I have a bunch of cartoons and film shorts on my hard drive. Now that I've installed Suse, I have video/audio output to my TV/Stereo, and I've set up Myth, I wanted to figure out how to play a series of videos from a playlists (.pls) file. Here's how I did it. As a bonus, I also set up Myth with an option to randomize a playlist as well. Read the rest of this entry ...
I've been writing a bit of PHP, SVG and JavaScript. Creating nested XML nodes with a procedural language can be a pain, PHP is no exception here. I wrote a quick PHP function to help with my SVG node creation. Read the rest of this entry ...
Via Sean Inman. A great essay by Paul Graham entitled How To Do What You Love, also has some overlap with Rob's latest entry revealing this key: Always Produce.
Some people didn't like the fact that the snow in my scripted SVG blog header was causing the Firefox CPU load to rail. My excuse was that I was trying to push out some content before the Holiday rush hit and I had to go travelling. Given that the season is now over, I spent about 20 minutes optimizing the script. My apologies to all those CPU fans out there for the last couple weeks...
Other than minor JavaScript tweaking (like removing parsing of strings into floats and declaring variables outside of loops, etc), I decided to just have all snowflakes active at once and to slow down the timer interval. From my side, it looks like it did the trick for Firefox 1.5 but not Opera 9 TP1 (Adobe SVG Viewer was never an issue), but I'll wait to hear from my critics 😉
If you wanted to optimize this even more at the cost of perceived randomness it would be quite simple to do in SVG. I'll probably save another entry for that, but basically it involves adding flakes randomly beforehand to a few static "snow panes" (<g> elements) and then simply sliding each pane down the image at differing speeds and positions (you can add a random drift too each pane's descent too). I think it would still look pretty cool and only require updating the position of (let's say) 4 snow "panes" instead of 50 snow flakes every tick.
I wrote about my hard drive plans here, but what I ended up doing was purchasing a really cheap internal Maxtor SATA hard drive kit that Costco just started carrying ($170 for 300 GB). The kit comes with a SATA PCI adapter card, which is good because my home system only has a SCSI interface for hard drives. I've been waiting for the next Maxtor hard drive to show up at this price point at Costco. I figure buy it early to maximize the gains for the dollars spent (up until a few weeks ago they had been carrying a 250 GB SATA Maxtor kit for $160 and I was kicking myself for not hopping on that early). Read the rest of this entry ...