I’ve always been a bookworm and so around the age of 11 or 12 I asked all my male and female friends whether they would vote for a black man or a white woman for president.  Everyone, male and female alike would always say black man.  I was surprised that the ladies didn’t stick up for one of their own.  I was so surprised, that I would ask my friends this question every couple of years.  We moved a little and I also changed who I hung out with so I wasn’t always asking the same people.  Yet, even though high school and college a majority would say they would rather go for a black man.

So, thanks to a problem I had with rigging up Nick in " Sugar", I’ve temporarily lost interest in animation.  This happens to me all the time, and I think I’ve mentioned it before in previous blog posts that I’m too lazy to look up before that I tend to gain and lose interest in my hobbies.  For example, I haven’t touched the Wii since I beat Mario Galaxy during Christmas and until this recent problem with “Sugar” happened, I hadn’t done any programming in about a year.  Even my interest in photography has ebbed so much that I let my subscription to Digital Camera Magazine lapse.

After a light window manager roundup in the latest LXF (Issue #103) I decided to give IceWM another shot.  I had looked at it once before and found it to both be bare and lacking any programs in the IceWM->Programs menu.  It loaded up ridiculously fast, which was nice.  Unfortunately, for some strange reason, loading up Rythmbox also loads up the Gnome background.  I understand that the Gnome libraries are loaded for whatever necessary reasons when Rhythmbox loads up, but I think it’s pretty rotten behavior to usurp the desktop background!  I wonder if this is worth filing a bug report about with Gnome developers.

Here’s the computer I built back in January:

In celebration of the new year, and to solve a problem that I explain on the page, here’s a program to figure out which Zodiac animal corresponds to each year: Vietnamese Zodiac

I’m still working some kinks out such as the fact that unicode is currently not working on my blog so depending on whether I’m testing a new feature there may be some breakage.

It’s the year of the rat!

I was writing a GUI for Pydvdauthor, my program for creating DVDs on Linux from an MPEG file. I wrote this in order to help me create the XML files necessary for dvdauthor. Here’s what the GUI looks like right now:

I updated the project on freshmeat, but they haven’t updated my main page yet. You’ll know because the tar file will be 0.1.6. I’m pretty excited as this is my first non-toy program GUI. With time it’s gotten easier and easier to do them - they were quite intimidating at first.

Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line.  For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot.  (I couldn’t access all the files anymore)  For reasons I don’t wish to get into right now, it’s easier to not have spaces in filenames in Linux.  It’s not because Linux can’t handle spaces in filenames - it can.  But if you’re a semi-hacker like me, spaces in filenames can wreak total havoc on your scripts.  So I wanted to remove spaces off of around 200 or so files.

So, to wrap up a review I started a long time ago.

So I took a good look at the files and I had an xvid at 704x400 (I cropped a little) and an ogg theora with 720x480 resolution. Generally speaking, the ogg theora had much better audio/video sync. Throughout the entire film, the audio was just as in sync as on the DVD. The xvid file lost sync little by little, but never to a ridiculous degree. (Although it has happened to me with other discs)

Compiz-Fusion, as you surely know is responsible for eye candy on GNU/Linux distros such as windows that turn into paper airplanes when the user minimizes it to turning the desktop into a spinning cube.  There’s something about the wobbly windows that provides some a sense of inertia that just makes things feel a little more dynamic on the desktop.  I can’t explain it, but some of the effects make the GUI slightly more useful.  However, Compiz-Fusion isn’t perfect.