korny m*thaf*ckas

2005-09-03 13:17

korny m*thaf*ckas

on monday the 29th august lumberjack and carlo and his girlfriend joined me in front of my place where we entered carlo’s car and went to berlin to watch korn show. since we finally know the way (and never will lose orientation again … cross fingers) we made it with perfect timing to see the openener .. funny behavior on the stage but completly meaningless music .. i even forgot the name of them already.

since lumberjack didnt have to drive the car back we could have a beer before the show together, while we lost carlo and his girlfriend who told us later that they went upstairs to see the show from there. while getting the beer we recognized the (at least for us) surprisingly big number of “kids” .. 15 – 17 years old “men” :) they celebrated the opener almost fanaticly .. funny to see that.

then the crew prepared the stage for korn. they put some black sheets around the drumset, around jonathans microphone (which EVERYONE on earth already knows about). and just before the show starts they wanted to hide the whole stage behind a another black sheet .. which was a complete disaster since they couldnt tear the sheet down from the lightning stuff :)) as you can imagine, we laughed a lot with the rest of the crowd.

we placed ourself behind the pit this time to see what happens when the action starts .. well .. as it happens we crossed the pit as easy as a hot knife crosses butter. no wonder, all those kids built the pit :)

anyways, we were back in 5th – 3rd row after two songs and enjoyed the concert from there. great view, the sound was a bit unclean, at least the voice of jonathan was a bit too quiet. the selected fans inside the cages on the stage rocked really .. by not moving themselves… hehe. this cagething reminded me a bit of the deftones-show we watched some time back now .. they selected some fans before the show and put them somewhere on stage .. with fans i mean 15 year old girls which just looked cute enough for the one who picked them :)

i personally liked the show of korn although it was “just” a normal rockshow, no fancy fireworks or artworks or whatever. i found some pics of that evening in the net and mirrored them away to this place

comments [2]

^^^

sin city

2005-08-17 09:07

well, yesterday i went straight from work to cinema to watch sin city ... i felt like it must have been back in the old times, when cinema was all black and white and when they brought out those old film noir films… as alway i sat relativly close to the screen to have filled my whole field of vision (how can a movie played from dvd ever match against a cinema and a 20×10 m canvas?) and it was just spectacular. the style was as comic as it can be, great cast.

comments

^^^

ikaro is back

2005-08-14 00:00

for those of you who dont know ikaro .. ikaro was one of the most active theme contributors to fluxbox and his site http://ikaro.dk was one of the first big fluxbox community sites.

all out of a sudden he disappeared and ikaro.dk was gone .. but now he is back :)

so, check out his new/old site at http://ikaro.dk and give him a warm welcome.

comments [1]

^^^

updates

2005-08-06 17:43

first of all: another year passed by and i became 27 (for those of you who missed it: 4th july .. ) i got some really nice presents. anja ebayed a fancy “akira – special edition” dvdbox for me, i was deeply surprised since she told me that she had something but i had to guess it … never came close. such a great gift. plop
thanx to all the other “gifters” .. i should start a party here i guess :)

some days later i joined the developer team at living solids for fulltime .. yeah :) we do some really nice 3d stuff there, a lot of stuff todo but very nice atmosphere.

so, since i got a fulltime job now i dont think that i can spend as much time on fluxbox as before but i ll hope to get some of my stuff for fluxbox integrated as soon as possible, i hope you are not too angry with me for the little delays, still try to make my best, promised!

next big event on my schedule is the highfield ... a little music festival and basicly the only “holidays” for this year i guess. i am looking forward to experience beautiful 3 days on that festival, maybe i ll see someone of you .. though i doubt you would recognize me .. hehe :) maybe if i would wear the fluxbox shirt fluxgen promised .. hahahr.

