogger removes the hassle of remembering yet another - The new non beta blogger is quite nice indeed. Those rat-bastards who designed myspace should really look at how the new template editor works (while taking extensive notes) and then shoot themselves in the head. The fact that I can now use my Google loginusername and password, too. Unfortunately, The interface still seems a little out of place with the rest of the minimalist-yet-hyperfunctional offerings from Google. Integrating the editor into the post management page would go a long way toward fixing that though. BTW: looks like you can now post to blogger directly from Google Docs as well as Reader.

Groups - Oh, man, Newsgroups. Nothing can quite pique fond memories of those early days of the web like newsgroups. Ok, so they were mostly used for porn and posting copyrighted material for public download, but at one point newsgroups were *the* forum for expressing our simian ideas. Google groups manages to capture this wondrous past and breath new life into the service whilst making the whole shooting match indexed and searchable.

That's all for now kiddies. Did you learn anything?

In Loving Memory of Terry Jones.

2007-04-02T01:59:00.000-04:00

Not that he's dead or anything. I have long been a fan of Terry Jones, though admittedly for his work with Monty Python. Like many of Python alums, I have noticed his name in many of my favorite movies as well (Labyrinth, Erik the Viking). I was not aware, however, that he had taken to writing politically oriented editorials. Some of these have even been collected and published as Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror (2005), ISBN 1-56025-653-2. I just ran across an article he authored in response to the Iranian treatment of British military prisoners. Or, perhaps more accurately, in response to the media's response to their treatment.

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

You can find the full article here.

Make working flash with free tools

2007-04-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

While this has been in the news a bit, I decided to try my hand at ActionScript recently and felt I would pass on my findings. There is an Eclipse setup (I am told) for flash development, but the massive IDEs aren't really my cup of tea, So I have found a few tools that may be of help to like-minded seekers of curiosities. First stop should probably be the Open Source Flash project at http://www.osflsh.org/ This is the holy grail of OS flash resources and where I found links to swfmill, an xml to swf and swf to xml processor, as well as the Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler, better known as MTASC. Both of these tools are available in Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. For more information on setting up these tools for flash development, see "How to structure and set up a Flash project without using the Flash IDE" on the OSFlash site.

A rose by any other set of bits

2007-03-31T08:14:00.000-04:00

I always wondered what was up with character encoding and I found an excelent article that explains how different encodings work as well as their various origins. While it is geared more towards developers, It shouldn't be hard for anyone to grasp the concepts that are explained within. But, rather than rehash someone else's work, I'll just give you a link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Goodies Two: The Reconing

2007-03-30T07:31:00.000-04:00

I love music. I play music in the car, when I work, even when I sleep. So, when my sister offered to buy me a new mp3 player, I got really excited. The video ipods looked so nice, all clean and black and shiny-- they even play videos. But then, so did my old one. So I decided (and strangely enough have yet to regret) passing over the video ipod for a shuffle. For anyone who doesn't know, the shuffle is the smallest of the line-- in size, price, and storage capacity. And when I say small, I mean it. I'm too damn lazy to find my vernier calipers, but the case supposedly measures 1.07 inch tall, 0.98 inch wide, and 0.33 inch deep. It has an integrated clip and is extremely light weight. It uses a single port for audio, power and data transfer. Yeah, weird, takes a little getting used too. On one edge are two tiny sliding switches for power and shuffle/repeat, and the other has the jack and a status led. The face has 5 buttons, a combination play/pause, volume controls, and fore and back track switching. The play/pause button also hides some other features. By holding it in for three seconds locks out the controls from accidental triggering, and pressing it three times in succession will reset the playlist to the first track. In short, it is quite possible that the second gen shuffles are the best balance of technology and simplicity engineered to date, and I really am glad to have it over the full-sized pocket TV. This next (and last) item holds a special place in my heart, as do all devices intended to hurl copper jacketed chunks of lead at super-sonic velocities. A sub-compact .40 caliber Springfield Arms XD. This Pistol is really interesting, but I won't ramble on about all of the little features that make it special. Suffice it to say that the design is inspired by both Glock and John Browning, and when activated it goes BOOM!

Flash Games

2007-03-29T07:06:00.000-04:00

For a *very* long time, I never saw any redeeming value in flash. Period, end of story. It did nothing but make web pages difficult to see and navigate. Of course, that is really the designers fault, but that is not my point. I still don't see any point in using flash for web pages, but as content for those pages, the beast has been redeemed in my eyes. I know that flash and shockwave games are nothing new, but the quality (in my opinion at least) tended to be sorely lacking. A few days ago a friend showed me Orisinal Games, a collection of horribly addictive and entertaining games by Ferry Halim. The games manage to be both simple and challenging, and there are more than a few that I could spend hours playing. After that, I started poking the internet with my google stick and asking it to give me games. That brought me to a fairly new site, Kongregate, which is attempting to be the flash game analog to xbox live. My favorite game there has to be The Fancy Pants Adventure, a side scrolling game in the spirit of Super Mario Bros. and the like. The first world is fun, but the demo for the second world has left me salivating. Fancy Pants led me to Armor Games, which has a nice selection of flash games and several playable demos for installable games. The flash games vary in quality, but some are simply amazing. On in particular, Chaos Faction, left me stupefied. I never would have believed that a game so... feature complete could be made with flash. If you have ever played Super Smash Bothers for Nintendo, then you should feel right at home. Chaos Faction even includes a level editor! I was really impressed with this one, I just cant express that enough. All that aside, flash pages suck.(period)

The Dailies

2007-03-28T05:47:00.000-04:00

I read a lot of web comics. Well, a lot for me anyway. I have compiled a list of 60 or so that I feel safe recommending to others. No promises, but I hope you like them.

