July 5, 2010
In apology for my broken promise and rather uncool decision to leave my screencast broken, I am giving you a drawing. You may remember my past drawings which were the very start of this blog (2007 May 27 - 2007 June 29).
The truth is that I haven't been drawing for almost a year actually. The Open Source Emo series and my Ninja story were the last things I've drawn except for a few things here and there until yesterday. I drew two girls yesterday with the GIMP and today I drew a third with Inkscape. The image above was drawn in one go with Inkscape. Unlike yesterday where I drew hundreds of lines to create a decent shape, this one came together with the strokes you see here -- 27 strokes and one piece of text.
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June 10, 2010
Hello fine readers. I would have a video below but a few things are stopping me. Since they are interesting, I thought I might tell you about them as well. The first thing is how slow I get when I am loopy from lack of sleep. If I was more with it, I would have finished my screencast in under 10 minutes. The next thing is the long-windedness that I have when it comes to some of my projects. If I wasn't so long-winded about my projects, I would have a 1 minute screencast that would awe some strange person who reads this blog. The next thing that is stopping me from posting this screencast is Youtube's 10 minute limit. If Youtube decided that 15 minutes was the new limit, I would have posted. If I trusted another video site as much as I do Youtube, I would have posted it elsewhere. Under the current climate I have not even looked for other video hosts, though there may be some out there with reasonable terms and rules. If there was a video editor that I knew how to use that worked better than LiVES (like VirtualDub) then I would have edited out a bunch of umm's and it would've been ~5 minutes long. If I had installed the latest version of LiVES and it worked with my file then I would've edited it.
And now for the more far fetched excuses: If bandwidth were be cheaper, I would buy more bandwidth, so I could host the 68MB ogg file on my own server. If Google supported Ogg Theora instead of H.264 video codec for the <video> tag, I could put the Ogg Theora video on my server and expect that people could properly view it with several browsers. If the H.264 developers considered Mozilla Firefox, Konqueror, and Webkit to be safe from any patent infringement when implementing x264 natively, then I would be happy to convert the screencast to H.264 mpeg-4 and put it in a <video> tag and buy more bandwidth.
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Jun 3, 2010
*nix have some strange concepts. This will be a brief blog because I have little to say. In the grep manual, I found a reference to an obscure option:
-Z, --null
Output a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead of the character that normally
follows a file name. For example, grep -lZ outputs a zero byte after each file name
instead of the usual newline. This option makes the output unambiguous, even in the
presence of file names containing unusual characters like newlines. This option can be
used with commands like find -print0, perl -0, sort -z, and xargs -0 to process arbitrary
file names, even those that contain newline characters.
Did you read that? It's saying that you can have a newline in a filename, so I tested that out:
jvoss@localhost ~ $ touch 'blah > yak > dah' jvoss@localhost ~ $ ls Desktop j0anna1.crt regdev asos2l.txt j0anna1a.crt src blah?yak?dah j0anna1a1.crt stage3-amd64-20090611.tar.bz2 emerge_kate1.txt libusb-1.0.8.tar.bz2 suzy_make.conf emerge_kdebase-runtime-meta1.txt lin2632.cfg suzy_world.txt emerge_kdebase-startkde1.txt lin2632a.cfg time1.py emerge_konsole1.txt media use1.txt iwlist1.txt necessary.txt wmii+ixp-3.9-2.tbz iwlwifi-5000-ucode-8.24.2.12 portage-2010a.tgz wpa_lev1.conf iwlwifi-5000-ucode-8.24.2.12.gz recent xness.txt
See that blah?yak?dah file there? It's replacing newlines with ? because it doesn't want to display something else. That's probably very smart. Tab completion however, shows a completely different story:
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May 19, 2010
Now that AltSci is back up and fewer a few serious XSS bugs, I thought I would show you some awesome things that AltSci has given you in the past few years. AltSci Language AI is perhaps the most interesting, with gems like "悪政" and "День Победы", you may learn a lot more than a language or two.
Tonight I hacked on something for work and for humanity. At the same time a person I know worked for me on another project that will not so much advance humanity so much as prove something quite simple. Who did more for the world, who had more fun, and who did the most work are pretty much immaterial but I wished that everyone in the world could enjoy a fraction of the satisfaction that a programmer does when they create a piece of code. A piece of code that can be open sourced and that helps others, even better.
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