Shattered Photo - Inkscape Screencast

I've finished another Inkscape screencast, Episode 032 to be specific. This one shows one way of creating a shattered glass effect with a photo image using Inkscape. I've uploaded a lower quality version to YouTube and of course you can find it in significantly higher quality, along with all of our other screencasts at: screencasters.heathenx.org

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. :)

Gaming nostalgia and a possible time sinkhole...

Back in the day, I used to enjoy me the odd pc-based videogame. I was heavy into the racing sim games which varied from the high quality (Indy500 from Papyrus, Geoff Crammond's GP1,GP2 and GP3) to the very low (Bill Elliot's Nascar Challenge, and the old Road&Track Grand Prix Unlimited game - eeewww, what's that smell??).

But my pc-gaming experience extended past the racing sim genre to include a few other favourites. Two of which I've recently re-experienced using a neat utility called DosBox. DosBox is an open-source DOS emulator. Indeed, I have been using DosBox at work for some time, since it's the only way I can get a favourite old DOS-based design program running within XP. From their website:

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games...

So locating the files for two of my absolute all-time favourites, 4D Sports Boxing and Out of this World (which was called 'Another World' in the UK), I immediately fired up DosBox, mounted the C:\ drive to a specified folder on my system and it ran them both flawlessly, sound included - just like they ran on my old 386 and P75 machines.

Out of this World is still a marvel of interesting gameplay. The theatrical intro, ultra cool background music and polygon based graphics made this one a cult hit then. It's still a great challenge to play. Think of it as Prince of Persia but much more elegant and involving. I remember spending countless hours trying to figure out solutions to the problems I faced in the game, without the benefit of Google or it's associated cheat and hint code environment.

So indeed, if you've got a hankerin' for that pc game from long ago, check out DosBox and let the retro roll!!

And if arcade gaming was also your thing (think Zaxxon, Galaga, Q-bert, Omega Race and Joust) then you could always check out the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or Mame for short. You can find the mame site here, or if you're a linux user, check your repos, you might be a quick 'sudo apt-get install xmame-common' away from retro gaming nirvana like I was. ;)

Caution: This post holds the potential for a massive time sinkhole. You have been warned!! :)

Were you a gamer in years past? Share some of your faves in the comments.

The graphic app that will change the world!!

via Digg,

Finally! Something windows users can be proud of, and Mac users can just sit and drool over:




:)

Excuses Excuses

Too much work + not enough time = very little blogging

But in the meantime, I did find this hilarious:

A source for free comic fonts...

Among the 1001 other things I've wanted to learn more about is comic design and creation. A nice find this week was the Comic Tools Blog. Via that blog, I found a homey 90's looking website of the very experienced comic letterer Todd Klein. Lots of interesting information there.

Of course, being into Inkscape I was keen on the computerized end of things. Long story short, I ended up at the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering site. They sell a wide range of comic fonts, but wouldn't you know - they also offer several high quality free fonts for non-commercial use.

I'm sure experienced comic artists already know all this stuff, so for any of you aspiring web comic artists out there, you might want to check it out.

Incidentally, one of the free fonts there was called Evil Genious. Dave Slusher would be proud. ;)

ps - Come to think of it, I miss Earl's comic-captioned photos too. Where'd they go Earl?

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Watching the horrible news of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. CNN is currently listing 3 fatalities. Watching the footage, I'm thinking the news will get significantly worse. :(

As a structural engineer, things like this scare the hell out of me. I'm not sure if it's naive to take the safety of our buildings and bridges for granted, or a testament to our engineering and construction know-how when we realize how few and far between failures like this are.

There are many variables that can lead to a structural failure: errors in design, errors in construction, and errors in maintenance. And make no mistake, engineers, designers and constructors are only human. And humans make errors. Let's just hope they find out what those errors were, and what we can learn from them.

Check out The GUIdebook

If you're interested in screenshots, icons and splash screens of various GUI's over the years from GeoWorks, Amiga Workbench, CDE, NextStep, BeOS, OS/2, Windows, Mac and others, check out GUIdebook.org. While the front page notes a last update of Oct/06, I still found plenty of good images, and info on the development of various GUI systems.

The navigation on the site tells me that they were planning (or maybe are still planning) to provide a very wide breadth of information on GUI's and OS's from timelines to graphics and news. There are a quite a few areas to explore, but naturally some areas are thin on information as you might expect. A nice find anyway though.

One GUI I couldn't find on the site was the old OpenWindows desktop (a piece of which is shown above). I used this desktop during graduate school for my thesis which dumped me into the deep end of C programming, make files and gcc. Nevertheless the OpenWindows desktop (and unix in general) seemed like a revelation to me at the time (just previous to the launch of Win95). Very high resolution - for that time - and a desktop capable of really multitasking made me frown when I went back to my apartment where I was running Windows 3.11 at 800x600 and bombing around the Compuserve forums using OzWin.. ;)

Google Image Labeler - Using the User

Have you ever tried out Google Image Labeler? I had never heard of it, and I'm not sure if it's new or not.

Doing a quick image search on something, I was presented with the question at the bottom of my results asking whether or not I wanted to try it. Curious, I clicked the link to find out what it was. According to their web page, Image Labeler is:

"...a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results."

So you get paired up with a partner and for two minutes you are shown a variety of images. As each image is presented, you (and your partner) enter plausible labels for the image. When you and your partner match up on a given label, you move on to the next picture. At the end of it, you're presented with a score and ranking.

It's no surprise to me that Google has given a neat way to help improve their search product and involve the user in the process. They don't hide the fact that yes, they are using you to improve their search. I took a few minutes out to do it and it was quite fun to see how high I could get my score. It didn't bother me in the least. How effective it is at improving their product I don't know.

[note: I'm assuming you need a google account to use Image Labeler - not entirely sure]

DIY Linux Box (literally!)

