that’s whacked

photos and re-designs

Wednesday, Nov 26. 2008  –  Category: Grommit, Photos

Personal stuff first: On a whim, I bought stevel.me and decided to keep a photoblog using Wordpress and YAPB. I also reorganised my photo gallery.

Stuff for the other grommit residents: I installed a bunch of new themes to the grommit gallery, as well as turning on a bunch of new Gallery plugins. None of the defaults have changed, but if you play around with the album settings you should see some new features.

For some reason or another, I’m quite fond of the square thumbnails plugin. I notice between my new blog theme, my photoblog theme, and my new gallery theme… I seem to really be into grids, squares, and lines… the square thumbnails must fit nicely into those in a uniform space sort of way.

SF OSUG (2008.11)

Monday, Nov 24. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Photos

We had a pretty good turnout for our monthly San Francisco OpenSolaris User Group meeting tonight (Luc, Riku, edp, Shannon, comay, Rafael, and myself), with the exception of our fearless leader Miss. Michelle. I finally remembered to bring my camera this time so I took some photos. We mostly chatted with comay about the upcoming 2008.11 release, and discussed the multiple repositories and how package installation and repositories would be structured in the future.

Rafael and I also discussed evangelism of OpenSolaris to Linux audiences. Rafael had recently presented at the Ontario Linuxfest, and I had previously presented at SVLUG. We tossed around the idea of presenting to an SF LUG.

The full photo album of the meetup is here.

my first fake tilt-shift

Tuesday, Nov 18. 2008  –  Category: Photos

i was messing around with trying to replicate the tilt-shift photographic effect in Photoshop and GIMP tonight. except GIMP crashed on me. repeatedly. anyway, here’s my first attempt:

this is a shot i took from the Petronas Towers’ SkyBridge in Kuala Lumpur back in March of 2007 when i was in Malaysia for a Tech Days conference. i think the blur is a little too narrow, but it generally achieves the effect. i think i probably should have cropped the skyline out since that sort of breaks the illusion of it being a model but this is otherwise a semi-decent attempt. the overhead shot is conducive to this effect since that’s how we usually look at models.

that being said, i wanted to try it on a head-on/street-level shot to see what my mind would make of it when trying to interpret the focus (or lack there-of). so here’s my second shot:

this is from our honeymoon last year, when Wendy and I were riding bikes through Kyoto. again, lots of sky - though the effect is okay since the sky is pretty uniformly washed out. the people really give it away here since i set the focus at Wendy’s level, and she’s clearly too detailed to be a toy person.

i know some people disparage this effect… i happen to really like it since it encourages perception of a landscape (especially an urban one such as Kuala Lumpur) as a model… and well, going off on mental tangents from there is enough to entertain my mind for at least a few hours. i’m not that into it that i want to go out and buy a tilt-shift lens or anything for my camera, so i’ll settle for cheap Photoshop tricks instead.

Album reviews in mashTape

Tuesday, Nov 18. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Following a great suggestion by ian, I just finished adding album reviews to mashTape (well, a first pass anyway… I’m sure we’ll have more visual follow-ups - but the core of it is there).

Obligatory screenshot here:

Album Reviews in mashTape

One of the fun parts of working on mashTape has been finding multiple providers… it gives me a general guideline to follow in determining what fields of data are common across different providers. Unfortunately, the only album review data I can find that is accessible via an API is from Amazon’s AWS. It looks like MetaCritic has some awesome data aggregated from other sources, but doesn’t provide an API to access said data.

Anyone know of any sites that have externally accessible review data?

whacked gets fatty

Sunday, Nov 16. 2008  –  Category: Grommit

I just installed a new Wordpress theme (Miniml). It’s considerably fatter (as in ‘wider’) than my previous theme… so hopefully all y’all who complained about the previous one being too skinny will stop hassling me now.

It also integrates my photo gallery and Twitter stream below. This is a half-assed attempt to keep my blog looking active even when I’m lazy and not blogging.

Songbird 1.0.0rc2 on OpenSolaris

Sunday, Nov 16. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Alfred posted to desktop-discuss a couple of days ago with a pointer to his latest build of Songbird for OpenSolaris (1.0.0rc2). You can grab it here. This is the second release candidate of our final 1.0 release. Hopefully once we launch 1.0, we can get it updated into the IPS repository at pkg.opensolaris.org.

One caveat, Songbird normally builds againsts its own bundled GStreamer libraries in order to provide a consistent build across all our platforms (and given we can’t depend on a system GStreamer for Mac or Windows). This means there can be some hiccups with building against a system-wide GStreamer install. Alfred pointed out in his message above that in order for the 1.0.0rc2 build to play media files you need to have the GStreamer input-selector plugin installed.

I’ve gone ahead and made a build of input-selector and packaged it up into an easy-to-install Songbird add-on which you can (and should) download from our add-ons site. If you launch Songbird and then go to that URL, you should be able to click the big green INSTALL button. Restart Songbird and you’ll be able to play media files again happily (or unhappily, depending on your choice of music).

(this was built on a 2008.11-ish machine with Sun Studio 12 against gst-plugins-bad 0.10.8)

woefully lagging on blog posts

Friday, Nov 14. 2008  –  Category: Musings

sigh. my blog is being neglected… mostly because i end up twittering more often these days. what’s sad is that i’ve even started twittering as Char-siu. sadder yet, is that i’ve realised that twittering as my dog is way more interesting and fun than twittering as myself.

writing blog posts and twittering my actual life often just reveals the reality of life and how boring it can be.

pretending to be my dog on twitter means i get to make up wonderful things that may or may not be true. meh. being grounded in reality was never that much fun anyway

winter is coming, the resorts are opening, and i spent some time in the basement tonight cleaning up (lubed my cams for the first time ever too (why does that sound vaguely dirty??)) my climbing gear, and putting it away for the season. doesn’t look like i’ll get any more outdoor climbing in this winter unless an “emergency” jtree trip comes up. i lined up my boards and boots, and then crossed my fingers for snow. thinking about planning a trip to Park City this winter for some riding, except now apparently i’m supposed to be boycotting Utah because of Prop 8.

sigh. i wish politics would stay out of my sports. okay, enough rambling… i’m going back to twittering as my dog.