Life the Universe and Everything

Cool Gstreamer Pipeline

2009-03-18T15:32:00.000+11:00

The effect plugins in GStreamer are very cool, If you have a box with a webcam and gstreamer install I suggest taking a look at this silly pipline I made today :)

gst-launch-0.10 -v v4l2src name=source queue-size=2 ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480\,framerate=30/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! revtv ! shagadelictv ! edgetv ! ximagesink

USA, PS3, USB HDD and other TLA

2007-08-14T15:08:00.002+10:00

I have been in Oregon for the week playing with Onion machines, Its nice and hot down here being summer. Anyhow Oregon is a Tax Free state in the USA and therefor I have been shopping with all my free time.

I got me...

A PS3
9 PS3 Games
1 Wii Game
2 PS2 Games
1 160GB Laptop Hard Disk Drive
1 Keybord, 1 Mouse some PC speakers
Spare controllers for my PS3
A mobile phone with a US phone number

So the last couple of days have been consumed by playing PS3 and installing Linux on my new toy.

Can't wait till i get back home to the housemates HDTV.

Other then that I have been eating far to much junk food, eating more new types of junk food ( Wendys (not the ice cream place ) ,Taco Time and A&W ), I have been drinking Grolsch since I don't really like coors.

Also recently got back into the whitlams

and thats my life so far.

USA - First Day and Second

2007-08-02T10:53:00.000+10:00

Landed in the USA yesterday had to sit around at LAX for 6 hours while we waited for our plane to Seattle. After arriving at Seattle we went to sleep in a small motel ( with 4 rooms ) a small town between Seattle and Yakima, I had beef jerky and popcorn for tea, I'm eating well.

Anyhow I turned on the TV in the morning and found a great show that hasn't yet made it to Australia ( as far as I know ). His name is Hip Hop Harry and he has stolen my heart.

This one was on the episode I watched.

Going the USA

2007-07-29T21:13:00.000+10:00

Tuesday this week I will be flying off to Washington State, USA to commission two machines.

I have a bit of a shopping adventure planned in the nearby state Oregon that apparently has no sales tax. I plan to get a PS3 ( To chuck Linux on ) and a couple of Wii games,

A friend also wants me to get him an iPhone.

I will be over in the states for at least 2 weeks but could be there for longer depending.

I don't think that I will have any trouble getting on the net ( unlike in Australia ) so I might upload photos to flickr and blog as I go...

Facebook and Yahoo Pipes

2007-07-17T17:37:00.000+10:00

Was surfing the internet yesterday when I came across a very, very cool thing. I'm certain that many have come across it before, but it was new to me.

I found Yahoo Pipes a nice way of manipulating RSS feeds and other such stuff to make other RSS feeds.

I decided to combine my whole sindicatable life into one large RSS feed and then decided to open a face book account and add the whole massive feed of my life ( Including blogs from blogspot, myspace and livejornal as well as del.icio.us links and flicker photos ) onto a face book account that I created for the occasion.

Wouldn't mind adding LastFM songs and google cal stuff to there as well :P... but hey.

My web2 life at last isn't extended over the whole internet.... I feel.. whole :P

Colour Vision Systems work stuff

2007-07-05T17:30:00.000+10:00

Since I have left IBM I have been having fun traveling all over Australia servicing fruit sorting equipment.

They have also been using me to redesign the website and create a database of machines using PHP and mysql.

Me and richard have been uploading a lot of videos to youtube of our machines ( primarily for the new website) but for any of you guys that don't know what a fruit sorting machine looks like ( I would say most of you ) here are some movies.

I service the electronics on the machine, so the software on the PC (front end), the embedded stuff also the output ( CIO that fire solenoids to drop the fruit ) and or baggers or box fillers that receive output from the sizer ( mostly the output from the sizer, we see the PLC as a bit of a black box... just installed the PLC programming software tho.. should be fun to look at )

So long Adam

2007-06-05T22:39:00.000+10:00

RIP Adam 23-6-1986 - 03-6-2007

Thanks for all the good times, the debates and being a great friend to all.