Anybody who has ever seen the Red Green show will have come to know the full potential of duct tape. If Red Green wanted a linux box, you just know he would have made it himself, and it would have looked something like this one.

[via digg]

Screencasting Workflow Mess

I was a bit overwhelmed last night putting together my last screencast. The actual recording of the screencast was done early last week and took about 25 minutes. But last night I set about getting things in order to upload things to the site and to YouTube. Needless to say the whole process was a dog's breakfast and took me several times longer than it should have.

So in order to try and get a handle on it, I've used Gliffy to do up a simple flowchart (see below) of the shameful process I used. You will plainly see that I don't know what I'm doing. But that shouldn't be news to anyone. ;)

Have a look if your interested and give me some suggestions if you see some step or process that is plainly retarded.

I'm going to try and streamline this mess so that it doesn't take me 3 hours of fiddling to get things online once I finish recording a screencast. We'll see how that goes. ;)

Device Graphic - Inkscape Screencast

Amidst the quagmire heathenx and I are calling 'Codec Hell', I did manage to get another Inkscape screencast done. This one demonstrates the use of Inkscape's guides, gradients and some shadow effects to come up with a decent looking 3D device graphic. This one is about 17 minutes long (my longest to date), so I had to split the YouTube version into two parts. Hopefully I won't lose anybody at the halfway mark. With their 10min/100MB limitation it makes screencasting about something substantial a bit of a tough one. But that's one of the reasons we started screencasters.heathenx.org. So if you want to see the whole video in one piece, and in significantly higher quality, check it out there instead.

Also, please let us know via our blog at screencasters.wordpress.com or via the comments here if you have any trouble watching the video.

New organic food logo...

The Canadian Federal Government has come up with a new logo for organic foods that have been tested and certified by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

I have nothing against organic foods or the logo, but at first glance it reminded me of the Maple Leaf Foods logo for some reason.

Even though you'd find it tough to argue that the two logos were anything but distinct, there was enough there, that as a Canadian consumer, it's the first thing I thought of. And if that feeling is widespread, it might be quite beneficial to Maple Leaf Foods Inc. in the long run. Lucky break maybe.

Police Reunion Tour - Awesome Concert

A nice last minute opportunity gave the wife and I floor seats (16th row) for the Police reunion tour concert in Toronto tonight. I'm not always a big fan of rock shows, but this was awesome awesome awesome!

Even the opening band (Fiction Plane, fronted by Sting's son Joe Sumner) was pretty darn good. He's got a very strong voice reminiscent of his father and Bono. There was a lot of young middle-agers there. And while it had its fair share of cougars and cougar-wannabes, there is something to be said for an audience who's there to sing and dance without the aggression and stupidity of youth. Not quite as friendly and nice as the beautiful James Taylor concert we went to years back, but very nice nonetheless.

The Police have always been one of my favourite bands. And I think they've stood the test of time so well because of their complete lack of schtick and the fact that their music has always been so unique and honest. Just three guys rocking out without the hairspray, pyrotechnics and gimmicks.

They played for about 90 minutes and then did two encores as well. I could have sat there just watching Stewart Copeland drum all friggin' night. What an amazing band - very very impressed.

My favourite of the night: Truth Hits Everybody (from the album Outlandos d'Amour). I hadn't heard this song for years, but it brought me right back to a 1982 trip down to Florida in the back seat of my uncle's Monte Carlo.. tape deck blaring. :)

If you get a chance to see them on this reunion tour, I highly recommend it.

Intel Onboard Graphics Performance Upgrade in 10 Seconds

I've had this desktop computer for two and a half years. I've been running Linux pretty steadily since October 2005.

Today, July 20, 2007, I figured out that I could enter the bios upon bootup and increase my onboard video card's shared ram (default 8MB) to 32MB. This took a total of about 10 seconds.

Performance is now significantly improved everywhere on my system.

I, faithful reader, am an idiot.

So if you own a pc with an Intel onboard graphics chip (mine is an i915) and it uses shared ram, do yourself a favour and check if your bios will let you increase the default amount.

Now excuse me while I go tar and feather myself.

8 Things You Didn't Know About Me

Earl Moore has tagged me to supply Eight Things Previously Unknown. They ended up being a bit wordier than expected so apologies there, but let's get down to it:

1. I eat a bowl of cereal almost every night before bed. I've done this since I was probably 5 years old. Special K - lightly sugared, is my absolute favourite.

2. Out of high school, I applied for Architecture at 3 schools. One of them accepted me, but at that time they were not fully accredited with the Ontario Architect's Association (they are now). I declined and went into engineering in Ottawa instead. The rest is (a lower paying) history. :)

3. I worked for my father's company in plumbing and pipe-fitting work for years. My first duties were answering phones, filing, and accounting/payroll ledger work starting at the tender age of 13. I moved on to actual construction work at 16. From the start I learned that an honest day's work is something to value. Since then I've always respected hard honest work much more than easy money. Spoiled son of the boss, I was not. My dad wouldn't have put up with that crap.

4. I have an older brother (2 years older). We got along well (and still do) but in a lot of ways we're as different as the day is long. He's a licensed plumber and moved out west to Edmonton several years ago. We speak about twice a year on the phone. He's a man of few words, always has been. But still we get along remarkably well. We accepted our differences long long ago.

5. My father was born in northern Italy, my Mom in Manitoba. I only ever had an Italian set of grandparents since my Mom was basically abandoned as a young teen by her family. And although some of her family is still alive, I've never met them and never care to. I think my Dad, Mom and brother went out to visit them before I was born, and we've never ever been back since - I guess that tells you how well it went. ;) Do I feel at a loss? No. Not at all. My mom has always been remarkably strong and self-sufficient. I love that. I can't speak much Italian and my Nonno and Nonna couldn't speak much English, so I never really had the typical grandparent-grandchild relationship that most others did.

