Worst. Film. Ever.

Michael Bay killed my inner child.

I was a huge fan of the *original* Transformers cartoon series. I loved it. I loved the little plots. I loved the characters. I loved the voices. I loved the battles. Hell, I even *really* loved a particular transformer...

But all of that is dead now, because I've seen the utter atrocity that is the Michael Bay vision.
He can go rot in Hell... or, maybe Detroit.

Christ, leave it to the current society to:

1. destroy their own nostalgia, and
   
2. lap up (with record box-office numbers) the dumbed-down-to-the-absolute-lowest-common-denominator-possible, evolutionarily-speaking, version of a story, since it had OOH! SHINY! SPECIAL EFFECTS!

I gave that bastard money to sit in a crappy theatre with a thousand other people that I have NOTHING in common with (jesus christ, do their brains just glaze over all the horrendous plot holes, stupidity, shitty characterizations, flat dialogue, stereotypes, and endless suspension-of-disbelief mistakes?) - and be angry for 144 minutes.

Transformers was so bad, Michael Bay made Gigli look like Shakespeare.

I'm going to be sick.

Fuse.

So I was playing around with Beryl when I read about the merger between compiz and beryl, and the call for a new logo/artwork..

After reading the tango specifications again, I started playing around with some ideas...

This image is the result of my ideas. (Thank you to CBU for providing much-needed rendering happiness...)

First Coffee!

Oh man, there is nothing better than hearing the coffee whoosh down the tube of the vacuum coffee maker and knowing that I'm literally one minute away from having fresh yummy coffee...

And then, I run to the pot and grab FIRST COFFEE! Oh yeah, that's right! CBU didn't have a chance! I gots the coffeeeeeez beyotch!

A little milk or moo-less-juice, some ice... and voila, coffee perfection.

Edit: ok ok, so CBU was out getting breakfast when I snagged fr1st c0ff33z.

Arch Linux just rocks.

So, I'm looking at my system thinking... wow, I have a bunch of nifty little applications here... I should probably write a nice list of them. So today is list day!

Arch-only:

yaourt

color-coded pacman wrapper that adds some extra information from the queries and also adds AUR/community packages to search/install and even *build!* Automate all of your AUR package builds! sweet!

alunn

Gnome system-tray notification for Arch Linux news and Pacman updates. Nice, configurable little informant-type application that spits out archlinux info.

handiness++:

cssed

Really nice folding-editor for cascading style sheets.

emma

gtk/gnome mysql administrator client... SO HANDY when you deal with multiple mysql databases/tables.

gobby

it doesn't sound cool with a short description of: "collaborative editor," but gobby rocks. It's like having chat and notepad all in one program. This is almost essential for any kind of online-collaboration. Cool cool cool.

gcolor2

Ever wanted to know the color of something on your desktop? This program does that. It has this cute little dropper tool that will pick up the color from anywhere on your screen. The bonus feature is that you can save your favorite colors in a named list. The ultimate palette builder!

screen ruler

In a similar group as gcolor2, have you ever needed to know how many pixels wide or tall something on your screen is? Yet another of my must-have apps.

cowbell

There was a time in my life, as I ripped my own cds to my computer that I did not care about what album some songs were from, what directory those songs were in, or even, what year/genre/etc. of those songs... When I started needing tons of hard drive space to hold my music collection, then I noticed I had a problem... I couldn't find a damn song. Cowbell does for my lazy ass what I couldn't be bothered to do now - clean up my music files. It checks amazon and tries to help you put everything in order with song name, artist, track number, year, genre - even artwork. It can even rename your music files. I gotta have more cowbell!

gjots2

I use mind-map and outline tools all the time, but this one is just awesome. I love that this little application focuses on letting me create an outline, and ONLY an outline. When I want to outline notes, ideas, and everything else - I grab this tool.

notecase

why do I have two outlining applications, you ask? Well, this outliner is more like a note-processor, and will encrypt notes as well as export them out to a pdf. When I need to have more explanation - more like notes with hierarchy, I use notecase.

incollector

A generic "information collector" that allows you to add notes, ideas, scraps, thoughts, and anything else - and then tag them. This is a very handy application if you're always grabbing for the stack of post-it notes.

labyrinth

Did I mention I LOVE mind-mapping tools? Labyrinth is super easy to use, and provides a mind-map browser for letting me create bunches of maps and browse through them all.

freemind

The *big* mind-mapping tool that uses Java. It's a GREAT application, with many, many, many features. If you need a heavy-duty mind-map tool, this is is.

assogiate

Sometimes I need to edit file types / mime types and their associations in Gnome. It's not always easy to find a clear, clean way of doing that until I found this little utility. I really like this little application.

