Zzot!

I’ve made the mistake of getting drawn into pointless arguments before. Somehow, once, I was even drawn into an argument against my own position on the question being argued.

The internet is full of people who waste other people’s valuable time in pointless arguments like they’re getting paid for it. While it had never occured that this matter deserves its own rules of engagement, at least _someone_ has.

Raves | Permalink | No Comments

While watching some ADC TV, I became somewhat enchanted with a Panther feature I previously was largely unaware of — most of the Quartz compositing engine is now available from Python. The problem I had with it, however, was that there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of info available beyond what I said above; its in there somewhere. I only found out about it half a year after the presentation when I watched it on ADC TV, and months after Panther’s release.

So, tonight I idly decide to skim O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter — host of many interesting articles, in spite of the fact that I get over there slightly less often than most people see their Dentist. One of the items that jumped out at me was Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics, complete with an example featuring the requisite PDF-powered drop-shadow effect. What’s more, they point out where Apple’s cool sample code is — /Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/ — and that some of Panther’s fax features, including generation of cover sheets for outgoing faxes, are implemented in CoreGraphics-using Python scripts (see /usr/libexec/fax/).

I should start buying my non-programmer friends (i.e., “I’ve been too busy using [Mac OS X] to have time to learn how to use it”) Python books whenever a gift occasion pops up. “You already gave me a python book, you know.” “Clearly you need another one!”

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Every once in a while, I poke at the various search engines to see who else is using Indecisive in their name — this time I saw something I was entirely unprepared for. When I asked Google what sites it thinks are similar to mine, it had a handful of answers. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the sites of several IgorMUD denizens listed, or even when several of Igor’s guilds were listed, including one I’ve never so much as cloned its guild badge. But I didn’t expect to find that I’m similar to Arbor Brewing Company. It just goes to show you, if you don’t pay attention, one day you’ll wake up and discover you’ve turned into a pub.

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I finally got my workroom to the point that I could move my computer to where I wanted it. At some point in the process, I realized that I was putting it back where it had been not so long ago. Looking around, however, it feels like I’ve at least got a much different set of blocks that I’m trying to stack than I used to have.

At least my printer is working again, after much upset, mostly related to installing Gentoo on Tom. Now if only I could conjour up some shelves that would just magically work well with how I have things arranged…

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…since anyone said “It’s been a coon’s age” about anything? I shouldn’t start posting again after I can’t remember how long and late at night. That being said, here goes anyway.

I’ve been falling into my usual trap of making an endless search for more technology to use making my website, skipping over the minor inconvenience of actually building it. How long will I be over the practice this time? Who knows!

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I spent much of this week trying to get DirectX / Direct3D / DirectShow / DirectCatastrophy to do what I want. When I told my boss that I’d gotten an answer from nVidia about their StereoBLT API, he asked if it was something I would have figured out on my own — the way you trigger the behavior is the most obscure way of accessing a published hardware feature that I’ve ever heard of.

At the end of the week, I’d found several comments that if you’re looking for a graphics API with Stereo hooks that hardware venders use, instead of hacking in their own wacko trigger, you want OpenGL. Too bad that didn’t occur to me at the beginning of the week — it’s been a long time since I used OpenGL, but apparently I’d have been at least as successful. Oh well.

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