Goodies

2007-03-27T07:20:00.000-04:00

Christmas and my birthday were banner events for me this year(what, you don't celebrate new years in the fall?), and I wanted to take a moment to express my thanks. Well, OK, I wanted to brag about my shiny (and matte) new toys. Where to start where to start... I suppose we should start with the biggest first: a shinny new silver and white Dell Inspiron 1501, outfitted with an AMD Turion x2 TL-56 64 bit processor, an even gig of ram and a dual layer DVD-+R/W drive. Thats a mouthful, but amounts to a sweet little PC. It even came with an extra battery and a gps locater. A piece of hardware that fine practically demanded an upgrade in my peripherals. Fortunately I also received a (matching I might add) Logitech headset and an actual laser mouse from the same manufacturer. I am truly surprised at the recording quality of the flexible boom mic. Maybe now I can actually use teamspeak and googletalk as they were intended. I'm not holding my breath though. The mouse is a true work of technophile art, a total of 10 buttons, a scroll wheel and 1000 dpi laser that appears to use a bandidlth that is outside of the visual spectrum, the only down side to this is that my mouse will no longer function as an emergency flashlight... Ok, yes, I realize I am a geek. That's all the blustering I can manage for today anyway. More unabashed pride later.

Dual booting tip

2007-03-26T03:34:00.001-04:00

As soon as I opened up my new notebook, I installed ubuntu edgy. It was my intent to remove windows altogether. But, this being the first copy of Windows XP that I have purchased, I decided to leave it on. The Ubuntu installer was able to resize my NTFS windows partition, install the operating system and configure GRUB with minimal interaction on my part. Configuring fstab so that my Windows partition was mounted read/write automatically on boot was slightly more involved, but I have seen that process documented quite extensivly elsewere. What I had never seen, and honestly had never looked for before now, was a way to mount Linux partitions-- ext3 to be more precise-- in Windows. That was when I found Ext2IFS, an installable file system driver for the ext2 and ext3 file systems. You can find the program's home page at http://www.fs-driver.org The install process was simple, just a standard windows executable installer, and the results were immediately visible. The installer allows you to choose what drive letter to asign to you ext partitions, but to change them you just have to look for the new control panel applet "IFS Drives." For those of you that use itunes, it seems to lock down a player to a single drive letter. In my case, the drive letter "E:" was associated with my ipod and was also default assignment for my home partition, if you have applications installed to a USB drive that is not attached to the system at the time of the driver install, this may be an issue as well.

Adultswim

2006-12-11T17:37:00.000-05:00

My love for the adultswim fix is now met only with loathing. It now requires active x to view, and with no way (that I have found) to locate the actual play lists, I am doomed to a fixless world until they get their heads out of their asses and lend support to mac and linux users.

Taking a moment...

2006-11-23T17:55:00.000-05:00

to thank and be thankful for all of you who will never see this blog, but who have been an influence in my life.

Two Themes

2006-09-13T22:15:00.000-04:00

Here are two gtk themes that I created for use with xubuntu. The first one depends on the clearlooks engine:

# Xedgy-Clearlooks theme for Xubuntu
# Based on Clearlooks
# Created by Peter Durrill.

style "clearlooks-default"
{
GtkButton      ::default_border    = { 0, 0, 0, 0 }
GtkRange       ::trough_border     = 0
GtkPaned       ::handle_size       = 6
GtkRange       ::slider_width      = 15
GtkRange       ::stepper_size      = 15
GtkScrollbar   ::min_slider_length = 30
GtkCheckButton ::indicator_size    = 12
GtkMenuBar     ::internal-padding  = 0
GtkTreeView    ::expander_size     = 14
GtkExpander    ::expander_size     = 16

xthickness = 1
ythickness = 1

fg[NORMAL]        = "#101010" # dark grey
fg[PRELIGHT]      = "#101010" # dark grey
fg[ACTIVE]        = "#000000" # black
fg[SELECTED]      = "#ffffff" # white
fg[INSENSITIVE]   = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / grey

bg[NORMAL]        = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey
bg[PRELIGHT]      = "#ffffff" # white
bg[ACTIVE]        = "#f0f0f0" # mid white / light grey
bg[SELECTED]      = "#51739c" # blue
bg[INSENSITIVE]   = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey

base[NORMAL]      = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey
base[PRELIGHT]    = "#51739c" # blue
base[ACTIVE]      = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / light grey
base[SELECTED]    = "#51739c" # blue
base[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey

