Journal of Robert Kosten

I've just managed to set up dual screens for working. Problem is: One screen is my laptop at 1280x800, the other is 1280x1024. Now, that wouldn't be so bad (All GNU/Linux distributions I know can handle that, no idea where other OSs are concerned), but the laptop monitor is actually a physically higher resolution (that is, more dpi), which makes everything sorta align at the top of both screens, but diverge further down. For programms I don't mind that, they mostly reside on one screen or the other exclusively, but for wallpapers it is jarring. The fact that the laptop monitor has much less saturation doesn't help either.

Gimp and Python to the rescue. All I need to do is select the right portions of a given image, scale them appropriately, adjust the sturation for good measure and paste the results into something that looks horrible by itself, but aligns perfectly when used as a wallpaper.

So, I turn something like this:

into something like this:

Anyone interested in the script? You may have it ;-P Copy into your ~/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ directory, rename it to splitscreen.py and make sure it is executable. It's just a quick script to scratch a personal itch, but maybe someone finds it useful.

Ah, the pleasures of software freedom.

4chan is one of those places on the internet your parents warned you about, one of those where you can accidentally end up seeing things that make you want to claw your eyes out. Beauty is not exactly a thing I associate with it lightly. Enter Katawa Shoujo…

In early 2007 someone anonymously posted a single page (That I assume I may link to here, copyright law is difficult in these times) concerned with an idea for a dating sim. Some of the regular visitors latched onto that idea and decided to actually just make that game (more as a visual novel then a dating sim, so no household chore planning, like in some games of the genre), using the free (MIT-License) game engine Ren'Py (Which works on Windows, Mac and Linux, yay!). Instead of the usual bland prettiness and fan-service the characters are all disabled in a way, blind, deaf, double amputee. What may sound like a blatant invitation for guro (If you don't know that term I'd advise you against a google image search on it, trust me) and the like, especially where 4chan is involved, is actually a very, very beautiful work of art, with a mood spectrum (I personally find the "bad ending", which I got first, to be very lurching) and quality not unlike Kana Little Sister, which, as I mentioned before (Though I can't find the post for the sake of it), I consider to be the best game of the genre.

At the moment only Act 1 is released, but unlike most other amateur games, this is not quick demo, but a full game that will take you hours to complete. There are few choices to make along the way (and a lot of them have this cringey feeling that you need to select option a to achieve your actual goal, but you know that it'll feel like you're really tact- and clueless anyway), but then that's the usual problem of such games, as the number of possible branches explodes with each new decision.

Well, this post isn't as coherent as I'd like it to be, but at least I'm adding a tiny little bit of awareness about this absolute gem to the ocean that is the internet.

I develop in PHP for a living. It's mostly older (I'll shun the term "legacy" here, as the software is quite stable and I'm not too comfortable with the definition of "legacy" ≅ "without a testing harness", as Michael C. Feathers does.) PHP 4 based stuff, tightly coupled to a proprietary build system. In my spare time, I still enjoy coding (weirding some of my colleagues out to no end), but obviously I'm my own master then. So I use PHP 6 compiled from the nightly snapshots.

Alas, that comes with its own set of troubles. Most developer tools were started in the PHP 4 days, ported to PHP 5, but are a long way from supporting version 6 yet. Namespaces, which will make their first appearance in 5.3, for example are obviously a syntactic change that most tools can't grasp yet (making Eclipse, for example, pretty ugly to use, as it will mark a lot of files as invalid).

So, suffering from Not invented here syndrome, it's quite easy to dismiss a lot of good and helpful tools right off the bat. Being a free software fanatic doesn't help either, as a tool under a sub-optimal license just isn't good enough sometimes… Nevertheless sometimes you need to crawl out from under your "I'll need to rewrite this whole operating system to get everything working right!" stone and look at the world. This is what I intend to do here, quickly (Hey, I'm not a journalist, I can get by with just sniffing at something and telling you when I think it stinks) reviewing a few great-looking tools that have not yet made it into my hobbyist programming due to such irrational shenanigans as mentioned above.