thinkMoult

GetKDE.org – the workspace, and what’s going on.

Dion Moult — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 19:16:40 +0000

Some updates. Both for newcomers to GetKDE.org and those who have seen this project before, see the homepage, the explore page, and then finally, the page I’m writing about.

Homepage has been updated too:

And explore page updated too.

Hope you like it.

I have to apologise for only having the time to work on this very sporadically. Next in the to-do list is the apps page.

I love whiteboards.

Dion Moult — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:02:30 +0000

Although it might seem like an awkward title (perhaps even shit-worthy), but I have felt the need to profess how amazing they are.

A long time back when I was still in Malaysia, I owned a little corkboard panel which I used to pin up those important forms I would always lose, and occasionally use it to map out ideas for projects. After moving to Australia, where their customs wasn’t too happy about bringing over wood, it was a while until I used such a board again. When I did, however, it had taken up a newer purpose – as a pin-up of my half-finished, terrible works that were going to be binned. I called it the “motivation-board” – something I would look at and realise which projects had potential and which didn’t, and drive myself towards completing the ones that did. I added stuff quite frequently to that board – which shows a little bit about the easy come, easy go nature of some of my micro projects.

After an academic year was over, I spent the winter in Shanghai where I again lost access to such a board. As I slowly found time to slip into my “work on my projects” groove, I picked up a slightly distorted square A4 book which served as a journal to jot down ideas and work out design problems. It was better than nothing, but lacked the “overview” quality that boards have.

However after moving again early this year back in Australia, I decided to get my board back. I walked over to an Officeworks, right past the chipboards and into the whiteboards section. I bought a decently large one and took it home.

That was when I realised the differences between these boards.

The pin-up board is good as a consumption device – a long-term overview of your work.
The journal is an on-the-go device, but divides your ideas into very linear and isolated chunks.
The whiteboard, at least when I use it, is a absolute gold device for short-term brain-dribble visualisation which makes it a dedicated creation device. There is no consume on a whiteboard. It’s a develop and iterate tool. It’s what I really needed from the very beginning.

So much for noteslate and courier.

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Testdriving Skydrive

Dion Moult — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:49:29 +0000

For those unfamiliar with Microsoft’s answer to cloud storage, [Microsoft Windows Live] SkyDrive offers a website accessible online file manager for free. When I first tested Skydrive many years back, it only offered 5GB storage and had a clunky interface that was a horror to work with.

Imagine my reaction when I heard the bozos who work at the University of Sydney’s excuse of an IT department announced that they were abandoning a personal user folder on the network and replacing it with a SkyDrive account.

Admittedly after brushing up with SkyDrive’s latest updates, featuring a HTML 5 non-uncanny interface along with 100MB per file with a total size of 25GB per person, my interest in trying out the service was rekindled. They apparently also updated photo sharing and manipulation technologies as well as synchronisation with MS Office. Neither feature of which I particularly need or will use, but a nice touch nonetheless that shows at least some departments in Microsoft care about their products.

Apart from playing with it sporadically, this week I had the fortune (that’s right, I wouldn’t say misfortune) to use it within my average work environment, ie. working with graphics and diagrams and scanned images. My other average work environment involves programming, for which anything other than a vcs repository with a local LAMP setup is inappropriate, but that’s something else entirely.

The Good

When working within a relatively small group for a small design project, SkyDrive is great for collaboration. Not only does it solve the issue of always shifting workstations and having to transfer over resources or source material, SkyDrive acts as a replacement for a Dropbox setup. By this I mean that when SkyDrive is operating under an institution, I can very easily tell it to share a directory with 5 of my friends working on the same project as I am, or otherwise interested in my work.

Along with a drag n’ drop interface, it makes it easy to copy over whatever has changed just by looking at the last modified dates and selected the top X number of entries.

SkyDrive is also quick. It doesn’t dally around like other uploaders and gets straight to the point of dumping your files online just like Dropbox does.

