July 23, 2009
Success is defined by goals achieved and hypothesis confirmed. I have succeeded in many ways in my project Digg Diversity and yet it is not nearly ready for version 1.0. It remains Beta because there are issues that a person cannot overlook. On the other hand, I am able to use it everyday without any important issues stopping me. I suspect that anyone who likes Digg and doesn't like users that abuse Digg's front page can use this as an alternative front page.
One issue that I'd like to address in version 1.0 is to allow a larger set of data to be shown and compared. By multiplying the number of articles shows by 20 and filtering out all those items that will be given a score of zero (or less than 1.0) from the current version, the competition will become quite a lot fiercer for Digg Diversity's front page. Items that would never show up on Digg's front page will show up at the top of some or even all of Digg Diversity's users' list. The main success in Digg Diversity's 1.5 month Beta so far is that it has perfectly followed my hypothesis that is far graver than I even imagined when I wrote a rant against Digg at the initial release of Digg Diversity. In fact, the data that I currently possess is far graver than anyone could possibly know besides Digg or the Cabals that run Digg's front page could guess.
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June 30, 2010
3 weeks ago I promised a screencast and though I totally missed my self-imposed deadline, I feel that the outcome is passable. That's right, it isn't good enough for me to say that it's decent. That's okay though, sometimes you have a lofty plan and it just sucks. The funny thing is that editing the video and audio was not worthwhile because it was easier to re-record than to edit. In fact, I could have easily re-recorded yet another video easier than I re-recorded just the audio. What that says is that editing on Linux is at a point where certain people can get it to work and many people cannot. As a programmer, I see that as an opportunity. Especially with these type of programs that many people pay good money for, programmers can make a quick killing just by spending a weekend writing some code.
Rockband 2 Drum Instrument for Linux
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July 5, 2010
In apology for my broken promise and rather uncool decision to leave my screencast broken, I am giving you a drawing. You may remember my past drawings which were the very start of this blog (2007 May 27 - 2007 June 29).
The truth is that I haven't been drawing for almost a year actually. The Open Source Emo series and my Ninja story were the last things I've drawn except for a few things here and there until yesterday. I drew two girls yesterday with the GIMP and today I drew a third with Inkscape. The image above was drawn in one go with Inkscape. Unlike yesterday where I drew hundreds of lines to create a decent shape, this one came together with the strokes you see here -- 27 strokes and one piece of text.
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June 10, 2010
Hello fine readers. I would have a video below but a few things are stopping me. Since they are interesting, I thought I might tell you about them as well. The first thing is how slow I get when I am loopy from lack of sleep. If I was more with it, I would have finished my screencast in under 10 minutes. The next thing is the long-windedness that I have when it comes to some of my projects. If I wasn't so long-winded about my projects, I would have a 1 minute screencast that would awe some strange person who reads this blog. The next thing that is stopping me from posting this screencast is Youtube's 10 minute limit. If Youtube decided that 15 minutes was the new limit, I would have posted. If I trusted another video site as much as I do Youtube, I would have posted it elsewhere. Under the current climate I have not even looked for other video hosts, though there may be some out there with reasonable terms and rules. If there was a video editor that I knew how to use that worked better than LiVES (like VirtualDub) then I would have edited out a bunch of umm's and it would've been ~5 minutes long. If I had installed the latest version of LiVES and it worked with my file then I would've edited it.
And now for the more far fetched excuses: If bandwidth were be cheaper, I would buy more bandwidth, so I could host the 68MB ogg file on my own server. If Google supported Ogg Theora instead of H.264 video codec for the <video> tag, I could put the Ogg Theora video on my server and expect that people could properly view it with several browsers. If the H.264 developers considered Mozilla Firefox, Konqueror, and Webkit to be safe from any patent infringement when implementing x264 natively, then I would be happy to convert the screencast to H.264 mpeg-4 and put it in a <video> tag and buy more bandwidth.
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