I was getting overly confident with my Mozilla 0.9.9 and decided to install the Blackdown Java J2RE 1.3.1 as well as Macromedia 5.0.43 flash plugins. Well well well… mozilla started crashing all over. So I started cursing like in the old days… then I remembered something: this entry in the Mozilla bug tracking system. What it comes down to is that the Flash plugin is buggy… it simply locks up if the /dev/dsp device is busy, whereas previous versions of this plugin would just disable their sound in this case.
Make your time HA HA HA
One of the most productive days in a long time. I can move mountains quicker now, mostly due to Python, and today I did some serious terraforming. The scary thing is that it’s all so elegant and intuitive on top of it all. I didn’t think I liked Bush (the music, not the politician, whom I don’t like). It turns out I was wrong. Conveniently so, as EMusic has a few albums available.
The years of pain are over.
Finally. At least in my case, Mozilla 0.9.9 has put an end to all these years of cursing at everyone and everything that might have contributed to the cauldron of fresh shit that was web-browsing on non-windows platforms. After having used 0.9.9 exclusively and extensively for 10 days now (and I practically live on the internet) my levels of stress and general malice have decreased considerably. Thank you very much Mozilla, I never really doubted you.
A note and some new music…
Keep your eyes on XVid. This is also an OpenDivX-derived codec, but it’s open source. According to all reports and tests, this seems to be good competition for DivX4. As soon as it’s more accessible or I have more time, I can start playing with it. Clan Of Xymox came to my attention recently on EMusic. This is rather interesting Alternative/Goth/Industrial that reminds one of vintage Sisters of Mercy with some Cure thrown in for kicks.
Microsoft IDIOTS
This is idiotic. This is childish. This makes me angry. Click here so you can be too.
On DivX 4.0 and OpenDivX
I’ve just done a quick subjective comparison between the same film compressed with DivX Networks’ DivX 4.0 codec (as performed with my own im2avi linked with avifile) and Project Mayo’s OpenDivX (also mpeg4) codec, as implemented independently by ffmpeg. Now, ffmpeg encodes the whole movie in a fraction of the time. This is no surprise, as ffmpeg has spent some time on optimising their code for real-time streaming. This is still impressive.
News update.
I get to work at home today. Yaaaay! Read this Salon article about Mozilla; it’s reasonable and down to earth. Also remember to IGNORE any links to MozillaQuest that you ever come across: the guy behind it is an absolute moron. Don’t confuse MozillaQuest (urgh) with MozillaZine, which is good. I’m test driving Mozilla 0.9.9, and I must say that it’s impressive. One day, all this browser pain will be behind us.
InBook and Book both suck.
I just updated the script that generates our publications listings so that it doesn’t list the cross references separately anymore. It creates full citations for each and every publication instead. In this change, I ran into the old problem of @InBook and @Book not allowing author and editor, which is strange… think about when you’ve written a chapter in a book for instance. In anycase, my advice is to ditch these and use @Proceedings and @InProceedings instead.