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Where is the Geek TV?
2007-07-29 16:09:00
For once, Digg actually hit something worth talking about. This link goes to the story of the decline of TechTV and its replacement with a lot of babble about video games. The Digg commenters lament its passing, but there's another, even more pertinent thought behind that thought. What about a channel that teaches people something general about computers? It's not as if there wasn't demand for it. Does a day go by in the life of the average tech-savvy person when they don't hear somebody else lament their own lack of technical know-how? Every day we hear the great masses, posting desperately in forums with their frustrating problems, voicing their exasperation at how little support they have. Make no mistake at all: no matter how much of a "lamer" someone might be, everybody wants to know more about how to use technology. That animosity that sometimes crops up between the "elite" and the "lamer" reflects a resentment on the part of the less able: they want to learn! There jus...
More About: General , Geek , Where , The G

Digg is like a Manic-Depressive Girlfriend
2007-07-27 16:57:00
And I say this with the authority of having had a couple of those in my early twenties... Many guys starting out fall into this trap. It's easy to do, because when you meet an as-yet-untreated manic-depressive who happens to be at the top of their cycle, they'll charm you like a fairy. They're energetic and glib and fun to be around. Two weeks later, you're wondering what happened to that person and who is this new angry and/or unhappy person you're seeing? And what on Earth did you do to deserve that? In my professional capacity, I have had about too many clients who hyper-focus on Digg .com. They don't care what I write, draw, design, or do, as long as it gets onto Digg's front page. If it happens to be a hit on Digg, I get praised outrageously as a genius and they plead with me to repeat the same magic again next week. If it doesn't happen to work, the client is polite enough to not blame me (thank goodness), but is still disappointed, disillusioned, and asking for my cr...
More About: Girlfriend , General , Depressive , A Man

The Internet Finally Killed a Newspaper!
2007-07-26 17:35:00
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/25/week ly_world_news_di.html Ever since the Intern et caught on, publishers have been moaning about how the electronic invaders would one day gobble up the printed media audience. Well, at last the prediction has come true: Weekly World News is shutting down! Yes, the famous black-and-white supermarket tabloid is going out of print after 28 years of the best noir-surreal pulp tabloid fantasy on the market. Of interest to geeks is that the rag provided a window into the state of graphics work through the years, producing mind-bending warped images which came across as grainy and gruesome in saturated black ink that stained your hands for days afterward. You could track what the market for graphic designers was like by glancing at the cover. Good quality work meant hard times, if somebody with any talent was reduced to working for them. Not only this, but the quality of writing was skin-crawlingly horrible - to the point where it was a Zen art form. ...
More About: General , Finally , The Internet

Inkscape Tutorial - Web 2.0 Logos
2007-07-25 17:45:00
Bleah! More glossy crystal buttons and mirrored text! If you're anything like me, your reaction these days to the Web 2.0 aesthetic style is a cry of dismay and the gesture of your finger in your mouth in a gagging motion. Ten years from now, the world will look back on the currently popular art style as "the disco era of the web". First I was afraid; I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side... But I know one thing that is guaranteed to boost your opinion of Web 2.0 graphics: put some money in your pocket and put you in charge of buying some logos for your company. Suddenly, you become so conservative that even Ted Stevens would go "Hey, loosen up, dude!" If you work in graphics right now and try to do ANYTHING original, you won't sell it. Clients go, "What's that? That doesn't look like anything I've seen before. I don't trust it. It looks daring. Can't you just draw me something that looks exactly like every other website out there?" So, We...
More About: Tutorial , Logos , Rial , Scape

Inkscape Tutorial - Trees
2007-07-22 15:38:00
Fractals have a long history of fascinating computer and math geek alike, but this time we're going to take the way a fractal simulates natural ordered chaos and apply it to the practical purpose of drawing a natural object! However, this isn't going to be a very realistic tree, just a drawing good enough for an icon or a game sprite. I'm assuming you know the basics of Inkscape editing. If not, head on over the one of the best manuals for any graphics tool I've ever read, "A Guide to Inkscape". This tutorial also makes heavy use of the 'effects' plug-ins in Inkscape 0.44. Not only are the effects items being changed and shuffled around between versions, but they also require that you have the PyGTK library. In short, I'd recommend finding a GNU/*nix system which already has all of this installed and configured for you. I did it all manually a while back on Slackware, which I remember as being a painful experience. Anywho - if your system doesn't have the exact same names ...
More About: Tutorial , Trees , Rial , Scape