text[NORMAL]      = "#000000" # black
text[PRELIGHT]    = "#000000" # black
text[ACTIVE]      = "#ffffff" # white
text[SELECTED]    = "#ffffff" # white
text[INSENSITIVE] = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / light grey

engine "clearlooks"  {
  menubarstyle      = 2       # 0 = flat, 1 = sunken, 2 = flat gradient
  menuitemstyle     = 1       # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient), 2 = 3d-ish (button)
  listviewitemstyle = 1       # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient)
  progressbarstyle  = 0       # 0 = candy bar, 1 = flat
}
}

style "clearlooks-wide" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 2
}

style "clearlooks-button" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 3
ythickness = 3
}

style "clearlooks-check" = "clearlooks-button"
{
text[NORMAL] = "#336699" # blue
text[PRELIGHT] = "#6699cc" # blue
}

style "clearlooks-notebook" = "clearlooks-wide"
{
bg[NORMAL] = "#f0f0f0" # mid white / light grey
bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#ffffff" # white
}

style "clearlooks-tasklist" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 5
ythickness = 3
}

style "clearlooks-menu" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 1
bg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" # white
}

style "clearlooks-menu-item" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 3
fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white
text[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white
bg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" # black
}

style "clearlooks-menu-itembar" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 3
ythickness = 3
}

style "clearlooks-tree" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 2
}

style "clearlooks-frame-title" = "clearlooks-default"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#2a2a2a" # grey
}

style "clearlooks-tooltips" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 4
ythickness = 4
bg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" # white
}

style "clearlooks-progressbar" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 1
ythickness = 1

fg[PRELIGHT]  = "#ffffff" # white
}

style "clearlooks-combo" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 3
}

# widget styles
class "GtkWidget" style "clearlooks-default"
class "GtkButton" style "clearlooks-button"
class "GtkCombo"  style "clearlooks-button"
class "GtkRange"  style "clearlooks-wide"
class "GtkFrame"  style "clearlooks-wide"
class "GtkMenu"   style "clearlooks-menu"
class "GtkEntry"  style "clearlooks-button"
class "GtkMenuItem"    style "clearlooks-menu-item"
class "GtkStatusbar"   style "clearlooks-wide"
class "GtkNotebook"    style "clearlooks-notebook"
class "GtkProgressBar" style "clearlooks-progressbar"
class "GtkCheckButton" style "clearlooks-check"
class "GtkRadioButton" style "clearlooks-check"

widget_class "*MenuItem.*" style "clearlooks-menu-item"

# combobox stuff
widget_class "*.GtkComboBox.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo"
widget_class "*.GtkCombo.GtkButton"    style "clearlooks-combo"

# tooltips stuff
widget_class "*.tooltips.*.GtkToggleButton" style "clearlooks-tasklist"
widget "gtk-tooltips" style "clearlooks-tooltips"

# treeview stuff
widget_class "*.GtkTreeView.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkCTree.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkCList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkFrame.GtkLabel" style "clearlooks-frame-title"

# notebook stuff
widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkEventBox" style "clearlooks-notebook"
widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkViewport" style "clearlooks-notebook"

The second depends on the ubuntu-looks engine:


# Xedgy-Human theme for Xubuntu
# Based on Ubuntu Human Colorscheme
# Created by Peter Durrill.


style "clearlooks-default"
{
GtkButton      ::default_border    = { 0, 0, 0, 0 }
GtkRange       ::trough_border     = 0
GtkPaned       ::handle_size       = 6
GtkRange       ::slider_width      = 15
GtkRange       ::stepper_size      = 15

GtkScrollbar   ::min_slider_length = 35
GtkCheckButton ::indicator_size    = 14
GtkMenuBar     ::internal-padding  = 0
GtkTreeView    ::expander_size     = 14
GtkExpander    ::expander_size     = 16
GtkScale       ::slider-length     = 31
# GtkToolbar     ::button-relief     = GTK_RELIEF_NORMAL
# GtkMenuBar     ::shadow-type       = GTK_SHADOW_OUT
# GtkScrollbar   ::has-secondary-forward-stepper = 1
# GtkScrollbar   ::has-secondary-backward-stepper = 1

GtkButton      ::child-displacement-x = 0
GtkButton      ::child-displacement-y = 0

xthickness = 1
ythickness = 1

GtkTreeView::odd_row_color = "#ffffff"
GtkTreeView::even_row_color = "#f0f0f0"

fg[NORMAL]        = "#101010"
fg[PRELIGHT]      = "#000000"
fg[ACTIVE]        = "#000000"
fg[SELECTED]      = "#ffffff"
fg[INSENSITIVE]   = "#aaaaaa" # B3AFAB disabled widget text

bg[NORMAL]        = "#f5f5f5" # efebe7 background
bg[PRELIGHT]      = "#f5f5f5" # f5f3f0 ?
bg[ACTIVE]        = "#ffffff" # E1D9D1 ?
bg[SELECTED]      = "#f5f5f5" # D6722D ?
bg[INSENSITIVE]   = "#f0f0f0" # EBE7E3 disabled widget backgrounds

