July 2003 – Page 5 – Something Odd!

Rainbow Cocktails

This is a great photograph and description of how it was done. Cool!

The state of just about everything at OScon

This article is a good summary of keynotes at OScon.

Many 2.5/2.6 changes were put to the test recently when Linus Torvalds announced his move to the Open Source Development Network and the OSDN site was slashdotted. Thanks to improved efficiency in the kernel (especially the virtual memory management system), the system running their Web site stayed up through the onslaught…
But there is no doubt that Apple computers play a critical role at this conference. In fact, it’s loaded with Apple lovers. I haven’t tried to do an official count, but the silver laptops are gleaming out all over the place.

Tab Cleanup

I really wish Moz FB had session support.. Here’s a few pages I’ll be reading tomorrow morning:

Daring Fireball: Independent Days
Act Your Age
Build an XML-Based Content Management System with PHP
We’ve found the perfect solution to spam – Justin Mason is out of business. hehe.
Business models of news Web sites
Mozex – an extension which allows the user to use external programs for things like “view source”, “downloading”, etc.

Developing your Images

This simple tutorial is a good introduction to the workflow involved when editing images. I like the author’s idea of adding more sky!

Digital camera noise: discussion and solutions.

Neatimage has been mentioned a lot on The Sony Talk Forum but it only works in Windows. I searched for GIMP related solutions to the problem of digital camera noise. There’s a couple of good sites out there! 🙂

Listening to Online Radio

In the evenings I like to listen to The Last Word on . Unfortunately I’d also like to listen to Radio 1 from RTE. Here’s how I’ll do it:

TodayFM streams using the Microsoft ASX format. Mplayer understands this format with the right plugin and can even play online streams! What’s more, Mplayer can also save it’s output to a file. With this command I can save the stream for later listening:

mplayer -ao pcm -aofile todayfm.wav -vc null -vo null http://www.virtuetv.com/clients/srh/today_fm.asx
Mplayer can also play Realaudio but the one available through apt-get doesn’t so I’ll just listen to Radio 1 in realtime.

Does anyone know how I can pipe the output of Mplayer to lame or another mp3 encoder?

Train map and schedules in Chicago

When in Chicago you’re going to use the L at some stage. This is the elevated (and underground) train system that services downtown Chicago and it’s suburbs. This map is a good starting point if you want to know about the different lines and the Loop.
For reference, I’m living near “Irving Park” – follow the Brown Line from downtown and Irving Park is 3/4 of the way up.

Busy morning..

And an expensive one..

Payed the car insurance for a year.
Booked and payed for flights from Chicago to Boston and New York to Chicago for next month

I could have saved money on the car insurance but I’m far away from home and organising past insurance details and policy numbers would be a pain from here.
Oh yeah, I’m heading to Boston on August 20th and New York on the 24th. Back to Chicago on the 27th. If you’re in those two cities around then I’d love to get in touch!