Go See Brian Proffitt Today, re: 359 Choices
2007-07-21 17:13:00
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3 ?ltsn=2007-07-20-028-26-OP-SW Yeah, old B. P. over at Linux Today has a real ringer up. It's a post after my own heart. Yes, choice is a good thing. It is one of those "invisible hand of the marketplace" benefits to a capitalistic system, after all. Everywhere else, choice is praised. But stuff a Redmond paycheck into the pocket of an asstroturf think-tank, and all of a sudden choice - applied to operating systems - becomes the worst scourge since the Black Plague. As always, I'd like to point out to the new Linux user that in the legendary 359 distributions of Linux, ...most of them are related to each other, so once you know Red Hat you pretty much know Fedora and CentOS too. ...some of them differ only by a few installed packages or so, so for instance Kubuntu is just Ubuntu with a KDE desktop. ...a sizable chunk of them are just optimized for a specific country's language. You can do that when your software is free. You can do wh...
More About: Brian , Choi , Choices

Inkscape Tutorial - The Sun
2007-07-19 16:20:00
Half of the battle in graphic design is working smarter, not harder. I've done some tutorials for Gimp which push that tool to its limits, but too many folks focus on Gimp and forget that we have a whole arsenal of power graphics tools on the Linux desktop. Here is one image which would have been a pain to do in Gimp, but a snap in Inkscape . I'm assuming you know the basics of Inkscape editing. If not, head on over the one of the best manuals for any graphics tool I've ever read, "A Guide to Inkscape". Inkscape is much easier to learn than Gimp, anyway. How to Draw a Sun in Inkscape 1. First, draw a circle. Keep it to the grid to ensure that it's round. Give it a radial gradient (Ctrl-Shift-F to get the fill 'n' stroke dialog) of yellow-to-orange. Use the path-edit tool to move the gradient slightly off-center to the upper left. 2. Use the Bezier curve tool to click out a two-stroke path. that it, click once, move straight down and click again, move back to the first nod...
More About: Tutorial , Rial , Scape

Gimp Tutorial - Mirrored Ball on Checkered Plane
2007-07-16 02:30:00
I can hear everybody now: "Petey!" you all say, slapping your foreheads Howie-Mandel-style, "Can't be!!!" Everybody knows that Mirrored Ball on Checkered Plane is the exclusive domain of 3D ray-tracers, in programs like Yafray and Blender and POVray, and in fact is such a cliche that it's the canonical first image you post in a POVray group as a rite-of-passage. You're right; I'm pulling your leg. Gimp isn't a ray-tracer, no way, no how. To quote the Cheese Shop sketch, I was deliberately wasting your time. However, you can fake it. So this will be a faux Mirrored Ball on Checkered Plane. Not for art's sake, nor skill's, but for the sake of being a smart-ass. How to do Mirrored Ball on Checkered Plane in Gimp 1. Start your new file and make a checkerboard with Filters-> Render-> Pattern-> Checkerboard. Do a little math to be sure the checkerboard maps evenly to the plane. 2. Get the Map Object dialog with Filters-> Map-> Map Object. In the dialog's 'options' tab, sel...
More About: Tutorial , Rial

InformationWeek.com falsifies Linus Torvalds quote
2007-07-15 21:07:00
http://www.fsdaily.com/Opposition/Mislead ing_InformationWeek_GPLv3_article/ Looks like we finally have an answer to Mad Penguin's troll-question "Is a Linux Civil War brewing?" That answer is "Depends on who's trying to start one." Remember that story on Slashdot yesterday in which Linus Torvalds allegedly indulged in name-calling with the FSF? Did it seem to you like this was a little far out there, even for a normally outspoken and opinionated Torvalds? That's because it was MADE UP by InformationWeek.com! It doesn't surprise me that Information Week would be sloppy, irresponsible, and have an axe to grind against Free Software. It is shocking that they would deliberately do this. I think it is nice and restrained of Free Software Magazine to call I.W.'s article "misleading", but to me it looks like what Information Week did was tell a BIG FAT LIE, with the intention of breeding FUD in the Linux community, and then getting Slashdot to run it. And quite possible toasting th...
More About: General , Format , Quote