At the airport

2007-05-06T14:25:00.001+10:00

I have been in Bowen all week for work and am finally making it home.

Currently sitting at the airport waiting for my connecting flight from brissy to Melbourne to arrive.

Taking the time to check my emails and update my blog using the Virgin blues 'lounges' wireless.

Thought I might attempt to add some information about what I got upto while in bowen.

Me and Richard explored the beach out the front of our hotel

About 3 minutes from the hotel we found a rock pointing out the existence of a nude beach. At the time no one was on this stretch of beach, but apparently on the weekend quite a few fat old men enjoyed this beach ( according to a couple of blokes I fished with from Townsville ).

Anyhow Bowen is a damn awesome place.

I'm going to go back to the Whitsundays sometime when I have some holidays.

2007-05-06T14:25:00.000+10:00

Where are the cups ?

2007-04-11T15:57:00.000+10:00

Yesterday me and Mark where chauffeur driven to the airport at 5:00 in the morning we arrived at the terminal at 6:00 only to leave at 7:00. We boarded our rather artistic 737 and a couple of hours later left it again in Brisbane.

Me and Mark then jumped into an Avis rental car and cruised down to Stanthorpe to resolve some issues with a machine down that way . Long story short, its now working and we where sitting both in a very small room in an airport hotel.

Got up at 5:30 today in time for a short meeting at the airport before flying from Brisbane to Bundaberg at 8:00, we then drove our rental car out to a packing shed to fix a comms problem with there machine ( I love coax cable. ( had a stuffed terminator )) anyhow there was not much we could do there after that was resolved since they where attempting to catch up on some packing.

Therefor I am currently in an apartment in Bundaberg, Queensland, Although the camera on my new toy (a Palm Treo 650 ) takes shocking pictures, The apartment is quite a nice place.

Currently sitting on a table in the middle of this long hallway

Nice kitchen

Good View - Place had 5 stars and its not hard to see why.

Chucked Tomtom on the Treo, appears to work ok as long as you switch it on after the bluetooth receiver can see sats.

Anyhow....

Catch you all later

Wii Code

2006-12-20T10:59:00.000+11:00

My Wii Code

1413-9260-9796-0733

Post yours in a comment

Collaborative music development with rype

2006-09-14T13:23:00.000+10:00

Guitar.com intends to be a collaborative web2 music development site, Guitar.com have produced a multitrack studio called rype.

"Rype has a social network built around it to allow musicians to collaborate, send each other music files, projects for collaboration, video chat, voice chat and instant message via Skype." - Guitar.com

This looks really cool....

read more | digg story

But wait theres more

While Rype is still in development and not yet released there are two services I found that do the same thing that are already availible.

Free Sound - http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/ and
Splice Music - http://www.splicemusic.com/

2006-07-23T04:24:00.000+10:00

What I should be doing, what I want to do and what I have been doing are very, very different things.

I have to finish off this uni project crap.

I want to write a weather app for the nokia 770, Just think no more need to get out of bed and look out the window to find its cold, Just look at the nokia.....

I have been installing suse, then reinstalling ubuntu after realising I dont really like suse.

- if you read this far i pitty you...

nokia 770

2006-07-13T02:23:00.000+10:00

Curently blogging on my nokia about my nokia 770.

For people who do not know the nokia 770 is a little 'internet tablet' (PDAish kinda thing) that runs Linux and a Widget set developed ontop of GTK named maemo.

The tablet has an 800x480 screen resolution ( Not to shabby for something of its size ) and wifi for connecting to the internet and yes, Linux Ownz Windows Mobile... (Rant... Is there anything worse then Windows Mobile, Seriously.. If you have an O2 sell it, Or smash it or smash it then sell it.. )

The Nokia 770 has not be released in Australia, therefor I got mine via Expansys in the UK.