6. At age 9 I was at a week long summer hockey camp. On a dare, I picked up a pay phone, dialed zero and said 'There's a bomb here..' and quickly hung up. I almost soiled myself 15 minutes later when police and fire trucks arrived to evacuate the community centre. I was never caught, and I never made another crank call again. Boy, you can be remarkably stupid at nine years of age.

7. After graduating from university, my first engineering job involved being a technical specialist for a startup company developing a new extruded concrete building product. The money was great and I had my own big office. I thought I had it made. After 4 months it turned out that the owners were trying to take the company public and were swindling shareholders in the process. It all ended for me during a shareholders meeting at a downtown hotel. I sat in the audience and was called out by the owner to tell everyone when the product testing certification was finally going to be completed. He expected me to say one month. I told the truth and said six months. I was let go shortly after. I was glad I left. The owner ended up in big trouble with the securities commission and was even sentenced to some jail time. Talk about a rude introduction into the engineering world.

8. I did all kinds of semi-embarrassing things as a kid. I learned to knit at age 5, took tap dancing lessons around age 7, accordion around age 7 or 8 too. I learned to do laundry well before 8 years of age and could cook a decent supper shortly thereafter. At around 7 years old, using one of my mother's cookbooks as a guide, I made and baked an apple pie from scratch while she napped (Mom was a shift-working emergency nurse). She told me the kitchen was an absolute disaster area but the pie tasted great. As a result of this type of upbringing, one of the things I always encourage of our daughter is self-reliance. Don't wait to be taught something if you can learn it yourself.

Now to tag 5 others to share their own 8 unknown things. Feel free to ignore if you're not into meme's or if you've done it already:

Perwari Naan

Donncha O Caoimh

David Airey

Will Simpson

Rich Burridge

My new favourite blog post...

You've got to hand it to Dave Slusher. He took all of my heightening disinterest in Web2.0, social networks and  startups and splattered it all out in one fell swoop. Bravo sir, Bravo!

Three cheers for Dave!!

iPhone's style was originally based on something else...

... the Zenith Space Command remote control from the 70's! Plink!


Wonderfully chunky, rounded-rectangle device. Friends of the family had one and I was jealous. We were still using one of those rectangular brown plastic boxes with the 20 buttons along the top (kuh-chunk!) with the wire running to the tv.

Little did I know at the time, but the Space Command remote didn't even require batteries. It worked on sound frequencies, something akin to a tuning fork. To me it was very cool. Almost like something from Space: 1999.

I wax nostalgic.. Sorry.

Nuking the Firefox Search Box and Finding a Better Way

One of the things I never use in Firefox is the search box up in the right corner. I finally figured out how to get rid of it, and it's super easy-peasy.

Thanks to this wonderful post, you just right-click a blank area on the toolbar, select customize and then drag the search box into the customize window and POOF! it's gone. Fabulous.

So how do I search? Well I go to altavista.com and then I ... er.. just joking - sadly. What I do is go to google.com the very first time and do the following:

1. Right-click the search box.
2. Choose 'Add a Keyword for this Search'
3. Name the keyword search.
4. Add a keyword. So for this one I entered 'gg'
5. Click OK.

For then on, when I want to google search something like 'favourite sandwich', I open a new tab (Ctrl-T), type 'gg favourite sandwich' in the address bar and hit 'Enter'. This launches a google search for whatever I typed after the 'gg'.

I find this feature to be infinitely useful for a variety of searches. I personally have the following keyword searches saved:

gg <search terms> - Google Search
gis <search terms> - Google Image Search
gbs <search terms> - Google BlogSearch
tn <search terms> - Technorati Search
mdb <search terms> - IMDB Search
wkp <search terms> - Wikipedia Search

If you're comfortable typing, you'll undoubtedly find this to be a real timesaver. The nice thing is that by hitting Ctrl-T to open a new tab, it plunks the cursor up in the address bar anyway - so just hit Ctrl-T, and type away people!

Problem sending large Gmail attachments.. Anybody?

On my windows box here at work, I've always had a problem sending
attachments of any significant size through Gmail. If I try to send an
email with a 150kb file, no problemo. But if I try to send something
that's say, 1.5MB, it just sits there and never sends it.

I'm connected through a LAN which runs through a proxy server
(FreeProxy) here at work, so maybe that's the problem. I don't have
any of these problems on my home machine.

I've tried increasing the dom.max_script_run_time setting in Firefox's
about:config page, but this seems to have done nothing to help me.

Anybody out there have any clues?

Quick Command Line Tip - for XP users no less

I'm always eager to shout about the benefits of the command line to whoever will listen, even if it's XP.

I had a colleague here ask me about how to get a printed out listing of files in a given directory. He was told by a friend that he could use MS-Paint to...

whoa whoa whoa.. I stopped him in his tracks. I'm sure MS-Paint is a solution for something (doubtful, but maybe), however printing out directory listings is definitely NOT it!

I showed him how, by opening up the XP command line, you could navigate to the folder in question and then just do:

dir > filelist.txt

Which of course does the 'dir' command but puts the listing into a text file of your choosing instead of displaying it. The text file I argued, was infinitely more useful than a bmp image. The only downside I told him was having to navigate to the folder you want with a series of cd commands. I demonstrated the TAB completion that XP has in its console window to aid in this regard.

However, a quick google search yielded this page, which describes a few different methods of getting a 'Open Up Command Prompt Here..' function into your right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.

Very useful! ;)

Mis-Advertised price. What would you do?

Okay, it's ethical question time again. Have I ever asked an ethical question here? Dunno. But here goes:

You go visit the Acme Co. website and notice that they're showing their rocket-powered roller skates on sale for $24.99. You're impressed, mostly because those specific skates are normally listed somewhere around $125.00.