Gimp Tutorial - Popout Photo
2007-07-15 15:09:00
Really, this tutorial will be about masking: taking a photograph and separating a foreground subject from the background, for the purposes of doing something interesting with it. This kind of subject may prove unsatisfying, because when you sit down to write a tutorial, you're free to pick whatever nice clean image you want as your subject. In the real world, clients come to you with fuzzy, blurry, low-res JPGs that have been saved numerous times, with a whole circus of noise in the background. So that's how these masking tutorials make it look so easy: we cheat. If you find this work to be slow, frustrating, and tedious, you're right: masking is just like that, and takes some skill to pull off. So, for our nice, clean, no-hassle subject image, we'll use this Model-A Ford photo from Wikimedia Commons. From the featured images, yet! How to mask a subject 1. Generally, the first step is to go Filters-> Colors-> Decompose, and in the dialog check "RGB" and "decompose to layers....
More About: Photo , Tutorial , Gimp , Rial

Gimp Tutorial - Pebbles
2007-07-14 09:52:00
Here's a topic I don't see a tutorial on anywhere. While Gimp is NOT a 3D ray-tracer, it does have some plug-ins that perform simple 3D functions. We're going to exploit the "Map Object" plug-in for all it's worth, here. Then we'll look at a more common method. I'm assuming you already know the basic usage of Gimp. If not, here's the manual in English (other languages available). How to make pebbles - Method A 1. Grab an example image of pebbles or rocks from online/ creative-commons works. Since we're only going to be sampling them for a few pixels, licensing isn't as hot an issue. 2. Start a new image file - Make it a square 128x128. With your pebble example image open, select a square of pebble texture from the image and copy it into your new square. If the square you ended up with is smaller that the image square, use the resize tool to make it bigger, then Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V to cut it and re-paste it into the frame so it is centered. 3. Do Filters-> Map-> Make Se...
More About: Tutorial , Rial , Pebble

Gimp Tutorial - Metallic Text
2007-07-13 10:31:00
I figured the old chrome-text tutorial over at the Gimp User Group site could use both an update and an enhancement of technique. Mine is done on Gimp version 2.2.13. I'm assuming you already know the basic usage of Gimp. If not, here's the manual in English (other languages available). How to make metallic text: 1. Make some white text on a black background. Use a sans serif font and make it big. 2. Apply a heavy Guassian blur. About 16.0 The purpose of this is to give the text some rounded corners and smooth edges. 3. Layers-> Colors-> Levels... squeeze the outer arrows together. This is just like in the rounded corners tutorial at the GUG. 4. Lighter Gaussian Blur. About 7.0 This time we are forming the beveled edges of the metal. 5. Color-select the black area, invert the selection. 6. Get that Layers dialog open (Ctrl-L). Make a new Layer #2 and set it transparent. Switch off Layer #1 and focus Layer #2 (by clicking it in the dialog), so you have a floating ...
More About: Tutorial , Text , Rial , Metallic

Every time you use one of these sites, you're using Linux
2007-07-12 15:23:00
http://www.venturecake.com/web-20-is-buil t-on-open-source/ The link in the title gives an interesting who's-who of the biggest social networking sites and what they run. Not many surprises here - could you take a look at a page rendered in ASP, look at MySpace, and not conclude that it ran on Windows? Here again is another area where we could focus on real Linux advocacy. The commenters to that article express regret that the big sites don't contribute back to the FOSS community, but sew buttons on teddy bears - I'd be happy if they just gave us a little nod! How much easier would spreading GNU/Linux awareness be, if the likes of web giants like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Del.icio.us, and YouTube put a simple icon on every page: "Powered by Linux", "Brought to you by GNU", "Support our software, donate to FSF". Here we have Microsoft ads plastered all over the place, Microsoft shills trolling every comment thread - all hosted on a LAMP server. It wouldn't be too much to ask, to n...
More About: Time , Sites , These

Should FOSS Change to a Dual License?
2007-07-12 06:56:00
Regular readers of this site should know that I cringe not from controversy. Well, get ready for another one of those radical propositions that make the damsels faint and the gentlemen look up from their mint juleps, drop their monocle, and chortle "My word! The audacity!" I'm thinking that it's a mistake to have been porting FOSS to the Windows desktop all this time. I see some of you brought your bag of rotten tomatoes with you. Good - but before you reach for those, see O'Reilly's "The Dubious Benefits of Porting FOSS to Windows". Now, appended to those thoughts, I put before your consideration the following: Microsoft is like a stoned Pac-Man with the munchies gobbling up Linux lately. The latest recruit is TurboLinux, who is going to help them spread the foulness that is OOXML (pronounced "ooks-mull"). While we're all scampering around in circles asking "What are they doing? Who will they eat next? What is their strategy?", has anybody considered that maybe they've sim...
More About: General , Change , License , Dual , Chang

