Coders Edge

consider the following code snippit for brace expansion, a Bash command that with it's output as follows:

echo -e {He,She}" sings "{his,her}" song of "{him,her}"
  with "{his,her}" every breath
 as "{he,she}" sings of "{him,her}" too
 all of this in silence

"

He sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 He sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings his song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of him
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with his every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as he sings of her too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of him too
 all of this in silence

 She sings her song of her
  with her every breath
 as she sings of her too
 all of this in silence

That is quite a lot,isn't it? That is why three columns are used to display it.

Well, I do like brace expansion,it is a fun thing. It easily makes an interesting possibility matrix, but if you were crafting statements, say statemenst for a language, how would assure that the statement was acceptible, that iw ould be a valid querry, for example if it were a querry statement that you were making, then . . . would that statement get parsed correctly? Or if it described relationships between people, or objects? Does the scheme of what the input is provide output that can be interpreted as valid or invalid? If so do mechanisms exist for the set's members to be tagged as such, or, if a member is invalid just delete it? Of course we could endevour to study such tasks, if that endevour were fruitful.

In the case of the above poem I really see that one needs to do something else to create valid alternatives. In the case of some of the outcomes the 'meaning' (which is just what we would put on it, because the brace expansion mechanism is not about meaning, but about permutation of output based upon the input. The idea that we can find 'truth' within the produced output is a product of our own endevour, just as creating these muliplicitious output would also be. Suppose we used names? How would we do it to allow for things to be declared 'true' or to be declared 'false', or as 'valid' or as 'invalid'? Of course, we would devise tests, and a scheme, or we would just go through the outcomes and dismiss them based upon what we notice. If it were for a project, and we were an editor, say a poetry project, we would just delete the items that don't seem to makes sense. And then, well, hand that idea over to a psychology student, looking for disertaition work and we probabaly get a thesis idea out of it. What are the outcomes thta peopel delete? A sort of psychological test? Why do they delete that one and not the other one? All of this interesting, giving insight into people's motivations and beliefs.

We can make up all kinds of these manufactured brace expansion word-plays. It really is a powerful tool. For example I can do something very easily like this:

 echo -e {Who,Catholics,Menonites,Amish\ Folk,Jewish\ Folk,Muslims,Hindus,everyone}" should pray for "{Catholics,Menonites,Amish\ Folk,Jewish\ Folk,Muslims,Hindus,everyone}"\n\n\"

I won't run that one for you. It is a bunch of lines, you can run it on your own command line if you want to. Question: how would you modify the above to output these as questions or statements of direction? So the construct of the output needs to get modified based upon the rules of the language used, in this case English. OK, so, the example above is suggesting that everyone should pray for everyone. So would there be a way to 'filter', in a sense, the output, so that the redundancy is removed? The answer: it is all inanity anyway in one sense.

So, there it is, folks, fun with brace expansion.

Fun with Brace Expansion

The following is a line of a Gimp script for producing a histogram for color manipulation using the color Curves manipulator:

The details of the line above include that the data gets profiled as part of the format. The '28' that follows the name of the file, in this case $1.024c.jpg, represents the number of elements in the histogram, which is not the number of datapoints. The first value represents the first poin in the Color curves tool input, which is often 0. If that data point isn't there, then I think the curves tool probably adds it. The curves tool (you should run gimp and check it out) basically lets you set the level for each value for either all (RGB) or for just one channel at a time. So, the first number must be lower in value than the third number which must be lower in value than the fifth number all the way up to the second to last nubmer in the whole series, which usually will be 255, because there are 256 possible color values and we start at 0.

Alright, cool, whatever. Let's consider a color graph with a lot fewer points that the one shown here. Say we only do three points, one in the middle and two for the ends. So the line would look like this:

How can I use brace expansion to make a huge set of input for the gimp so I can make an output image matrix and then discard what I do not find desirable?

How can a unique file name be crafted? Does brace expansion allow for a counter?

results later.

I was able to generate over 100,000 lines of code, by using brace expansion! Each of these lines would generate a single unique image. How unique? Well, that would mean that the code woudl apply the transform with unique inputs. How different would the outputs be? The output matrix would need to be examined.

OK, it's crazy how many lines there are. So I won't quote you that line but, instead, tame it down a little. I was using {0..255} so now I will just use {0,24,48,72,96,122,144,155,200,220,240,255}, or something similar, insteda of the other. That will drastically cut down on the number of lines.

