mad professor leo

Do programmers have feelings?
Do we have normal human emotions?
Do we give birth, do we love, care, feel sadness, joy… Do we? I don’t know. I feel sad right now. It’s Friday and I feel sadness with a smoke between me index and middle finger on my right hand as I type.
Does that mean I am no good as a coder?

I don’t know.

–
Looking back I have to guess.. Sure. Developers have feelings too. Even posix h4×0r5.

I’m glad that’s over and Now I can get back to thinking of something else. Life’s short and there’s a lot of people to help out. Gotta get your ass out of your head and open your eyes wider.

Entropy’s such a bitch.
Sooner or later she’ll catch you with a butcher knife behind your back and teach you who’s your momma.
But until then..

I tried out the WordPress module by Sebastian Enger to post to wordpress blogs.

The module is missing a lot of things- it won’t pass tests, and it’s lacking in options- all it does is post. I am writing a set of tools/packages for interacting with a wordpress blog.

I have isolated all relevant the xmlrpc calls for the wordpress application in this module, WordPress::XMLRPC. This module can be used standalone. WordPress::XMLRPC lets you post, download, query, etc etc. I think people familiar with WordPress will be very happy to have a perl interface to the xmlrpc calls (I am!).

WordPress::XMLRPC

I wanted to cut a chunk of footage from a video file.
Mencoder does this wonderfully, but, the command is not intuitive.

First, the example. This command goes to 10 minutes after the movie starts and takes 30 seconds after and spits out to ‘out.avi’..

mencoder ./filein.avi -ss 00:10:00 -endpos 00:00:30 -o ./out.avi

More practical example:

Fire up a terminal emulator.. open your source movie with mplayer.
You’ll need to see where in the movie you are, press ‘o’, get a pen and paper. This tells you the time elapsed.
You want to start your video selection at 00:14:24, that is, 14 minutes, 24 seconds.
And you want to stop at 00:15:24.
What you need to figure out is how much time there is betwen the start time and the stop time, in this case, one minute.

So our -ss seek/start time, will be 00:14:24
Once the movie is being copied, the end position (inside the copy movie) will be 00:01:00 (one minute).

Let’s put the command together..

mencoder ./in.avi -ss 00:14:24 -endpos 00:01:00 -o ./out.avi

Wait! Where is the stop time of 00:15:24?? RTFM, remember? endpos is telling mencoder where to stop, this is the target duration of the output movie we are making.

Examples

mencoder ./a.avi ./b.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -o joined.avi

Basically, there are three sets of parameters, in whatever order..

1) a list of files to join (paths)
2) -o the name of the output file (path)
3) settings for how to deal with audio (-oac) and video (-ovc)

There are a lot more settings then this, for that please see man mencoder.

Sometimes I have a divx file that is way too big to fit into a cd.
How the heck do you make an avi smaller?

I ripped a copy from dvd to an avi, and got it to under 700 megs, great. That fits in a cd. But then I had a 10 meg subtitle file! So, it didn’t fit! I needed to get the avi a little smaller.

If you look up info on mplayer, mencoder.. there’s a LOT to read.
So here’s how, in no way complete.
Just one way to solve the problem.

   mencoder in.avi -o out.avi -ovc lavc -oac copy  -lavcopts vbitrate=400:vpass=1

Now, what’s very cool about mencoder, is it gives you stats on progress..

   Pos: 101.5s   2435f ( 0%) 213.30fps Trem:  27min 628mb  A-V:0.036 [320:32]

‘Trem’ is rime remaining, and the mb count is the guess for how big it will be.
As the progress gets further along (beyond 10%), the stats will be more precise.

This is the “Tao te ching”. It is a collection of 81 “poems” that make up a philosophy.
The Tao was written by Lao Tzu.

There are many translations of the Tao. Here is the version that I prefer. It was made by a
scholar named Wing Tsit Chan.
The version is not easily found, the book is out of print.
Thus, when I found it again, I placed it here so that others looking for the Wing Tsit Chan Translation of the Tao may have an easier time finding it.

tao te ching translated by wing tsit chan

I code for a living. I need a lot of text on two screens at all times.
I need the best monitor possible so that my eyes will not burn out and I won’t be able to keep working.
If the company I work for did not buy me the hardware I need, I would go out and buy it myself.