Why is Everything so Stupid on Windows?
2007-07-11 03:51:00
Sorry, I just had to ask. I can get away with saying it just once per year. This is it. Hold your fire. Check out what happens when a tool that has been a standard part of Unix - for what 30 years now? - gets ported to Windows for the first time. Here is "wingrep", the grep for Windows. So, today, class, we will learn all about (writing it on the chalkboard and underlining it twice) grep!: "In beginner mode, the Search Assistant guides you though the process of setting up and executing a search." Is life just impossible without Clippy? "Searches plain text and UNIX-style text files" - because, you know, text files on Unix are something completely different from "normal" plain text files. They're like X-Files, with mutants growing out of their stomachs. "Searches all binary files such as Word Processor documents..." And whose idea was it to make the office documents be in binary, hmmm? "Replacing as well as searching..." We'd better do that now, because we sure can't port sed...
More About: Humor , Stupid , Thing

Linux at Dell on YouTube
2007-07-09 07:21:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6UWUTCeRa I Quick, before it gets Digg'd into oblivion, go see the Linux at Dell ad on YouTube (link in title). It's very cute. It does have a homemade, rough edges feel to it, and in places sounds like "we're trying too hard." But heck, it's an improvement over the nothing there was before. Just to rescue this from being a "Looka Dat!" post, may I suggest to the thin air and anybody else listening that, since we will be making Linux commercials anyway, we make a few showing Linux on the desktop doing its stuff? Just round up some local Linux users and film them doing simple tasks that highlight what a breeze it is to use a system that gets out of your way and lets you be productive. Think of all the features that Linux has that proprietary systems lack... [Fade into wavy dream sequence] ? A web developer sets a coffee cup on the desk and begins whipping up a web page. She throws together a template in NVU on desktop one, makes a quick banne...
More About: Youtube

People Who Will Never Adopt Linux
2007-07-07 04:50:00
I almost fell out of my chair... and it's a recliner. Slashdot AGAIN posted what is becoming one of the greatest cliched titles since "Netcraft confirms it...": Have another look at The Year of Linux on the Desktop. Now I know what the movie "Groundhog Day" was about; Bill Murray sees the same story pop up over and over again no matter how often he resets his newsfeed. But like it or not, there are some people who will NEVER adopt Linux, no matter what. Such as... Hardcore Gamers - Never mind that I currently have more games installed on one of my Linux systems than I ever ran in the sum total of my Windows years; the cutting-edge blockbuster titles will just have to remain out of reach for a while. Even if Big Name Brand game companies ever did accidentally spike their coffee pot with enough ecstasy to decide to make a Linux-portable blockbuster game title, the fans just ain't there. Linux has such a rotten reputation amongst gamers that the mere mention will repulse them. Hec...
More About: People , General , Adopt

New Wallpaper Gallery Section - iPhone Wallpapers
2007-07-06 23:53:00
http://penguinpetes.com/gallery/index.php #iPhone OK, I guess I can't avoid jumping all over the iPhone bandwagon. So I have selected the few wallpapers from my gallery that will work, and cropped them to 320x480 size, the size that fits Apple's iPhone. So the wallpaper gallery has a new iPhone section. I'll whip up some more designs later custom for that format. It's just my little way of saying "Eh, there isn't any GNU-Phone on the horizon and Apple has been semi-chummy with open source, so I might as well." Anybody out there who reads a site like this have an iPhone? If so, I'm curious to hear how these display on it, and anything else an iPhone user would have to share. For instance, as I understand it, any website that displays well in Safari should have no trouble with the iPhone. Which I gather means that using Konqueror on the Linux desktop to test compatibility will work, since they both use KHTML and kjs. That's the theory, but what about the actual impl...
More About: Site News , Wallpaper , Wallpapers , Iphone , Gallery

GPL3 Better Garlic, Scares Away Microsoft Vampire
2007-07-06 17:37:00
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story= 20070705205728953 The link in the title goes to Groklaw's coverage of the story that the Linux community will be buzzing about all week: Microsoft doesn't like the GPL3. So far, I've been non-committal on GPL3. GPL2, I have said, is just about as good, isn't it? But if this reaction is the omen of the future, I might begin to think that GPL3 really will be our salvation, after all. The one thing stopping us right now is inertia. For instance, I decided to dump a GPL2 in with the little Flash SWFTools examples I've posted recently. That was partly a shrug - they're just demos, not important for anything - but also the practical consideration that SWFTools itself is GPL2. Now I look up the chain of command, so to speak, and I see where inertia may slow the adoption of GPL3. SWFTools might have some dependency on a GPL2 library, the GPL2 library can point to Linus Torvalds and go, "Well, the kernel is staying GPL2!" and so on. The thing...
More About: Garlic , General , Vampire , Away