Just recently upgraded the nokia 770 to the 2006 nokia os, This is packaged with lots of fun google talk stuff, therefore forcing me to make my gtalk account now authenticates with a msn jabber transport so I can connect to my msn with it.

But anyway, Screenshots

I should have possably taken a delayed screenshot, Since you can see that the take screenshot application, Is half on/ Half off the screen when attempting to take some of these shots

Web browser with my blog open.

The RSS Feed Reader
Image Viewer

Just can't stop Posting on google earth

2006-07-04T23:27:00.000+10:00

Just found an interesting article on ZDNet posted at about the time Picasa for linux was released and a reference to the Picasa FAQ is there.

"If Picasa for Linux is successful, then other Google applications (and future versions of Picasa) may also be ported using Wine. (Google Earth won't be one of them, though; it will be a native Linux application.)"

Just a quick check of the Google Earth makes me think it actually runs natively using qt.

Good stuff I guess, If only the installer was decent.

Google Earth Fun

2006-06-15T11:32:00.000+10:00

Just downloaded and installed google earth for linux, Another great wine app via google.

Anyway ballarat seems to have been updated and there are now higher res shots
Ballarat CSC. Take a look at the car park.

If you worked on the 24-1-2006 you might be able to see your car :P

Google Earth for Linux

2006-06-14T01:18:00.000+10:00

Now google have gone and released another application for Linux, Google Earth.

You can get it here http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html .

Don't know if google earth runs on wine or not since I havent yet tryed it...

But there isn't any nice debian or rpm's like googles last release just a self exctracting script anyway happy earthing.

Scared of Technology

2006-06-04T23:12:00.000+10:00

This post on Slashdot made me think in general about record comanys and there slow adoption and fear of new technology.

In my mind the internet does not need to be a burden for the music industry, but can be quite an advantage.

The way people listen to music has drastically changed in recent years, I think it would be fair to say majority of people previously listened to music mostly when in there cars or out previously, This is still possibly true, but it would also be fair in my opinion to say that a lot more time is spent listening to music by those listening on there computers.

The ITunes store could be seen as a way of uterlising this technology, but having said that the price of buying an Album of songs of ITunes is approximately the same price as buying one from the store and sometimes even more, This does not take into account the lessened distribution costs or the increased amount of songs that I believe are listened to.

So because the record company's are unable to provide an adequate solution for a pecentage of the population they spend millions on preventing piracy, instead of providing a cheap, easy way of getting music from the internet.

Anyway, In reality the RIAA is never going to stop music piracy but they should attempt to take advantage of a new and growing market.

PSP Update 2.60 and its joke of an RSS Feed Aggregator

2006-05-31T12:10:00.000+10:00

Decided to update my PSP firmware to 2.60 last night, Why. Because it had a RSS Feed Aggregator, I know this seems like a pritty flimsy reason for updating ones PSP.

But just think, I can read all my morning news on my PSP and watch peoples blogs also.

So I upgraded, Whote a small webpage with RSS Feeds on it and pointed my PSP too it and what do you know, It dosn't read normal RSS Feeds, no... It only seems to read Podcasts, Why the hell not call it Podcast and not RSS Channel. Perhaps for legal reasons they can't call it podcast, But why not Music RSS or something.

But even more to the point, If you have put the effort into making an RSS Aggregator for Podcasts how much harder can it be to add support for plan text feeds ?

Picasa for Linux

2006-05-28T02:03:00.000+10:00

Google just realeased a version if Picasa for linux

There is a .deb, rpm and bin package avalible (all for i386) easy to install on Dapper Drake.

Anyway.... It seems to work quite well. But it dosn't quite like being disturbed while its loading.

Its interesting to note that the Picasa actully uses Wine, therefor oviously cannot be 100% native, I guess its better then nothing and has possably been quite optermized, But Picasa could already be run in wine, so In reality.. Is this really anything new ?

Inkscape Hat Trick

2006-05-27T02:18:00.000+10:00

Put some stuff on Gnome-Look / KDE-Look today..
also

More Inkscape ....