Soon, Acme Co. realizes that the pricing shown is a mistake and erects some sort of electronic barrier to block the page. Some enthusiastic shoppers (who obviously love rocket-powered roller skates) are able to circumvent the barrier and find the incorrect listings. They place orders. Lots of orders.

Shortly thereafter, Acme issues a notice describing the mistake and offered those customers a discount. Normal orders on those mis-priced roller skates increase by 200X over the weekend.

Now would you:

A) Take the discount and be happy.

B) Accept the discount, grumble and tell Acme Co. that it should be more careful.

or,

C) Capitalize on Acme's mistake and fight - for four years -right up to the Supreme Court of Canada.


For me, it's either A) or B) depending on the situation. For a Quebec man and his dealings with Dell Inc. it's C).

There are lots of other minute but important details to the case. But it just drives me nuts when I see people try to capitalize on other people's mistakes in that way.

No, I'm no saint. I've had people undercharge me for things, and later, when I realize it, I've been pleasantly surprised. But there are many more times where someone has undercharged me and I realize it right there and then. I tell them. They appreciate it. I feel good.

Maybe I'm just hokey. Or does the idea of spending 4 years fighting for my right to capitalize on someone else's mistake sound perfectly noble to you?

Pre-Hammered Sinatra

I finally got around to watching Steve Gillmor's Bad Sinatra 1. Since I don't own an iPhone (and have no desire to), I decided I'd use the nifty program DeVeDe to burn it to a DVD and experience the full glory of Gillmor on my living room TV. With a slice of cold pizza in hand, I hit the play button and watched.

After it was over, I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't feel as though it was '38 minutes I'd never get back'. Clearly it's not polished. Hopefully it never will be. Steve still has his magic. His ability to annoy, cajole and make me chuckle has remained untainted over his months of relative silence. I'm glad.

High points? Dan Farber, definitely. Devoid of the scene-stealing, attention hungry bravado of Calacanis, Farber continues to forcefully right the apple cart that Steve is constantly trying to upset. I admire his attempts at pinning Steve down on some of the issues. Never quite successful mind you, but it's sure fun watching him try.

Other things I liked - Doc Searls of course. Pre-hammered shit and the state of VRM. Now there's a white paper for you. He made me laugh - more than a couple of times.

I wasn't impressed with a lot of the other stuff, not because it wasn't important (to someone), but it wasn't to me. If it was up to me, it would be the Steve, Dan and Doc Show all over again - there is long standing magic there I think - you can hear.. er.. see it. And just to ice the cake, put Jon Udell on speakerphone in every episode and pan away to a lovely scenic shot just as he's about to make his big point on the crackly speaker. That was classic too.

Annoyances? Damn Robert.. straighten the hat and adjust the camera if you need to. I know it's cool to be a nerd these days, but c'mon, that just couldn't be comfortable.

I'm interested to see where it goes. If it's anything like the Gang of old, I'm sure Steve has no idea where that is. ;)

Oh yeah... Note to Steve. The USB input on my new Kia's stereo, combined with my 100km daily commute says to me that audio podcasting is anything but 'dead'. I must have listened to 35 Diggnation episodes and have only ever watched two and they even have hot babes on there sometimes ;) - The power of video podcasting is not as strong as you'd like to think.

I guess the true test will be if I create an audio version of your video show and feel I'm not missing anything. Wanna pull a Diggnation and save me the work by providing an mp3 only feed too?

Didn't think so. ;)

Expanding the Dell Linux experiment...

Dell's interest in Linux is getting thicker... and Leons getting larger...

25 absolutely free Inkscape screencasts to anyone who can tell me in
the comments where the 2nd half of that line comes from... ;)

7th Son podcast now back from hiatus.. Finally!!

Almost forgot!

JC Hutchin's fabulous audio trilogy 7th Son is finally back from hiatus. Book Three: Episode Zero is now up (and looks like it was posted on July 4th).

If you're into listening to audiobooks, and you're a fan of the great action/thriller/sci-fi genre, you owe it to yourself to subscribe. I was initially pulled into listening to it via a mention on Chess Griffins' LinuxReality podcast and before long I was completely hooked. It's very very well done and I recommend it highly.

[update: Episode 0 was just a recap of the story so far.. Good news though, JC has Episode 1 up on the site now, right on schedule. ;) ]

Web Design Gone Bad...

[** WARNING ** People prone to epileptic seizures beware!!! Seriously!]

You just know a Digg comment thread is going to be fun when the title of the post is:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Ever_wonder_what_the_worst_looking_site_on_the_internet_is

Lots of good... er.. bad ...er... horrible competing sites in the comment thread. Makes MySpace look like CSSZenGarden.

Screencasters... The Blog

Lock up your daughters... Screencasters now has a blog!

If you want to keep up with new episodes, leave your comments on how good (or bad) you feel the work is, or just want to discuss something inkscapey, screencastey, or anything else, then head on over to screencasters.wordpress.com and subscribe to the feed.

Cheers.

RQ

iPhone, Woodstock and Peeing in Nature.. you figure it out

I was listening to Twit103 earlier today and of course it was iPhone mania. I have absolutely no interest in the iPhone, but at the same time I understand the enthusiasm of others. However, I have to draw the line at the statements made in that episode comparing the wait in line for an iPhone to Woodstock. I mean puhhhleeeeze...

No, I'm not old enough to have gone to Woodstock. But this past weekend we took a short 3 day trip over the border to Buffalo and got stuck in line at the border (Queenston/Lewiston bridge) for 3 hours. Now I would never compare this to Woodstock, but people were wandering off into the bushes on the side of the highway to relieve themselves or 'pee in nature' as my 5 year old daughter likes to put it. That by itself makes it more like Woodstock than any iPhone line.

Sheesh people. Get a grip.

