Back on our May long weekend, we decided to opt for conservative parenting and didn’t take our daughter to see the fireworks (too late and too little sleep we figured), but we made the promise that she’d definitely get to see them on Canada Day. So last night we went.

While Em, along with hundreds of other kids, unleashed their youthful joy in staying up late (she got to bed at 11:15pm), I took a few shots with my DSLR (f/8 aperture, 0.5″ shutter speed and manual focus). They turned out okay considering that I slouched and used my chest as a makeshift tripod. You can see several decent ones in the embedded Flickr slideshow near the end of this post.

[note: for some reason, the embedded Flickr slideshow is not showing up in my post when it comes through an RSS aggregator - not in Google Reader anyway. So if you want to view the pictures you’ll have to visit the blog. If anyone else has embedded Flickr slideshows in their blog posts and wants to share some tips, please leave a comment - thanks!]

I also thought I’d try out my Flip Video camera in capturing some of the sights and sounds. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it did. Note that the audio sync delay is a result of the speed of sound, not the video encoding

Canada Day Fireworks - Tottenham, Ontario from Richard Querin on Vimeo.

I hope everyone had a great Canada Day.

I like Firefox, I really do. Version 3 has a lot of cool features, and runs very stable on both my XP system at work and my Ubuntu system at home. But…

Firefox3 is a huge memory hog.

I regularly see 140+ MB of memory being used by FF on both my Linux and XP systems. This is with 3 or 4 tabs open, doing nothing special. C’mon people! I’m running a full version of AutoCAD with about 10 drawings open and it’s still well under 50MB. WTF?

Maybe this RAMBack plugin mentioned on Lifehacker will do the trick. But someone please tell me why any web browser has to take up 100+ MB of memory.

And just to let you know, I’ve been running Firefox3 all day here, and have about 5 tabs open right now. Windows Task Manager is currently showing firefox.exe taking a whopping 250+ MB!!

Firefox 3 is better than Firefox 2. But not that much better.

I’ve just finished and uploaded Episode 064. This screencast demonstrates the use of Inkscape’s Object->Clip->Set function for some creative bitmap masking.

Head over there to watch or download the episode and check out any of the other 63 episodes we’ve done so far.

Happy Canada Day tomorrow everybody!

If you’re interested in a super-slick way to browse images (on Flickr, Google Image Search, Picasa, Facebook or any of almost 20 different sites), and you’re using Firefox (Windows/Mac), Safari or even IE, then check out Piclens.

On my XP machine at work I’ve installed the Piclens add-on for FF3 (there’s one for FF2 as well btw), and I have to say I was blown away. Once you install the plugin and restart your browser, you’ll notice that when you hover over image thumbnails, you’ll now see a little triangular play button icon. Click that little icon and you will get a very smooth, very slick 3D navigation interface for the images on that page.

This is a great way to browse through Google Image search results or a Flickr photo stream. I’m absolutely amazed at what they are able to achieve with just a browser plugin.

What’s the catch?

Well, there isn’t yet a Linux compatible FF plugin, or an Opera add-on for that matter either. But it is a little bit heartening to see that this is one of their top feedback requests. At least we can assume they at least know that we Linux users want it.

So if you’re on a Windows box or a Mac (not sure if it will work in XP running in a VM on Linux) and you want to check out a really nice way to browse photos (or video thumbnails for that matter), check it out. You’ll be impressed.

I’ve been meaning to add a ‘related posts’ plugin to my theme for quite a while now. Adding the plugin was dead easy. However getting it to look decent on my blog template was an exercise in first class, grade A, CSS butchery. Look away Dan Cederholm.. Bulletproof CSS this is not.

I approached the problem thinking “It’s nothin’ a little elbow grease and a truckload of div’s can’t fix.”

Actually, after wading around knee-deep in extra div elements and adjusting padding values like a pair of itchy underwear, it ended up being a div background image that was created too short to begin with. Oh for shame… Who’da thought that I’d ever have anything down there more than 150 pixels high.

Anyway, the (allegedly) related posts are now down there happily nestled in their padded boxes.