The Bad

Unfortunately it’s also completely inappropriate for my uses. The average design save file can very easily exceed the 100MB per file limit, and even when it doesn’t, having to download a ~50MB file, especially when the connection is spotty, is a pain, and can cost you several hours of productive work, or worse, lose a client.

SkyDrive also doesn’t support incremental updating, which I guess is asking too much, but since people have already been spoilt by Dropbox, which does something alike that, I don’t see why I can’t grumble about it.

Brief Conclusion

Apart from not being useful for my usecase I really cannot find much to critique about SkyDrive. Especially when I rarely see other people making use of Cloud solutions other than Dropbox I’m quite surprised not more people are using SkyDrive. With upcoming integration with Windows 8 (of which I have mixed reactions to) and up to 2GB file transfers, I’d say Kudos, MS. Kudos.

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Another year awaits.

Dion Moult — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:41:11 +0000

Well, it’s been another month since my last post but my online slumbering isn’t the result of laziness, but rather the shifting of focus towards more of real life and less of the fantastical world wide web.

Since then, I had returned to Shanghai to continue studying Mandarin. Upon my return, my ever-faithful Acer Aspire 4530 had decided it was time to corrupt its hard drive and stop displaying things on the monitor. I am now the happy owner of a Thinkpad T420i, whose notable features include choosing discrete/integrated graphics at the BIOS level, which subverts any possible Linux NVidia Optimus problems, things just working, thanks to the series being a developer favourite, and a very rough-textured nipple and touchpad, which are like heaven to my sensitive hands which suffer from hyperhidrosis. Even when my hands do act up, the keyboard has a drainage system.

Software-wise it runs Gentoo Linux with KDE. Files were easily transferred without any problems from my backup server at rsync.net – whom I’d recommend to anyone in an instant.

I have included a picture of it below (or rather, a stock photo of it). Aesthetically it looks not much more than a black box, but given its reputation as something which just doesn’t give up on you, it’s an appropriate design.

This caused quite a bit of a setback in my office work as well as personal projects, of which the latter got severely cut back upon. Not helping was the fact that in a couple weeks time I moved back to Sydney, Australia to prepare for my second year of university. Also not helping is that I am moving around quite a bit during my first couple of weeks in Sydney.

In terms of personal projects, I finalised and synchronised the latest live.WIPUP design with the stable version. Those who were checking WIPUP would’ve seen the first animation sequence of ThoughtScore finished and posted online on the 24th of Janurary.

Best background music ever.

Dion Moult — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:58:16 +0000

From Orisinal: Morning Sunshine:

wget http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/carrot.swf emerge -av swftools swfextract -s 31 carrot.swf -o carrot.mp3 mplayer -loop 0 carrot.mp3

Or replace with any other Orisinal song :)

Note: -s 31 depends on the sound index number, which may be different – do swfextract foo.swf to check.

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Back in Malaysia, and other things I have dabbled in.

Dion Moult — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:03:50 +0000

Blog posting has been slow lately. This is mostly due to real life and connectivity issues, but despite this I have had some time to dabble in the various public projects I juggle. The pace is not rapid enough to be able to keep up a alternate-day post like I used to, but is suitable for a summary post, such as this one.

The ThoughtScore Project

The first project is my ever-incomplete ThoughtScore animated movie. The highlight of this update is that there has been an animation update with a few extra shots added. You can view the ThoughtScore Blender animation here, or click the screenshot below.

You may view more feedback on its BlenderArtists forum thread (page 4).

The project also got awarded its own domain with some content I pulled together quickly in about an hour. See ThoughtScore.org.

I do have a couple more scenes prepped and awaiting animation & rendering, so more updates will be popping up.

live.WIPUP

WIPUP, a way to share works in progresses, has experienced the yearly dip in content due to the holiday season, but live.WIPUP (the bleeding-edge iteration of WIPUP) has received experimental design changes and slight SEO updates.

live.WIPUP -like the projects it was built to showcase- is also a work-in-progress. It’s incomplete, but as always, hopefully a step in the right direction. Text link to check out live.WIPUP – share your works in progress here.