Neon Sign Effect - Inkscape Screencast

I've done a new Inkscape screencast. This one quickly (very quickly) demonstrates how to easily achieve a neon sign effect. Maybe you're putting together a tawdry pr0n site or something. ;) What's next you're asking yourself... flashing Unicorn gifs?? :)

Check out this episode and all of our other Inkscape screencasts at screencasters.heathenx.org where you can view the flash version online or download a high quality avi of your very own.

My Open Source Oasis

I first started dabbling with Linux almost three years ago. In the past year it became my primary OS at home, and now it's the sole occupant of my home pc. But at work we run AutoCAD on XP Pro, so there's no escaping the giant from Redmond I guess. However, I have managed to maintain my little 'open-source oasis' in this proprietary desert. Here's how I cope:

First, I run windows versions of my favourite Linux apps. Inkscape, GIMP, and GVim get a full workout here on my XP box at work. More recently I've been pleasantly surprised to find that Avidemux (which I use for a bunch of screencasting tasks) has a windows version too. As does Blender, the 3D modelling and animation application that we used to create that 15 second animation for our screencast intros at screencasters.heathenx.org. Oh, and don't forget Audacity which I use for a bit of audio editing - which has a perfectly serviceable windows version. And let's not forget OpenOffice which I try to use in lieu of MS-Office whenever I can. Of course Firefox goes without saying.

Next, I run Cygwin, which is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It isn't an emulator and won't run native linux apps on windows, but you can recompile linux applications from source to run on Cygwin. However my needs are much simpler. I mostly use it as a terminal for file management and my todo list duties. There is even a port of the X-Window system called Cygwin/X that allows you to run many graphical Linux apps inside of windows. For some reason I can't seem to get that working - something to do with our proxy server setup here at work. A head-scratcher that is...

Interestingly, I ran Cygwin from a shortcut on my desktop but was frustrated by the fact that it ran inside a DOS window. This limited my font choices to raster fonts or Lucida console 12pt. I could do various things to customize the bash shell (colours etc..) but the font limitation seemed to stick. That is, until I found these instructions for running rxvt on top of Cygwin.

Now I run a shortcut to rxvt and set up the shortcut to launch with whatever font I want. Here's my current shortcut launch command to get rxvt up and running:
C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe rxvt -sl 1500 -fn "Consolas-14" -bg black -fg grey -sr -e bash --login -i



Now you combine this with the recent excellent blog post (and comments) by Kyle Pott at Lifehacker about turbocharging your terminal, and you've got a perfectly serviceable linux terminal inside of XP.

So there you have it. That's how I get my Linux fix at work. If you're a lone Linux fish swimming in proprietary waters, how do you cope?

It's so simple now...

From the "I wish I had said that" file comes:

"you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?"

Courtesy of Jason Kottke.

[via evhead].

Starting from square one - update

An update on my journey back to square one...

I've installed a lot of the apps I normally use that don't come pre-installed in Ubuntu Feisty like Rawstudio, Inkscape, Avidemux, vlc, mplayer and beep media player. No problems there. You gotta love linux distros and their repository systems. In Feisty, there are 21,000 odd packages available for installation and they're just a click away.

I took a stab at installing the new Compiz-Fusion compositing system for those lovely desktop effects, and while it worked, the startup of Compiz was painfully slow and the configuration app seems very kludgy compared to where Beryl is. It also seemed to bring instability to the performance on my system. So off it went.

After verifying that the desktop performance of standard Metacity was up to snuff (it was), I have now installed a fresh copy of Beryl and I'm a happy camper once again.

Problems? A single small one at the moment. My dsl seems to disconnect at random times. Sometimes it will stay up for hours and other times will go out every 10 or 15 minutes. I end up having to do a 'pon dsl-provider' in a terminal window to get it back up and running. It's strange. I can't seem to figure out what could be causing it. I thought it might be the suspend or sleep mode of my system, but I've turned that off and still get the behaviour. If anyone's got any clues on what might be turning it off I'd be thankful. I don't have a router and run straight into my DSL modem, but don't know if that matters or not.

Anyway, the system is running much better that it used to. I am the proverbial Happy Camper right now.

Screencasters Update

There has been significant discussion over on this thread at inkscapeforum.com about our screencasters.heathenx.org site. We received several good suggestions and as a result we've updated the site slightly. Kudos to heathenx for his successful journey through video encoding hell, and his patience with my absolute skill at butchering his CSS work. ;)

Here's the low-down on the changes:

- tweaks to the css to make it suck less in IE browsers

- we're now streaming the swf files and offering up avi files for direct download (the avi's are encoded with xvid and mp3 codecs for those interested).

- we now show the size of the avi file so that you know what you're about to download

- we added anchor links for each episode so if great people like Ryan Lerch and Nico Buculei and other Inkscapers want to blog about specific screencasts they can link directly to the specific episode

That's pretty much it. If you've got more suggestions, keep 'em coming. Although now maybe heathenx and I can concentrate more on coming up with some new screencasts.

Speed Linking? Didn't know it was called that - but I like it.

David Airey posts about 'speed linking'. I had never heard the term before, but I've seen plenty of it. In fact, Kent Newsome's Evening Reading posts could be termed speed-link posts and are among my favourite reads.

It's actually a pretty accurate term too. I find myself zipping through Kent's ER posts very quickly. I find them to be low commitment - that is, I go in knowing they're not going to be in-depth dissertations on a single topic - which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy a good long well-written post, but at times I want something lighter and fast-paced. He gives me his quick take on a variety of topics and provides the links should I want them. No pressure. In and out.

And it's not a simple link blog post. I get to see what things are piquing Kent's interest at the moment along with his take on them. And it's fun - because I never know what I'm going to find in there. The writing style has a lot to do with it too. Someone pointing me to their delicious links or to their Google Reader shared feeds is NOT the same thing.