As some of you might know, I run a rather old-ish system. It’s a 3GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and on-board Intel graphics. It ain’t no Ferrari, but it gets me around.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been running Compiz on Hardy mostly because I wanted to use the Key-Status utility for my screencasts and window transparency makes that a little less obtrusive. I like Compiz. It runs well on my system even with a medium to high level of effects turned on. But there is a certain sluggishness in desktop response that has been clawing at me like a pair of ill-fitting jeans. I am in search of something lighter and leaner.

I could go back to Openbox. After all, I was running it successfully for months. But the linuxy techno-wannabe inside me wants to search for more. So I decided to check out Xfce by way of ’sudo apt-get install xfce4′ to get a taste for the seemingly much improved Xfce 4.4.2 experience.

I absolutely loved the clean crisp look of these screenshots from the recent Zenwalk release (a Slackware-based Xfce desktop distro). And I know that Xfce has a perfectly adequate Composite manager of its own, namely xfwm4. And since all I’m really after in the desktop effects market is window shadows and transparency, I thought it would be a good package to check out.

The Xfce4 package installed without problem. However, logging into an Xubuntu session found me with Compiz set as the window compositor by default, and no foreseeable way of changing it to Xfwm. I’ve been searching the forums for an answer and while running the following command will indeed work:

pkill compiz && xfwm4

For some reason it doesn’t hold those settings after I log out and back in. There is some (Gnome) startup script that is running Compiz on startup and I can’t seem to figure out what or where it is. If anybody has a clue I’d love to hear it.

But along my travels, I did find out something I absolutely did not know. Metacity itself has its own composite manager built in! Maybe I’m just extremely late to the party, but I’ve never heard anyone ever mention this. So turning off desktop effects in Ubuntu leaves you using Metacity. Then a simple change to a single entry in gconf-editor will magically enable compositing in Metacity instantly. Check out this post to see exactly how to do it.

Problem solved? Not quite. I may be wrong (and by all means tell me if I am), but the Metacity compositor gives you window shadows, maximize/minimize animations and shaded Alt-Tab effects, but I can’t see any provision for adjustable window transparency. It does feel lighter and less resource intensive than Compiz and it will let you use things like Awn, Screenlets and other stuff that requires a compositing engine without all the brawn of Compiz or the requirement for hardware accelerated graphics.

I found similar features in Openbox when I used Xcompmgr. But towards the end there Xcompmgr seemed a little glitchy with video players and it started leaving funny little artifacting around windows as well.

So after all this rambling, I’m still interested in running Xfce 4.4.2 on Hardy with xfwm4 compositing. I just need to find out how to kill Compiz and get Xfce to hold my settings. Let’s hope the thread I posted in the Ubuntuforums, or you wonderfully knowledgable readers are able to shed some light on how I might do this.

Are you running Linux on a middle-aged machine? If you are, what desktop environment floats your boat?

A week or so ago, I espoused the virtues of Task, a great little command line application that has replaced the venerable todo.txt system for managing my projects and To-Do list at work. In that post, I described how to build Task within Cygwin for those of us who use Cygwin to get our Linux fix inside a Windows environment.

Since then, I also successfully created a deb package for the Task source and Paul Beckingham (the creator of Task) is hosting it over on the Task website - Thanks Paul!. Of course it will come as no surprise to anyone that I took the lazyman’s route to deb file creation, namely using the CheckInstall utility to create a deb file.

But while this creates a working deb file, it is not the ‘proper’ way to create Debian packages. Since Paul was going to put these on his site for people to actually use, I decided I’d better figure out the ‘right’ way of doing it instead of the ‘easy’ way.

A quick note to Dave Yates resulted in him pointing me to the Debian Maintainer’s Guide. A cursory reading of that guide made me gulp a little bit and seriously question whether this was a good idea or not. But thanks to this wonderful posting on the ubuntuforums, I found a more digestible description on how to do this properly.

Following the steps very carefully, it took me about 20 minutes to create a proper deb file of the package. It wasn’t hard, but it’s not completely intuitive either. I have new respect and understanding for what package maintainers do.

While Paul hasn’t yet posted the deb file for 1.2.0. on his site, when he does, I’d appreciate anyone with a knowledge of deb files or Debian packaging to give it a once over and let me know if I’ve done anything glaringly wrong.

Incidentally, following the steps in that tutorial, of course I end up with a package named perfectly for an Ubuntu install. But what about those using Debian or some other Debian-based distro? Will the naming somehow eff things up for them?

