Petals

Friday MyPaint Sketch #1

A Book That Shape the Meaning of Happiness

Whew this month seems about personal stuff at all.

This time I want to share a book (& essays) from Andi Carloff, his weblink is in the left links pane (top). While it's not too obvious where the happiness is, this book surely draw the line of life principles which somewhat compatible with mine. Thus help me how I define happiness in my life. The book contains many raw truth of life that often washed out by common public opinion, talk about the norm and hypocrisy.

Maybe this book is not everyone's taste but after watch the whole middle-east revolution recently, I've come to realize more the importance of freedom and how any individual should know early on what they had by default. These encouraged me to share it so anyone who can't afford the internet could enjoy Andi Carloff's work at home.

I've asked his permission months ago to reproduce his website as chm e-book. Here is:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2554170/punkersloot.chm (38.7 MB)
this book is a copyleft 

Good Music Good Instrumental

Sometime music is just great without lyrics/vocal in it, which is pretty much how my taste described. Here is some great tunes of mainstream instrumental music on my winamp.

Guitar-oriented (Yeah I'm Satch's big fan):
Joe Satriani - The Forgotten
Joe Satriani - Bamboo
Joe Satriani - Always With Me, Always With You
Joe Satriani - Love Thing
Joe Satriani - What Breaks A Heart
Joe Satriani - Why
Joe Satriani - Searching
Joe Satriani - Andalusia
Joe Satriani - The Bells Of Lal
Joe Satriani - Banana Mango
Joe Satriani - Speed Natives
Joe Satriani - Crystal Planet
Joe Satriani - One Robot's Dream
Joe Satriani - Devil's Slide
Joe Satriani - Crushing Day
Joe Satriani - Belly Dancer
Joe Satriani - Cool #9
Joe Satriani - Killer Bee Bop
Al Di Meola - Flesh On Flesh
Al Di Meola - Nena
Al Di Meola - Dark Eye Tango
Al Di Meola - Beijing Demons
Al Di Meola - Kiss My Axe
Al Di Meola - Calliope
Al Di Meola - July
Al Di Meola - Electric Rendezvous
Al Di Meola - Passion, Grace & Fire
Al Di Meola - Race With Devil On Spanish Highway
Al Di Meola - Suite - Golden Down
Al Di Meola - Al Di's Dream Theme
Al Di Meola - Perpetual Emotion
Steve Vai - For the Love of God
Steve Vai - The Blood & Tears
Steve Vai - Bledsoe Bluvd
Steve Vai - Whispering A Prayer
Eric Johnson - Cliffs Of Dover
Eric Johnson (Electromagnets) - Blackhole
Eric Johnson - Magnetized
Eric Johnson - East Wes
Eric Johnson - A Song For Life
Eric Johnson - Manhattan
Pink Floyd - Marooned

Electronics/Beats/Trance (may contain minor vocal):
Chick Corea - Vulcan Worlds [extended version]
Teebee - Tsunami
Calyx - Illusion
Calyx Feat. Gridlok -  Dead Ringer
Serge - JooS!
Serge - Del-8 me
Safri Duo - Rise
Ill Skillz - Be There 4 U
Jamiroquai - Destitute Illusions
Fatboy Slim - Kalifornia
DJ Sylvan - Guitar Spell
Blue Man Group - Drumbone
Aphex Twin - Heliosphan
Aphex Twin - Xtal
Daf Punk - Around the World
Maksim - Huljic: Croatian Rhapsody
Maksim - Procession Of The Sardar
ATB - Tristan Da Cunha
Aquasky - Blue Thunder
Aquasky - Manmade Symphony
Arkimed  - L'Ultimo Dei Mohicani
The Chemical Brothers - Loops Of Fury
The Chemical Brothers - Saturate
The Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar
The Chemical Brothers - Freak Of The Week
Veracocha - Carte Blanche
Robert Miles - Children
Various Artists - Breakbeat Bass (Aquasky Non-Stop Remix)
Ed Rush - Pacman RMX RAM Trilogy

