My experience with KDE4, part 2

I obviously did not want to stop with a single compile of KDE4, therefore I’m updating more or less randomly my build off the SVN to check what has been changing. The first and most important change since my last post was the addition of the K-menu in the taskbar: Kickoff was moved from playground (where it resided) to kdebase. Also, kate now works perfectly, and is already usable as a full-blown text editor.

October 20, 2007

My KDE4 impression

Since Beta 3 was announced a short time ago, I thought I would try testing KDE4 on my computer. Here I’m reporting on my first impressions and I’ll try to provide constructive feedback as much as possible: the developers are being already (and unjustly, in my opinion) bashed enough.

October 16, 2007

Script to make captures of movie files

The other day I was thinking about how to make screencaps for the anime I watch. Windows users often use Media Player Classic, which can create a video contact sheet (i.e., a series of captures) out of a movie file. I had two problems with this: The biggest is that it runs on Windows, and I don’t use Windows; The frames needed to be manually cropped every time, which was slow.

October 14, 2007

Clannad 1

Straight out of my anime backlog, I watched the first episode of Clannad. I don’t know much about the original name (save for the time it took to be released), but I knew that the animation studio who did this series was Kyoto Animation (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Air, Kanon and Lucky Star).

October 13, 2007

Prism Ark 1

From the already large backlog of new series, I recently watched the first episode of Prism Ark, an anime adaptation of the H-Game _PRISM ARK ~ PRISM HEART II ~ _by Pajamas Soft (I wonder how some Japanese companies get to choose their names…). It is being directed by Masami Obari, who did Dancougar Nova the last season.

October 12, 2007

Blogging scholarships!?

I just read from Weblog Tools Collection that CollegeScholarships.org is hosting a vote for a round of $10,000 blogging scholarships. Now, I may be a little out of the “Web 2.0” trend (actually for me “2.0” does not relate to Tim O’Reilly’s buzzword, but to real and interesting technologies like the Semantic Web), but I find this absurd. I mean, I have no doubts that the people listed there have made interesting blogs.

October 11, 2007

New theme

After some thoughts, I switched dennogumi.org to the dKret theme. Please report any errors you may find. The header is the default image, but it will be changed soon (hint: Melissa, you already know what to do…).

October 9, 2007

SOFT file woes

Today I started working on a data set published on GEO. As the sample data were somehow inconsistent (they mentioned 23 controls when I found 28), I decided to parse the SOFT file from GEO in order to get the exact sample information. I did a grave mistake. First of all, Biopython’s SOFT parser is horribly broken (doesn’t work at all) and quite undocumented: I could work around the lack of documentation (API docs) but not with the fact that it wouldn’t work.

October 7, 2007

Unimpressive management: Wordpress 2.3

I’ve recently upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3. While I’m interested in the new changes this release brings (like tagging support) I question the way the transition to the new version was handled. In particular, I am referring to the (questionable) idea of breaking the database schema three weeks before the release. Given the amount of breakage that brought upon plugins, it should have been announced at the start of the 2.

October 4, 2007

Easy RMA: RMAExpress

Today I was looking for an easy way to do some calculations of raw expression data on Affymetrix arrays, but I didn’t want to use R: I have already mentioned how I don’t like its design and implementation. While looking for some documentation, I stumbled upon this nifty little program called RMAExpress.