moving parts of the kasper clan

I bought $180 of in-ear headphones to try out (the Shure SE210’s and the Sennheiser CX300’s) and both of them, I think, made me feel dizzy to the point of falling over and feeling like I was going to hurl my guts out the next morning. I’ve blogged previously about motion sickness, but this is just frightening and frustrating and badness.

Blef.

The Hori screen protector that I have on my PSP has managed to become poked and has subsequently created a bubble on my PSP’s screen. So I was looking at getting an InvisibleShield screen protector, being that they’re all but bullet-proof. And then I saw a couple of crazy nuts that talked about just buying some 3m Scotchgard sheets (you know… the stuff they put on the fronts of cars now to protect them from rocks, dirt, and small farm animals) and cutting it to size and saving vast amounts of coin. Wellsir, that’s just crazy enough that it simply has to work!

So I scoured around a bit and came across this little gem to help you Prep Your iPod for Armageddon! I went right out and purchased 24 inches of 4″-wide 8mil Paint Protection Film. I figure that if this actually does work, my $11 investment will provide me with enough material to cover my PSP, the kids’ 3 iPods, my Treo, and perhaps even the cat.

Woot!

Watch out, MacGyver… there’s a new kid in town!!

I was going to update my previous post about the amazing movie, Copying Beethoven, with this, but I am sufficiently taken to generate a new post. Kerry Candaele commented on my last post with a link to his forthcoming movie called Following The Ninth, so I visited his site and I am very, very impressed. The short, 7-minute preview of his work in progress fully echoes my thoughts and feelings about Beethoven and his amazing Ninth Symphony. Even better, it shows the impact that the Ninth is still having in our generation today. One of my favorite quotes from the clip:

“This piece enters your bloodstream and then changes who you are. The entire blueprint of everything… of society, of how things should be, of how things are… all the way from subatomic particles to galactic clusters… it’s all here.”
George Mathew: Conductor, Beethoven’s Ninth For South Asia
Carnegie Hall 1/23/2006

Kerry, I sincerely wish you the best of good fortune in your endeavor and I hope your film gets the attention that it deserves!

I just watched one of the most amazing movies that I have ever seen: the excellent Copying Beethoven.

I have always been deeply fascinated with the genius that is Ludwig van Beethoven. I grew up listening to my mom playing his pieces on our piano, and have enjoyed the complexity and overwhelming emotion found both in the observation and participation of his immense talent. In particular, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has something that resonates in my soul like nothing else ever has.

The second movement (Molto vivace - Presto) has such passion and raw power and ferocity and strength and beauty and peace!!! It is everything that life should have in it, and I am amazed at Beethoven’s ability to make it all fit together and make sense in one place. Every time I hear it, it just overwhelms me with emotion. Watching Ed Harris’s spectacular portrayal of Beethoven as he was conducting the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, I was just absolutely overjoyed beyond words to hear the second movement kick in and finally get some visual confirmation of the pure joy and power and energy that I’ve always felt deep in my soul when listening to it. I was smiling and laughing and air-violining… just such power… amazing. And seeing the expression on Beethoven’s face as he was pouring his very soul into the playing of his music… pure, intense joy.

And then the fourth movement… which is what most people (who are even aware of such things) think of when the Ninth Symphony is mentioned… WOW. I’ve always preferred the second movement over the fourth movement, and quite honestly, I never really grasped what Beethoven was doing with it. Of course, it helps not that the fourth movement played such a prominent role in the deeply disturbing Clockwork Orange. But what I didn’t realize was what ground-breaking stuff Beethoven was doing at the time! A chorale and two tenors in a Symphony–it was unheard of until Beethoven dared to do it. And then to have them do absolutely nothing but stand on-stage for the entirety of the performance preceding their parts in the fourth movement–it must have seemed absolute insanity! But. But… when the chorale joins in in the fourth movement… the incredible power and beauty of it absolutely brought me to tears. It was as if the countless multitudes of angels of heaven had joined in at that very moment and the eye and ear could scarcely take it in. And the effect that it had on those in the crowd on screen was exactly what I felt: pure emotion and power and beauty.

The funny thing is that just a few hours earlier today, I sat through another Ed Harris movie (okay, it was a Nicolas Cage movie), National Treasure: Book of Secrets. As far as movies go, it was a pretty good ride. Laughs and suspense and danger and all the right ingredients. A nice, clean family movie, and I applaud it for being that. And Ed Harris did a very nice job in it.