base[NORMAL]      = "#ffffff"
base[PRELIGHT]    = "#ffffff"
base[ACTIVE]      = "#ffffff" # E1D9D1
base[SELECTED]    = "#52759f" # FFD799 highlights
base[INSENSITIVE] = "#f0f0f0" # EBE7E3 disabled entry widget background

text[NORMAL]      = "#000000"
text[PRELIGHT]    = "#000000"
text[ACTIVE]      = "#000000"
text[SELECTED]    = "#ffffff" # highlighted text
text[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # B3AFAB

engine "ubuntulooks"
{
 menubarstyle      = 2       # 0 = flat, 1 = sunken, 2 = flat gradient
 menuitemstyle     = 1       # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient), 2 = 3d-ish (button)
 listviewitemstyle = 1       # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient)
 progressbarstyle  = 1       # 0 = candy bar, 1 = fancy candy bar, 2 = flat
 animation         = FALSE
}
}

# Evolution (and some deprecated widgets) use bg and fg for its listview instead of
# base and text like they should, so we override it.
style "evolution-hack" = "clearlooks-default"
{
bg[ACTIVE]   = "#f5f5f5" # E1D9D1
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FFD799 gtk combo highlight
fg[ACTIVE]   = "#000000"
fg[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" # 000000 gtk combo highlight text
}

# Bright orange highlights only for selected widgets
style "clearlooks-orange" = "clearlooks-default"
{
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C
}


style "clearlooks-wide" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 2
}
style "clearlooks-wide-orange" = "clearlooks-wide"
{
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C
}

style "clearlooks-wider" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 3
ythickness = 3
}
style "clearlooks-wider-orange" = "clearlooks-wider"
{
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C
}

style "clearlooks-button" = "clearlooks-wider-orange"
{
bg[PRELIGHT] = "#efefef" # button prelight
bg[ACTIVE]   = "#e5e5e5" # pressed button
}

style "clearlooks-notebook" = "clearlooks-wide-orange"
{
bg[NORMAL]       = "#f5f5f5" # efebe5
bg[ACTIVE]       = "#f5f5f5" # d0c8c1
bg[INSENSITIVE]  = "#f5f5f5" # efebe5
}

style "clearlooks-tasklist" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 5
ythickness = 3
}

style "clearlooks-menu" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 1
bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # f8f5f2 menu background
}

style "clearlooks-menubar-item" = "clearlooks-button"
{
fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
}

style "clearlooks-menu-item" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 3
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FFD799 menu highlights
fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # 000000 highlited menu text
text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
}

style "clearlooks-tree" = "clearlooks-wide"
{
}

style "clearlooks-frame-title" = "clearlooks-default"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#404040"
}

style "clearlooks-tooltips" = "clearlooks-default"
{
xthickness = 4
ythickness = 4
bg[NORMAL] = { 1.0,1.0,1.0 }
}

style "clearlooks-progressbar" = "clearlooks-wide-orange"
{
xthickness = 2
ythickness = 2
fg[PRELIGHT]  = "#ffffff"
}

style "clearlooks-combo" = "clearlooks-button"
{
}

style "clearlooks-check" = "clearlooks-button"
{
}

style "clearlooks-range" = "clearlooks-wide-orange"
{
}

style "metacity-frame" = "clearlooks-default"
{
bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # CC863E
}

style "extra-view-widgets" = "clearlooks-default"
{
bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # F5C07F
}


# widget styles
class "GtkWidget"      style "clearlooks-default"
class "GtkButton"      style "clearlooks-button"
class "GtkCombo"       style "clearlooks-button"
class "GtkRange"       style "clearlooks-range"
class "GtkFrame"       style "clearlooks-wide"
class "GtkMenu"        style "clearlooks-menu"
class "GtkEntry"       style "clearlooks-wider-orange"
class "GtkMenuItem"    style "clearlooks-menu-item"
class "GtkNotebook"    style "clearlooks-notebook"
class "GtkProgressBar" style "clearlooks-progressbar"
class "MetaFrames"     style "metacity-frame"
class "GtkWindow"      style "metacity-frame"

class "GtkCheckButton" style "clearlooks-check"
class "GtkRadioButton" style "clearlooks-check"

widget_class "*MenuItem.*" style "clearlooks-menu-item"
widget_class "*MenuItem.*ProgressBar*" style "clearlooks-default"

# combobox stuff
widget_class "*.GtkComboBox.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo"
widget_class "*.GtkCombo.GtkButton"    style "clearlooks-combo"
# tooltips stuff
widget_class "*.tooltips.*.GtkToggleButton" style "clearlooks-tasklist"
widget "gtk-tooltips" style "clearlooks-tooltips"

# treeview stuff
widget_class "*.GtkTreeView.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkCTree.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkCList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree"
widget_class "*.GtkFrame.GtkLabel" style "clearlooks-frame-title"

# notebook stuff
widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkEventBox" style "clearlooks-notebook"
widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkViewport" style "clearlooks-notebook"

# these should really use base and text colors instead
widget_class "*GtkCTree*" style "evolution-hack"
widget_class "*GtkList*" style "evolution-hack"
widget_class "*GtkCList*" style "evolution-hack"
widget_class "*.ETree.*" style "evolution-hack"

widget "*.nautilus-extra-view-widget" style:highest "extra-view-widgets"

unfortunatly, either I got them on the wiki too late, or they just weren't liked. But here they are for the rest of us.

