muesli's Blog

Oh my god.

Okay, everybody knew this movie sucks, everybody told me. But I had to face it: I saw the first two parts, I wanna know the end, so there is no way around it. I went to the cinema with Andz and was full of expectations. But oh-oh: There is even less story than in the second part. It's just too frustrating, that movie makers seem to have the opinion that "more action" equals "better movie".

I'm so bored of this, everybody realized "Okay, computers made it possible, there is no impossible in movies anymore". So don't bore me with some old technics-shit and get back to real movie arts: A good story where action scenes are a stylistic device of dramaturgy.

I didn't get the whole thing in the end, anyways: Why were we doing this whole crap again? Ah zillions of monsters, let's take some machine guns. Hey, I can clone myself... But I want it the hard way, let's fight bare-knuckle, although we could also fly around.

"Why are you so sure?" - "Because I am"

Thanks for the dialogue.

...muesli

I did it.

I bought a PlayStation 2 game. Not only that, I also bought additional PS2 hardware. I thought that wouldn't happen anymore since I got my xBox sometime ago.

The reason: Only with the PS2, you're able to play EA's latest games online. Sony's online gaming service is even for free, which is another big plus.

After playing NFS half the day, I'm already addicted. It's flashy, colorful and highspeed. In the beginning it feels like you don't have any control, but pretty soon you will recognize it's just NFS-style. Get used to it, otherwise you will miss this great title

Online gaming? It's the best. After some problems with the configuration (the menu is just misleading) everything worked fine and we were connected in just a few seconds. As you could change the style of your car in any (really: any) way you could imagine, every race is just amazing: You pretty much never see the exact same cars again.

Gotta play... byebye.

Wooha. Long time, no blogging. Although, there were quite a few things happening the last couple of days, I couldn't find the right time and mood to write it down. So here we go.

First of, the KDE 3.2 release is coming closer! We recently released the first beta of 3.2 and I'm quite impressed by the changes we made. Not only the speed, but also the User Interace (comfort & logic) improved greatly and so did the variety of applications, which come along with the K-Desktop-Environment.

In particular, the latest changes I commited:

- amaroK got fast playlist-searching. Given 13000 playlist entries, instead of searching aprox. 1 minute, it's able to complete the task in <100ms, now. I'm still rewriting the whole playlist management, since it turned out that KListView is not able to handle huge amounts of invisible items.

- Konversation OnScreenDisplay among other various (smaller) fixes and extensions. Search my blog for more information about these.

I was also able to finish a two-month project yesterday, which just makes me happy. The terrible part of this project was the CORBA interface. It's usually a really nice way of remote method execution and data transport, since it's independent of your programming language and still pretty straight-forward, while it offers all the hype-features we got used to (like exceptions, oop etc). It turned out, there are a few bugs in Sun's JDK ORB implementation, which really pissed me off. In the end we replaced Sun's with OpenORB - and suddenly everything worked without one change in my source.

So, there's light again, I can see short-term goals and all that stuff, that pushes up your motivation. Thanks.

Movie Players and Linux. This is a looong story First, I used xine, which was (and still is) a quite nice player. It's slim, works out of the box and did everything I begged for.

My interest turned to MPlayer, since I heard it's even less resource-hungry and I wanted to setup a low-Mhz PC for DivX playback. Wow, I was amazed. It offered plenty of configuration options, supported zillions of file formats and ran really speedy.

So I switched to MPlayer on my desktop, too. But hell, there must be a GUI, right? I didn't like Gmplayer so much, since it was space-hungry and the interface just wasn't intuitive (imho). KMPlayer wasn't exactly what I was looking for either, but it was slick at least, so I switched again.

Today I found my program: KPlayer. It's just the right compromise of a slim design and all the important functions at your fingertips.

KDE3? MPlayer? Get it!

"My wife takes 90% of my money, my job job takes 110% of my time - I am happy if KDE only takes 60% of my CPU :-)" quoting kwwii.