To The Spammers...

Who continue to make me wish I had disabled comments, GO THE FUCK AWAY.

Building a Sexier GTK Media Player - Part 1

    Today I feel the need to express my discontent for the majority of Linux application UI's, I love GTK and I think it's an extremely simple to use yet powerful widget toolkit, and the unified styling of my choosing by all GTK applications is nice, but there are some cases where I just wish applications would stop looking like crap because of it.

Crying Tears of Joy

    Two days ago I was stupid, very stupid. I tried to plug my 3.5" PATA HDD into a 2.5" IDE cable. Those of you that have done this, you'll know that it generally fucks with the pins or worse. I got off easy, it only pushed pin 36 most of the way back into the controller on the drive, but that was enough to make the drive useless.

Screw You Microsoft

    I've been testing Windows 7 happily for a few months now, it's stable, fast and probably the best Windows is going to get. Last week, after installing updates on my RC install, I was shocked to see ffdshow no longer handled the decoding of H264 video. Since Microsoft's crappy software is too stupid to figure out how to render AAS subtitles when I'm watching .mkv anime rips, I've relied on ffdshow to do this for me (and it's done a WONDERFUL job at it).

    But alas, Microsoft has decided that I'm incapable of choosing what codecs I use, and instead they've made it near impossible to use 3rd party codecs when an equivalent MediaFoundation codec exists. I can get the reasoning behind MediaFoundation, it's all about DRM for CableCard really, but are you actually going to go so far as to preventing me from replacing these and simply losing the functionality to play encrypted TV shows? Really?

    Thankfully, the wonderful people at the doom9 forums have come up with a (albiet ugly) solution.

Custom Iterators in Vala

    For a certain code golf challenge I needed a way to abstract away the mess of dealing with stdin to make my code cleaner (and I can reuse this wherever, which is a big bonus). However, being accustomed to STDIN.each_line in ruby, I wanted an iterator instead of using a while loop in my SumApplication.run() method, so I spent an hour in the vala source figuring out how to write my own iterator that works with foreach(). Now I give this knowledge to you, so you don't have to spend the time yourself!