I'm not sure how long Kent (or David) spends crafting these things. I fly through them quickly and they 'read quickly' if that means anything, but I imagine they're not so quick to put together. I'd be interested in hearing for instance how long it takes Kent to put together one of his evening reads. David? Kent?

Clean Slate

After about 2.5 hours of backing up my XP and Linux data to my new USB external hard drive, I popped in the Fiesty install CD and wiped the slate. In a relatively quick 40 minutes, I was back up and running. I had no problems with the install at all. Very nice.

But boy did I ever do a lot of tweaking and customization to my system over the past year or so. You don't realize all the fiddling you've done until it's all stripped away and you're back at square one. I've got a lot of re-tweaking ahead of me, but at least I'll now be running XP-free on this machine (at least in the non-virtual sense if that means anything). Anyway, it's sometimes refreshing to start with a clean slate.

I've now got about 90MB of updates to download and install - seems like the perfect time to let it do it's thing while I sleep. ;)

All revved up, not sure where to go...

I spotted a good deal on a 500GB external USB 2.0 drive, and decided to pick one up this morning. It's an IOMagic drive and cost me $170 CAD (plus taxes of course). While I know kind of what I plan to do with it, I'm still mulling over the finer points. If you've got suggestions I'd love to hear them. Here's what I'm thinking:

My machine has been a mess ever since I set it up as dual boot XP/Linux box. I've never been fully pleased with the performance of linux on this box and I think part of the reason is that the boot drive is a SATA drive, which caused weird problems with early versions of Ubuntu. I could never really get the dual boot setup working right, and performance on the machine is quite spotty.

Since upgrading to Feisty, things have been much better, but still at times it feels like it's got a P3-800 chip on it and not the P4-3Ghz chip that's actually on there. Processing operations are sometimes slow and other times rebooting seems to cure the problem - something that should NOT be a problem on a Linux box.

Anyway, I plan to use the new drive to back up all of my data that resides on my XP and Ubuntu partitions and wipe everything clean, starting from scratch. I'm going to install a fresh copy of Feisty on it, and then run XP in a virtual machine - yes, there are still a couple of things I need XP for... :(

So here's where my questions begin - pardon any stupidity:

1. Do I have to format this 500 GB drive? I'm assuming that I do. Should I do it in multiple partitions? And what type. I was going to do the whole thing in ext3. I can see all my XP data from within Linux now, so I'm assuming that's the best route.

2. Once the backup is done, is there a definitive 'best' partition setup to use for the fresh Ubuntu Feisty install on my internal drives? I've got 2 - 160GB internal hard drives. One is SATA the other is IDE. I can let Ubuntu do it's thing automatically. Is this the best way? Anybody got any pointers on this?

3. Is there any point in trying to preserve the various app settings and configurations that I have? I was just going to really start fresh. And that means reinstalling and configuring a lot of things from scratch. I'm a bit worried that if I try to migrate system settings that my past performance problems might follow me.

4. Is there anything I definitely need to save before wiping out my existing system? I've got all my ISP info on paper, and I generally don't use saved passwords and logon info from my browser so that's likely not a problem. But should I grab device info (like hard drive info) before starting the install? Is there a way to easily get this data? (maybe the dmesg logs?)


Those are my main questions right now. I will be taking the plunge this weekend whether or not I get any suggestions or advice. I'm far too impatient, especially when it comes to geeky stuff like my pc, to wait ;).

A New Site is Born...

Well we've gone and done it. Fellow Inkscape screencaster heathenx and I have spent the last month or so putting together a home for higher quality versions of our screencasts. You can see the fruits of our labour at http://screencasters.heathenx.org.

About 6 months ago I uploaded my first Inkscape screencast to YouTube and soon after heathenx started doing them too [he does nothing but copy me ;)]. We've had plenty of views on YouTube, but two things always bugged us. The quality/size of the video, and the 10 minute/100MB limitation on uploads.

So while we won't be abandoning the YouTube posts, we're going to be putting our screencasts over on the new site and likely posting versions to YouTube in tandem with that.

We've got all of our 23 episodes up on the site right now. We decided to encode them in flash format (.swf files) for two reasons really: ubiquity of the flash format and easier streaming capability. You can download the swf files to your local machine and view them in your browser or any flash capable media player, or watch them right on the site in your browser. The site also has an RSS feed which will serve mainly as a outlet for announcements - ie. not as a video blog per se, at least for the time being.

Call me a masochist, but I have to say that the hurdles and challenges we had to overcome to get the site the way we wanted was the most fun I've had in a while. Both heathenx and myself are engineers and because of that, I think that we're pretty much in our element when stuck with a problem and left to our own devices. The fact that we share the same dry and sometimes childish sense of humour didn't hurt the fun factor either. A quick check of the About page will illustrate that fact quite clearly. :)

And that's really the whole motive behind it. Fun. Sure, we could easily use the site to make millions (after all, we developed a completely custom-built content management system for it - in 80 lines of python [cough cough]), but we're far too modest for that. ;)

So if you've enjoyed any of our past screencasts, or want to check them out, head on over to the site at: http://screencasters.heathenx.org

We'd appreciate your feedback to help improve the site, so if you've got any comments or questions, you can comment on this post, or email us at: screencasters AT heathenx.org

And of course, if you like the site (or hell, even if you don't) spread the word to your screencast and/or Inkscape loving friends.

Wiki research in mindmap format... nice!

I've always been a fan of the concept of mind mapping, but for the most part, for me, it has remained in the realm of pencil and paper. I've found a few good tools, but just haven't put enough effort into any of them thus far.

Will Simpson posts about a great online app called WikiMindMap which pulls the search results for any term from wikipedia.org and displays it in a mindmap format. The output is great for this type of data since it let's you expand different nodes to effectively drill down without the clutter.

