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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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May
30
Big Buck Bunny has been Released to the net!
Category: Blender, Movies, computer animation | 
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Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.
Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie. It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream. Check it out!
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May
30
Gnome Music Player Showdown
Category: Linux, Mono, Music | 2 Comments
I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0. (Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example) It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox. As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora). Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux. (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza) Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed. Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs. For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.
So let’s take a look, feature-by-feature and see how they stack up. For comparison purposes, I’m checking out Rhythmbox 0.11.3 vs Banshee 0.13.1 - these are the latest updated versions available in Fedora 8. First of all, apparently Banshee is not able to detect when I’ve added new music into my music folder. Both Rhythmbox and Amarok do this, so subtract points from Banshee from the start.
Here you can see the difference in the way the programs look when they are first started up:
First of all, from a user’s perspective, Rythmbox has nice, intuitive buttons. Text appears under each button letting the user know what it does. While no one will have any problems with Banshee’s play, forward and backwards buttons, I have no idea just by looking if it’s in random mode or in a mode to play straight through my music.
Also, right off the bat we see that in this version of Banshee, although it can Scrobble my music, it does not appear to have any last.fm support built-in. By contrast, Rhythmbox comes with Neighbor Radio and the ability to add more radio stations based on similar artist, artist, and tags. Very nice features.
Banshee does finally have Podcast support, which is good. Banshee is also lacking support for Magnatunes and Jamendo. This is becoming a huge trend to provide a free version of the iTunes store. (Even Amarok has support for Magnatunes) So, here you can see what you get in Rhythmbox:
In addition to getting access to the Jamendo and Magnatunes catalogues for listening to, there are additional buttons added to the interface to facilitate the extra features of these services such as buying tracks or downloading albums.
Looking at the radio selections, Banshee wins on the sheer number and variety of stations it provides “out of the box” so to speak.
So I was just about to write off Banshee as a nice try, but something I’ll have to get back to when 1.0 finally comes out. Then I decided to play a song….
Here’s the kind of information being provided that makes me love Amarok! I’m not sure if this information comes from last.fm, but here I get similar artists, top songs and top albums by the same artist! Clicking on any of the songs from the top tracks switches over to that track. What I’d love would be the ability to use that to create a playlist. So instead of jumping to that song, I’d like to see it allow me to right click or middle-button click and get it added to a playlist. After waiting for the song to end so I could scrobble it, I clicked on the items and they take you to the corresponding page on last.fm - so that must be where the info comes from. I’d like to see that better integrated to include the functions I mentioned above.
Final verdict? I think that Banshee has great promise to take over as my main audio program in the future. Features such as the last.fm integration I mentioned above are just the kind of extra info I expect to get if I’m going to run a music player more complicated than XMMS. However, I’d like to see better integration with last.fm radio, Jamendo, Magnatunes, and any other such programs. I didn’t test podcasting since I have a ton of podcasts I’m currently following in Rhythmbox, but they appear to support it now. So I say stick with Rhytmbox for now if you want feature-completeness and keep a close eye on Banshee throughout the rest of 2008 to see what great suprises they have in store in 1.0. Of course, if you’re a Mono-hater, then you’ll be stuck with Rhytmbox, but I don’t see those guys laying down on the job and I expect the feature set to continue to grow and get better.
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May
29
Code Monkey
Category: Computers, Geek Love, Music, Video Games, programming | Leave a Comment
This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!
I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His last.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.
I’m sure that if you’re a programmer or into geek culture that this will be on your playlist for a long time. It’ll probably be my top scrobbled song this year.
And here’s the neatest part, if you still haven’t downloaded it yet - Jonathan Coulton is the guy who came up with the “Still Alive” song from Portal!!! That song rocks!
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May
25
Congrats Danny!
Category: General | Leave a Comment
On graduation from Cornell!
Although, since you’ve done a summer job every summer, like me, you probably won’t notice that you’ve graduated until winter comes around and you don’t get a winter break.
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May
23
5000 Views!
Category: General | Leave a Comment
I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that 5000 people have seen this one picture of mine. It’s nuts!
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May
20
Blender 2.46 Released! (Yesterday)
Category: Blender | Leave a Comment
Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny. What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any tools that make armatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which should allow most of the video editing to take place inside of Blender.
I’d love to play with it, but right now I’m working on some animation projects so I need to wait until at least Fedora comes out with the 2.46 rpm. Ideally also my FreeBSD render farm would also get updated. A lot of the new goodies like hair/fur rendering are not backwards compatible. Good job from the coding team and I hope to test it out soon enough.
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May
17
History Meme
Category: Geek Love, Linux, Others' Blogs | Leave a Comment
[emesa@mario ~]$ uname -a
Linux mario.mushroomkingdom 2.6.24.5-85.fc8 #1 SMP Sat Apr 19 12:39:34 EDT 2008 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[emesa@mario ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
176 ls
172 eog
81 ./makeSpiral.pl
80 cd
61 ./makefibonaccicollage.pl
58 mplayer
51 ./makePolar.pl
36 mv
28 flickr_views.py
24 exit
and root:
[root@mario ~]# history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
193 ls
127 cd
102 exit
87 mount
77 yum
71 history
43 emacs
35 cat
20 rm
16 ifconfig
Notes:
- Wordpress may mess up the double quotes, you may need to retype that if you copy this directly from the blog
- The perl scripts you see are the ones I used to create mathematical collages of my pictures
I got this idea from Mark Pilgrim of Dive into Mark who said this meme is sweeping the net. I couldn’t help but participate.
As is to be done with Memes, I tag Dan and Penguin Pete to go next.