Alright, I'm down to 2730 lines from the following:

 echo -e "(jpeg_histogram \"$1\" \"$1.some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg\" 6 #\( "{0,4,8}" "{0,25,50,75,100,125,150,175,200,225,240,250,255}" "{24,44,64,84,104,124,144,164,184,204}" "{5,40,80,120,160,200,240}" 225 243 \) \)\
" >~/junk/not_as_big_out.big

Well, it's not a proper script, as the file names are all the same. It's a good first step. Here is just a few lines of the output of a similar command, pipped into a different file because it is different:

 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 80 225 245 ) )
 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 80 225 255 ) )
 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 120 225 0 ) )
 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 120 225 50 ) )
 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 120 225 75 ) )
 (jpeg_histogram "" ".some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg" 6 #( 8 255 204 120 225 100 ) )

Notice that there is part with the quotes, that is where the file name will go in the script, once I determine the naming scheme. just a note: it would be nice, when looking at a transformed image, that one could find the transform that was made to the image some how so that one could use that same one again for another image. That could be encoded into the exif data of the file, or it could be put into the filename. As I need a scheme for a filename, and I know that each line has a unique part as the result of the brace expansion, I am thus able to craft a unique filename based upon the input to the transform. It will look like this:

input_filename.jpg.6_#__8_255__204_120__225_100__.jpg

Or something similar. Probably I would need to make some sed script thing that would generate these file names, and then I will be able to run this enormous script . . . and that would make so many files beyond what is normal. Maybe it could just be a list of possible transforms and we dip into it randomly for each image, and when we find one we like we can use it to transform even more images. So when we use the random image dip (it would be like a tabaco chew, just dip and chew. Chaw, the image maven maw. (the fingler click 'wake up').

When crafting these kinds of things it is important to plan ahead like this to see what will work for what is desired. In the case of the above the desired output is not easily obtainible without just adding in a few more spaces where I want underscores in the file names. That way the job of replacement of the space (becuae I don't like having spaces in a filename, even thoughthey are allowed) is not also a job of trying to figure out the boundries of the point sets. I modify above to:

Notice that there is part with the quotes, that is where the file name will go in the script, once I determine the naming scheme. just a note: it would be nice, when looking at a transformed image, that one could find the transform that was made to the image some how so that one could use that same one again for another image. That could be encoded into the exif data of the file, or it could be put into the filename. As I need a scheme for a filename, and I know that each line has a unique part as the result of the brace expansion, I am thus able to craft a unique filename based upon the input to the transform. It will look like this:

input_filename.jpg.6_#__8_255__204_120__225_100__.jpg

This is the line to generate the output:

 echo -e "(jpeg_histogram \"\$1\" \"\$1.some_coded_filename_yet_to_be_determined.jpg\" 6 #( "{0,4,8}" "{0,25,50,75,100,125,150,175,200,225,240,250,255}"  "{24,44,64,84,104,124,144,164,184,204}" "{5,40,80,120,160,200,240}"  225 "{0,50,75,100,125,175,225,245,255}" ))\n\" >~/junk/fairly_big.big

you will get an indirection error unless you have directory named ~/junk and if you have write premission there. Well, I guess I could craft something to write out xml position data to put into Supertuxkart, and bump up the number of objects. I ought to be able to craft arrays of objects. Hacking into Supertuxkart save formats I discovered:

 <small-nitro x="-23.263922" y="13.064166" z="148.008377" \/>

Do I need to spell it out for you? If I do then here it is:

echo -e  "\<small-nitro x=\"-"{0..22}".263922\" y=\""{0..33}".064166\" z=\""{0,30,50,90,100,120,140,180}".008377\" \/>\n"\>lot_of_nitros.xml
wow a hard one to encode, hope I got it right!

Now, theoretically, I should beable to paste these into the track.xml file in any Supertuxkart track and the game should put these objects in it. That would be a very lot of objectttts so I think I will only paste some of them to see at first.

Interesting effect. I just put in the huge 5000 or more line file and it took it. Supertuxkart only renders the power ups when they are near a surface. I would like to put some other object in the place of these and get an array in the sky.

Using the same data I made it into shapes. The game crawled to a halt. But the game did it. I used the 'dice' from the 'the-cube' level, had to copy the b3b and a bit map over.

I'd give screenshots but I'm not sure if I should due to Copyright law.

fun fun fun

Fedora 20

upgrade success!

Started Fedup after winging through their guide on how to do it without screwing it up. Well, It's been more than 20 times since I started using the RedHat logo'd Linux. I remember when doing rpm upgrades required downloading the files manually and then running them from a command line. There was no yum.