I've seen a few posts in my feed list about mind mapping in the past. What tools are people using to do this stuff on the desktop? Leave a comment and let me know.

Daddy's day...

To all fathers out there. Happy Father's Day.

Make sure to celebrate it with those that make you a father. Namely
your sons or daughters.

Hope you all enjoy the day.

Another Twist on the Quick Chill

Here's a twist on the cold beer hack I spotted over on lifehack.org this morning. That post suggests using a tray full of salted ice water in the freezer to quickly chill a room temp beer. If, like me, you haven't got any room in your freezer, a trick that I've used to good effect in the past to achieve similar results is as follows:

1. Pour a sink or bucket full of cold water, some ice and some salt. Make it deep enough that the entire bottle (or can) of beer can be submerged including the air trapped in the neck of the bottle - that's crucial.

2. Grasping the bottle top in your fingers, spin it back and forth keeping it as vertical as possible. Higher rpm is better but don't strain yourself - you're chilling a beer after all ;).

3. A couple of minutes of that will drop the temperature to a respectable degree.

4. Dry off the bottle and add a side of nacho chips, chicken wings or pizza to suit. Enjoy.


I think spinning keeps the beer from foaming, and also keeps moving the warm beer in the middle of the bottle out to the sides where it's nice and cold. The part about submerging the air in the bottle neck is crucial since this can inhibit the chilling effect.

If you're good, you can spin two at once and enjoy that beer with a friend. :)

While you should be able to do it with cans, spinning them might be more difficult. I don't normally drink canned beer, but give it a try. What the heck.

My personal recommendations for a hot summer day are Pilsner Urquell, Creemore Springs or a nice Sam Adams.

On the DoFollow Wagon...

Following the lead of a few of my favourite reads, I've decided to disable the nofollow attribute for commenting that's built into my Blogger™ template. So to encourage commenting and discussion if you leave your link in the comments, you will be justly rewarded.

Now of course I manually moderate the comments - and oh boy, it's such an onerous job with the hundreds of comments I get on each post ;) - and any spam comments that show up will of course be swiftly dealt with. I've even put up an ominous commenting policy over on the right, but that's more just to encourage people to participate rather than lay down the proverbial law.

If you've got a Blogger™ blog and you're want to spread the Google juice to your commenters then check out this post.

It's All Text

Via Chromatic's post at the O'Reilly OnLamp blog, I tried out the It's All Text Firefox extension and I have to say I love it!

This extension lets you quickly bring up your favourite text editor any time you need to enter text on a web page. I find my own Blogger comment entry box for instance woefully small and inept. With this add-on installed, I can either right-click in the text box and choose "It's All Text" from the popup menu, or click the semi-transparent edit button that the extension puts at the bottom right of text boxes. If you haven't set an editor preference yet, it'll ask you to do so the first time.

From then on, once you do it, your editor of choice (gVim in my case) will pop up and when you save the document, the text gets pasted into the text box. Nice and simple.

I don't think it works in Gmail's rich text mode when composing an email, but a quick switch to plain text mode reveals the edit button once again. You shouldn't really be in Rich Text mode anyway should you... ;) Of course you can always compose the bulk of the text in plain text mode and then once it's been pasted in, switch to rich mode to add links and such.

All in all, a very useful tool. If you do a lot typing on the web and miss using your favourite offline editing tool, check it out.

Do you still email Word documents?

Kent Newsome cites Ed Bott, who writes about receiving MS-Word documents that inadvertently contain revision history and comments. Granted, I'm not in law, but I would assume that the engineering documents we send to our clients (sealed drawings, letters and reports) are every bit as much contract documents as what the lawyers are sending. But I have to say we very rarely ever send MS-Word documents or AutoCAD .dwg files to our clients. These days, the drawings, letters and reports that go out to our clients via email almost always go in PDF format.

The main advantage to us is formatting control. With drawings, the print quality and line weight issues have traditionally been a problem. We'd have to do a lot of futzing around with pen settings files that would have to go along with the drawings, and depending on the recipient's printer, we'd still have no guarantee that what they printed would accurately resemble what we intended. PDF solves that problem for us. The PDF we generate from AutoCAD (I use CutePDF) prints the same on the recipient's end as it does in our office. In addition, we can protect our PDF's so we can more securely send drawings with a P.Eng seal and signature - although the effectiveness of this is still a hotly debated topic among consultants.

If the documents we're sending are letters or reports to be reviewed and marked up by the client, they either have to do it using a PDF editor, or they hand mark it and send it back. If CAD drawings and plans are to be marked up or used by the client, contractor or another engineering consultant, we will send them AutoCAD .dwg files, but those drawings have the P.Eng seal and signatures removed (in fact those things are linked to documents on our servers and never get sent out anyway). But any drawings containing signatures and a seal are sent out in PDF format or hardcopy.

While we do use .doc format internally for some things [I try to use OpenOffice of course ;) ], I am always surprised and a little amused when someone sends me a Word document via email. Almost everyone in our business seems to have moved to PDF for document exchange.

Maybe Ed and Kent are talking strictly about clients being able to make revision-trackable comments and changes to documents. In that case, I can see the familiarity of MS-Word being an advantage, but the lack of protection, formatting control problems and the inadvertent escape of sensitive metadata makes me wonder why it's still the format of choice for them.

Now there's a Linux Ad...

I know you've likely seen this one before, but this IBM commercial about Linux is a heck of a lot more appealing to me than any Mac-ad spoof.

If a Tweet falls in the forest.. do I care?

I think I've officially lost all interest in Twitter. At least for now. Granted, I only have 7 friends (and 8 followers), but either Twitter is busted or nobody in my tiny circle of friends is using it anymore. There's only one who seems to be posting with any kind of frequency and he's not even what I'd call a personal contact.