new-murrine-configurator

I use gnome, and I use the murrine gtk engine for my gtk themes. I love murrine because it allows me to very easily make all of my gtk widgets look flat, round, and just a tiny-bit-shiny, oddly enough... like most white apple products. One of the BEST features for this engine, however, is that the author of the engine created a tool that will let you create your own theme with a GUI, previewing your theme at every step. That just rocks. The engine and this special tool blow clearlooks out of the water. (Of course, I NEVER liked clearlooks anyway... and would have stuck with industrial until I could no longer make it compile on a gnome system, if it hadn't been for murrine.)

the usual suspects:

inkscape

This illustration tool is truly one of the BEST vector graphics tools I've worked with (and I work with Illustrator, Freehand, and Flash.) It has it's quirks - because it's still a developing project, but you simply cannot beat the fact that it uses SVG for it's main document format. I've been known to open the SVG file in bluefish and do a mass find/replace to recolor images before.

gajim

I need a very powerful instant messaging application. I need to know what protocol people in my roster are using, so that I don't have to keep guessing which alias to send the encrypted document. I need to be able to use my pgp keys when talking with some individuals. And I need an application where the developers' personal neuroses don't stop me from using the application in a way I need to for my business. *cough*pidgin*cough* Hello Gajim!

exaile

I want a music player that doesn't get in my way. I don't want recommendations, clutter, and gobs of "functions" that obscure the one thing I want to do - play music. I need a few pieces - like an intelligent music library (can I see things by artist? albums? genre?) and a radio/playlist editor... and on the off chance that I need to just see what music files I have, show me my music directory. I'd like all of that separate (like with tabs), but all in one small-ish window that I can hide because I spend roughly 1% of my time actually in the music player window. That's exactly what exaile does. (Well, and then it streams to my last.fm, gives me an OSD of my song change + cover art, and notifies gajim what I'm playing... did I mention it talks with my cube?)

vlc

When you want a media player that will play *anything* vlc is what you want. The skins that you can apply to vlc aren't super, but they're at least not bad - especially given that if you're watching a movie, you're not looking at the player's interface. :)

If you're running an arch system, most of these items are available at your command-line or Jacman-gui fingertips. If you've installed yaourt, then you can probably get most of the rest of these items as well. I think only screen ruler isn't available as a package in arch.

Of course, if you're also using arch, you'll be able to get the latest and greatest updates for all of these applications using pacman/yaourt + alunn. It's a beautiful thing.

World creation kit.

I was working on my latest client project in rails when I had an idea. You see, for years I have been writing / revising / researching my novels, and I've accumulated heaps and heaps of papers documenting all of this "stuff." I might be a bit unusual, but I actually care that if/when I reference a "holy book" in my novel - I actually have a mostly-written version of that book available to reference. I don't just "make up crap" and toss it into my novel without another thought. I mean, I wouldn't just toss in any old spice I grab from the cupboard into whatever I'm cooking...

So I document everything. I have a language, with characters, grammar, usage, dictionary, etc. I have a recipe book that records the kind of food I serve to the people in the novels. I have an encyclopedia (or did) that references flora, fauna, culture, habitat, environment, planetary system, solar system, constellations, etc. I have religious texts, etc. I literally have hundreds of thousands of pages of all of this crap - on physical media.

As anyone that writes knows, having all of this stuff on physical paper is a nightmare to track. Where the hell is the note I wrote fifteen years ago in that one notebook about the *THING* that I'm trying to remember?! Didn't I just make another chapter in the religious text of the people that are on the green side of the religious debate?! Has anyone seen my sketch-note book that has all the information about architecture in it?!

Uh huh. This is the state of novel affairs. So, I was working when I thought, "this would be so much better if I just had a single place I could store all this crap digitally, reference it, search through it, and of course, MAKE BACKUPS." (*Note to self: when packing your belongings for the 405th time, please take note of things like "little post-it notes that seem to be stapled together," BEFORE throwing them in the rubbish bin.)

So, I keep picturing the following pieces (granted, this particular idea works for me, and may not be the core of what someone else needs... but at least it's modular.):

Dictionary - create/edit/delete/view/search of words, definitions, parts of speech, gender, declensions, plurality, synonyms, antonyms, root structure, and of course a reverse-captcha to actually show what the word looks like with native character images (until I can be be arsed to make a true font... argh.) The definition text could certainly benefit from something like markdown or textile markup as well.

Reference Bookshelf - create/edit/delete/view/search for "books" like this world's history, their cosmology, biology, religion, and encyclopedia. Each book would have a title, then inside would be comprised of chapters or sections, and pages, possibly sub-divided into further sections. Pages would definitely benefit from page-numbering, chapter or section numbering, tags, and some kind of markup as well.

Notebook / Scrapbook - create/edit/delete/view/search for notes or scraps - which are comprised of a subject/title, a body, creation date, and tags. If I can include multimedia along with text than these scraps/notes are like a doubleplusgood version of postit notes. Having the ability to markup text and tag each scrap/note makes them organized in a mind-map kind of way, without having to think about the structure before I create each scrap/note. This reminds me of creating a blog article, actually.

