Happy Puppy!

So, ever since I've gotten this high speed link I've slowly been accumulating these largish image files. The big problem has been the ones that are over 700 MB in length and don't fit on a CD. In the case of some of these files, they are movies that I've been trying to get a copy of for AGES and I was reluctant to delete them, but I also had no way of storing them (execpt by putting them on 1 Gig Jaz disks (of which I only have 5)) or letting them accumulate on my backup drive (NOT a good plan for any number of reasons). Some time ago I was told that VirtualDub was a free program that could resample movies to fit in arbitrary sizes (and arbitrarily reduce image quality while doing so), so I tried it out. I could NOT get it to do anything.

Well, a few versions later and the UI for the program still SUCKS RANCID DONKEY DICKS but this time I managed to find a set of configuration options that work. As I speak a 1.3 GB file is being reduced to 700 MB. This is the worst case compression that I have to perform, and sample tests that I have done seem to indicate that it will have acceptable results. When you consider that the majority of the files I need to shrink are in the 700-800 Meg range, this makes me happy!  I may have to buy another 100 CD spindle to be able to finish burning these movies, but they will no longer clog up my hard drive.

Yay Thing!

This is good, since I haven't felt too well all day. I've been getting sinus-type headaches, I've been producing unjustified amounts of phlegm and I've been too nauseous to eat much of anything. Maybe I'll experiment with some chicken soup. That might just stay down.

Awake?

I'm not well. I made myself get up today because its been two weeks since I heard from the folks at the museum, and I had told myself that I would give them a call before 1:00 pm today if I hadn't heard from them before then.  Well, I phoned but my contact is out of the office all day for an off-site meeting. I left my name and number and maybe he'll get back to me when he's in tomorrow.

I think it was just as well that I didn't have to appear alert and competant, since I currently feel like shit. Well, to be more accurate, I feel the way shit feels when...  you know, maybe we don't need more accuracy. I think 'lousy' would do just as well for a description.

UI pleasantness.

I rant a bunch here about bad UI design, so I think its only fair when I point out when someone gets it right.

I am now using XEmacs as my programming editor of choice because:

1. They are actively trying to fix some of the broken/outdated ideas in standard Emacs.
2. They actually care that the Windows port have actual meaningful functionality. I can actually use the e-mail, FTP and other telecom elisp modues for the first time ever.

Now, they ain't perfect, but thats mainly because the original Emacs source is huge and is fundamentally broken in lots of places. Fixing foundation issues while maintaining backwards compatibility with a huge set of crufty modules is no easy task.

Anyway, for a while now its been possible in Emacs to click on various screen decorations like the window status bar, and have that perform some programmable action. Xemacs has taken that further and clicking on different places on the status bar has different effects depending on what you click on. So, for example if you click on a minor-mode in the mode-list section (overstrke, word-wrap, auto-fill, etc) then that mode is toggled off. I was just thinking that a nice extension would be to have a right click on the mode-list bring up a list of all minor modes that had somehow registered themselves as being appropriate to the major mode, and let you turn any on that you wish. So, I right-clicked on the mode-list, to see if anything was currently bound to that action, and was startled to see the exact menu that I had just been wishing for!

It a sign of GOOD UI work when an unknown feature is in the exact place and works in the exact way you would wish for...