I am a recent convert to lcd screens.

There are a couple of peculiarities about the ViewSonic VA903b that I have learned and want to share.
I have two of these, and for a little while I wanted to chuck them out with the bath water.

Two things that could be happening with the VA903b to give you a moire effect, a blurry image:

1) If you see ghosting of light letters on a dark background: check the cable on the back of the monitor, make sure it is plugged in properly.
Wiggle it a bit, and the ghosting dissappears. If the cable is too tight from being far from the computer, your image is bad.

2) Check the horizontal size of your screen. I noticed that the auto adjust does not automatically adjust the horizontonal size of the screen.
I also noticed that there is a sweet spot just under the total number of cells on the screen. This setting is *more* important then the “fine tune”
option on the “manual adjust” menu.

Having figured those two things out, I love my monitors way past my old CRTs. I don’t know that I could ever use a CRT again.

Ingredients:

• Linux distro (Fedora Core 4)
• Camera USB (Kodak Easyshare LS743)
• gphoto2

So I get a camera, and take pictures.. now what? I got linux. I thought this may be complicated.. But guess what..

Step 1

Make sure gphoto2 is installed. If not.. open shell cli prompt (whatever) and become su, then # yum -y install gphoto2, wait for it to complete..

Step 2

Make your dir to receive photos, change to it.. then # gphoto2 -P

Step 3

All your photos are downloaded to your current working dir. Now, delete the photos.. # gphoto2 -DR .. All the photos are deleted from your camera.

Done. That's it. No mouse clicking. No stupid dialogues. Wow.

So, I saw Marie Antoinette.

Turns out this movie is directed by Sofia Coppola.

I loved Lost in Translation.
The good thing about that movie, is that what is on the verge of happening throughout the whole thing never does happen. And you’re left with this beautiful sweet taste of a sin half way committed.

In the movie Marie Antoinette, you know what’s going to happen.
The main characters of the movie are all going to be killed.
The whole movie plays like a children’s show, very flowery.
So you think- this is good. Can’t wait to see where this ends up very witty- this must be showing the situation from their standpoint.. You’re just.. la dee da.. and look at the pretty flowers, and the sunlight and then - oh no, we’re dead! The End. Movie over.. aha! What a great movie.. but no. Sorry Sofia Coppola. You suck here.
You can’t use the same formula and get away with it, not here.
This screenplay had a chance to actually be witty, to leave some kind of an aftertaste in your eyeballs, nut nooOOOoooo… I’m Sofia Coppola, I’m going to make a joke without a punchline and you’re all going to laugh anyway.

Well, I ain’t laughing.

Nor is your father, Francis Ford Coppola. I know it. I know he’s shaking his head and thinking *tsk* *tsk* - and you’re like.. “Why daddy! Why! It *is* a good movie! It’s a fucking masterpiece! It’s a great movie, daddy!!! buahahhhahahahaah!”
And daddy don’t say nuthin’ does he?! Maybe he nods and says ‘yes honey, you made a movie.’
But, I wanna be like daddy!!!

Sorry, it takes more then a dick and balls to make Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia.

Ps. Gotta tell ya though, incredibly good score. The Strokes.. Joy Division. Almost made the movie good. Try it without the video next time, should be cheaper to make.

=== Location Widget ===
Contributors: leocharre
Tags: widget, location, google map
Requires at least: 2.2
Tested up to: 2.3.2
VERSION: $Revision: 1.1.1.1 $

Lets you insert widgets representing a location, an address. Includes a link to google maps,
generated from the address data.

== Description ==

This lets you insert an address widget, if enough data is available, then a link to google
maps is made visible.

Usage is similar to the text widget.

== Installation ==

To install the plugin follow these steps :

1. Download the location.zip file to your local machine.
1. Unzip the file.
1. Upload the “location-widget” folder to your “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.
1. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

== Screenshots ==

1. Select how many location widgets you want.

2. Enter whatever data you want, a title, address lines 1 through 3, city, state, zip, etc.

3. At the bottom right we see the location widgets as visitors see them. A link to google maps
is generated, provided we have enough data to suggest an address.