Archives for November 2000

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color

November 28, 2000 by Eric Richardson

I found Slashdot's discussion of this article on tetrachromatics fascinating. That's just too weird...

cvs fun

November 26, 2000 by Eric Richardson

It looks like the CVS client/server protocol is going to make my life a whole lot easier on the content management front. Now I can write a Perl cvs client that does everything in memory, without having to worry about tmp files and setting up cvs file structures properly. This makes me happy.

gar

November 26, 2000 by Eric Richardson

I think I've got some serious library problems going on... The last two kernels I've compiled haven't booted, and xmms still blows up whenever it touches gtk. I've been upgrading piece-meal since the initial Redhat 5.1 install way back when, so I really should just blow things away and redo my install. Unfortunately, my CD-ROM still doesn't want to cooperate. Gar. So I'm stuck.

wallpaper

November 23, 2000 by Eric Richardson

As you probably know, I tend to change my wallpaper a lot. With 5 desktops and some fairly odd tastes, sometimes I have trouble coming up with enough good material. Today I found a site, deviant art, which looks like it'll keep my screen filled for a while. I went through the photo manipulation section today... 468 images, and 11 candidates for my desktop. That's a good day.

camera thumbnail

November 19, 2000 by Eric Richardson

I'm playing with adding the little camera thumbnail back. Right now there are still going to be some issues with image caching (I need to server it out of a CGI so I can either set pragma=no-cache or set the Expire date in the past) and a little grey halo from the blur function in the dropshadow code, but it's a start.

it's snow time

November 19, 2000 by Eric Richardson

So yesterday I did my first sideways sliding of the season. A couple friends and I went to see How the Grinch Stole Christmas yesterday, and coming back the little NM roads were all solid ice. I slid past one turn (unintentionally), did a fun little 180 backing out of a driveway (intentionally), and then held a powerslide too long, leading to the previously mentioned little time going sideways (although I did manage to pull out of it and continue down the street).

Ah.... It's really winter now.

software patents are evil

November 19, 2000 by Eric Richardson

So apparently UniSys has decided to wave their GIF patents a little more. This time they've made Dupont quit distributing ImageMagick. When will the patent office wake up to the fact that you shouldn't be able to patent algorithms? It's all just math, people. You can't patent math.

heh

November 17, 2000 by Eric Richardson

So I just stumbled across this page about eThreads on a ZDNet site. That's sort of weird, seeing my name there.

music

November 13, 2000 by Eric Richardson

For all the hype over Napster, etc, I have to say that mp3.com's regular artist section is the best thing to ever happen to web music. Where else can you hear the Red Elvises (Your Favorite Band) or Buddhakowski? Click for links to a couple artists a like right now.

Continue Reading...

revision control

November 12, 2000 by Eric Richardson

One of my big projects right now is to get my school newspaper online. Like most things I do, I have some thoughts on how to do this right that are going to necessitate me writing my own software to do it.

One of the tougher things to work out with stuff like this (given the stateless nature of the web) is locking. A couple minutes ago I got a crazy idea to do away with locking and take a cvs-style approach to the whole situation (possibly even using cvs for article storage). I don't know for sure if it'll work yet, but if nothing else it'll be a fun little effort. I'm a big fan of cvs, so it would be cool to put it to use here.

i'll take two, please

November 8, 2000 by Eric Richardson

Those who can't afford to buy, rent.

It's about time to start my Christmas list... Any of these would be a good start.

Indy games

November 6, 2000 by Eric Richardson

Today I downloaded a couple old games for the Indy I've got sitting on my desk. Fun stuff. Right now I'm trying to take a shot at mastering Lumbus, a game controlled via your head. It uses image analysis on the IndyCam to attempt and determine the 3d movement of your head. Crazy stuff.

woo hoo

November 5, 2000 by Eric Richardson

I'm proud of myself. I just wrote my first Perl/GTK app that actually does something useful. For a while I've been meaning to write a little app to edit MP3 ID3 tags, so now I have a little app to do just that (as well as change the info in the db, so it shows up on this site). Fun fun. And it basically all worked first go.

Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

November 4, 2000 by Eric Richardson

I bought PJ Harvey's new cd on Thursday, and I have to say that it's already my favorite PJ Harvey CD (and I do have pretty much all of them). "The Mess We're In", "We Float", and "Big Exit" are all great songs, and the CD doesn't really have any bad ones. It's a bit short at only 47 minutes and change, but that's the only negative bit in a great CD.