2006-05-26T02:35:00.000+10:00

Housemate lost my Priest.... All I have left of my last inkscaping is now...

The good news is that while at work I made another awesome little picture... W/O pirates... ( Disapointing I Know ... )

And HERE IT IS !!!

I made this at an earlyer date in Paint and now have revampted it with alittle inkscape joy....

Oh look more dapper updates.... Only the whole of open office... Easy

More Inkscaping

2006-05-25T17:07:00.000+10:00

Inkscape

2006-05-23T01:21:00.000+10:00

Been playing around with inkscape, A GNU Vector image program for linux :D

Lots of fun :)

Anyway for people who havent used/seen inkscape heres a screen shot of the build im using.

2006-05-16T00:54:00.000+10:00

Playing around with google trends today, It really proves that the internet is primarily used for sex and secondly as a new resource.

Blue is Sex.
Red Is News.

More Panel Applet

2006-05-15T02:10:00.000+10:00

I have been meaning to work on my little project more, but can't seem to motivate myself... Plus a lot of the time I find myself doing something else.

There where a few GTK# teething problems,

I found early on that using the System.Treaded.Timer class for refreshing my feed periodically actually screwed GTK up something cronic, Everything seemed to go to shit and the feed wouln't refresh. I was then introduced to the GLib.Timeout.Add method that makes the GLib MainLoop execute an event after X amounts of seconds.

This has worked quite well.

Since this was done, today I decided to start refactoring some code so I didn't have just one monolithic class anymore.

You can now also click on the feed and watch it open up in the preferred Webbrowser.

Anyway, the latest version looks something like this... Pritty

The Second button Displaying the Firefox RSS Icon.. Has to have functionality added

A Bit To Drunk

2006-05-09T01:34:00.000+10:00

Me and My housemate elvey started talking about RSS feeds today.

This began because I have started to attempt to make a website for myself so I can put all my rss feeds in one nice location ( all 9 or so of them ).

My Concept Looked abit Like this. The big box is for blog feeds and the little ones are for current track playing at last.fm

Elvey quickly distracted me by stating this shittieness of the site proposed.

Elvey then continued with how frustrated he had become because there where no RSS feed readers avalible for the gnome-panel.

I proposed that we should do it... and now...

But by this stage me and elvey had both been drinking a little with our tea.

So after attempting to compile my thoughts realised we would have to do it in C#

So I told elvey, "we will have to do it in C# im abit to drunk for C currently.."

So here it is... A nice screen shot of what me and elvey got upto on our drunkin rage...

Abit of a test of the Applet stuff...

Whats Currently Happening on BBC

So start looking forwald to a dodgy C# application coming out for a panel near you but not CPT

Linux in Ballarat

2006-05-04T22:51:00.000+10:00

For people that are currently not up on the news Sasha is creating a Ballarat branch of LUV ( Linux Users Victoria ) .

His organized a first meeting that will be held on the 11th of May at 5:30 in T126 ( University Of Ballarat - T Building ).

T127 is on the bottom floor of the T building approximatly where the crude arrow points

Full Map

Or alternativly add the ICAL feed to your favorate calender application

People are also able to subscribe to the mailing list luv-ballarat by first becoming a member of LUV then accessing the mailing list subscription page.

Become a LUV member

Also anyone from OSC that wants to take the start of my shift say 6:00 - 8:00 on thursday, It would be much apperciated.

2006-05-04T17:18:00.000+10:00

Compiz and 1ms delay on water :)

My desktop is flooding...... and this is starting to make me feel sick

It must be noted that an attempt to set a 0ms delay on water will result in compiz crashing

Why did Father give these humans free will? Now they're all confused.

2006-05-01T00:12:00.000+10:00

Just listening to the newest tool album 10,000 days and by the way it really rocks....

Also customizing my compiz at the same time. To say the least im currenly feeling abit obsessed.