My Next Flash Project Idea - a Flash Roller-Coaster Ride
2007-07-05 06:59:00
This time, don't get your hopes up. I'm just blogging this mostly for me, to get the idea down, and publishing it maybe as a way to goad myself into attempting it. Imagine a Flash animation that shows the point of view of riding a roller-coaster. Not only is this idea to do that, but to write a program that generates a random coaster! I like to generate 3D landscapes when I can, so that way it surprises me, too. This isn't so far-fetched as one might think. I could start with POVray: design a series of track sections, in simple unit blocks. Write a script to lay these blocks out in a track. Define ground and sky. Define a series of camera positions around the track. Run it. Save the images in a series. Have another script compile the stills into an animation. I've done the two halves of this before in other projects. The POVray part - designing a series of blocks which a script then assembles - is how I generated the buildings in wallpapers like this one and this one. More to...
More About: Project , Ride , Idea , Roller Coaster

New Flash Game - Distro Slot
2007-07-04 02:48:00
http://www.penguinpetes.com/pages/flash_p layground/distro_slot.html Well, that was quite a bit of work... After struggling with some new tasks in Actionscript, I have produced a fairly decent Flash slot machine game. Yes, I used the logos from 7 well-known Linux distributions as the slot machine symbols. I hope this doesn't come back on me as one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" type moments. There's all kinds of hilarious jokes you could make with this idea. What if you set one of these up in real life, and it would pay out in install CDs? Or add a Windows symbol that takes away your credits and breaks the machine... I included the source code tarball, GPL2ed, for anybody who's interested. This time the source code has two varieties: one plain and one with generous documentation included in comments, for those, like I, who are learning. By the way, two milestones I've conquered here are playing sounds from Flash, and setting a timer. The timer was necessary...
More About: Game , Lash , Distro

.bu??oo1 ?ou ??,no? u??? dn ?p?s-??b?? s? ?sod s???
2007-07-02 13:54:00
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When HASN'T Linux been at war?
2007-06-29 15:07:00
Let's make one thing perfectly clear: Microsoft wants Linux dead. Four words that tell you all you need to know about how Microsoft and Linux relate. It was that way from the day Linus Torvalds thought he'd try his hand at an operating system. It was that way the day Richard Stallman tried to fix that damned printer. It will be that way, and that way for every other free and open source system, BSD, GNU, and all. Forever and ever! Power in the hands of one global dictator versus power in the equal hands of all the people. Of *course* - duh! - the multi- billionaire global dictator doesn't want the people to get funny ideas about controlling their own technology. Microsoft wants Linux dead. Write it down. My opinion of anybody who purports to be pro-Linux while selling out to Linux's sworn enemy was already pretty low. News of Novell, Xandross, and now Linspire lining up to seal a deal with Redmond already crossed my desk, and the very best I can hope for them is that they fi...
More About: General , Been

Linux Command-Line Memes Explained
2007-06-26 16:45:00
You've seen these many times, in chats, comments, and discussion posts online. Particularly Unix system admins, but also plain old regular Linux users, tend to use these command-based memes conversationally. Such is the power of Unix command-line syntax, that it's often handy to adopt a convention into your day-to-day speech! For the mystified, here's a little cheat sheet. With rare exceptions, you'll find these always written, never spoken. s/foo/bar/ - The sed command takes this string to mean "substitute foo with bar". Usage: Very common and useful. Example: Use it to 'correct' a typo in your last message: "s/lkie/like/" or as a joke to 'say what you really mean': "I find your comments interesting. s/interesting/berzerk/" $THING - This is how you use a variable in Bash. The $ is necessary; upper-case letters are a convention. Usage: Very common and useful. Example: Use it to designate any random member of the set: "You could do that on Linux, BSD, or any other $UNIX" ...
More About: Memes , Line , Comm , Command

What it means to blog...
2007-06-25 19:02:00
Somewhere in my voluminous past postings I'm sure I've tossed this idea out there in some form. But I'm pretty sure I've never made it quite clear, so here I'll chisel it in stone: A blog is a little more that a diary, and a little less than a newspaper or magazine column. It's the least formal, most personal form of writing ever devised. To me, blogging is like I invited people to drop by my living room every day or so at a random hour, just to say 'hi' and see what the devil I'm up to now. Sometimes, you get really lucky and catch the artist having just completed a masterpiece, all ready to show off. Other times, you catch me in my bathrobe clipping toenails. And not having done a damn thing all day. Sometimes the place is a mess, and sometimes it's freshly vacuumed and dusted. Sometimes I welcome the company and invite you to have a sit on the porch with me over lemonade, while we crackle our witty repartee into the fresh spring air and pause to hear the birds' song...
More About: General , Blog

