I finished my SCA device at last!

Today, Belle, Matt, Dauid, Simon, Peter, Vicki and I completed the bottom half of the bread oven at the Canterbury Faire site at Waipara. I'm absolutely knackered!

Today I took apart my my wee LED squeeze torch I bought for $10 a couple of years ago. Having examined fnord_fnord's shake torch and later discovered the strange disc-like objects were in fact a pair of CR2032 lithium batteries, I thought I'd have a close look at what's inside my squeeze torch.

I finally finished drawing and packing my nice icons for the XMPP clients, Psi, Gajim, Miranda IM and Pidgin.

Maxim Shemanarev, the creator of the awesome geometry and text rendering library AGG, has a wonderful rant titled Texts Rasterization Exposures concerning the abysmal text rendering on Windows and Linux.

Not only does AGG's text rendering look nice even at absurdly small scales, it scales exactly so that automatic scaling of dialogue boxes and other GUI elements will not cause text to jump about and overflow into other elements. The Haiku BeOS system uses AGG's text rendering, presumably for this very benefit.

I'm surprised that gamma correction alone does not fix the horrid letter ms in Ubuntu.

By the way, the AGG demos include a really neat program, image_filters that demonstrates the effect of compound rotations of a raster image using a variety of reconstruction filters. The nearest neighbour, bilinear and bicubic filters severely smears the image after just a few rotations; Blackman 256 preserves the image detail even after several dozens of rotations.

RIPLinux9.3 is a LiveCD designed for repair and forensics. It's got the useful bits like ssh, sshd, sshfs, dar, partimage, gparted, Firefox, Opera and various arcane goodies.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 with the help of a screwdriver. (The D-Link DWL G520+ is deadly toxic to any Ubuntu system I've tried).

Unfortunately, the text was corrupted for a while. The bottom few pixel rows of various characters get progressively more corrupt over time.

It's as if the pixel map cache is affected by an off-by-one (or two) error for the y-loop during the copy from the plain rastered glyphs to the coloured and treated glyphs that ultimately get composited to the display. It started when I tried out the Visual Effects settings and went away after I tried them all on all user accounts. See Bug 293059 and this Post on the Ubuntu Forums.

A more serious issue is the handling of the Wacom ArtZ II tablet stylus. The mouse pointer tracks the stylus with a lag of about a third of a second unless you turn the stylus upside down (and use the spongey eraser) or press a button. If you wiggle the stylus at one place, lift the stylus and later, put the stylus down somewhere else, the input recorded when the stylus was wiggled will then be played back the moment the stylus is put down again. See Bug 365997.

This is much worse than Ubuntu's 8.04's handling of the tablet. At least you could do everyday tasks if you didn't mind having a phantom toddler with a second stylus randomly poking hard at places on the tablet corresponding to the edges and corners of the screen.

It's kinda surprising that an annoying Firefox PNG display bug I reported last month is still "unconfirmed" despite the report linking to a demonstration of the bug. I'm pleased to see there is at least one reference to it, though.

A wee refinement of my dream PC on www.wepc.com, the Überpad II:

Actually, it's a shameless plug for votes on WePC. :)

I had a great time with Oliver (and Rob and Sarah, not too far away) at the concert. The sound was a bit mushy, being in an indoor stadium. The contrast and clarity for which I like Iron Maiden so much in the first place went a long way to alleviating that defect, though.

The cover bands were awful, but that's to be expected. I had a finger in my good ear for most of the time they were playing, partly to save myself for Iron Maiden and partly because the lack of contrast in the cover bands' music made the volume of their music effectively too loud for comfort[1]. Bruce air-raid siren Dickenson's voice was louder and Iron Maiden's music was played more powerfully but both were relatively easy on the ears. I'm pretty sure the trick was in his vocal range and the many kinds of contrast (soft vs loud, smooth vs crunchy etc.) in Iron Maiden's music that makes it so appealing.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner was orgasmic! Of course it would be for me, since it's still my favourite song. The twelve foot high Eddie-as-a-cyborg-bounty-hunter (two guys in a suit?) walking about the stage was brilliant!

It was sweet that Rob and Sarah could come and enjoy the event after all. I had a couple of tickets to sell them at a severely reduced price after Ticketek cruelly reassigned the seats for Oliver and me as a result of the unexpected change in venue. Rob said that although the sound was significantly mushier for them where they were sitting, they did actually get a good view of the stage (and the back-stage), even if it was from the side.

I'm seriously pleased I splurged out and attended the concert. Yay for Iron Maiden!

[1] They weren't as bad as Daleks singing Snoopy's Christmas, though.

I've joined the blackout in protest of Section 92A and the manner in which the law to end all laws was pushed upon us.

I've blacked out realhamster too.

That strident bitch Jidith Tizard needs to be righteously reamed with a Tomahawk cruise missile.

I watched THX-1138 today (the Director's cut). I hadn't seen it for a couple of decades and I read the book sometime in the mid 1990s. The film was quite fun! It is much more in the spirit of Christmas than I remembered, electric Jesuses and all.

The CGI mutant monkeys near the end were a bit jarring, since I was looking forward to seeing lots more sexy bearded dwarves like Mark Lawhead. I should have made the connection between the words Director's Cut written on the box and the digital pox George Lucas wreaks upon films like Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

I'm grateful there was no Jar-Jar Binks in this film, though. That would have made me very unhappy. On the other hand, seeing Jar-Jar spending some quality time with the friendly and helpful robotic police officers might not be so bad.

Buy more! Buy more now! Buy… and be happy!

The 25th of December is the birthday of a man who was born of a virgin, preached love and kindness, performed many miracles, was executed, came back to life three days after his death and flew to Heaven. Mithra's birthday was celebrated up until 336CE, when some influential Roman decided it should be a celebration of Jesus's birthday instead, even though it's the wrong time of the year.

Perhaps the 4th century Romans thought Jesus was much more fashionable because he did most of the things all the other Jesus-like figures did and he created an army of zombie saints, which is just soooo cool!

Another design I've toyed with on www.wepc.com, a tiny, highly directional display for securely entering passwords.

Wouldn't it be cool if laptop computers could run on blood sugar?

I had a wee bit of fun on www.wepc.com, sketching a kind of tablet PC I've wanted for years:

The idea is that you scribble and annotate stuff on the tablet-plus-screen on the front cover and display books, photo albums and notes on the e-paper pages.

It would be very cool if the e-paper could be made flexible enough to accommodate centrefolds.

Following are the kind of effects I applied to the hand-assembled knot tiles I did for Fitznik II:

Wheee! I finally finished my Celtic Knot editor and renderer.