A video with an improbable plot

I told you you'd be seeing a video soon ;-)

Anyway, I got 64 studio working, though I installed via Debian 4.0 instead of with the DVD because my DVD writer is somehow not fully functional. Cinelerra works fine there and voilà, this is the masterpiece I put together:

YouTube link

Feel free to discuss, preferably over on YouTube.

The new face of JollyBOX

Having finished the blog's style, it is now time to implement a common theme out of that for all of jollybox.de (except maybe the zombieHQ). The designs will follow a common scheme, but not be identical—the blog is slightly wider (due to the sidebar), and they shall have different Tango-based colour schemes. The root logo looks like this:

This uses the Tango Butter colourset, which was also used in the style sheet. Similarly, on this blog, the logo and style alike use the Tango Chameleon colours. I have created logos in all Tango colours, but probably won't need them all ;-) The images were created in Inkscape, the fonts used are Gentium and Century Schoolbook.

Just for reference, here is what I used as logo before:

Any comments are, as always, welcome.

64 Studio ?

Though I swore to myself a while ago that I would cease to hop from one distro to another faster than Steve Ballmer can say “patent”, I have just started downloading 64 Studio 2.0 which I intend to install alongside my Debian sid system. Though, in general, I don't mind the “instability” of Debian GNU/Linux unstable—in fact, I quite like how new software flows in and creates tiny problems every few weeks instead of ripping apart the system every release—, but lately, and especially today, I have become fed up of a certain consequence: video editing software is constantly broken. A while ago, the Debian kernel team included the new Firewire stack in the distribution, a change which has a habit of breaking nearly everything to do with Firewire (well, firewire network (not many use it AFAIK, but I do), some devices like (I think) iPods, and, most importantly, DV), and the fact that Cinelerra isn't included in Debian-proper doesn't go too well with the rapid software rotation either. In effect, I cannot get video onto my drive with an upstream kernel (there are alternative kernels by Holger Levsen, which do the job), and cannot edit video at all.

So, when I have a problem with digital multimedia processing, on a 64-bit Debian system, why not try a 64-bit Debian-based probably-stable distribution tailored towards digital multimedia production, eh ? I also briefly contemplated getting arch linux (NO: unstable as well, and cinelerra, in a comunity repository, might disintegrate after a few updates there too...) or Ubuntu hardy (NO: pulseaudio etc), but 64 Studio just seamed a lot more lovable. Well, we'll see. I'll probably install it tomorrow and spam you all with a boring update on whether it does what I want or not.

If all goes well, you will be able to see a very confusing film by me from roughly this Sunday, 18:00z.

New blog style

Since I started this blog, I've wanted to make it look the way I wanted, even though I didn't really have an idea what that could be. I have now, after reading what Pascal Klein has to say on the subject, crafted a design I think is nice and elegant, and emphasizes the content enough in a beautiful way. To be honest, it still needs some work ;-)

While I chose the precise text style manually, for colours I used the Tango project's palette and drew inspiration from that same project in designing the header graphic and the icons. I am going to use Tango emoticons and a Tango RSS icon as well soon.

Here you have some example code, including my font choices:

body {
    font-size: 81.25%25; /* 1em = 13px IF font size is set to 16px */
    font-family: "Liberation Serif", "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
    background: #2e3436;
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
}

blockquote {
    font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 0.923em;
    ...
}

pre.sourcecode {
    font-family: "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace;
    font-size: 0.769em;
    ...
}

Note that the default fonts are all libres, and included in a number of GNU/Linux distributions

Religiöses Gewand

Gestern Freitag, den 16. Mai 2008, fing der Hauptartikel im Merkur (den man meist getrost überspringen kann), mal wieder saftig an:

München/Stuttgart — Mit scharfer Kritik haben Union und SPD auf ein Gerichtsurteil regiert, das Nonnen und Mönchen das Tragen ihrer Ordensgewänder an öffentlichen Schulen in Baden-Württemberg verbietet. Demnach sind künftig nicht nur Kopftücher,sondern auch Kutten untersagt.

„Die Gleichsetzung einer Ordenstracht mir dem Kopftuch verbietet sich schon deshalb, weil das Kopftuch ein Symbol der Unterdrückung ist”, krirtisierte CSU-Generalsekretärin Christine Haderthauer.