Would Yahoo really censor Open Source answers?
2007-06-22 12:33:00
Just caught this little nugget scrolling across the feeds. Apparently, there have been cases where answers on Yahoo 's Answers service, that suggest Open Source solutions, have been deleted. While I'd not doubt it, I'd be hesitant to give it the thundering accusation that it got on Digg. I just tried Googling the string 'yahoo answers linux' (without quotes) and got a number of first-page hits which indicate that Linux-related answers are very much alive and well in Yahoo Answers. In particular this thread even recommends Linux over Vista when somebody asks. As I'm sure most of us are aware, Yahoo is built upon BSD, so it isn't very logical that Yahoo would be hostile to open source. Mind you, it could be that somebody in Yahoo is biased against open source, or they have some kind of contract, or mis-believe the fabricated rumor about Microsoft and Yahoo merging. But I'm going to invoke Robert J. Hanlon on this one: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately expla...
More About: General

What?!?!? Linux now NEEDS Microsoft?!?!?
2007-06-19 02:02:00
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6099316 851.html Nothing's more disappointing than watching the dunce in the corner suddenly appear to be on the verge of getting his first clue, only to get distracted and go back to rooting in his nostril at the last second. Groans all around! Well, that zany SJVN is at it again. For the past two weeks, he's started to make noises like he has a clue, but then today posts something that instantly erases all credibility he was beginning to build up. Specifically, in the story linked from my title he's now saying that it makes good business sense for Linux and Microsoft to unite forces. It helps us both, you see. Now, let us consider: Linux is now big enough and powerful enough for Redmond to treat it as an equal. The question is, How did that happen? Is it because: Microsoft led an ad campaign for all these years expounding the virtues of its competitor? Gates and Ballmer jammed into kernel-dev and coded until their fingers bled building ...
More About: General , Needs

Generate Background Tiles With ImageMagick
2007-06-18 17:53:00
I was puttering around with ImageMagick and wrote a short script which, when run, generates a gray-scale background tile. It is capable of a wide range of patterns, with only a few random numbers thrown at parameters. Thusly: #!/bin/bash RANDVAL="rand()*"$(($RANDOM % 512 + 1)) convert -size 256x256 xc: -fx $RANDVAL -write mpr:rand -virtual-pixel tile -blur 0x$(($RANDOM % 10)) -edge $(($RANDOM % 12)) -shade $(($RANDOM % 180))x$(($RANDOM % 180)) -fx G -normalize randbg.jpg exit 0 The only glitch seems to be that sometimes it complains of "convert: Zero sigma not permitted `rand'" I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but it produces an image anyway! Count this as a lazy hack.
More About: Background , Gene , Imagem , Round

New Site category: Flash!
2007-06-17 23:34:00
http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php?c at=24 Whoo-ho! Now that I've been digging into Flash , I've decided to create a separate category just for the Flash stuff. This will help the Flash tutorials keep their own area so that others who want to learn Flash on Linux can follow along easier. I hope others out there will find my tutorials helpful, and I intend to keep pushing forward with it whenever I can. If you have links to the posts and the link goes by category and title, you'll want to update them. I figured this is a good time to switch them to their own category, since that area has cooled off with incoming links for a bit while I've been working on other jobs.
More About: Site News , Site , New Site , Cate

Here comes HTML5! Duck!
2007-06-16 00:53:00
http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/html5 /html4-differences/Overview.html Just when we were all getting so snug and cozy in our Web 2.0 world, along comes the new HTML spec. And it's a dilly! Meet HTML5. Of course, you don't have to rush to change all your web pages right now. Oh, if only it were that easy! Instead, look forward to half of it being implemented in half of the browsers half of the time gradually over the next decade or so. Some random thoughts on the changes: I like the stricter content model. This is only going to mean that you have to be consistent. You can put either block or inline level tags inside a or , but not both in the same . I love the new elements! Unfortunately, it would help if they designed a prototype web browser to display each element in action and took a screen-shot of it, so we could have some idea of what it's supposed to look like. I count 22 new elements, some of which sound like they're redundant. What's the difference between an...
More About: General , Duck , Html