Firefox Extensions 2006-09-13

2006-09-13T18:16:00.000-04:00

A quick list of firefox extensions I'm using right now:

adblock - blocks elements in pages, can be selective or general.

adblock updater - updates blacklist from several third-party lists of adservers.

all-in-one sidebar - Gives you a few goodies in addition to opening common popup firefox windows (like downloads, extensions, themes) in the sidebar. Comes with url tools toolbar button, which lets you look up the current url on archive.org, whois, or the google cache. also suplies you with a vertically oriented toolbar that can collapse to a thin "grippy".

autohide - gives you a little more control over the fullscreen appearence of firefox, including, as the name suggests, autohiding toolbars.

chatzilla - Ah, this one brings back some warm memories of the internet around... 1998? I forget now. IRC client, useful, lite, small. unfortunatly, i can no longer open in a tab or the sidebar... damn.

crash recovery - in the event of a crash in firefox, crash recovery will open up all of the old tabs when you restart.

deepest sender - a blog composer for several different blog formats including blogger, wordpress, and livejournal.

downthemall - a download manager, one click access to emmbeded or linked objects.

flashblock - blocks flash and shockwave, replaced by a play button.

foxytunes - control your audio player from the status bar. pretty complete controls, as well as the currently playing song. Compatible with winamp, foobar2000, windows media player and more.

gmail manager - check the mail on multiple gmail accounts. supports https.

google browser sync - this is rather cool if you use more than one computer. It stores your currently open tabs and windows, as well as syncing your stored passwords, history, bookmarks and cookies on a server so you can stop working on one computer and pick right up on another. supports encryption for storage and transfer.

google calendar notifier - lets you subscribe to google calendar feeds, gives you one click access to your calendar and posts reminders.

image zoom - lets you zoom a single image or all images on a page.

pagestyle2tab - coppies the body css information to the page's tab. can also copy it to the whole browser.

pdfdownload - gives you options instead of just loading the acrobat plugin.

search plugin hacks lets you remove installed mycroft search engines.

spellbound - a spellchecker for firefox. needs a version bump to work with the current firefox, but works none the less.

translate - translate the current page into english. supports 12 languages including korean, japanese, chinese, and russian.

ubuntu forums - a toolbar menu for ubuntu forums. links to forum categories, searches, and adds context menu search for the forum, compiz forum, the wiki and other pages. Needs some customizing though, no options are available.

undoclosetab - another extension that needs a version bump, but otherwise works fine in the current firefox 1.5.*. right click on a tab and get "undo close tab" works like undo usually does, with a chronological history.

unplug - download embeded movies, including flash. Unlike video downloader, it doesn't connect to a third web page to do this.

News and an Extension

2006-09-12T21:16:00.000-04:00

So, I'm (hopefully) writing this post from deepest sender, a firefox plugin that gives you the ability to post from the firefox sidebar. This, unfortunately, is due to avg antivirus recognizing portable firefox 2.0 as a trojan. And not the ribbed kind. DS is not 2.0 compatible yet, so I'd had it on a back shelf and was using performancing-- which BTW is teh suk compared to DS.

Hopefully this will encourage me to post more often. I hope to write a couple of entries here later, but for a quick status report:

The GDM theming tutorial is stalled at about 75-80 percent complete. I'm still not sure how glorious of a finish I want to give the instructional GDM theme. More on this later.

It looks like the Xubuntu team didn't care for either of my gtk themes, and have chosen to go withGTK a murrina-based theme. it's cool in that it's different, but the engine just leaves the themes looking too hard for my tastes. More on this later (film at eleven!).

Not only have I figured out how to get my Ubuntu box to play adultswim's fix, but I've figured out how to save them locally to... ahem, so I can, uh, play them without the lag of streaming. More on this later.

The supremely, nay, divinely simple GDM theme that I posted on gnome look now has it's second derivative posted there. I couldn't be more proud. the first was 22lips, and has a fantastic svg wallpaper of... two tulips. The second is part of a meta-theme/style pack for arch Linux.

My first theme, sunergos blue, should be breaking the 5,000 downloads barrier sometime today. Mind you, that's just from the two sites that I can keep track of, I've seen it posted (by others :D) in at least five theme sites, as well as on my sunergos homepage. That, in my opinion, is really fucking cool.

Hopefully, I will be gainfully employed again by the end of this month doing something that is a hair's breadth from my dream job. It's the first job Ive wanted to study up for, so I'm hoping things go well.