Writing Area - create/edit/delete/view/search for actual drafts of my novels. This area is remarkably similar to the reference bookshelf, but for my purposes is exactly defined as being a book title, section name, scene number, key title, code number, draft text, and tags. Every "page" is arranged by code number (which is something like book-number.section-number.scene-number: 1.1.13) The draft text portion of this area will definitely need markup text.

The Dictionary, Reference Bookshelf, and Writing Areas all act like wikis. The Reference Bookshelf and Writing area have inherent organization to them in the idea of page numbers or code numbers, whereas the Dictionary is simply "alphabetized." The Notebook/Scrapbook acts like a blog without any kind of organization other than tagging/dates. So, I just need to create a nifty little ror app that does two things - a wiki and a blog, and has them separated into four sections to store the different kinds of information.

I even have icons. :) And that's the most important part, right? the visual design, of course.




So yay, I have a cute little application started to keep track of all my crap. Now I just need to map out some functions, get the feel of a couple of cute plugins, and it's all good. Yay for world creating.

Aptana should rot in hell.

This isn't my average rant. What makes this rant particularly different from my regular BLAH BLAH BLAH is that it involves my beloved ruby & ror *AND* my work.

You see, I used to use this totally awesome tool called RadRails. It was an eclipse-based Ruby on Rails IDE. It rocked. All of the things I would need in order to do my rails development were at my fingertips! It was the equivalent of ecstasy while programming. I mean, eclipse is a great product on it's own, but with radrails and then the RDT for regular ruby programming... I mean, wow. Super super super happiness. It's like they were, oh, I don't know, rails and ruby programmers setting up eclipse especially for my needs. A thing of pure beauty.

Then, something evil happened. Enter Aptana... a *JAVASCRIPT / AJAX* focused company. Now, as most of you know, I would rather use a dirty coke spoon to gouge out my eyeballs, nerve by nerve, than program in Javascript, or it's metrosexual cousin, Ajax... so it was with horror that I found Aptana acquired both RadRails and RDT.

Thinking that there isn't much they can do to ruin two great products, I downloaded and installed Aptana "Milestone 7" ....

WHISKEY. TANGO. FOXTROT.

My ENTIRE workbench perspective has been UTTERLY DESTROYED, AND REPLACED BY WORTHLESS SHIT.

Oh. Joy. In order to USE ANY OF MY PREVIOUS RADRAILS OR RDT CAPABILITIES, I HAVE TO INSTALL THEM AS PLUGINS TO APTANA.

yeah, did I mention, $0.07 / Mb? Right, that's my bandwidth fee. Aptana is over 100Mb. The plugins?! God only knows, because it's not like they can be EFFING BOTHERED TO TELL ME WHAT SIZE THEY ARE.... So in reality, I'm paying for the privilege of being ass-raped by aptana here...

So, I FINALLY have these "plugins" installed... you know, the actual CORE of what I wanted to use. And I still get to go around and FIX the perspectives, and FINALLY get it set up correctly.

And then, this steaming pile of monkey feces gives me an SWT error, and asks me to shut down the workbench.

I search through their forums and find an answer... Oh joy, I get to edit my profile and include something because Aptana assumes I'm using something asinine for a linux distribution, instead of a real distribution. Nice.

So I'm coding along, and saving my work. I notice that I can no longer see the ror plugins nor the ruby gems on my system. Returning to their forum once again, I see that these issues are supposedly "fixed" in the new version. I go to commit my changes to the SVN server like I always do, preparing to shut down Aptana... except... that feature isn't available....

You've got to be kidding me. It's yet ANOTHER plugin that I have to install.

I download the new version. Install ALL plugins I can POSSIBLY FIND, and start it up.

Except.... the file I was editing and had SAVED... has reverted... COMPLETELY TO THE ORIGINAL STATE. That's right, all my saved changes have been completely removed - as if I never made them. Now, I had tested these changes multiple times in the mongrel server, and I had seen them change... but they're all gone now.

All. Gone. Oh, and, did I mention... I have multiple errors with the plugins and the gems perspective is gone.

I have HAD IT WITH APTANA.

sudo rm -Rf /usr/share/aptana

I install Eclipse, then add the RadRails+RDT plugins, Subclipse, and then the CSS editor from Aptana (since they can't be bothered to add the CSS editor to RadRails or anything... it's not like they care about the RoR developers, obviously.) I have now re-created my complete workbench perspective, with WORKING plugin and gems features.

I don't have any annoying aptana crap cluttering my workbench anymore. It is DISGUSTING what they have done to my IDE. I can't support their "efforts" to "improve" my tool of choice, and I refuse to tell them to "keep up the good work" when I've had my work environment shattered multiple times by a company that has no interest in actually supporting the tools in their "portfolio" other than the one that is their stated direction. I know that my complaints, issues, and anger at what they've done will simply fall on deaf ears if I were to actually complain to anyone that could stop the raping of RadRails, and I don't believe the support staff need more venom directed at them for the choices made by people that know JACK SHIT about the products/communities they've acquired. So, eh, I scream/blog and then go back to work... with Eclipse.