When i logged-in today, i got this fortune cookie:
...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.
- Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction", edited by Philip Berman
I was quite happy to see that there exists/existed people who not only have thought/feelings quite simillar to mine but unlike me, they are quite good at expressing them as well.
Job
I've got the Cisco ADSL Modem working, but i had to configure it through it's driver (windoz only). But after the configuration, it works ok with all OSes.
Also got successfull in interfacing with the Card Reader device though the low-level interface. As i no more open/close any FDs I've got rid of the worst problem: Had to reboot to open /dev/ttyS0 after the fist time i close it. I still sometimes get weir characters, but I think that happens whenever i do something wrong. I'll work further on this tomorow.
I told my boss about the ASCII video (he already knew about static images) and how it can be used to construct cheap video-walls. I think he took it prety well.
Gstreamer
Working on a new element (GstAAfilter) that would take video on it's sink pad and produce ascii on it's source pad. We also need an element to do the ascii -> fourcc translation. It seems GstTextOverlay already is capable of doing this as it has a sink pad for "text/plain" or "text/x-pango-markup" mimetype. If it does'nt, i'll just hack on the textoverlay to write one for this purpose.