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.

“He says ‘hello’.  That’s what I look for in a stalker.”  - Lauren

“I think I was a little boy growing up”  - Lauren

“You had mad cow disease?” - T to Lauren

Blogged with Flock

After having tried drupal for a couple of years on an unrelated site, I came to see that it would be a great way to develop a new site for drop the bomb productions.  After about two days of converting the site over, you can now see the results.  I think it results in a cleaner, easier to navigate site and I think it’ll be easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

I’ve tried a bunch of times, but apparently something’s wrong with the Syllable VMWare files and LiveCD because I was unable to get either to run. They both appear to be missing a bunch of necessary files.