A bud of mine is recommending that folks run Mint, which I have not looked into. But I can tell you that on his stystem it is kickity, in the menus bounce open without hesitatin. And if you don't use it as a game system, then, well, you dont' have the super graphics card. But then, well , the experience is not the same. the newer browswers take advantage of the graphics. I recommend the best card that you understand is better. I mean like don't go buy the most expensive one because it never is a good deal for a poor guy to buy the newest of the newest. The prices always have a fall very quickly and you can get last months stuff at a much better deal. Leave it to the millionaires and government buyers, who have more money or access to it then normal people ever do. They buy the thing at the huge price and pay it because it is all a tax write off. Or, in the case of the government procurement of the item, and it ends up at someone's house (yes, it has happened, even though it is very illegal, the money that a government guy spends never is his money.

Simple things can be charged a lot for. And government is good at ignoring the gouge. But, the reason for the gouge is that hte profits that are made are always looted by the locals. So, when you see it, the huge graft, when you are a green bean gov guy, you might be outraged by it. But really, if it isn't wasted here, it will be wasted somewhere else. So it makes sense to just let them spend their budget on what they want, who they are funding are friends. It's a local grift for local people. Have you been to the new fitness center? Did you know that there are two golf courses for every Air Base in the world? Well, maybe that is something that people 'know' but they have no real facts to back it up. It's somethign I heard a captain saying once. He didn't offer me any actual source for his observation. It seemed like it must be true and I used to believe that it probably is. But in journalism "probably is" doesn't cut it. I am not a journalist and still I know that repeating false hood is a common as a chikadee in a frozen fallen over bush burried in an early Winter blizzard. It might make a good intro into a discussion about falsehood and the corporate news.

And so, when you go out to buy new technology, spec it out. Get to know what the new things are, what the old things were, what you have now. there is always a new type of whatever-it-is. And the new things are often very worth it to get after they have been proven. But making a computer fast and a system cutting edge one needs to ask 'what are we really doing here?'

Maybe the thing that is slowing you done is a bug. If you took sometime to debug the program, you might solve it and find a faster solution wiht what you have. And some bugs it doesn't matter how fast your system is , or how much memory, becuase the bug is 'use all the memory until there is none left' in its effect. Or use all the processor power that you can. Or it might be a block on a call to a subprocess that is blocked.

I've loaded too many langauges. It's slowing me down. I don't ever use these. I ought to uninstall most of them. It really would make the upgrade much faster.

If most fonts and most kde languages were uninstalled before the upgrade, and then reinstalled after the upgrade, the package loading would happen much much faster. It is too bad the upgrade isn't better broken up, and that there isn't another part of it on the other side of it. But that is really not possible becuase no one knows what all of things do for someone elses system. YOu can't go disabling all other langauges and the thousands of fonts for the first boot.

Well, it is morning now, a good nights sleep. I'd gone to sleep with the Christmas tree plugged in and the upgrade at the point of installation, with no way back. Very cool. It was 5:30 AM, I walked over to the monitor. I unplugged the Christmas tree (it is not a 'holiday' tree).

The monitor showed that the upgrade was over except for the verification. I had over 5000 upgrade nodes! Again: the upgrade with fedup will go much much faster if you yum remove things with very large rpm sizes. Or, in the case of KDE, you might want to remove all the langauges that you do not use (why are they loaded anyway?).

Too many fonts, too, will slow down the upload.

As someone who is a user of Fedora, who has gone through every single upgrade, I have to say that it is always a little bit scarey to do it. I get pensive. I need to make sure I approach it in a rested state of mind. I make sure that I am finished with any projects for the system, that there is nothing pending.

This upgrade happened very easily. I went to bed again after noting that the upgrade was doing the verification. When I got up a few hours later the process was done, the system was rebooted, and here I am telling you all about it.

important last step: there were some packages that left warnings concerning them. I need to see if any of these are broken (broken means that the do not all of their dependencies installed and so parts of their functionality might not work)

There is one that I use often, called gthumbs, it is a useful tool, but as time progresses, and browswers become far more efficient, tools like gthumb become more and more obsolete. The reason: you can do everything that gthumb will do with small amounts of Javascript and a browswer.

gthumb annoyance

there is a selection for the gthumb which allows 'sort by time that the photo was taken' (paraphrase). When there is a very large set of files for gthumb to parse through it needs to then access and open each and everyone of them in order to then make a sort of them in the time order of their original creation. This is not the file timestamp so the files really do need to be opened. If the system crawls to a halt while using gthumbs (on an older system) perhaps it is this process of sorting by date of image creation. Selecting a different sorting order is the better way.

