Posted on by lhl

OSCON audio cleanup has ground up to a halt mostly because 1) things are crazy at work; it’s August already (jeez where does the time go?!?) and site need to go up before school starts at the end of the month—it’s going to be nuts, and 2) I’ve been busy after work. Tonight I just got back from doing some car shopping and learning car stuff from my cousin. Monday night I went out with my brother and some of his friends and watched a screening of Pedicab Driver at the Egyptian. Sammo Hung was there and did a QA afterwards. He was pretty funny and had some great stories, including a great Bruce Lee story.

/. has had quite a few interesting stories the past few days, really makes me wish I had more time to dig through messages. Lots of crap, but the good ones make it worthwhile (in some abstract way I suppose. I mean, it’s still a huge time sink).

Posted on by lhl

ATI and Massive render The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in real time in Linux – wowza.

MARKHAM, Ontario – ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY, NASDAQ:ATYT) and Massive today announced that they will be rendering Academy Award® winner, “The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Rings,” in real time at SIGGRAPH. This demonstration will be taking place in the ATI booth (#13097) and Massive booth (#5112) using ATI’s FIRE GL™ workstation graphics technology.

Posted on by lhl

Audacity is a simple GPL’d cross-platform sound editor that has VST plug-in support. I originally found tihs while I was looking for tools to do real time recording/encoding, but I saw it linked from tools.komlenic.com it just occurred to me I could have used this for editing at OSCON. Oops. There’s also a free editor for OS X called Spark ME that also has VST plug-in support.

Free VST plug-ins:

Non sequitur: JesseR cites a blog entry of mine as an example of how not to use the title attribute. And while perhaps it isn’t the best thing to do, I don’t think it’s wrong by any normative scale, certainly not by the w3c recommendations. My use of title tags are generally for annotations, additional comments, and non sequiturs. These would otherwise break the flow of the narrative and sentence structure, and IMO would be more harmful to not be in title tags. Now, perhaps one can argue that in that case I should simply edit myself and simply leave it out, but well, then why bother typing anything at all?

Posted on by lhl

Sam Ruby presents REST+SOAP. Paul Prescod makes some comments.

Paul also has some worthwhile (and well reasoned) short opinion pieces on his page, like his thoughts on the role of gov’t, financial inequality, and moral equivalence.

He also has a little piece entitled Why I Promote Python, and he elaborates on his complexity complaint in a followup, Is Perl Difficult? Of course we all know the answer to that question. Still, while Perl is complex and in some cases bizarre (and probably not particluarly accessible), for people who program it day in and day out, Perl does translate into actual power and saved programming time. Worth the trade-off? I don’t know.

Posted on by lhl

PHP Benchmark tests – along the lines of Jeff Greenberg’s Javascript Optimization tests. Note, that some of these tests aren’t quite as thorough as they might be. For example, I ran some tests a while back on single quote vs double quote speed and came to very different conclusions (there was a significant penalty for using double quotes and I changed my coding style accordingly. Perhaps this has changed since then). My results are appended as a comment/correction at the bottom of the page to Nathan Wallace’s PHP: Hacker’s Paradise article.

Posted on by lhl

Hyatt write about tabbed browsing’s usefulness not as MDI, but as a tool for grouping/organization, which is especially true with the advent of bookmarking groups of tab. Now, of course, one of the problems that this suffers is that the longer you browse, the more likely that your tabs will start getting mixed around and disorganized (especially a pain when you’re trying to bookmark groups of tabs). I think the best way to solve this problem is not through more interface clutter at the context-menu or main browser chrome, but to have a separate ‘tab manager’ window that allows reparenting of tabs. I’ve submitted this as an RFE (159853). Hmm, I wonder if this suggestion will get me flamed by mpt. Lord knows he sure loves tabbed browsing sooo much.

Perhaps this could be done as a separate XUL project, although the reparenting aspect of it could get pretty hairy. Speaking of XUL, Ian Oeschger mentioned Bugxula at the Mozilla BOF session at OSCON. While having a XUL interface to Bugzilla is an improvement, I don’t think it’s going to solve the fundamental usability problem with Bugzilla. It just slows to a crawl too much when people are grinding away on complex queries/reports. I still think that there should be a better search interface on static pages when people just want to search/view bugs. I think that’d fix a lot of the problems with so many duplicate bugs (as it’s such a PITA to search). As a bonus, Bugzilla probably also wouldn’t have to worry so much when it gets linked from /.

Posted on by lhl

New to me:

In other news, just doing some random Google searching, and this site has finally taken the top spot for leonard lin from my (inactive) resume page. I’m currently first for random foo and randomfoo (apologies to random foo pictures) and ranked 4th for foo. All this of course is rather pointless, but I need to do something w/ my time while I wait for audio to process.