More Compiz Shots

Late Night Jamming

2006-04-24T02:38:00.000+10:00

Was up late tonight playing around with Ardour, a GNU multi-track recorder.

Here is a nice screenie

Anyhow here are the tracks.

Late Night Jam 1

Late Night Jam 2

They can also be found at.
http://www.freewebs.com/thepont/index.htm

GNOME-Mud

2006-04-23T02:15:00.000+10:00

I recently did some work on gnome-mud, Currently celebrating since this was just uploaded to the CVS.

I must thank the guys on #gnome-mud, they are great to work with and are willing to help you out with simple CVS problems.

So I added some buttons, made the tabs show server information and fixed some minor bugs.

Here is a nice screen shot of gnome-mud after my patches.

Out of stupidity I added a Quit button to the toolbar,
Its not nice to think that Quit would be such a commonly used function that it would warrant being on the toolbar.

This should really be taken off.

Oblivion for a week

2006-04-11T09:30:00.000+10:00

Been playing the latest in the Elder Scrolls series of games Oblivion

- Partitioned my disk ( Using GParted live cd ).
- Installed Windows
- Reinstalled Grub
- Spent an entire week playing Oblivion.

Sight Words

This week assignments have to be done and I also have to figure out how to use the the javax.sound.sampled API for a university project.

Our project team at university is programming an application called "Sight Words", Its aimed at teaching primary school kids how to spell.

Word flashes up on the screen, they can hear it pronounced (if they wish) then the word disappears and they attempt to spell it.

And Watching for Pigs on the Wing ( Cairo-Clock fun )

2006-03-28T04:41:00.000+11:00

My Cairo Clock Themes

So I installed Dapper, Compiz and then Macslows's Cairo-Clock and since then my days have consisted of wobbling a window, trying to design a clock and wobbling another window.

Therefor this has been a very unproductive week for uni.

Yet Another Post

2005-11-10T21:42:00.000+11:00

Had a little presontation on Glade at uni for my industry experiance assignment

Lots of fun.

2005-09-23T15:52:00.000+10:00

About the bugs

Hmm, I have to take back what I said seems foresight is also a prerealese

2005-09-23T15:50:00.000+10:00

We have all won one race

No matter how unsuccessful you have been just remember, you where the first to the egg.

Anyway, Last night I decided to watch a movie using the live CD while installing Gentoo, This ended up quite bad since the whole thing appeared to freeze. ( Remind me never to do this again ).

So I took the CD out and certainly the computer booted.. Interesting thing is I just restarted the computer and now it just reboots its self each time it attempts to load grub.

Bah !

2005-09-23T02:32:00.000+10:00

New Gentoo Graphical Installer

So I have Ubuntu on my laptop and previously on one of my desktops but recently felt like changing to Forsight Linux.

I didn't like Forsight that much, it seemed buggy compared to the Ubuntu beta so now I am trying out Gentoo again and have downloaded the newest experimental live cd so I can experience the new graphical installer.

Conclusion:

It has some bugs ( but not to many since its a pre-release ), I think they will mostly be fixed by the time the finished product comes out.

Really nice and easy to use too, worth a try I think.

2005-09-19T20:25:00.000+10:00

Ubuntu 5.10

Currently playing around with Ubuntu Linux 5.10 and am exceedingly impressed with the gnome 2.12 desktop.

Other then of course gstreamer and it pathetic lack of gap-less play.

2005-09-19T20:16:00.000+10:00

Nine Inch Nails

Programming Assignment

Have three assignments to do one on Glade another making a shell '42sh'? and another about design patterns.

Holidays are fun.

2005-09-19T18:03:00.000+10:00

Ubuntu, has beagle

Quite surprised and happy after using the newest Ubuntu preview, I can find a package for beagle, the great gnome search tool.

Works really well too.

AND WOOT 320 new messages since i last checked my gmail

What I love about Gaim

2005-06-14T05:52:00.000+10:00

Well gaim, you goto love it... Its got some great features one is the ability to know when someone is closing windows on you..