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May
15
Microsoft DRM Metldown Redux
Category: DRM, M$, Music, Others' Blogs | Leave a Comment
As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers. To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system. These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing the proper logo, will no longer play once August comes around and Microsoft turns off the servers which validate you as a non-criminal. I hope there’s a huge outcry that forces them to un-DRM all these songs and sounds the ultimate death knell for DRM.
Mark Pilmgim, Python hacker and author, wrote a piece about this in his blog in which he explains the situation to his father. Here are my favorite quotes.
Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”
To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.”
To demonstrate the awesomeness of their developer platform, Microsoft opened their own online store, MSN Music, so they could compete directly with their business partners who also offered “PlaysForSure”-compatible music downloads. Because there’s nothing end users love more than fake choices.
At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.
Also, he mention that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which I’m a member, has posted a letter to Microsoft calling them on this move.
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May
14
Lightweight Linux Throwdown
Category: Linux | 4 Comments
I’ve used Damn Small Linux (DSL) quite a bit in the past. Before getting my laptop I used to use it to be able to get a Linux desktop at my in-laws’ house. I decided I wanted to try out some of these other lightweight Linux distros that everyone is always talking about. Even on Linux Outlaws they mentioned how they like some different light distros over DSL. Since I’ve used DSL so much, I decided to evaluate these other Linux distros based on how they compare to DSL.
So, here’s how DSL did on my test rig:
Boot Time
DSL took 1 minute 28 seconds from the time it asked me to hit enter until the time I had a usable desktop.
Window Manager
Back when I used to use DSL the developer(s) had chosen Fluxbox as the lightweight window manager of choice. Well, in an attempt to make DSL a little easier to use, by having a start menu, DSL booted by default into Joe’s Window Manager. (JWN) It’s not bad and seems to run just as fast as Fluxbox ever did.
Net Connection
DSL failed to bring up an ethernet device on my test rig. This wasn’t a problem on my in-laws’ computer, so I’m not sure - I guess my ethernet uses a firmware in a newer version of the Linux kernel. Last time I checked DSL used the 2.4 series because it was a lot smaller.
Programs
Firefox 1, Dillo - I was unable to test any web pages these older browsers might be unable to render correctly. I imagine they have some security problems and would probably have some problems with some websites.
mtPaint - it’s like Microsoft Paint. It’s the only raster image editing program - no GIMP on here.
Beaver, Nano, Vim - these are the text editors/programming editors. Beaver appears to be some really simple version of Emacs.
Ted Word Processing, MS Word Viewer - not even Abiword appeared to be included. Ted Word Processing looks like something from about 15 years ago.
AIM, ICQ, IRC - commandline versions - nAIM, nICQ, and nIRC.
Assorted Games
In the end, I think DSL can only be recommended for when you absolutely must be able to fit all your programs into 50 MB. It seems to be lacking in some key programs such as a good office suite, the GIMP, any nice email clients. The web browsers are all begining to get a bit ancient. I’ve used it before and I’d use it again in a bind, but I wouldn’t saddle anyone into using this on a daily basis.
Feather Linux was the next one I tried. It appeared to get stuck on the “Scannign for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab…” part. At least, I got bored after seven minutes. I removed my memory stick and tried again. Again no dice, so I tried turning off my external hard drive. This seemed to be the trick. Why couldn’t it read attached storage?
Boot Time
Boot time was about 2 minutes. One neat thing was that it asked me what resolution and color depth I wanted as well as whether I had a USB mouth. With the resolution question asked, Feather Linux looked a lot LESS crowded on the desktop than DSL did. I’m sure there was some cheat code I could pass to DSL, but I was doing this based purely on starting it up and hitting enter at the proper screen.
Window Manager
The Window Manager in Feather Linux 0.7.5 is Fluxbox.
Net Connection
The net connection worked on Feather Linux which is weird since both DSL and Feather Linux derive from Knoppix. Perhaps Feather uses a newer kernel?
Programs
At first I thought there wouldn’t be much of a difference between DSL and Feather Linux. After all, they both use Firefox 1.0 and Dillo for their web browser. However, it seems that the Feather folks have packed in a LOT more programs. They do appear to be a bit behind the times in all their applications, however. They have Ethereal (useful for observing what’s going on in the network and kismet which is great for 802.11 hacking and cracking. They are still using gAIM instead of Pidgin.
For office work they have Abiword. It’s not quite as refined as Open Office.org , but a lot of people swear by Abiword. They have version 2.2.1 - I’m not sure how old that is.
Interestingly enough, there are no games on the disc.
All of the editors from emacs to vi are represented.
Feather Linux is supposed to have a mode that can be triggered from inside LiveCD mode to move everything to run from RAM. This did not work on my computer. However, all of the programs launched quickly enough. Given that there are more programs in Feather Linux and that it detected my ethernet connection, it may be my replacement small distro. It certainly seems to have advantages over DSL. (Although the part where it didn’t boot up with my USB stick or external hard drive connected was weird)
Next up I tried Puppy Linux. People have been talking about this one like there’s no tomorrow. I tried version 3.01 and I know 4.x just came out recently, but for my distro reviews I’m sticking to whatever comes in the latest Linux Format Magazine to save on bandwidth and blank CDs. Strangely, the CD wouldn’t boot when I just let it boot normally. I was about to give up on Puppy, but, on a whim, I decided to go ahead and load it all in RAM. It worked! And it was ridiculously fast!!
Boot Time
It took around three minutes, but it also asked a lot of questions such as what keyboard I was using.
Window Manager
Like the rest of the gang, Puppy Linux is using Joe’s Window Manager
Net Connection
At first it didn’t work. Then I realized what a dork I was. The background told me what to do! So I followed those directions and t