The UN inspectors have found a dozen warheads usable for chemical weapons. In my opinion, the Iraqi excuse sounds fishy. If Bush bombed Iraq tomorrow morning, I'd feel a little bit less strong when I walked onto the I-5 freeway, but it wouldn't stop me nor a few hundred students. This evidence is bad news for anyone who wants to see peace in the Middle East. If Iraq is forgetful enough to leave a dozen empty, unusable chemical warheads in plain view, what else have they forgotten? Oh, we forgot to get rid of this thousand tons of Agent Orange that we bought surplus from the US in 1989. Doh! I think it's time for Iraqi military to get their arses in gear and double-check those weapons for stray strains of botulism. It reminds me of a song by the Canadian band, Three Dead Trollies whose humorous music is on mp3.com. Put away the dead hookers, used syringes, sex toys, and weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, momma's coming for a visit!
Alright, I've been slacking on Making of JF for a week or so. Why? Nothing to show you and I'm not going to go out of my way to show you something that will blow your mind when I'm in a bad mood. Why am I/was I in a bad mood? Money, school, AltSci3D, and JF. It had nothing to do with the amazing amout of rain we're getting here in Seattle. This week it rained nearly 24/7. We saw little rain, big rain, and rain from every direction, even from beneath us. Don't let me go Forrest Gump* on you. This picture is evidence of Javantea's Fate getting closer. I was so very close to getting Scene 1 done on my Windows computer. When I finished Page 6, I was ready to finish Page 7 and 8, but then something happened. I forget what. The usual, most likely. I tried to start work on Page 7 yesterday and AltSci3D Manga Director v3 crashed on startup. I messed with the data file a bit and it just wouldn't work. So I've decided that I'm going to do a small bit of work in the next few days to get the Linux version functional. It won't be perfect, but it will be enough to get Scene 7 done. So I did just that. Good stuff happened last night and today.. I stayed up to 4 AM working on c++ stuff and it is coming together. This shows how I can move the Accelerated particles around with the camera. The mouse movement is not working yet, but if it works with camera, I can do it. I also got the animation half working. So I'm going to do a bit more fixing up and it'll start working... You'll believe it when you see it, right? Well this is half of it. How do you know that this was made in Linux? Well, you'll have to trust me. A picture being made in Linux can be faked as easily as being made in China can be faked. You change a name, copy a title from here to there, and it's fake. If I were to release the source, you might be able to believe a bit more.
Today's rant has to be short because I didn't start it until 2:23 AM. For today's lesson, I'm going to comment a bit more on the importance of file format. You'll need to look at both very small pictures today to get the full meaning of the rant because they are different. But that is the point. The jpeg can easily compress an anime that was previously compressed with mpeg (I actually ripped the frame right off my Captain Tylor DVD #2). The picture is pretty big (460x488x24-bit) considering how small the file size is [18.1 kB], right? Well that's because I picked the right tool for the job, given to me by the amazing field of mathematics. A png at half that resolution (1/4 the data) is 25 kB. The png, though is doing its job very well also. At a whopping 736x804x4-bit, it weighs in at just 8.5 kB, a marvel of modern computer science. How did I do it? Well, I created the png in XFig and exported it to a png file with smoothing on. Then I opened it in Gimp and cut it down to a non-dithered 16 colors. The jpeg was interesting. I ripped it from my DVD using transcode. Then I opened it in Gimp and cropped it to size. Then I saved it as jpeg. The save dialog let me see both the preview and the size of the file. I sized to make it look good and here it is. I can't say how sweet Gimp is. Today I spent a few hours working on getting Script-Fu to work. Most of it was learning the obscure (yet simple) language. I was trying to get it to convert a bunch of PCX files into PNG files. I finally gave up and I decided to look for a program called ppmtopng. You see, I found a program that converts pcx files to ppm, aptly named pcxtopng and it came with my distro of Linux (Slackware). But curiously, there was no pcxtopng or ppmtopng converter. In fact, there was no png converters at all. What was the big idea? ZLib is the core of the free software movement, I could hardly see them being turned away from Slackware. So I looked on the web and sure enough there was a ppmtopng. I downloaded it and it needed a library called NetPBM. I found that and compiled it. But what's this? It has a program called pnmtopng! What is a pnm file? A pnm file is any of the ppm, pbm, pgm files. So that was my solution. I edited my mp3 to ogg converter script to convert pcms to pngs and viola! What did I convert? The whole System Shock 2 Multi Function Display (MFD). I had done it before using a trialware PoS program, but this time it was personal. ^_^. I really wanted to do it for free and I knew there was a way. I found it, it is Linux/NetPBM.