15:46:41) Pont: Its me pont/polithium
(15:46:53) Dominique has closed the conversation window.
(15:48:49) Pont: hows uni going ?
(15:48:56) Dominique has closed the conversation window.
(15:48:59) Pont: This is really frustrating, everyone that I used to talk to like 3 years ago seems to just dismiss me and close the window. bah! you ppl
(15:49:12) Dominique has closed the conversation window.
(15:49:16) Pont: you
(15:49:24) Dominique has closed the conversation window.
(15:49:25) Pont: will
(15:49:36) Dominique has closed the conversation window.
(15:49:37) Pont: have
(15:49:44) Dominique logged out.
(15:49:45) Dominique has closed the conversation window.

And then you get a bit of a hunch, One sec she logged out before she closed the conversation window, I have a hunch I was blocked.

BTW. I was going to say "You will have to block me"

2005-05-11T23:26:00.000+10:00

Check it out

Gnome blog allows me to drag images into my blog :) Snaz

2005-05-11T23:17:00.000+10:00

JavaSMS

Im starting to write a javaSMS libary for a project I have to do and Im planning on GPLing it after its done.

Java isn't really the ultermate language for doing protocal work in, but still its ok. It should be "Finished" by sometime in July.

2005-05-11T23:13:00.000+10:00

Gnome-Blog

Meza tesing da gnome blogger, The Ultrament in Gnome blogging Blog Star TECHNOLOGY...

BTW, Have you watch the HHGTTG Movie ?

Its ok, In some respects, yet strays from the book abit, a couple of jokes that don't make sense since they only include punch lines and no, joke starting Rubbish ... BAH

BASH SCRIPZoR

GMail Accounts

2004-10-02T03:22:00.000+10:00

5 Gmail Accounts up for grabs

Anybody want them ?

What will the Free Trade Agreement do to Australia ?

2004-10-01T20:50:00.000+10:00

This question has been worring me for some time, Will the American technology Patents transfer over to Australia and make it harder for us to develop.

Will the American drug patents come to Australia and destroy the PBS.

After reading a report on linux.org.au
I was convinced it would, and being a responsable person, I rang the two magor Australian partys and asked as an opening question if this would infact happen, Labour has a plan to review the FTA if they get into office and so they should, both partys could not tell me if the patents would or wouldn't be transfered over let alone tell me there solution to the problem.

So why do i hate patents ?

They sound like a good idea ?

Patents seem to be geting more and more abstract, Abstract ideas are getting patented, that halt development of anything within that abstract definition.

Now lets say I patented that idea below, If I did that, the next 18 years no one would be able to design a system that used workstations, for distributed systems at night. Not an extreemly bad thing i guess, but the more and more abstract patents we get, the more and more ideas that are un avalible for use and as we know, people advance by advancing on pervious ideas, not via reinventing the wheel.

So really, My question is, Why hasn't this been researched further ? Why has this been jumped into ?

A great take on patents can be found
here

And heres an interesting blog about patents by Peter O'Kelly

http://www.ilaw.com.au/public/ftaarticle.html

Now I don't know about you, but i want people that can research in the goverment.

Clustering Live CD's

2004-10-01T20:27:00.000+10:00

What a great idea, here is a great list of linux boot cd's
Note to blogger.com, This thing works crap in Mozilla Firefox on linux.

Now Small Universitys, don't really have the money to spend on super computers so what would happen say if everynight, windows would reboot, and grub (I don't know if grub has this functionality) would check the time, and if the time was in the Universitys downtime then it would boot up a distributed computing linux dist and start cracking through batch proccesses that have been added through the day.

This really is a supercomputer, By day its a workstation and by night it turns into a cluster of computers crunching numbers !

Really can't be bothered bloggying right now, just got this cause its a snazzy idea

Life The Universe and Everything

2004-10-01T16:36:00.000+10:00

This is my blog.