Slackware/Compiling

Ok ok, I admit it. Slackware is cool. That goes for easys, too.

I have to be fair, and I am going to update my last post. easys is easier to use then slackware. Very much so.

easys taught me to no longer fear compiling programs. For the first time, I finally found the pure joy of compiling software. If you havn't experenced the joy of this, I beg of you to download a simple program's source code, like ClamAV, and then do a good old "./configure", then a "make check", then, at last, "make install". Know that sometimes you can use "make uninstall" to remove a program.

No point in doing this all the time if you have access to YAST or yum or apt-get or something, but compiling can make the program highly optimized for your system, and can be quite rewarding.
Keep in mind that apt-get and such can give higher success rates.

Enjoy! Remeber the three steps (not counting unarchiving):
./configure
make check
make install
------------
-To uninstall:
make uninstall

easys Linux (formally Pocket Linux) Review

I have recently tried easys, and found it usable, but lacking in ways.

easys is meant to be light weight, simple to use, and unconfusing with a policy of one application per task. Does it succeed? Well, maybe.

It is light-weight while still looking attractive with a custom KDE Light desktop (Openbox instead od kwin, etc.), and I must complement them on having only one application per task. But the terminal choice makes no sense (qt based, Konsole is installed, but they use aterm?!), the menu is impossible to edit without going all 1337, and they don't have enough tasks. For example, easys comes with networking preconfigured, but no dialup program, and it has xchat for connecting to chat servers, but no IM program like GAIM.

Software installation is a pain with slackware's slackpkg (although I grant that the update function worked like a dream), which involves either 1) Using the tiny slackware repository, 2)downloading packages at linuxpackages.net, or 3) Compiling programs yourself. Considering that slackpkg doesn't handle dependencies, non of these options are very user-friendly, even if the desired program is in the slackware repository.

Configuration is a nightmare in easys. Well, a nightmare if you aren't a huge geek. The installer is decent enough, but it didn't let me add a user, so I spent the next ten minutes fumbling around looking for the GUI tool that wasn't there. Finally I just looked up the command line tool, adduser, which worked fine. Also, the sound never did work. It did find my sound card, but no sound would ever be played. Finally, it used VESA on me. I had a GeForce 2 video card, which should work fine with nv, but no. It used VESA.

I can't say it was all bad, however. It was lightweight, slick, and professional. The theme was quite presentable, and Firefox would actually download plugins by itself, which is something that was broken in Xubuntu 6.06 and SUSE 10.0. I also have to say that the login screen was nice and matched the theme nicely (unlike KateOS).

All in all, this is a nice alternative to Slackware (Easier to use), but I wouldn't want to use it if I was a newbie, or if I wanted it to just work without fiddling. Yet somehow, despite all of it's flaws, I can't help but like it.

Ease-of-use: 3/5
Hardware detection: 1/5
appearance: 4/5
Stability: -Still testing- 3.5/5
Tilt: 5/5
Overall: 3/5

What do you mean "evil" is two syllables?!

After re-reading that last post, I realized that the first line has too many syllables. One too many. Oh well. This is a blog. What can you expect?

Just pretend that the first line says "Darkness shrouds music". Not the same I know, but good enough.

mp3 Haiku

mp3 is evil
ogg is always good and kind
The evil must fall

Ok ok, mp3 isn't evil, but evil seemed to fit into my Haiku nicely.

mp3, ogg

I don't like mp3. What I mean is that I don't trust it. What I mean by that is that I don't trust the legalities. If you don't know about the questional legalities of mp3, go to http://www.mp3licensing.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.

OGG has a better compression ratio, and better quality.
It can be implemented for free, and is open source.
So why is mp3 so much more common when many users fear being sued just because they legally bought a disk of mp3?

The same goes for DVD's, you know. I'm scared to use DVD's because of the legalities. A lot of other OSS people are being sued because they tried to watch their "Matrix" or "Shrek" DVD's that they bought at Best Buy.

Please people. DON'T use mp3s. Use .ogg whenever possible. OGG has been helped by wikipedia incidentally, who made it their official media format.

