Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 259)

Immortal Pongbat
Pong is a classic game, also known by the more generic name Video Tennis. Many years ago a shareware developer took this simple concept and added extra destruction. In a move worthy of Dr. Evil he added frickin lasers to the bats allowing you to shoot chunks out of your opponent. His Mortal Pongbat was a shareware game for the Macintosh only. Now the developers of Immortal Pongbat have recreated the game and it is as much fun as ever (I noticed the project a while ago but only recently did I find the playable download). The game is not complete but it is playable and you can download Immortal Pongbat for windows. The game was developed using SDL and Python so at least in theory it should be portable to other Operating Systems but it is so much fun to play I have not looked at the source code yet.

Portable software is the best software
GQView is a powerful and feature filled Image Thumbnail Browser written in GTK. GQView has been around a long time and includes powerful image matching features and support for a wide range of formats. The current version of GQView is 2.1.1 and I was pleased to see the the developer had incorporated some of my suggestions and it was now using a standard toolbar widget. Before making any more suggestions I decided I should look through the gqview developer mailing list archives and I was pleased to discover a working version of GQView for Windows. It will be great to be able to use the same software the various platforms I use and not have to remember various different ways of doing essentially the same tasks.
One reason this interests me so much is that I have been looking for cross platform tools we at OpenClipArt.org could recommend to our users and this is the most promising candidate I have seen yet. GQView has support for SVG as well as tools for adding all kinds of keywords and metadata to photographs although I am unsure if the metata format XMP is supported. Unfortunately the Windows version of GQView does not yet include support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) but all the necessary pieces such as librsvg have already been ported to work on Windows as part of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Hopefully with some encouragement developers could be convinced to help OpenClipArt.org and do the extra work needed to support SVG.
If people really care about increasing the market share of Gnome and Gtk programs I see cross platform as an essential part of reaching a wider market. I believe it will also have the beneficial side effect of helping to strengthen open standards like SVG.

Related Writings:
Gthumb is based on GQView.
Give us a link to OpenClipart.org

Stealth is a no brainer
Watched Stealth out of a desire to see if it as bad as the reviews suggest. It was dumb nonsensical rubbish but I went expecting it to be awful so I was able to turn off my brain and have a laugh so it wasn't a total loss but I definatley wouldn't recommend it. More on Stealth...

Donnie Darko
Even though I bought the video it took BBC2 showing Donnie Darko for me to finally watch it again. The first time I watched it I had high expectations and was not disappointed. Complexity is something most film makers are unwilling to try but it makes revisiting a film much more enjoyable. The second time round I was less concerned about trying to guess what would happen next and could instead better appreciate different aspects of the story. In a way it was a tragic love story and the .
I'm left pondering the question "If you could travel back in time what would you do?"

Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies
From the moment I read the tagline on the poster which read "Featuring the Asian guy from American Pie and the Indian guy from Van Wilder" and laughed at the self awareness I knew I wanted to see this film. It only got a brief cinema run and I missed it but I knew I wanted to see it. Having eaten a monsterous sandwich for lunch (half a vienna loaf stuffed with peppered salami, so huge my jaw hurt from ripping and tearing it apart) I was sated and in dazed trance like state half falling asleep. My brain and body were in agreement it was time to take a break. I figured Harold and Kumar must have been released to video by now and decided the time was right for a good dumb comedy.
Recreational drug use is not usually interesting to watch and it is about as much fun as being the designated driver who has to stay sober while everyone else goes crazy or being the only one left out of a big private joke. Fortunately this film does not place too much emphasis on being stoned but is much more about the stoners hunger and their quest for satisfaction. The film raises the mundane task of getting food into an epic quest to rival any road movie. The most remarkable thing about this film is not the ethinicity of the lead characters (which will in retrospect seem less and less important) but their intelligence. Harold and Kumar are a smart pair through the post college wilderness trying to get their lives on track but try to goof off and have fun too. It is a fresh look at fairly familiar themes and although the homour may be dumb but thankfully not ignorant or unoriginal.
Harold and Kumar is another fine comedy in the tradition of American Pie, Old School, or Something About Mary and if you like that sort of film it is well worth watching. Even if that doesn't sound exactly to your taste it is still a consistently intersting film perhaps without hitting as many major high points (no pun intended) as other films. I didn't have the munchies but I was left wanting more, I am looking forward to seeing what this team can come up with next. If they do make a sequel and visit Amsterdam I hope they can avoid some of the unfunny stereotypes and cliches of American tourists in Europe.