Well, that's all for now, hopefully this will post and not be eaten by the entarwebs....MFL &<

Alternatives

2006-09-03T18:56:00.000-04:00

Well, allpeers, while not being bad per se, didn't live up to my expectations. In all fairness, after all this buildup it would have been nigh on impossible to meet my expectations. Anything short of printing out pure Au would have failed. On the bright side however, Psyc has released psychzilla (wiki), which comes oh so close to my dream of a distributed peer-to-peer social network with chat, mail, homepages and filesharing. I really thought that I was going to have to embed torrent binaries in rss pages, broadcast them with feedtree, and pull it all together with a Firefox extension, a torrent extension and jabberzilla or mozchat(now called mango). Whew. Now you see why that wasn't such a good idea. more later.

Why am I surprised

2006-08-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

that allpeers has gone public beta and writely has started accepting new users again, and I had no idea?

(mis)adventures in irc

2006-08-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

So, It's been nearly a decade since I used irc. that should say more about irc than it does about me. I have to ait that irc is very... cool. I've already met some nice people... and met one complete asshole. So if you are on irc, connect to #ubuntu on freenode and tell gnomefreak I said "operator > nazi" I also recived a request from troy_s in #ubuntu-artwork to create an informational page for GDM themes on the ubuntu wiki. Yay. So if you want to see it, or you want to help, or if you are just monumentally bored, head on over to http://wiki.ubuntu.com/incoming/artwork/GDMthemeing [It's obvious that irc dates from a time when "command line" was not a dirty word; it's actually well thought out.]

The Socialized Net

2006-08-05T01:54:00.000-04:00

After years of dreaming and more time searching than I care to admit, I seem to have found something very close to that for which I was looking. I have long dreamed of a decentralized "social network" that would allow users to communicate and exchange data. The Socialized.net is probably as close as I will get without writing it my own damn self. It would appear that there are four components implemented at the moment:

The TSN dameon A Gaim TSN plugin A firefox search (mycroft) TSN plugin An Azureus torrentsearch TSN plugin

Using the TSN dameon, you connect to the decentralized network. You can then chat with other members using the Gaim plugin, search for arbitrary content with the firefox plugin, and search for torrents witht he Azureus plugin.

My Ten Favorite Movies (give or take 56)

2006-07-29T09:20:00.013-04:00

It's funny, yesterday someone implied that I was a "movie critic" (I inferred his meaning that I was an avid lover of cinema) and I really didn't think of myself as one. But I tried. I really did. I was going to do five, and I got four sure ones (#1empire of the sun[which is my number 1 fucking favorite movie of all time and then some. when he sings that song towards the end I choke up every time], #2Hope and Glory, #3American Pop, #4Magnolia) but I couldn't decide which movie I wanted for number five. or for number ten. or eleven. and so on, until I just gave up. I didn't even try for a round number in the end, because I just didn't want to add a move that didn't belong. So, here they are, my "sixty three most favoritest moves ever omg that I could think of off the top of my head". And because I'm such a nice guy (really, I'm an asshole and a liar, and you probably shouldn't talk to me) and I have too much time in my hands, I have included the imdb links for all the movies. Some personal notes may be added in the future. For instance, I should tell you why hamburger hill is probably the best war movie ever, and it has nothing to do with its extremely graphic nature. But it took me fucking long enough to do this, and I've already added Citizen X since I started writing this little introduction up (because I started thinking of a much loved [but naught heard from] friend), so I'm done for now. Please leave a comment if you agree, and feel obliged to, if you don't. Oh, yeah, they are in reverse chronological order.

District 9 (2009)
The Hangover (2009)
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)
Charlie Bartlett (2007)
The Host (2007)
Across the Universe (2007)
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Sin City (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Garden State (2004)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
28 Days Later (2002)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Siu Lam Juk Kau [Shaolin Soccer] (2001)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Moulin Rouge (2001)
Prozac Nation (2001)
Snatch. (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
American Beauty (1999)
The Boondock Saints (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Magnolia (1999)
American History X (1998)
Apt Pupil (1998)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Pi (1998)
Le Violon Rouge (1998)
Shin seiki Evangelion Gekijô-ban: Air/Magokoro wo, kimi ni [End of Evangelion](1997)
Trainspotting (1996)
Memorizu (1995)
Citizen X (1995)
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Tombstone (1993)
Brain Donors (1992)
Dracula (1992)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Akira (1988)
Powaqqatsi (1988)
Empire of the Sun (1987)
Hamburger Hill (1987)
Hope and Glory (1987)
Aliens (1986)
Koneko monogatari [Milo and Otis](1986)
Platoon (1986)
The Wraith (1986)
The Goonies (1985)
Pale Rider (1985)
Gandhi (1982)
American Pop (1981)
Das Boot (1981)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Caddyshack (1980)
1941 (1979)
All That Jazz (1979)
Animal House (1978)
The Hobbit (1977)
Jaws (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
American Graffiti (1973)
Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Walkabout (1971)
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music (1970)
MASH (1970)
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Little Big man (1970
Patton (1970)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
The Great Escape (1963)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Yojimbo (1961)
12 Angry Men (1957)
7 Samurai (1954)
Them! (1954)
Alvin C. York (1941)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Animal Crackers (1930)

So, I couldn't help now, but tally them up: 00's : ***** 90's : ********************** 80's : ***************** 70's : ********** 60's : ***** 50's : *** 40's : * 30's : ***

Xfce Recycle Bin workaround in four easy steps.