The theory of image storage and sorting is an important one. A description of common practice, also a good one. As a 'content maven' I leraned a very long time ago that storing things by date is teh best way to do it. And so when I am image creating I will make a directory with the date in a format of month_day_year, always using two digit format for the month and day and a four digit one for a year. Then all of the thngs that I do on that day, or on subsequent days, will be saved in that directory. I might have a few different versions of this, one for C programs, maybe one for scripting work. The images, through, really need to be sorted like this. Otherwise they become much harder to inventory later.

If you date things like this, it might be that you have a project that you know will take a long time. Maybe you have a bunch of different ones. In that case I suggest this because it works so very well. I also further break it down by year so I would have a tree that looks partially like this?

     ── 10_12_2009
│   ├── 10_26_2009
│   ├── 11_17_2009
│   ├── 11_22_2009
│   ├── 12_06_2009
│   └── 12_28_2009
├── CamPics2010
│   ├── 01_15_2010
│   ├── 01_17_2010
│   ├── 01_24_2010
│   ├── 01_31_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010_B
│   ├── 07_15_2010
│   ├── 07_25_2010
│   ├── 08_07_2010
│   ├── 08_07_2010_B
│   ├── 08_07_2010_C
│   ├── 08_16_2010
│   └── 12_05_2010
├── CamPics2011
│   ├── 01_03_2011

And, yes, it is ok to have things of the same date, A, B, C, whatever. You can call it 'fred': 01_22_2010_fred

Using the date code like this very much helps because it lets people know, not based upon a time stamp that can be cahnge, but upon the name of the directory, that this stuff is from that date, about that date, or stuff that had a genesis of that date, but is now on going work.

Another important aspect of archiving large quantities of content: it is best to not mix it all up in the same place. So if you were doing inkscape svg files from 9PM to midnight and into the AM, then getting up and in the morning doing a pod cast recording, and then spending several hours writing, it is best to have places for these that are separate. A structure like this:

├── photos
│   ├── 01_15_2010
│   ├── 01_17_2010
│   ├── 01_24_2010
│   ├── 01_31_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010_B
│   ├── 07_15_2010
│   ├── 07_25_2010
├── fiction
│   ├── 01_15_2010
│   ├── 01_17_2010
│   ├── 01_24_2010
│   ├── 01_31_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010_B
│   ├── 07_15_2010
│   ├── 07_25_2010
├── articles
│   ├── 01_15_2010
│   ├── 01_17_2010
│   ├── 01_24_2010
│   ├── 01_31_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010_B
│   ├── 07_15_2010
│   ├── 07_25_2010
├── jam_sessions
│   ├── 01_15_2010
│   ├── 01_17_2010
│   ├── 01_24_2010
│   ├── 01_31_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010
│   ├── 04_27_2010_B
│   ├── 07_15_2010
│   ├── 07_25_2010

at Urge Central you will find an image collage.

Dec 3, 2013

Bootstrap js

This very easy to use framework makes layout a breeze! here is a link to a sample page utilzing the bootstrap framework. Well, it isn't much, and the links don't do anything. It is just to show how easy bootstrap is to use.

Here is another bootstrap page, with some animated graphics.

Supertuxkart 0.8.1!

Supertuxkart 0.8.1! It's not much different from the 0.8. Some of the items are different, like the turbo powerups are blue now. That's cool. It was very easy to build it just by following their directions. I was playing the game almost as soon as it was done compiling. One hitch: when you run it with out installing it you need to be in the correct directory in order for it to work. Basically at the root of the build.

I haven't learned how to build a track for the game, but I do sometimes change the graphics. I have all of the new graphics here, so I used some of it for one of the levels. It's not hard to do it. I copied it and renamed it, and put references to it where it needed to be so now I have two 'museum' levels, one with my special graphics.

I did discover some cool stuff to do with Supertuxkart 0.8.1 (which has just been released, by the way). There is an 'artist's mode' that I did not know existed. Also, by using this mode, I can have the kart consume as many power ups as I would like. I't is sort of an ultimate cheat level. the game is rich in the way that it works. Some of the levels are far more detailed than others. All of them are far too short.

I love the idea of taking elevation data and crafting tracks like that. It seems as though that shouldn't be too hard to generate. I actually thought of that idea over 15 years ago by telling my friends that I knew that, someday, we would play with tracks that were just the same as what is in the real world. I am sure I am not the first one to think of this idea.