Safe Sex
An interest in Computers often helps encourage safe sex. Mostly because talking about computers and software in public massively decreases your chances of ever having getting any. There is certainly nothing safer than abstinence (or more dangerous than ignorance) but where's the fun in that?
Java Programmers make a big deal about the importance of compatibility in their software and have taken an interesting approach of promoting safe sex to help get their message out.

Software Quick Links:

Leafpad
Liked Microsoft Notepad? Gedit not exactly what you wanted and you would prefer an alternative text editor more closely resembling notepad? Try Leafpad.
Reported a minor issue with the Line Wrapping behaviour but Leafpad really does keep it simple and gets the essentials right. Now if only it ran on windows too.

Atomix
Been playing a bit of KAtomic recently. The bizarre use of a scrollbar to move between levels provoked me to put toghether a list of suggestions about the user interface and ways to potentially improve the eduacational value of KAtomic. While searching for references I discovered there was a version of Atomix for Gnome. Jens Finke is no longer maintaining Atomix so I have attempted to get in contact with the new maintainer. Haven't been able to get a working version yet unfortunately but it looks at least as good as KAtomic and claims to include a level editor. (Eventually got 1.2.2a to work, no sign of the level editor.) Atomix use Bonobo so fat chance of it working on windows too. You can download Atomix directly from the Gnome FTP site.

Quote of the day:

Families are like fudge...mostly sweet, with a few nuts.

Weekend of Film

Watched a whole load of films this weekend inlcuding Madagascar (only watched the end of it), Fantastic Four, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and last but most definately least Perfect Catch (Fever Pitch).

Fantastic Four wasn't very fantastic but they are fairly bland flat characters like Captain America with none of the edge or moral ambiguity of Batman. The X-men represents and more modern disfunctional family, in many ways the Fantastic Four are an anachronims stuck firmly in the past. And if the X-men were not enough to make the Fantastic Four completely redundant the Incredibles made a better Fantastic Four than the originals ever did. Jessica Alba is sexy but Sue Strom was mostly annoying and pathetic how she fawned over Reed Richards. Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm a.k.a. the Thing is the best thing in the film. The villian Dr. Doom fails to steal the show as he really should have done.
It was not terrible but it was unintentionally funny in places. If I wasn't a big fan of comic book movies I probably wouldn't have even bothered to go see Fantastic Four myself so I can hardly recommend it to anyone else. Vince Vaughan is so annoying I'm still glad I went to see this instead of Wedding Crashers (Isla Fisher and Rachel Mc Adams are beautiful though so I may watch it on video).

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had all the style and visual fliar you would expect from a Tim Burton film. Willy Wonka was played by Johnny Depp at his creepiest. Some of his facial expressions were very menacing and said more than the words he spoke. I could have done without the childhood flashbacks which attempted to physchoanalize him and rationalise his odd behaviour but this version of the story was essentially about "family values" (an expression so loaded with politics it makes me want to throw up). All the Oompa Loompa were played by Deep Roy but a little more variety would have been nice. The green hair is gone but the bright lucozade orange travel agent tan remains. Computer effects and forced perspective were used to make him look even smaller the the old Oompa Loompas. Freddy Highmore does a good job of not being an annoying child actor and Dublin Actor Frank Kelly does a great job as the lovable but slightly crazy old Grandfather. Cinema Musicals are a dead genre and with good reason but despite not being much of a fan of musicals the songs were not as good in this version. My friend said the lyrics were indistinct and they lacked the sing-a-long quality of the old film and I have to agree.
Sweets - or candy as they are annoyingly called throughout this film - are great but there comes a point when you have had too much of the same things and it all gets very stale. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have done a fantastic job however the earlier version has satisfied us for so many years this version despite it strengths suffers for being second. Worth seeing though, probably the best thing on at the moment.

