Every so often, I go on a trying-different-window-managers spree. This time was more depressing than usual, since I’ve tried most of the X11 window managers that are out there, even ion. By the way, I liked ION very much and I think the idea behind it does have merit, but I use too many applications that don’t play nice with ion. So, this time I was very strongly considering becoming a Pointless Window Manager hermit and have people stare at me strangely. By the way, I still am going to give PLWM a good shot, but later. It turns out that the author of ion, Tuomo Valkonen, wrote another window manager before getting the ion vision. This window manager is called pwm and it’s just what the doctor ordered…

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Today on Slashdot:

I’m guessing that everyone here has a valid criticism of Microsoft’s attacks on, and approach towards the Open Source model. To me, that begs the question of what we think would be an “appropriate” reaction from Microsoft towards the Open Source model… Article here.

This always makes me grind my teeth. No, you illiterate pseudo-intellectual idiot, you can not use that phrase like that. Let me quote from the website of Prof. Paul Brians (and the same information is available from a million other places):

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I was getting overly confident with my Mozilla 0.9.9 and decided to install the Blackdown Java J2RE 1.3.1 as well as Macromedia 5.0.43 flash plugins. Well well well… mozilla started crashing all over. So I started cursing like in the old days… then I remembered something: this entry in the Mozilla bug tracking system.

What it comes down to is that the Flash plugin is buggy… it simply locks up if the /dev/dsp device is busy, whereas previous versions of this plugin would just disable their sound in this case. So, if you’re playing MP3s in the background (like I am) Mozilla will just seem to crash when you go to a Flash site. However, if you kill your mp3 player, Moz will continue. It also seems that certain sound cards and drivers DO allow multiple access to the /dev/dsp, in which case you won’t have this problem.

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One of the most productive days in a long time. I can move mountains quicker now, mostly due to Python, and today I did some serious terraforming. The scary thing is that it’s all so elegant and intuitive on top of it all.

I didn’t think I liked Bush (the music, not the politician, whom I don’t like). It turns out I was wrong. Conveniently so, as EMusic has a few albums available.

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Finally. At least in my case, Mozilla 0.9.9 has put an end to all these years of cursing at everyone and everything that might have contributed to the cauldron of fresh shit that was web-browsing on non-windows platforms. After having used 0.9.9 exclusively and extensively for 10 days now (and I practically live on the internet) my levels of stress and general malice have decreased considerably. Thank you very much Mozilla, I never really doubted you.

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self.ortho_pipes = [[{‘vtkImageReslice’: vtkImageReslice(), ‘vtkPlaneSource’ : vtkPlaneSource(), ‘vtkTexture’ : vtkTexture()}] for i in range(3)]

Python is da bomb.

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Keep your eyes on XVid. This is also an OpenDivX-derived codec, but it’s open source. According to all reports and tests, this seems to be good competition for DivX4. As soon as it’s more accessible or I have more time, I can start playing with it.

Clan Of Xymox came to my attention recently on EMusic. This is rather interesting Alternative/Goth/Industrial that reminds one of vintage Sisters of Mercy with some Cure thrown in for kicks. I can highly recommend this.

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This is idiotic. This is childish. This makes me angry. Click here so you can be too.

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Dutch weather is a bitch. If you have to cycle for 10km in Dutch weather, it’s a hoary bitch in a particularly bad mood. I don’t know how these people remain so friendly. I’m turning into a Bastard…

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I’ve just done a quick subjective comparison between the same film compressed with DivX Networks’ DivX 4.0 codec (as performed with my own im2avi linked with avifile) and Project Mayo’s OpenDivX (also mpeg4) codec, as implemented independently by ffmpeg.

Now, ffmpeg encodes the whole movie in a fraction of the time. This is no surprise, as ffmpeg has spent some time on optimising their code for real-time streaming. This is still impressive.

Keep in mind that, at least according to what I read, DivX 4.0 was developed starting from the open source OpenDivX by more or less the same group of people. Well, subjectively speaking, even when encoding OpenDivX at DOUBLE the bitrate, the DivX 4.0 movie still looks far better. I would have liked to make a version of im2avi for ffmpeg exclusively: ffmpeg has just about zero dependencies and a carrot could compile it. Building avifile correctly (with support for all the codecs) is somewhat more involved. However, the quality of divx4 is hard to beat with open source. If I get VERY bored, I’ll do some quantitative tests.

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