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![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Sep
30
A reminder of my previous theme
Category: Site | 
2 Comments
I had the ramart theme for over 2 years, since announcing it in this post. I’ve had it for practically the entire life of this blog, so I thought it would be fitting to record how it looked. Perhaps I can go back to it if I can convince someone to redo it as a Wordpress 2.3 compliant theme or perhaps it’s time to move on. I haven’t really decided just yet.
Well, here are the screenshots (for memory’s sake):
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Sep
30
Tags are great!
Category: Site, wordpress | Leave a Comment
Other than widgets, I think that tags are the best feature of Wordpress 2.3. Up until now I kept adding more and more categories and things were starting to get ridiculous. But now with tags I have a wonderful middle path. Categories are for broad swaths of posts and there shouldn’t be too many. (Or at least not any more than I currently have) But now, instead of making a new category to talk about Compiz or X11, I can just file it under Linux and add the corresponding tags. Plus, tag clouds are fun!
Speaking of widgets, go here to check out all the neat widgets available.
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Sep
30
Look and feel of the site
Category: Site | 4 Comments
First of all, I was unsuccessful in getting my previous theme to work with the new features. Second, the current theme I have selected is god-awful. However, I really, really like the widgets idea a LOT! So I’m going to need to find a better theme that supports widgets. I tried about 4 different ones, but this one was the best. Really, the only thing I don’t like about it is that images flow out of the boxes instead of the boxes expanding. I’ll work on it or just roll back to my old one and forget about widgets.
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Sep
30
Theme
Category: Site | Leave a Comment
I’m going to try and upgrade my theme to work with the latest Wordpress feature - widgets. Therefore, the blog might look a little ugly as I attempt to get the theme to work.
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Sep
30
DONE!!!
Category: Site | Leave a Comment
It took around 4-5 hours total, but I finally got everything categorized! Now to backup the database and get on with other things!!!
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Sep
29
One year’s worth left
Category: Site, Sugar, wordpress | Leave a Comment
I’m getting a bit bored and my wrist is starting to hurt a little from operating the mouse so much. I’m not done recategorizing my blog posts, but I only have one year’s range left - March 2006 - March 2007. Hopefully that was a twelve month period in which I didn’t write too much. Boy-oh-boy did I learn my lesson about not backing up. Also, I was jumping from 2.1 to 2.3 so perhaps I was bound to run into those problems. Once I’m done with that, there are some pretty neat developments which have recently happened on vimeo as well as some exciting news on “Sugar” and “Trick or Treat”.
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Sep
29
Upgraded to Wordpress 2.3
Category: Site | 2 Comments
Broke categories….now all of my posts are uncategorized….
everything else appears to be working well….
now to fix the categories again….
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Sep
29
I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about 15-20 minutes to get set up.
Collisions from djotaku on Vimeo.
But you may notice a problem here. The ball appears to accelerate as it leaves the bricks. That’s because the tutorial was just a quick example of how to do the task at hand. So I set about to find out what was going on and why my ball was not obeying the conservation of energy. It turns out that the settings as described in the magazine kept continuously giving the ball energy. So I had to adjust it so that it would only get energy at the beginning. After that, I got something much more realistic.
Collisions (Newton’s Laws) from djotaku on Vimeo.
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Sep
28
Cycles
Category: Gnome, KDE, Linux | Leave a Comment
As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on….
Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to find a post to see what my Wordpress theme is called. (It’s called ramart) Wordpress 2.3 is out and they had a list of themes that were compatible, so I wanted to see if mine was, but I needed to know what it was called. (It isn’t compatible) I knew that I had changed to this theme early on so I was searching through my earliest articles.
I found this article. Well, it seems as though things have once again come full circle. Not only has Penguin Pete again been talking about Ubuntu being Linux for tyros, but I’m back to Fluxbox as my Window Manager.
“But I thought he was using KDE.” I hear those of you who have been following along. Yes, I was using KDE, but it just felt SO sluggish compared to Gnome. And random programs kept crashing all the time. (Mostly Konqueror, but sometimes Amarok) So I went back to Gnome, but, despite installing some updates, I still cannot log out with Compiz enabled. Not only that, but turning off Compiz freezes things up too! I tried fvwm-crystal again for a little while, but then I remembered why I had stopped using it - it has a problem with Blender. If Blender is launched with the -w argument it opens up in a window that can be moved and resized. Otherwise, it just takes up your whole screen. This would not be a problem except that I have dual screen and so I have an annoying cut through my image as fvwm-crystal causes Blender to take up both screens.
So I went back to good, old trusty Fluxbox. There’s still an unresolved bug for me with setting the background, but I’ll get around to fixing that soon enough. It used to work back in ‘05 and I’m sure if I spend enough time I can make it work now too. For now it provides me with what I need: a nice, stable Window Manager which does not crash and which lets me log out. It’s also pretty fast since it isn’t taking up too many resources. Fluxbox development, while slow, continues and therer are some new cosmetic features compared to last time around. For example, it seems to now be trivial to combine windows into tabbed windows. Also, I’m sure a lot of stuff is going on in the background.
I’m hoping to get back to Gnome in Fedora 8 when they move (hopefully) to Compiz-Fusion. And I’d like to check out KDE again when KDE 4 comes out. It’s supposed to have a lot of fixes and optimizations to make it run a little speedier. So, who knows, perhaps I’ll be back in Fluxbox in a couple of years too!
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Sep
28
How Engineers think…
Category: tv, xkcd | Leave a Comment
another great one from xkcd:
What did you think when you saw the first panel? I thought of Roadrunner cartoons RIGHT AWAY!
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Sep
26
Frets on Fire Rocks!
Category: Linux, Video Games | Leave a Comment
My brother introduced me to “Guitar Hero” over the summer. I couldn’t really get into it at the time. There were basically two reasons for this. First of all, I just wasn’t in the mood for that type of game on the day he brought it over. However, the concept stayed with me and whenever I hear rock songs, I imagine how easy or hard they would be to play in “Guitar Hero”. The other reason I didn’t get into the game when Dan brought it over is that I didn’t know any of the songs, but one or two. It’s really hard to get into playing the guitar for a song you’re not really into.
Enter Frets on Fire. Frets on Fire is an open source version of “Guitar Hero” that plays on Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows. The primary mode of play is to use your keyboard as the guitar. The F1-F5 keys are the frets and the enter key is the strum. Alternatively, I’ve heard that an Xbox guitar will work as it goes through the USB interface. I haven’t tried this myself, so I can’t comment. As you can see, the GUI is roughly the same as the commercial version.
And Frets on Fire succeeds where the commercial game fails in that you can play along to ANY song you want! All you need to do is create an OGG of the song and then tell the game when the Frets should be hit. I imagine this is a lot harder than it sounds. I didn’t get to try it out. However, there are a ton of groups out there on the internet creating songs for Frets. I definitely want to try it with some Linkin Park, LostProphets, and Anberlin songs.
I only had the change to play one song and part of the tutorial. The reason I didn’t finish the tutorial is the same reason that I only did so-so on the song I played - it’s really easy to misplace your fingers. In “Guitar Hero” I kept forgetting which finger was which color. I’m past that now, but I have a hard time making sure my fingers hit the right F-keys. I kept hitting escape accidentally and there’s only so many times I can listen to the same dialog, no matter how clever it is.
So, to wrap up, although I didn’t like “Guitar Hero” the first time around, it seems that it’s not the entire genre that I dislike. Rather, it’s just that I didn’t like the selection of songs and I wasn’t ready for it. If it turns out that I really like frets, then I’ll probably pick up a USB guitar controller.
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