2006-07-18T23:12:00.000-04:00

The new Xfce desktop is rather cool. The latest release include Thunar, a fast and light (and downright sexy) file manager. But Xfce and Thunar are not exactly perfect. One of the things I do miss is a trash or recycle bin. In the current thunar, when you delete a file, it is gone for good. Here's what I did to work around that.

Step 1: Create a folder for your trash. This can be anywhere that you have write access. I put mine in my home folder. For the purposes of this tutorial I will call the home folder "mine". You should replace "mine" with the name of your own home folder. So, create a folder called ".trash" in "/home/mine/". Now you should have a "/home/mine/.trash" folder.

Step 2: Now, in Thunar, click on Edit in the menu bar. Towards the end of the menu, click on "Configure custom actions". The custom actions window will probably have at least one entry, probably the "Open Terminal Here" action. Click on the plus sign on the right-hand side of the window. You will get the create action window. Under name, I typed "Trash". You may want to call it "move to trash" or something similar. For Command, type mv %n /home/mine/.trash/%n If you want an icon, click on the box that says "no icon" and choose an icon. Click on the "appearance Conditions" tab at top. You want an asterisk (*) for File pattern and go ahead and check all of the boxes in the window. Click on Ok in the Create Action window, and Close on the Custom Action window. Now when you right-click on a single file or folder, you should have an entry that says "Trash" and clicking on trash should move the file to "/home/mine/.trash"

Step 3: Like I said, this will only work on a single file. So for moving multiple files I need another solution. What I did was add an entry to the shortcuts sidebar for the .trash folder. If you have thunar open to your home folder, click on "View" on the menubar. About half way down the menu there should be an entry that says "Show Hidden Files". Click on that and there should be several folders now with names that start with a period. Scroll down until you find the ".trash" folder. Right-click on the .trash folder and left-click on "Add Folder to Shortcuts" on the menu. Now you should be able to select multiple files and folders and drag them to the .trash folder on the sidebar. If you want, you can rename the shortcut on the sidebar. I renamed mine to "trash"

Step 4: Ok, so now we can send files to the trash, but I've come to expect at least a little more functionality from my trash bin. So, the final step for my weak recycle bin replacement is to add a trash bin link to the task bar. Right-click on the bar and choose "Add New Item". In the "Add Items to the Panel" window, click on "Launcher" and click the "Add" button. Now you should be in the "Properties" window. For "Name" type "Trash", Choose an icon if you want, and for "Command" type thunar /home/mine/.trash This will open thunar to your .trash folder. Now, Look for the plus icon on the bottom left hand side of the Properties window. Click on that an you should have "New item" in the list above. For "Name" type "Empty Trash", Choose an icon if you want, and for "Command" type rm /home/mine/.trash/* Now check the box that says "Run in terminal" and click on close. You should now have an icon for trash, and an arrow that opens a menu with "Empty Trash". This will delete the contents of the .trash folder, so use it with caution.

Well. that, sadly is it. It is far from a complete solution. Most notably, pressing delete on the keyboard will still permanently delete a file. But without figuring out how to remap the delete key, this is all I've got. Much Love.

gnome-panel alternatives

2006-07-09T18:03:00.000-04:00

So, gnome panel is less than perfect. I think we can both agree on that, right? So, what are our alternative choices? Foopanel. Themeable. Last release, March 06. http://foopanel.berlios.de/foopanel/doku.php Fbpanel. Fast. Stable. Actually uses GTK. NetWM compatible. hasn't been updated since December of 04. http://fbpanel.sourceforge.net/ Suxpanel. Funny name. Uses GTK. Last release, June 06. http://suxpanel.berlios.de/ Luminance. Based on Fbpanel. Only release, December 02. Assumed dead. http://luminance.sourceforge.net/index.php Perlpanel. Intriguing. Updated April 05. http://perlpanel.org/

Installing Guten on Ubuntu Dapper

2006-07-08T17:37:00.000-04:00

Guten is an application that acts as an interface to the Project Gutenberg project. It formats and displays books, allows bookmarking, and automatically saves your current placein a text. The catalogue allows you to browse through titles and search based on autor or title.

Getting the Software

This is fairly easy to do, but does require that you download some additional files.

Get the Guten source here.

Get most current SQLObject deb here. Installing Double-click on the python2.4-sqlobject_0.6.1-1_all.deb file that you downloaded, it will give you a warning about the version, but just click on close and then install the package. Now, go to a terminal, and run sudo apt-get python-sqlite

Once that is installed, go back to your desktop and double-click on the guten-0.3.tar.bz2 file that you downloaded. Once it opens in the archive manager, extract it somewhere that will be easy to get to in the terminal. Now, go back to your terminal and get to the folder where you extracted guten. once you are there type:

sudo python setup.py install

Once that is done, you should be able to run guten.