I have failed to see the usefulness (for me anyway) in this style of short message posting. And believe me, I'm all for useless but fun web services, but I don't even find it fun.

I guess it's no surprise that I haven't posted a lot on Twitter - there are many things competing for my attention at the moment and it's survival of the fittest. My lack of Twitter postings (or tweets or whatever you call them) are clearly indicative of how far down the ladder of interest it is for me.

I won't close my Twitter account, but suffice it to say it will likely drop off my radar completely in short order.

In fact I think it's in a race to the bottom with Facebook at the moment. ;)

Planting The Seeds of Decent Grammar

Faithful readers,

Having read this blog, you know full well that I am not much of a grammar nazi. But I try to use proper grammar and full, reasonably coherent sentences. Sure, I throw the odd semicolon around with wild abandon, but I don't normally go around chastising people for their dangling gerunds (I looked that up btw). However, I draw the line at the increasing use of "Good" as a response to "How's it going?" or "How are you doing?".

I attempted to head this off at the pass this morning as I drove my sub 6 daughter to school:

"How is so-and-so doing?", I asked.

"Good", she replied.

Attempting to seize the opportunity and right the listing ship, I tactfully say, "Y'know... it's proper to say 'well' when someone asks you how you're doing or how is it going."

"No it's not Daddy."

"I'm pretty sure it is, cupcake.", I reply, deciding immediately that this is neither the time nor place to introduce the concept of verbs into the conversation.

"No. I'm right, and you're not Daddy."

Perhaps weakly, I resort to the standard, "This would be a good thing to ask Mrs. X".

Mrs. X being her teacher of course. The one person who can overrule whatever nonsense it is that Daddy tries to pawn off on her as knowledge.

Based on a multitude of similar conversations I've had with her in the past, this tactic usually works. Normally, I won't bring it up again right away, but (hopefully) I'll notice her slipping in the 'well' in place of the 'good' on her own accord.

Perhaps the job is just to plant the seed. All you can do is water it, care for it, and hope it grows.

Speed test anyone?

It's probably been at least a year, if not two, since I last checked into the speed of my DSL connection. I remember back then that I was supposed to get 1500 down and 500 up and that various speed tests were showing me at about 80-90% of that.

It seems my service has improved since then. (Click the graphic to visit the site and test your own connection).



Nice to see things improving.

Half the Geek

Whoa! I guess I'm not half the geek I thought I was. Scoble posts his top 35 favourite feeds of the month.

I read only three of those 35 (Digg, Lifehacker and Thomas Hawk).

I dropped Engadget a fairly long time back. Too many posts, too little interest.

Boingboing boinged it's way off my feed list about 9 months ago. Too many posts, and a little too weird. Sport jacket made entirely of meat anyone?

All things 'crunch' - I grew very tired of web2.0 startup news. I am finding this area of news more pretentious and less interesting every day - and it's not just Mike. But hey, that's just me. When Steve Gillmor closed the circus tent, I started losing interest - quickly.

Actually, I'm finding that that there are so many good and interesting relatively low-traffic blogs grabbing my interest that they are slowly but surely shoving aside many of the incumbents in my feed reader.

The old guard had better watch out.

Conversation with a Facebook Refugee

A friend of mine recently told me he was 'done with Facebook'. Naturally, I asked him why. He said that old "acquaintances" were coming out of the woodwork, and while it was great that his wife was (and still is) a Facebook member, he was uncomfortable seeing scrawlings on his wall from partners from days gone by. Clearly, he didn't want to deal with the potential problem of the 'crazy ex-girlfriend'.

He also lamented the fact that it became a way for friends and acquaintances to shoot cheeky responses around at each other. Now if you combine this with his demographic (mid to late 20's - very recently married - but very much a guys night out type of guy) you can safely assume the banter back and forth was not always G-rated (but probably quite fun.)

We soon got around to discussing the things people do and write on the web. And that while it might be fun to post outrageous things on someone's "Wall", you can't really count on being able to take them back. And further, you can't count on something you write (anywhere on the net) being really deleted or somehow disappearing into the ether after a year or two.

Now this guy is not that tech-saavy - doesn't blog, frequents YouTube but not Digg - you get the picture. So I thought it'd be fun to show him the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine. Needless to say he was amazed that so much of what has (and is) going on on the net is being archived and captured.

I have a feeling that most people in the mainstream who are now just starting to generate and publish (however inadvertently) things on the net, don't really get the potential permanence of it.

As I've said several times before, be proud of what you write (or at least not embarrassed) and you'll do fine. If you don't, you'll never know when it might come back and bite you.

ps - While I have never found Facebook very compelling, my interest in it is declining even further day by day. But then again, so is my interest in Twitter. But that's another story, for another post.

How is Technorati *supposed* to work?

I was checking out the newer, faster, better, Technorati today and did a search on 'inkscape' to see what new things people were doing. I noticed quite quickly that my YouTube hosted screencasts are there in all their glory but no mention of my blog at all. I didn't expect it to see it under the 'posts' tab since I haven't tagged anything 'inkscape' in the last few days, but I do have probably 20 or 30 posts tagged 'inkscape' on my blog so I kind of expected it to show up under the 'blogs' tab.

Hmm. I thought the Blogger(tm) labels were like any other blog tagging system and that they'd be picked up by Technorati. Maybe I've got to add Technorati specific tags to my posts like Kent does?

I signed up and 'claimed' my blog there a couple years back, but maybe I've got to be doing more to be visible there?

Anybody care to educate me on this?

Someone please tell me how this is supposed to work.

2012 Olympic logo - [cough cough] fugly [cough cough]

David Airey is not impressed with the new 2012 London Olympic logo that was recently unveiled.

I can't say I'm awestruck either.

At a rumoured $600,000.00 cost.. maybe dumbstruck is more accurate.