But Ed Harris’s performance in Copying Beethoven is something extremely special. It was obvious that he gave his whole heart and soul to the part. I don’t think I would have known that the actor playing Beethoven was Ed Harris, quite honestly–and in my book, that’s exactly how it should be. Tremendously done, Mr. Harris. I have complete respect for your abilities after seeing this movie.

In the special features section of the DVD, Agnieszka Holland said something to the effect that seeing people who have never listened to classical music crying from seeing and hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony made all the work worthwhile. Well, ma’am, I have loved classical music all my life and your film brought joy, tears, and some of the biggest smiles to my face that you could imagine. I’d say you did a darned good job.

As far as notoriety and high visibility go, I rather doubt that you’ll
be seeing a lot of raving reviews of Copying Beethoven. As a matter of fact, I kind of doubt you’ll find it mentioned much. Its style and
pace and camera work and subject matter and such are very much not the taste of today’s
huddled masses. It lacks too many of the normally-prescribed Hollywood
ingredients to make it palatable for our darling MTV generation.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t see it. =;)

Now, this one I’m really speaking out of the side of my head on… This is totally based on first impressions of NetBeans, albeit after 3<x<5 hours have been invested in said first impressions…

I’ve been using Eclipse and CDT for a while for my day job at VMware (which, by the by, totally rocks!!!). And for the most part, Eclipse+CDT really does a nice job at helping me maneuver around our very large code base and lowering the learning curve after I’ve figured out how to teach it about include paths that it can’t figure out on its own. As a C++ IDE, it’s very nice, responsive, stable, and it definitely helps in learning the code base via being able to quickly search, view inheritance hierarchies/object references, and quickly take you to definitions/declarations/usages. I had an itch to scratch with VIM keybindings and from what I’ve seen, viPlugin fits the bill very nicely. In fact, I’ve just today broken down and sent off my $21 for the wee beastie.

In response to a previous blog of mine, someone suggested that I look at NetBeans and SunStudio (which is built atop NetBeans) as alternatives to Eclipse as a C++ IDE, so I took some time to learn and explore today. I am definitely impressed with NetBeans in general, and their attention to C++ as a core component (as opposed to Eclipse, which provides C++ as a plugin, albeit a much-more-core plugin than previous). And NetBeans does a much nicer job, imho, in UI clarity as well as getting up and running quickly. Very nice attention to detail, and very good online help. I was up and running with our very large code base in NetBeans almost immediately–orders of magnitude quicker than doing the same thing in Eclipse.

And then I tried to set up NetBeans’ Code Assistance. For 4+ hours, on and off (each iteration took a painfully long time to discover that I’d still not gotten it right). Now… to be fair, it sure seems like NetBeans has some nice sophistication here, and gives you 3 ways of discovering how to construct your code model and code assistance goodness:

1. Examining a binary (depends on compiling with CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS=”-g3 -gdwarf-2″, iiuc)
2. Examining a bunch of build output/shared object code (also depends on compiling with CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS=”-g3 -gdwarf-2″, iiuc)
3. Finding its way through a mess of C/C++ source/header files (this is what Eclipse/CDT does, I think?)

However, try as I might, no matter how I told the code assistance wizard to do its thing, it only ended up finding 31 C (not even C++) files. Needless to say, no code assistance or navigability joy was mine, which makes this fantastic IDE… much less than useful for me, unfortunately.

One other thing that gives Eclipse a thumbs-up here is the Perforce plugin for Eclipse. I don’t think one exists for NetBeans 6.

And I personally much-prefer the speed and good looks of SWT over Swing, which gives Eclipse another ++.

So, all in all, I REALLY do like NetBeans. I will have to poke at it some more later, and would LOVE it (dear LazyWeb) if someone could point me in the right direction to getting Code Assistance working. But for the time being, I think I’ll stick with Eclipse+CDT+VIM keybindings.

sudo zypper update:

2 Problems:
Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture.
Problem: Cannot install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin, because it is conflicting with java-1_6_0-sun-plugin

Problem: No valid solution found with just resolvables of best architecture.
With this run only resolvables with the best architecture have been regarded.
Regarding all possible resolvables takes time, but can come to a valid result.
Solution 1: Make a solver run with ALL possibilities.
Regarding all resolvables with a compatible architecture.
number, (r)etry or (c)ancel> 1
Applying solution 1