Working Shockwave in Ubuntu Dapper (in about 10 minute's)

2006-07-01T03:15:00.000-04:00

No sound on my system, your mileage may vary First, you need to enable the universe repositories. There are instructions on the unofficial ubuntu guide. Now, open up your trusty terminal. When the time comes, just assume that you say yes to everything.

sudo apt-get update (enter your administrator password.)

sudo apt-get install wine (I got a warning here about sound)

sudo apt-get install mozplugger winecfg (after a bit of cranking, this should open a window with a windows 2000(TM) look to it)

If you haven't done so already, download the firefox and shockwave install files from their respective sites. The files I downloaded were "Firefox Setup 1.5.0.4.exe" and "Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe" Back in your trusty terminal window, change to the directory of the install files, and type: wine Firefox\ Setup\ 1.5.0.4.exe That should start the installer for firefox. For the sake of this document, I will assume that you chose all of the default options and locations. You may want to test the browser, you can use the convenient icon on the desktop or type:

wine /home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe where USERNAME is your user name. If firefox does not open, rinse, spin, and repeat. Ok, now close firefox. Please. Next type: wine Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe That should start the installer for shockwave. Follow through again, choosing the default options and locations. Now, once you are done, try opening firefox again and test out something shockwavy.

Resources:

--enabling the universe repositories-- --Firefox Setup 1.5.0.4.exe-- --Shockwave_Installer_Slim.exe--

in search of the firefox instant messenger

2006-07-01T00:05:00.000-04:00

XMPP Client Daemon: cross platform development environment for XMPP based applications. http://wxxcd.sourceforge.net/index.html Jabberpresence: verify the presence (online status) of your Jabber IM contacts. https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/867/ XUL jabber client http://jabberzilla.jabberstudio.org/ JabberXM is a set of bindings and components that can be used together to build a Jabber client in Mozilla. http://jabberxm.mozdev.org/ Jim is Jabber IM client written only in XUL and Javascript. http://jim.mozdev.org/ Nareau What is it? http://nareau.mozdev.org/what_is.html Email is too hard, so lets junk it. http://nareau.mozdev.org/messaging/index.html

Python goodness

2006-06-30T22:59:00.000-04:00

howto: Hello world using python/gtk http://handhelds.org/~nelson/pyglade/pyglade-tutorial Creating a GUI using PyGTK and Glade: http://www.learningpython.com/2006/05/07/creating-a-gui-using-pygtk-and-glade/ Building an Application with PyGTK and Glade: http://www.learningpython.com/2006/05/30/building-an-application-with-pygtk-and-glade/ Howto to Talk with GoogleTalk in Python: http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/214.html Send email with attachment(s) in Python http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/2038 Python Email Libraries, part 1: POP3: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-Email-Libraries-part-1-POP3/ Python Email Libraries, part 2: IMAP: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-Email-Libraries-part-2-IMAP/ Python Email Libraries, part 3: SMTP and Email Parsing: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-Email-Libraries-SMTP-and-Email-Parsing/ Devshed python tutorials: http://www.devshed.com/c/b/Python/ PyGTK tutorials: gnomes tutorials http://www.pygtk.org/tutorial.html Developing Gnome Application with Python, parts 1 2 and 3: old http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/July2000/article160.shtml http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/January2002/article224.shtml http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/November2002/article266.shtml A Beginner's Guide to Using pyGTK and Glade: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6586 Rapid Application Development with Python and Glade: writing a database application in glade using python/postgreSQL/gtk http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7421 Creating a GNOME Web Browser with Python: writing a simple mozilla-based browser with python/gtk http://patrick.wagstrom.net/tutorials/pygtkmozembed/pygtkmozembed.html Writing win32 applications with python and glade: writing a podcast client to download embedded torrents. http://www.pygtk.org/articles/bitpodder/BitPodder.htm Writing a Widget Using Cairo and PyGTK 2.8, parts 1 and 2 http://www.pygtk.org/articles/cairo-pygtk-widgets/cairo-pygtk-widgets.htm http://www.pygtk.org/articles/cairo-pygtk-widgets/cairo-pygtk-widgets2.htm Gstreamer based python audio player in no time: playing audio in python using gstreamer. http://base-art.net/Articles/67/ Implementations: email package: the official python email implementation http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/email-sig/ PyXMPP: Python Jabber/XMPPP implementation. http://pyxmpp.jajcus.net/ Pitivi: a python/gtk/gstreamer application for editing video and audio. http://pitivi.sourceforge.net/ Serpentine: a python/gtk application for writing cd-audio discs. http://s1x.homelinux.net/projects/serpentine/ PYGMY: a python/gtk mail client. http://pygmy.sourceforge.net/ SQmail home page: SQmaiL is a mail user agent that uses python/mysql/gtk. http://sqmail.sourceforge.net/ Shtoom: a voip application written in python http://www.divmod.org/projects/shtoom xmpppy: library that is targeted to provide easy scripting with Jabber http://xmpppy.sourceforge.net/

This is the start of something beautiful.

2006-06-30T19:20:00.000-04:00

No really. I promise.