jmoiron.net

Since most every other part of this website is a hastily cobbled together piece of crap, I see no reason for the title I've selected not to fail. If it doesn't, let it be known that its due to no merit of my own. My site has shown the capacity to display Unicode Japanese (日本語) characters in the past, so perhaps this won't be any different.

After some recent thinking, far too shallow to be considered soul searching, I realized that my desire to create that led me to CS has not really diminished. Like many of my peers, I have not really done shit. I coded this website, which, frankly, sucks. I've written a lot of blog entries, mostly detailing pointless trivialties of my life. As a historical reference to my thoughts and feelings of a particular month (as these seem monthly now, no matter how much I'd rather them not be), they aren't without purpose. But by and large they don't further any sort of meaningful discourse, or provide anyone with information.

The days of some long detailed entry here are probably over. Expect to see something like my 日本 trip for my upcoming excursion to Egypt. For something big like that, sure, I'll write something coherent. But there's a lot of interesting crap that slips through the cracks; a lot of random stuff that doesn't allow me to take up all of your time, that I still want to call attention to.

First up on the list, is that I've sort of started for myself a small repository of code snippets. This is mostly out of the hope that having an svn will encourage me to incrementally update projects and recognize and fix errors in them in some kind of organized fashion. Or at least, not forget about them. If you're curious, you can check it out yourself.

Johnny informed me yesterday that bmp was retired in portage. Whatever reasons were cited for its retiring, I'm not sure of, but the fact that it is unmaintained probably has something to do with it. The development team has moved on in a new direction, publically abandoning the tree available in many distros. The new tree, BMPx, isn't yet available in lots of distros because its not yet stable.

Enter audacious, a fork of the bmp project before it went loco. They have fixed an entertaining bug dealing with the xmms control socket, which conspicuously lacks solid documentation. This means that some script I wrote some time ago now reports the bitrate and frequency as their actual values, and not 0. They also have made it their duty in life to port a fuckton of plugins to their almost bmp compatible ABI/API. This ammounts to a decent bmp-like package that will play most anything I can think of. My current poison of choice is Debian, so here are some sources:

deb http://vdlinux.sourceforge.jp/ experimental audacious
deb-src http://vdlinux.sourceforge.jp/ experimental audacious

Another thing that you have probably heard of: our (the United States our) vice president shot a man a few weeks ago. At first he kept it from the press for about 24 hours, finally leaking it to a small Texas newspaper, wherefrom the story spread like wildfire. A few days afterwards, Cheney goes to the appropriate brokers of propaganda (fox news) and does an interview in which he describes his thoughts:

But the image of him falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there's Harry falling. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.

There are a few things that are just really, absurdly wrong with the situation. The first is that, with our celebrity based media circus concenrtating full time on the Cheney story, other extremely important news fell through the cracks. That's to be expected by a mass media that does little more than function as a propaganda machine, but it's upsetting nonetheless and deserves mention

The other is that there is a startling disconnect between this story, and especially Cheney's horrified reaction to the outcome, and the wars the United States is waging throughout the world. It deserves mention, although its largely regarded as historical fact already, that Cheney helped in no small part to propagate the lies and deliberate campaign of misinformation that led directly to the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi's and about 2500 US troops. But nowhere is it postulated that perhaps the reality of death and bloodshed, and the horror of watching the man at the end of your gun fall down, could be an occasion to revisit a harsh reality our army lives every day. A reality by and large the "American Public" ignores on a daily basis.