Das Thema wurde summa summarum mit etwa einer Seite politischem Schlamm gewürdigt, natürlich gezielt gegen muslimische Kopftücher und für Kutten argumentiert, die jüdische Kippa findet nur in einem Nebensatz Erwähnung. Die Argumentation läuft eigentlich durchgehend auf eine Idee hinaus: Mönchsgewänder seien abendländische Kultur, Kopftücher seien hingegen zu verabscheuende politische Symbole der Unterdrückung. Kopftüchen müsse man also verbieten, Kutten aber behalten und schätzen — man könne sie in keinem Falle gleichsetzen, vor allem nicht in unserem christlichen Kulturkreis.

Denken wir zurück an die Ursprünge des nicht unumstrittenen Kopftuchverbots: Kopftücher wurden als religiöse Symbole geächtet, zeitweise wurde auch erwägt, die Regelung auf große Kruzifixe anzuwenden. So steht es auch, zumindest in Baden-Württemberg, im Gesetz: „religiöse Bekundungen” — das trifft zweifellos auch auf Kutten zu. Ich halte ein solches Verbot für unnötig, aber wenn man sie hat, sollte man damit, um der Götter Willen, keinen diskriminieren und sie konsequent anwenden.

Desweiteren sind in der Zeitung einige hochinteressante Zitate zu finden, zum Beispiel:

Mit diesem Kopftuch-Urteil schafft die rechtsprechende, dritte Gewalt nur vorgeblich mehr Gerechtigkeit. In Wahrheit planiert sie willfährig die christlich-abendländische Werteordnung und damit das Fundament unserer freiheitlichen Gesellschaft ein, um Platz zu schaffen für multiethnische Werte-Beliebigkeit. Soll uns die Scharia irgendwann ebenso als Rechtsquelle dienen wie die Aufklärung, Humanismus und Christentum ? Eine Katastrophe.

Herr Anastasiadis, glauben sie wirklich, dass eine große Dosis öffentliches Christentum unsere Gesellschaft vom Zerfall bewahrt ? Man könnte sagen, sie widersprechen sich selbst — vor der Aufklärung wurden abscheuliche Gräueltaten von der römisch-katholischen Kirche durch die Religion gerechtfertigt, und es hat sich doch irgendwann die Trennung von Kirche und Staat durchgesetzt. Unser Grundgesetz bezieht sich nicht als solches auf das Chirstentum, legt aber einen wichtigen Grundstock für unsere Werte in Gegenwart und Zukunft.

Von einem „weiteren Schritt des Hinausdrängens der Kirchen aus dem öffentlich-staatlichen Raum” spricht Bundestags-Vizepräsident Wolfgang Thierse, Mitglied im Zentralkomitee der Katholiken (ZdK)

Na na, Herr Thierse, seit wann hat Kirche im öffentlich-staatlichen Raum überhaupt etwas zu suchen ? Theoretisch hat doch der Staat mit Kirche nichts am Hut...

Where's that web SVG support ?

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are a promising technology. We've all known for years that vector graphics are, scalable as they tend to be, a great thing and often more useful than raster-based image formats. SVG in particular is nice because it's

• all text
• an XML-based format, and thus hip in the industry
• an open format
• an open XML-based format, and thus portable and good with stuff like XSL-T.

Web browsers like to boast about their SVG support, it being a hip technology pushed as a web standard by the W³C, and the support isn't bad. Recent versions of Gecko (Firefox etc), Opera, KHTML and WebKit have all implemented a working subset of SVG and are able to display simple images correctly. Some browsers (at least Firefox and Opera) have decent support for XSL-T style sheets, allowing you to display an XML data sheet graphically in a browser by linking a suitable style sheet at the top — I never expected this, but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that last year. Also interesting is the support of ECMAScript within SVG, making it possible to play tetris in a vanilla IceWeasel.

What was this stuff called again?

We're talking about scalable vector graphics within a WWW context. The fact that these things are scalable could be used to our advantage, n'est-ce pas ? Let's say you have a website styled with only ems for measuring distance, no pixels or other absolute stuff. Being nice and accessible, having the whole website scale when you hit Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-. Something like <img src="foo.svgz" alt="An illustration of bar" style="width:20em"/> should be just what you need. So, which browser supports that ? Bingo, not a single one !

There is a standard, portable way to include SVG in websites: you use the <object> tag, like so: <object type="image/svg+xml" data="foo.svgz" ...>. This works in pretty much all modern browsers (if you don't count IE7, but why would anyone call that bastard “modern” ?), but it doesn't do what I want it to do: it doesn't scale the graphic. At all. It stubbornly uses the size in the SVG file. If you're lucky, zooming with change the font size in the image, but only the font. What's the point of that, I ask you ? Why bother with scalable vector graphics support if you can't scale them ? Maybe we should call them scriptable vector graphics when using them on the web...