I know the prevailing trend is to get organized and de-clutter. But sometimes being a bit of a pack-rat can pay off in enjoyment later on. Case in point, a copy of the 1978 Carguide magazine circulating through our office. This was a Canadian Auto buyers guide that listed specs and photos of all the cars on sale back then.

Thumbing through this, I spotted a little piece of copy that made me chuckle:

“The youth-oriented van popularity is growing so fast that the manufacturers are producing semi-custom vans.”

I remember doing up felt-doodle art posters of custom vans, complete with mag wheels, fancy paint and bubble rear windows. Fantastic.

I thought so much of this page (with it’s hippy-ish chick showcasing big ass foglamps on the front of a big ass Ford) that I thought I’d scan it and post it for your enjoyment

A little less than three months ago, I posted about how I won the coveted Finger of God prize from the boys over at Lugradio.

It finally arrived.

Now I’m not big on unboxing videos. By and large I think they’re silly, and pointless. But of course, having very little shame, and the fact that I’d take almost any opportunity for fooling around with my Flip video camera some more, I recorded one. It’s a little less painful than your typical unboxing if only because there is no actual box. And also it’s compressed down to a (possibly) bearable 59 sec.

Finger of God Un-Envelope-ing from Richard Querin on Vimeo.

Now, as you can only really do one of these things once (second takes are dishonest in this genre no?) I realized that I held the various items a little too close to the camera, so they’re a little blurry. For those precious few who might be mildly interested, here are some details on what I received:

- A couple of Lugradio stickers.
- A few EFF vs AT&T stickers.
- A great Lugradio T-Shirt.
- A cool black ‘O-Reilly’ Pencil.
- A nice note from the boys.
- The Finger of God autographed by the current Lugradio team with the following additional bits of wisdom written around the sides of it:

- “We hate the Linux Link Tech Show” crossed out by them and edited to read “Jono hates the Linux Link Tech Show”
- “Metals Rules”
- “Aq Sucks”
- And of course the obligatory drawing of a penis. Which precludes me from showing it to my daughter.. or maybe I could pass that off as drawing of a microphone?..

Now I’m just not sure if I want to actually try it. It might be safer to just put it up on the shelf for posterity.

Thanks again to the guys at Lugradio!

A faithful user of the todo.txt system of command line based todo list management for about a year now, I have recently fallen in love with a new command line based todo list application called simply Task, which was written by Paul Beckingham. He’s got a great screencast demo of it on YouTube which is of far more value than any description I can give here. I urge you to check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Kn4DMOVSw

On the todo.txt mailing list today, Dan DeLaiarro asked if someone could post a How To on compiling the package inside of Cygwin. What follows is my attempt at this. Forgive me if I’ve screwed it up.

How to build Task in Cygwin

While I’m no Cygwin expert, I will attempt to describe, as simply as possible, how to compile and install the Task program in Cygwin. I encourage anybody to comment with any corrections or clarifications they might have. Clearly your mileage may vary - widely.

Step 1: Download the Task archive package (http://www.beckingham.net/task-1.0.1.tar.gz) and extract it into a folder of your choice.

Step 2: Ensure you have the tools in Cygwin to build a C++ program

Run Cygwin’s setup.exe file and click next through each stage to proceed to the package selection step.
Ensure you have the following packages installed, or select them for installation if you don’t. All of these selections are under the ‘Devel’ branch of the list. I may be wrong about the full list, but it’s what I have installed on my own install of Cygwin:

autoconf
automake1.9
binutils
gcc-core
gcc-g++
gcc-mingw-core
gcc-mingw-g++
make
mingw-runtime
pkg-config

Click Next to download and install the packages.

Click Finish

Step 3: Compiling and Building the Package

**Note: The INSTALL text file that comes with the package (and with virtually any open source package) describes the build process in much more detail than I ever could - I recommend reading that.
Open up the cygwin shell.

cd into the folder where you extracted the Task files.

Type ‘./configure [enter]’ to configure the package

At this stage you may have to install additional packages to satisfy the requirements to build it. Hopefully not

After the configuration script has finished, type ‘make [enter]’.

After the make command has completed, type ‘make install [enter]’.
Voila - Task should now be installed and available from your command line.

[update: forgot to include the ‘make’ package in the list of required packages in step 2.]