schrödinger's dog

Feisty

I installed the beta version of the Ubuntu "feisty" Linux release on my laptop. And instead of going with my usual KDE desktop (Kubuntu), I decided to wipe the partition and install the vanilla Ubuntu release, with the Gnome desktop.

The last time I looked at Gnome was about a year or two ago, and there were several key features that prevented me from adopting it. But it's quite polished now, even at a beta level. The only KDE component I really can't live without is the konsole terminal, which is still far better than the Gnome equivalent.

The installation went well. I was hoping that it would support WPA LEAP wireless authentication, since that's what we use at work. Unfortunately, I had to resort to my old scripts to start wpa_supplicant, etc. Normal WEP authentication is handled fine, of course. One demerit here.

And Ubuntu ships with the compiz OpenGL desktop. It's off by default, but can be turned on with a single click. This gives you Mac-like window shadows, better repainting, stretchy and wobbly windows (if you want them), and loads of other goodies. The idea here is to compete with some of the Windows Vista eye-candy.

Compiz had problems at my default 24 bit resolution on my large 1400x1050 screen. The right 1/4 of the screen didn't receive any updates. I ended up reducing the bit depth to 16, and that works pretty well. Still a few glitches.

Suspend and hibernate worked well out of the box on my Dell D600 laptop.

I'll stick with Gnome on the laptop for a while, just to see how usable it really is. My main work desktop and home desktop will remain with KDE for a while.
Jim on 03.30.07 @ 08:11 PM ET [link]

Claymation

The girls and I tried our hand at claymation today. We did a very short film using my Canon 10D camera. I mounted it on a tripod and hooked it up to a laptop to control it using Canon's capture software. Worked pretty well. The whole enterprise took a little over an hour, including going to the backyard to find sticks to use as props.

I now had about 160 JPEG images to make into a movie. I first tried the Linux tools ffmpeg and mencoder. The latter worked somewhat, but I don't know enough about video to get high quality results. So I moved over to Barb's Mac, using iMovie. It's not a bad program, but there are still a few bugs I found when importing lots of images. I finally got it working, and added a simple audio track, then exported the results as a Quicktime movie.

The results are...amateurish, but what do you expect for a first try?

You can see our video "Bye-Bye Snowman" on YouTube.
Jim on 03.25.07 @ 04:50 PM ET [link]

Check

My latest mania this month is chess. At one time in my life I knew most of the major openings, but I've long since forgotten them. So I'm rekindling my interest by reading Jeremy Silman's book The Amateur's Mind. Silman walks his chess students through various games, telling them to voice their thoughts as they move. He then records and analyzes the results. Silman's comments are mostly scathing, but it's a great tool for learning what not to do. As with most chess books it needs to be read with a board in front of you.

I'm also playing the Daily Chess Puzzle. This is a great little Java-based puzzle that allows you to drag the pieces around while you formulate your answer.

And any actual games I'm playing are against GnuChess, using xboard. It handily beats me every time.

Jim on 03.10.07 @ 11:07 AM ET [link]