Some of the levels being more detailed, I decided to go and explore in places where the game, when you don't play in 'artist's mode, won't let you go otherwise. I also shut off an 'invisible wall' on one track by just removing the file in question that was the invisible wall (I don't like invisible walls). The wall was no longer there. And then, well, then it was obvious to me why the wall had been there in the first place. The reason: because without it if one gets too close to the edge one falls right off and over it. The old version: you smack into the invisible wall. You don't careen over.

I played the new soccer level (by myself) which was cute. I went to artist level on the city at night level. There is a cool thing with all of the buildings being really really tall. You can fly off to the tops of them and land on them. It makes me think we would make a race track that only goes along the tops of buildings. There would be no railings. Falling is always a posibility.

I modded the skyline level, calling that Railtrail Skyline. It would be cool to have a level that would be a skyline/city at night level where one would race along the streets, but then also race all the way along the sky, and then get back by hopping down the buildings one at a time. Is there any way to 'merge levels' so to speak? If you put the skyline level way up high above the city at night level you could just copy all the files together, I am guess, if the invisible wall was so easy to remove. It must be just as easy to add new things just by adding them. Of course, if the models intersect, it might be a little bit confusing to play the game, if not impossible.

And as far as artist mode goes, why switch back? The new Supertux level is significantly harder (thank the upgrade for that, I suppose) that I can not, and have not, won a single race in the Supertux mode. If you crash and die even once it leaves you way far behind. Commonly the other karts are dogging behind you at the end of 8 or so laps even in on a large track, which doesn't often happen in the 'expert' level.

I guess they changed the axis orientation of the tracks so that the coordinates of the old versions of tracks are 90 degrees askew of the old game (it might be some other value, say 180). And so on some of hte levels the karts are in places where the game checks for it, and it finds that the kart is in a bad place, and it doesn't start the game. It actually kicks you out of the game all the way! Kind of annoying. Anywho, the 'artist' level takes away that annoyance, and you can still play the game without a hitch (and fly around, and barrage the opponents with an endless and carpel tunnel inducing endless stream. It's really kind of cool They all bounce and arch off and do their thing, and it makes kind of a pretty sound. Or how about endless powerups? Don't do it! You'll hurt your thumb. I suppose map it to a keyboard key and just leave a piece of lead on it and the barrage will just keep going.

So in Artist mode I play the level with the problem with the karts being in bad starting locations. Some of them end up underneath the track. So throughout the game play they constantly die and are regenerated over and over. They progress backwards as their kart is placed further back everytime they die. Little flying hawk rises from the road and then the kart dies again. If it ever found a place that was not below the track it might have a chance and not die again

Also interesting is that when the kart starts too high it falls from the sky at the start.

There is a lot more that can be done with this software than just a racing game. The formats for the save models do not seem to have a readily available way to translate them into something that blender can use. There is a blitz3D company that will sell you an 80 dollar tool. That isn't really a lot of money to be able to have a starting point with which to create a new track. But, I suppose, open source and all that, the stuff is probably not provided by the developers of the game because they would really like the formats that they use to be unencumbered. They can provide the xport tool and not the import one. That will spawn people to use the software available. People to whom 70 dollars is a lot of money.

task chairs

I am still loving the chair. I have been much more productive since I got it. I am not sure if it is due to the chair or just bad weather.

Fedora 20

My latest Resume. some demos.

my antique mirror

I'll get to a place where that is a main page to access me, but I'm still not there. Now I use billperilli.com as a place for the demos. It's the supped up version, with all of the spinning, too annoying for most people I suppose.

fork and merge

consider the following fantasy fork-n-merge

SuperTuxWebKart

it's not a video game it's a cube collective. I can see it now: the spawn of ten thousand websites idea of mine can go like this: every single little square of a graphic that shows up as the face of a building on any of the supertuxkart levels could each be a feed from a website, and a full browser. How? Well, it would be a browswer in that it would show a current snap of the forward face of that page, probably don't want a full simubot dork-enabled dork-snot snark-inserter there too (though I am sure that some sadist is thinking about it right now and cutting code to do it even as I am here imagining the horrer of such a person who would do such a thing.

There is a city at night level that will give you a good idea of what I mean. You should put yourself into artists-view (I won't make it easy for you, if you don't know how to do it and you can't figure it out by websearching it yourself, you prob aren't reallying going to fork and merge these two items.

 Software Metal
 If it can't be broke
 you won't be either