Awesome Web Comic

I just found the most awesome web comic. Never again shall I be able to see humor at the pathetic likes of "Dilbert", "Foxtrot", "Get Fuzzy", and "Pearls Before Swine".

It has snappy political humor, satirical comments on America and the school system, brilliant character gags that flow naturally, and a drawing style so wonderful and gives so much life to them that you can't help but be cheered studying the drawing.

In conclusion, it's my new favorite comic. Even better then Real Life Comics!

It is called Ozy and Millie.

Stupid indenting

I was trying to get a CEGUI program running, and Python kept telling me that it could't find my quitApp function. Hours and too many experiments later, I figured out that I was indenting my function wrong.
Instead of

def quitApp(args):
 self.keepRendering = False
 system = cegui.System.getSingleton()
 system.injectKeyDown(evt.key)
 system.injectChar(evt.keyChar)
 evt.consume()

I wrote:

 def quitApp(args):
  self.keepRendering = False
  system = cegui.System.getSingleton()
  system.injectKeyDown(evt.key)
  system.injectChar(evt.keyChar)
  evt.consume()

That has to be one of the dumbest errors of all time (yes, believe it or not, there is a difference in Python).

Here Lies E3, RIP

Rest in Peace, E3.

E3 just announced on July 31 that E3 was to be invitation only, and it shall be called E3 Media Festival. Now only around 5,000 people (All press and professionals) are expected to visit, down from this year's 60,000. This, they said, was by request by several large companies. Finally, E3 plans to use two hotel's instead of the convention center of old.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=18659
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E3
http://www.e3insider.com/portal/

Elephant's Dream

Well, now that my blog's tenth post celebration is over, I wish to offer my view of Elephant's Dream. It's been all over the internet, and there are plenty of references and reviews. So I finally got around to watching it. It used to be called the Orange Project, and is the first high-quality movie to make the claim to fame to be a open movie (It is actually called The Open Movie Project). By open, I mean that all of the textures and Blender files are free under the Creative Commons Attribution license, and that it was made using all open-source tools (the only exception being MacOS X, which was used on the render farm, -they used Ubuntu for development- and the music synth software.

On to the review.
It was made mainly to show all that OSS tools can make, so I won't be too hard on the plot. But the plot really wasn't that interesting if you don't want to get into some very interesting debates about what it was about. Really, half the fun of it was arguing with my brother on the symbolism of the Machine. But I will summarize it in one sentence: Two men, Proog and Emo, are wandering around a giant machine, Proog trying to convince Emo of the beauty of it, but Emo sees nothing.
It makes a lot more sense if you read the script (Good luck. Wordpad messes the font up), and see that when Proog is saying "And if you look to the right you see", that is the prolog. Everything after that is a flash-back.

Overall Artistic Beauty: 5/5 - Beautiful, a masterpiece.
Character Animation: 3/5 - Sub-par at first, but gradually gets better.
Static CGI: 4.5/5 - Motion blur, textures, etc. are excellent.
Voice Acting: 3/5 - Of reasonable quality, but worse then in most feature films.
Music: 5/5 -Perfect. I really though that is was orchestral for a while.
Plot: 2/5 - This varies. It was very abstract, and requires much thought to extract any sense,
but some (like myself) enjoy it despite it's rather vague nature.
Overall: 3.75/5 - Enjoyable, but only to artists, animators, deep-thinkers, and music lovers.
Did I enjoy it: Yes.
http://www.elephantsdream.org/

Now, YOU, my readers, get to choose the next post: should I a) Try to interpret Elephant's Dream, b) Do the same, boring, thing.

Not dead

Nope, I'm not dead. So you can return all those flowers.
I've just been a little busy lately with the afore-mentiened math, added to learning PyOgre (I wrote the Wikipedia stub).

I've posted three articles at the MCGT Daily. Enjoy!

7000 feet

No, I didn't find 7000 severed feet somewhere. That would be like twilight zone or something. I climbed to 7000 feet on mt. Rainier. It was cool. Yeah. Nothing new, no tech news of interest. Oh, wait, Micro$oft decided to rename IE7+ as IE7 for Vista, and IE7 as IE7 for Windows XP.