Real Life

Apart from badminton, taking a break from learning Chinese, globetrotting, and client work, this picture says it all.

Well, that’s it for a brief summary of what I’ve been up to. I hope everybody have also had a great Christmas, New Year, upcoming Chinese New Year, and awesome holiday.

Migration from GoDaddy

Dion Moult — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:53:56 +0000

No doubt anybody with a domain name online has heard of the infamous GoDaddy. Whilst I’ve been dutifully spending time away from the computer this holiday, I’ve kept a close eye on the SOPA act as well as registrars’ reactions towards it. GoDaddy already has horrible customer service, horrible products, horrible interface, horrible advertising … and they also support SOPA.

Unfortunately I do have a couple of domains left on GoDaddy for legacy reasons and laziness on my part, but this was the final straw to migrate away (to Namecheap, if anybody’s interested). If you own a domain with them, spend the extra 5 minutes to migrate. It’s worth it.

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The aftermath of Failnation.com

Dion Moult — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:05:23 +0000

A while back I sold Failnation.com to the Cheezburger Inc Network of sites. I recently checked it and found it had been rerouted to a subsection of FAILBlog – currently housing “classic” fails. An appropriate new function, I think. The humour isn’t quite my cup of tea, but this is the Internet, after all.

Whatever happened to failnation?

Hello, Shanghai! Happy holidays, everyone!

Dion Moult — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:05:21 +0000

As you might’ve guessed from the title of this post, I am now in Shanghai and I have been for almost a month now. Apart from socialising with relatives, most of my time is spent on my job, with the free time I have soaked up by learning how to speak Mandarin. This has effectively stalled most if not all of my public projects – however once in a while it is good to just intensively learn and experience rather than the create-create-create I am normally used to. It’s also been good to have time to fix up and investigate a lot of nagging issues I’ve procrastinated in the past, such as creating a more robust backup solution, setting up better permissions on my webserver for alpha projects and hosted projects, and figuring out exactly how close my computer is to death.

Shanghai is cold. But Shanghai also has a lot of delicious food. The latter excuses the former. When I’m not resisting the cold and tanking up my stomach, I have experienced the usual touristy sights such as The Bund, public parks, ancient Chinese garden- oh, what’s that? No mention of the Great Wall or Tian’anmen Square? Yes, because that’s in Beijing, not Shanghai – which I will drop by and enjoy in the near future.

There was also a brief meet-up with Patrick Lauer (bonsaikitten) which was interesting given my previous geographic inconveniences meaning I could rarely meet up with anybody. If anybody else is in the area or knows of any FOSS events, give me a shout.

Every day is a linguistic challenge as I plough through new words to learn, but probably the best thing about being in Shanghai is that being back in an asian country means I play Badminton twice a week again.

Will be posting more updates to WIPUP in the near future.

Any FOSS-related events I should check out whilst I’m in Shanghai?

Tech Tip #10: merge PDFs into 2 per page, 3 per page, etc (n per page)

Dion Moult — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:48:38 +0000

This post is mostly just a reminder to myself, but it may be useful to others.

I was recently asked to convert a .ppt, or Powerpoint slideshow document, into a three slides per page, horizontally centered, one on top of another, with frames around each slide. Powerpoint itself offers several printing options, including a 2ⁿ per page (ie. 2, 4, 8, etc) as well as handouts, which can do 3 per page but are incredibly small and have writing lines besides the slides.

Luckily, Powerpoint can save the .ppt into a .pdf, and there are plenty of PDF manipulation tools on Linux, and are generally much more readily available than on Windows. Scribus is an option, but after some searching I discovered “pdfnup“, part of the “pdfjam” package. This is the command I ended up using:

pdfnup --nup 1x3 --no-landscape --frame true --batch foo.pdf bar.pdf etc.pdf

For a full explanation of the commands, you can try looking at its manpage, or pdfnup --help, which is much more useful.

Tech Tip #9: use Klipper to automatically post to a Pastebin.