Perfect Catch is a poor American remake of Fever Pitch, definately watch Fever Pitch instead even if you do not like Football. (Americans insist on incorrectly :P calling it Soccer even though their Football the foot rarely makes contact with the ball and it doesn't use a round shape you hardly call it a ball at all!) Last week I spent a full afternoon struggling through the awful website of Vue Cinemas to get free tickets, which taking into account various booking charges was not really free at all. The early Sunday morning preview screening was virtually empty, including the four of us there were still less than twenty people. There was a Volkswagon Beetle in the lobby and young women in prompotional jackets so I think perhaps there was a preview screening for Herbie in another screen and I was almost tempted to wander in and watch it instead. Perfect Catch was wrong in so many ways casting for one thing. Drew Barrymore just not attractive and should not be cast in romantic comedies, at one point she is even looking "like a cute stroke victim" because of the odd way she talks out of the side of her mouth. (If you are wondering how she got the part just look at who is the Producer of the film.) This film is a romantic comedy but gross out comedies are what the Farrelly Brother do best and they should stick with it. Don't even waste your time on this, if you are slightly tempted the older version is better and women seem to like Colin Firth (better known as Mr. Darcy). Another unsatisfying remake.

It is a bank holiday weekend in Ireland so there were loads more films on television than usual. I watched a few minutes of Batman and Robin which was far worse than I remembered and I really couldn't bear to watch. Blade was being shown on BBC uninterrupted by advertising so instead of watching a few minutes and being distracted I ended up watching it right until the end. Blade 3 was so awful made me forget how good Blade had been. The film has aged well and is one of the better comic book adaptations. The computer generated liquid blood effects do not look so good, however I dont think they ever did even when the film was new.

Better than OpenOffices support for Abiword
Abiword has always had excellent Rich Text Format (RTF) support and RTF has long been established as the de facto standard for document interchange between word processors. Users continue to make a lot of fuss about Abiword supporting the OpenDocument file format but no one ever seems to complain about OpenOffice with all their resources not making more of an effort to better support Abiword . KWord also a volunteer run project has basic support for OpenOffice.org doesn't have any support at all for Abiword . Maybe someone will use the OpenOffice XML Filters to add Abiword support to OpenOffice but unsurprisingly I would prefer to see people helping to improve Abiword.
The good news is INdT on behalf of Nokia and their Maemo system for the Nokia 7700 device are continuing to improve support for the OpenDocument format in Abiword. Nice work Daniel.

Beam me up Scotty
James Doohan 1920 - 2005, may he rest in peace.

Usability: Too many cliches

The recent release names of Marlin (a Sound Editor for Gnome) were indirectly inspired by some of my usability comments:

Marlin 0.8 - The Unix Philosophy Is A Lie
Marlin 0.9 - Pithy Phrases Do Not Make Good Software Design

Perhaps I have been using a few too many cliches and not providing enough clear justification and well thought out reasoning for some of the usability suggestions I have been making recently. I have been reassured by various people it is nothing personal and Iain does have an interesting sense of humour but I look at it as a challenge to be more rigourous.

Do one thing well is the aforementioned Unix Philosophy and is an important design philosophy and it is worth understanding even if you choose to dismiss it. Most programmers do make use of this on various levels by abstracting their code into smaller reusable modules that do one thing well. The level I am normally talking about is an individual application having one clear purpose, or else we end up with every application expanding until it can read email. Cliches become tired and stale from overuse but they usually start off as a succinct way to capture the essence of a more complex idea. Every old-wives tale contains a nugget of truth or a lesson to be learned.
The maxim do one thing well, works successfully with Unix because command line applications can be combined into more than the sum of their parts using pipes and redirects. Applications with full graphical user interfaces cannot be interconnected in quite the same easy way so it is important to also understand the need to have some way to integrate all the small parts together. Many programs are vague and sneaky about what they claim is the one thing they try to do well and define it so broadly as to be meaningless.

In life it is important not to blindly follow the rules without having an understanding of why they are there and the purprose they serve. Christians understand blind faith is worthless and Jesus himself questioned his fathers plan and I think most cultures understand the dangers of zealotry and fanaticism. The variety of different cultures and viewpoints I encounter in Open Source helps me to regularly challenge my own assumptions and learn to embrace new ideas. If I start falling into the trap of sloppy logic and easy answers no doubt there will be others there to challenge me.