Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

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Playing MIDI on Linux

Just a quick note-down. I was mildly surprised to find that the modern Linux environments I use (that’s Ubuntu and OpenSUSE) do not gracefully support MIDI as they do stuff like MP3 and WAV. Too old a file format? Hmmm, come to think of it, I’ve been on Linux for more than two years now and this is the first time I have ever tried to listen to a MIDI file. Oh well.

The answer is Timidity. I won’t claim it is the best answer – I was lazy and wasn’t up to doing detailed research, so I just installed a bunch of programs off the repository that look like they might do the job, and tried them one by one. Disappointingly, most of them wouldn’t work out the box despite promising descriptions. So as it turns out, the first program that Just Worked ™ was Timidity. So here I am telling you about it to save you time ;) You’ll need to install it off the repo in Ubuntu, while OpenSUSE appears to have it installed by default.

To play a MIDI file, simply do

timidity [yourfile.midi]

Command-line haters can get a nice gtk-based GUI too by installing the extras packages for Timidity and doing:

timidity -ig

I know a complete solution should also make it so that click/double-clicking on a MIDI file automatically opens the appropriate player, but I’m too lazy to check for something that gets all that done on installation, especially since I only wanted to play one MIDI file. Just manually configure your system to call timidity or something.

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I demand you all download Thunderbird 3 nao!

Because I’m in it!

I made it onto the credits list!

:) I can’t believe it, considering I only had what three fixes to my credit? Thank you for the mention and the fuzzy feelings it brings, Thunderbird! Talk about Christmas coming early.

Anyway, for those of you under a rock, Thunderbird 3 has at long last been unleashed, armed with quite an impressive slew of features and enhancements too. Go get it while it’s hot!

And damn, this sure makes me feel bad about slacking off near the end. Guess I gotta start kicking myself a little and also keep my KDE love affair in check. I’ve got a few bugs I was supposed to fix that are currently lazing around hiatusing, and I guess its about time I got back to them.

Now if only I didn’t have so many other things to do.. :(

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Ubunchu 03 ~ Halp! I’ve been Moefied!

Me to a Tee.

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Don’t yell at your developers! ~ a small rant

People who use community-developed, open source software need to acquaint themselves with a very important principle – everyone has equal responsibility towards the state of the product, because everyone is able to contribute and people who do contribute do it voluntarily.

Don’t get angry and take it out on the contributers when you want a feature and it fails to happen – especially the “LOOK OUTLOOK HAS IT” kind. None of us are any more obliged to spend our time implementing your feature than you are. You are not a customer, and we are not here to serve you. We are a community, and the responsibility for ensuring and improving the quality of our product lies evenly spread upon our joint shoulders.

Some of us have spent hours and hours of our own free time learning how to fix bugs, develop features, triage bugs, write documentation or make any other innumerable kinds of contribution to the community project. The absolute least you can do if you don’t want to learn to join us is to keep your tongue in check when talking to the people who have taken the time off to work on the stuff you use.

And please do not say that something is “easy“. If you actually know that it is easy, please just fix it. If you don’t really know, then please don’t sum up hours of someone else’s effort with that one unflattering, inconsiderate, and completely useless word.

Thank you.

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Why I like To Aru Kagaku no Railgun

I think I finally figured it out.

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Anisong: Spirale

In case you’re wondering about how all the songs so far are on the soft and gentle side, yes it’s deliberate. I do like a number of the stronger and more upbeat songs too, but those just don’t quite do as ambient background music, don’t you think?

Here is ‘Spirale‘, the first OP to Aria the Origination – third and sadly final season of that delighting show. I have a revisit post on Aria in the pipeline, so having this song up would hopefully prevent it from getting caught in the perma-procrastinate loop that hath heretofore consumed too many a stalwart idea. :(

Romaji lyrics and translations (and pic!) after the jump as usual. Hope you enjoy it as I did! Remember, hit F8 to listen along while reading.

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Nanami Madobe? How about Rina Kusuda?

I guess, given the resonance of the news with the geek-otaku underpinnings of this blog, it’s high time I finally came out and said something about this chick:

Tsundere remark: W.. we have multi-touch support in KDE SC 4.4 too. J-Just so you know!

(Warning: this post may contain an unhealthy dose of nonsense)

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Evangelion 1.0 – or You (Knew) it was Coming

People who know me probably saw this coming a mile away when I casually noted that I would take a side trip down memory’s lane :roll:

If you’ve watched Eva 1.0 and mused on the subtle differences from the original series, and thought to yourself that it’d be nice if some random Evafag would come along and do all the rewatching and comparing that you’re too lazy to do for yourself, well, you may have come to the right place!

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PlasMate Documentation Widget

Another update on PlasMate. A number of improvements have been made since my last update, the most visible of which is the newly implemented documentation widget.

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File previews in folderview popups

Just a quick record. I just committed a fix for a folderview bug that had been (excuse the pun) bugging me for awhile now.

If you’ve been fiddling with the file preview settings in folderview, you’ve probably noticed that there was no way to control file preview in the on-hover popup views – all settings in the config dialog applied only to the icons on the folderview itself, while the popups invariably only previewed images. That has been fixed now – the popups now properly inherit file preview settings:

I had intended to attempt this fix much earlier, but was impaired by formidable difficulties in rebuilding trunk after fresh-installing my system (all the new and unfamiliar dependencies didn’t help :P ). Fortunately bugfixes are still acceptable during feature/string freeze. It would have sucked if this pet peeve of mine had needed to delay its resolution till 4.5 :)

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Page 19 of 20

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