yesterday we went to cinemaxx (again) to watch the island .. what a fun. clever designed, a little bit too much product placement, but great action play with obi wan .. aeh .. mcgregor :) next movies on the schedule are crash and sin city which brings us back to batman begins (for those of you not seeing the connection: frank miller .. yeah, google for yourself, no link :)) anyways, “batman” and mr. bale .. what a great combination, best batman ever, so dark, so dark, so .. dark. go and check for yourself.

comments [1]

^^^

the beauty and the beast

2005-06-24 11:53

the beauty and the beast

today i finished the second version of my fluxbox keys syntax file for the ultimate editor vim. grab it either here or here. with that little helper editing the keysfile becomes easier coz it looks cooler and the visual feedback helps you to avoid mistakes such as beginning with invalid keynames or using invalid action names. the syntax file is in sync with fluxbox 0.9.13 now…

last question: which is the beauty and which is the beast? well, thats up to you :)

comments [2]

^^^

the wretched

2005-06-20 00:15

finally, after 5 long, long years trent reznor and his gang rocked again. last time i saw them was at the hurricane festival in summer 2000 and it was .. wow. so, as soon as they announced the touring dates i managed to get us tickets which was pretty clever since the next day it was sold out .. hehe.

the concert took place at the best location: columbia hall. and for the very first time in our history of rocking that hall we managed to NOT use the wrong way. for the first time we went straight to the place, we didnt take wrong exits on the autobahn or didnt take the wrong autobahn at all .. hehe. but we were still a bit shaky since we actually didnt drove that autobahn in that direction before so we thought “oh .. i dont know that exit there … are we still right? damn, we have managed to drive wrong again .. oh wait .. no, i dont know that exit there neither .. damn. we are really wrong again …” and that went on and on till i saw the ebay building which is nearby the autobahn and which was the final confirmation that we were indeed on the right way. after that we leaned back just to realize that none of us knew the right exit at a later point :) ”... this exit here? ... no, to early, i remember those houses and we have to pass them … this exit? no .. looks strange… ” and so on and so on. we finally made it, just in time. perfect.

most people were already in the building so the queue to get in was pretty short. like always we went to the right to the bar since there is the perfect place to head towards the stage in very short time once the crowd is moving.

near 20:00 the supporting act entered the stage: a woman and a man, the man with a melone on his head and pantomime makeup. the woman entered her keyboard and the man his drums. as soon as they started we realized that they are one of the best supporting acts we’ve had ever experienced. after a couple of songs they played “coin operated boy”. that was the point where my buddy feuer remembered their name dresden dolls. he wanted to see them on the hurricane festival last weekend already but he didn’t quite make it there. so he was very happy about it. they played somewhat between 45 or 60 minutes and it was really good.

after that the crew prepared the set for nin and we prepared ourselfes to .. cut thru the crowd :) anja decided to stay away from the “hot” zone and to watch the show from different positions: from behind, the side and from above .. aka gallery.

trent entered the stage and from there on feuer and i were pretty busy to head to the fence. we made it to the 5th or 4th row and needed 3 songs for that :) then we got separated and i was pushed more to the left (around where jeordie white was playing his bass) while feuer was busy getting to the 2nd row and defending his place. i had a pretty good view on the whole crew and the show was just .. well, like a nin-concert should be :)

after some songs at that place behind some “big” fellows and a constant pressure from behind i decided to see the rest of the show from a more relaxed point and went to see anja. i headed to both bars, checking out the sound and the view at those places coz i usually experience the concerts i go to from the first rows. the sound at the bar was a bit pulpy, the view was blocked from crowd and some struts. yeah, i really liked that place :) next i tried the gallery. much better air then in the eye of the crowd but i guess you have to be early at place to get a nice view. and i didnt find anja, though she was at the gallery but “hidden” at some place. so i went down again and found a nice place to watch the amazing show end. we met in front of the hall and headed towards the car. after changing cloths and drinking something we got hungry and, for the first time in our columbia-hall history (at least as i remember it), we managed to take the right exit to the next mcdoof (mcstupid).