Problem: Cannot install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin, because it is conflicting with java-1_6_0-sun-plugin
A conflict over java-1.5.0-plugin == 1.5.0_update14 (java-1.5.0-plugin) requires the removal of java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] which is scheduled for installation
=== java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] ===
java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] is needed by atom:java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] (java-1_5_0-sun-plugin >= 1.5.0_update14-0.1)
findutils-4.2.31-24.i586 is needed by java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] (/usr/bin/find)
=== java-1_6_0-sun-plugin-1.6.0.u4-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] ===
java-1_6_0-sun-plugin-1.6.0.u4-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] is needed by atom:java-1_6_0-sun-plugin-1.6.0.u4-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates] (java-1_6_0-sun-plugin >= 1.6.0.u4-0.1)

Solution 1: do not install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin
do not install java-1_5_0-sun-plugin-1.5.0_update14-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates]
Solution 2: do not install java-1_6_0-sun-plugin
do not install java-1_6_0-sun-plugin-1.6.0.u4-0.1.i586[opensuse-updates]
Solution 3: Ignore this conflict of java-1_5_0-sun-plugin
number, (r)etry or (c)ancel>
^C

*boggle*

sudo smart upgrade:

Computing transaction…

Upgrading packages (234):
MPlayer kdegames4-carddecks-default
SDL kdegames4-carddecks-other
SDL-devel kdegraphics3-kamera
SDL_image kdegraphics3-pdf
alsa kdegraphics3-postscript
alsa-devel kdegraphics3-scan
alsa-oss kdegraphics4
alsa-plugins kdelibs3
alsa-utils kdelibs3-arts
[snip lots of stuff in between]
kdeedu4 qtcurve-kde
kdegames3 screenlets
kdegames3-arcade soprano
kdegames3-board transcode
kdegames3-card vorbis-tools
kdegames3-tactic xfsprogs
kdegames4 xmoto

Installing packages (4):
kaffeine-lang kdebase3-runtime libavahi-qt3-1 libdca0

Removing packages (4):
gnucash gnucash-lang ktorrent-lang slib

571.7MB of package files are needed. 46.3MB will be freed.

Confirm changes? (Y/n): y

Um. Yeah. I think I’ll stick with smart for now, guys…

I’ve been looking for a way to have VIM functionality inside Eclipse for a long time. SlickEdit has it, sort of, but it’s prohibitively expensive and ugly. And then I saw this nifty little vimplugin sourceforge project and got my hopes all up. Sadly, it’s not quite there yet. After figuring out how to associate *.cc files to the Vim plugin (note to vimplugin guys: Maybe stick a README or some docs on how to use the plugin in the tarball?), I saw that I was unable to open more than one VIM tab in Eclipse at a time. In addition, there is no contextual/outline view associated to the code once you’re in the VIM editor as there is with the CDT C++ editor.

*sigh*

Back to the drawing board.

Oh No’s! My beloved Moleskine has torn itself asunder! Behold, the ripped binding.

For $15, you’d think they’d be a little more resilient than this!

And no, my deluxe custom black duct tape pen holder is not to blame (I don’t think?).

Oh, intrepid fellow Moleskine users: is this kind of senseless violence unprecedented?

[ Update (2008-03-19: ] Moleskine has come through for me and send me a replacement!!

I ran across this on Planet Gnome…

Openbox 3.4.6 and ObConf 2.0.3 released

Feb 02, 2008 - 12:53 pm EST

Openbox 3.4.6 and ObConf 2.0.3 have been released for mass consumption!

This Openbox release introduces a new look! The Clearlooks theme has been updated to match the latest GTK Clearlooks engine. As well Openbox and ObConf are both sporting shiny new icons.

Wow! That takes me back a ways!! Openbox was a fork started by the supremely-talented Ben Jansens (oh x0r, where have you gone?) and a couple of other talented guys who used to be hardcore blackbox dudes. I had no idea Openbox was still being developed!

Rock on, guys! =:)

It actually felt pretty good to “unplug”, as it was put in The Matrix, and allow my brain to focus on nothing other than family, video games, and good old-fashioned American football today. I just realized today that I’ve not had an truly restful weekend in about 3 months, what with new job, travelling, trying to sell a house, realtor-ish stuff, miscellaneous stress, etc. So it was a nice break from overwhelming life today.

Since I’ve not watched football (or much of TV at all) since last year’s Charger’s game, we didn’t even know who (other than the Patriots) were playing today. But we decided to root for the underdogs (The Giants), and it was a very exciting game! I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t Tivo’d it yet, but it was very well played–an enjoyable diversion. I include a totally unrelated picture of one of my favorite Chargers from my growing up years of watching football with my Dad… Charlie Joiner.

In other news, I see that the amazing Bertjan has committed a bit to KPilot trunk recently! Way to go Bertjan!! We need to catch up on IRC soon and talk more of world domination!

I guess that’s all for tonight. Need sleep and to get back on a decent schedule again…