Month: April 2003

or two weeks. Clear off and stop bugging me you damn ingrates! "Post to your ‘blog Rory", "say something interesting Rory", "clean the chimney Rory". I’m sitting exams people, keep your pants on. They’re going fairly well, so I don’t feel guilty about taking tomorrow off to go see X-Men 2. Normal programming will resume.

Was anyone hoping they’d get to see waht happens when every post is more than a week old? Probably not, I’d imagine. You probably hadn’t noticed that that’s how long they stay on the front page. I have excuses, of course. I always have excuses. I spent three hours on a bus today, to hand up an assignment that took approximately one hour to complete. That may be a personal record for time-wasting. Though it probably isn’t. I could’ve saved time by doing the assignment on the bus I guess. You live and learn. Anyway, I case you are wondering, the front page would display a psuedo-error message ‘Out of Cheese Error’. Probably has some spelling mistakes too, but it’s never been seen by anyone else. Now that I think of it, it has a rather tasteless joke too. You might get the chance to see it if I ever have another holiday abroad or something.

I’m assuming that you’ve seen at least one, maybe more, of Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty and One Hour Photo. There are surely other movies of their ilk, but these are the ones that spring most immediately to my mind. My question – which you may choose to answer by email, or simply by shouting and hoping I’m near, or perhaps by mentioning it to everyone you meet, thereby creating a new social meme that will spread through the social ether to me – is this: How closely is one meant to identify with the protagonists? Are you meant to feel, as my viewing company generally does, that these movies are ‘warnings’ that such socially skewed people exist, or are you meant to think "Yeah. Society is crap. Why play by those rules?" I don’t think I’ll be shooting up a burger joint in the near future, or creating an anarchist regime – the anarchist magazines I see in college are too contemptibly stupid for that – but I always seem to relate more to the freaks then the norms. I’ve never felt that kind of imprisoned feeling that seems to motivate the characters, but it’s very easy to imagine. So are you a William Foster, Tyler Durden, Lester Burnham or Sey Parrish? Could you be?

From Stephen (via email):

i can’t be bothered to trawl through slashdot etc for geeky news that is on my level, so get your act together and update the site! you could at least regale us with more reminiscences from our schooldays?

Good point. Exams aren’t that important. So, as a sister story to this humorous anecdote, here’s the legend of the Toilet Incident (the one with the shoes).

When Stephen was in school he didn’t feel content. He felt imprisoned, a view shared by many confined between those ten-foot high steel fences. The best any of us could hope for was a good view of the sunny day passing outside. Where best to gain this covetted view? The toilet of course. Alone and unattended, you could really get into the summer mood, without Teacher breathing down your neck. But the windows in the toilets were high, too high for a third-class student to see out of unaided. The solution jumped readily into Stephen’s mind: stand on the edge of the toilet. So obvious; so easy; so disastrous.

Stephen’s genius to this point had been hidden from me. He kept his plan to himself, and no-one else would have ever know about it, but for one fatal flaw. Toilet seats are slippy, and if you stand on one there are only two reasonable ways off. Slip out, or slip in. This story writes itself from here. Stephen went home wearing one sock and his PE runners that day, and to my knowledge he avoided standing on toilets to the end of his school days.

Take one link to Doom9.org (which confusingly refers to itself as doom9.net, which itself redirects to doom9.org – this is just the beginning of my confusion), several DVDs, two days of spare time, and a pinch of divine inspiration, and you might just get close to being able to rip video from a DVD. It’s very very complicted. And I still can’t do it right.

The process of ripping audio is significantly easier, involving only four programs, each full of esoteric settings that need to be modified every time, and a single batch file that I had to write myself to get one of these programs to work the way it’s meant to. Yes I did say this was easier. It goes like this: Use the DVD player that came with the system to find the correct chapter. This isn’t always straightforward. With South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the movie chapter numbers matched the chapter numbers on the disc, with the menus coming afterwards. However with Family Guy, the order of chapters on the disc seemed unrelated to the episode numbers, so I had to go on trial and error. When I’ve found the chapter I want, I decode the whole chapter and save it on the hard disk with one program. Then I extract the right audio stream (English language stream, French translation, Director’s commentary…) from that file with another program. This saves it in a format that no program understands, so I use a third program, controlled by my home-made batch script, to convert it to mp3. To get the clip I want, I edit this mp3 with Audacity and output to OGG format. Figuring this out took a day. Doing it takes about a minute. Yay!

Video is a diferent story, and the best I can do is a badly compressed AVI weighing it at about a gigabyte/minute with no sound. If anyone knows some reasonably good, free video editing software that can output decent quality MPEG, let me know.

I’ve been perusing the pages of netsoc’s members, hoping to find some good home-grown webby goodness. I saw that there are now more listed personal pages than in any of my previous years of membership, despite membership falling to about a quarter of its glorious high point of 00/01 in the same time. My hopes were quickly dashed.

A short but almost complete summary of what I found: crap

I’ll admit that that last summary wasn’t entirely fair or accurate, so for the sake of completeness:

• "This is my great site. Isn’t it great? I’m cool. Click here for some mindless crap."
• "Here’s a picture of me drunk. Here’s another."
• "Welcome to my cool site. It’s not done yet. But it’ll be great." – Last updated last century.
• "This is the official site of…" – WTF? This is free hosting from a college society. Can’t your hospital afford €200 a year for comercial hosting and a domain?
• Some random plaintext – I’m looking at you Gary

But in this haystack I found a single needle, from paul’s ‘about me’:

My dream is to become a freelance mercenary ninja.

I think we can all agree with that sentiment.

Today is one of those all too commmon days that has a name other than, say, Tuesday, specifically, for the culturally impaired out there, April Fools’ Day, and as such I feel required to take a dislike to it. Luckily this is something that comes quite easily to me. So without trying to convince you that I’ve taken to carrying ads or closed the source of an OSS project, may I just simply call you a fool and move on?

Since Slashdot decided not to post any real news at all today, I spent some time making it even harder for myself to screw up when posting here. It’s all aboput text filters and related interesting… thingies. There’s still no obvious advantage to you, the reader, but screw it; I spend longer here than you do. 🙂 Seriously, though, I am building up to a comment system. Maybe in May or June. Exams are such a nuisance.