so, nice evening with nice people and nice bands. if you ever get the chance to see either nin or dresden dolls .. dont think, buy the tickets :)

some other people made pictures: here and here and here

comments [3]

^^^

ipager and other nifty programs

2005-06-06 21:02

i am glad to link to the site of a buddy from russia who helped with some stuff for fluxbox: he wrote a little, fancy pager for x11 called ipager. its really neat, nifty and quite unique, check it out, its worth a try if you need something little.

another nice program i stumbled upon last days was xcuckoo ... funny things are possible with x11.

comments

^^^

benchmarking and fonts

2005-06-03 03:45

last evening i was pointed by someone in #fluxbox to the site from raster .. the dude behind a lot of stuff, most known for enlightenment. he posted some benchmarks related to the speed of windowmanagers. to my surprise fluxbox was pretty bad. well, i know we have some issues, but that bad? i had to test that on my own. as it turned out fluxbox wasnt that bad but also not the fastest one. i find it pretty interesting that even the speediest windowmanagers do only ~ 200 windowmappings per second while a pure x is able to do ~6000 or more. so, do we have a big mojo-leak here? hehe, noone knows, we need better tools to debug that, thats for sure. before anyone of you starts a little flameware about the benchmarks: i wrote raster already and our conversation was and is pretty friendly.

UPDATE

raster tried the 0913er version of fbox and 

map_response:              MIN: 0.007149s, MAX: 0.011372, AVG: 0.009750
map_throughput:            WIN/SEC 60.559743
no-toolbar.map_response:   MIN: 0.004989s, MAX: 0.010948, AVG: 0.008049
no-toolbar.map_throughput: WIN/SEC 85.115547
and for reference my old results:
map_response:              MIN: 0.022082s, MAX: 0.027370, AVG: 0.025921
map_throughput:            WIN/SEC 14.307426

another story of fluxbox is the fonthandling. when introducing xft-fonts in fluxbox i think a lot of confusion was started: “is it antialias? what does it do? why do i have to use that?”. and the best thing was: the “antialias” switch basicly didnt toggled antialias but usage of xft fonts. furthermore fluxbox started pretty slow in utf8 locales. and we loaded fonts multiple times. i hope i ve solved all of the problems with the stuff i wrote. i ll commit it tomorrow. after that i ll look into nls- and encoding-issues. hopefully i get that one done pretty soon.

UPDATE

i commited the font stuff and it seems to work pretty neat.

comments [1]

^^^

alock and akwarp

2005-05-30 04:26

i am almost done with alock .. currently i am trying to fix the last issues with it, the userinterface and the features are almost complete (at least from my point of view and thats the only thing that counts :)) after that a version 1.0 will be released and announced instantly. i am a bit sick of reading the 0.0.x version numbers for so many oss-projects on freshmeat.

another thing that is almost done is akwarp. after i saw akem’s Fwarp i was thinking about the problem and how to rewrite that idea in plain c, without external deps .. well, ‘akwarp’ was born and is almost 100% version 1.0 too :)

try out both apps and report back issues or thoughts you have.

comments

^^^

asciidoc and how to put back the fun in writing documentation

2005-05-30 04:20

for my smaller projects like alock or akwarp i searched for a clever way of writing the documentation. i tried to start with docbook but that was a bit too heavy for such small projects. after some surfing i stumbled over asciidoc and as it turns out: its the perfect solution. one writes the doc in normal, plain text and then convert it into manpages, html-pages, pdf’s and what not. pretty fancy, pretty amazing.

after playing around a bit with asciidoc i tried to convert the current fluxbox-manpage (or better, the version asenchi is maintaining at the moment) to asciidoc-format .. and THAT turned out to be a really good choice. i put the result online, check out here .. funny, isnt it?

well, i only can recommend anyone of you who write software to write documentation (or at least try). and if you do, use asciidoc :)

comments [1]

^^^

older news