Reminder: Sampit Massacre 2001

Ten years ago this month, ethnic war between Madura and Dayak commenced (19-28/02/01). I (and family) was living for a year at Sampit as Javanese newcomer 10 years before the event took place. What could be worse than a discrimination that repelled by lawless genocide (at least hundreds victims) How come this happened in 21st century. Shame on me

Let the photographs remind us:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
warning: real gory images 

Building WebkitGTK on Windows

update Mar 2014: The issue regarding mingw-w64 winapi no longer valid as tried with version 3.1.0 and webkitgtk 1.10.2

brief instruction for 1.6.1:
Download source from here file: mingw32-libwebkitgtk-1.6.1*.rpm (opensuse's patch included)
With 1.6.1 we can use msys-perl 5.8.8 instead of strawberry's and none of my patches below except datadir.patch applicable. At maximum configuration (without geolocation) we can use:

configure --enable-mathml --enable-link-prefetch --enable-animation-api --enable-register-protocol-handler --enable-web-timing --enable-datagrid --enable-page-visibility-api --enable-3d-rendering --enable-image-resizer --enable-touch-icon-loading --prefix=/c/GTKDEVEL --with-gtk=2.0 --with-target=win32 --with-unicode-backend=glib


which require additional gstreamer, in my brief test it gain score: 100 on ACID3 and 296 on http://html5test.com. However there are some regressions: annoying text/image flickering and several widget misplaced also plugins still not implemented yet. Best gtk to use with is probably 2.24.8.

  To shrink the runtime dll size to around 40% smaller, force the use of -Os flag (need to manually edit Gnumakefile) or disabling SVG/video will reduce size significantly.

VipsCC Python, an Alternative to PIL

Taken from their wiki:
libvips is a fully demand-driven, threaded image processing library with no image size limits and with good support for colour. It is mature and documented.

Comparison with other imaging package also available

Though not so pythonic their binding is fully featured and comparable with C command-line version. Personally I use it to manipulate HDR image (exr) and NASA Blue Marble Imagery but unfortunately whenever I build it with direct OpenEXR support, vips become broken. Though other HDR format available (radiance) the later is more widely used in scientific field than in multimedia world. As a workaround vips can utilize ImageMagick (as image import) which recent version support OpenEXR though arguably limited to 16bit whereas exr theoretically could support up to 32bit.

Make a proper free GM set

OLPC project has it! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples (Another gigantic well worth downloads)
Studios and professionals kindly donate it to OLPC and OLPC give it to the public under CC 3.0 BY.

As no one tried to make a GM set in SoundFont or GUS format yet I'm interested to make one as alternative to the improperly licensed freepats project which is under vague GPL. Surprisingly this is seems the only free GM set around since Eric Welsh originating it circa 90s! and went through various license changes.

First I'll use Viena to build SoundFont version then convert it to GUS using unsf? so project like timidity and wildmidi could use it. OPM donated samples was the potential candidate to be a GM though Dr. B said there will a true GM set released soon.

Conservative All in One PyGTK Installer

!!OBSOLETE WARNING!! This one looks very promising instead, I might update this pack or maybe not... since it would be pointless. Anyone who like to build pygtk python bindings may read my post here. It's for mypaint but relevant

BIG PyGTK Packages to keep you busy before migrating to GTK-3, PyGI and Python 3. Or are you want to try PyGI PyGobject try my experimental build 13 February 2013 here

22 April 2012
pygtkaio.7z
Alternate download for people who hate installer :-)
no changes except it doesn't include extras and have updated libcairo

22 July 2011
headers.7z (7.86 MB)
Just in case you're C developer and interested to use this runtime... (note that I build all from scratch even things like zlib, so it's completely unofficial)
headers only  (may contain unnecessary headers), import lib and static lib are too huge for me to upload
I'll assume you can use dlltool to make implib

pyliblzma win32 build

Ah so there are two 7zip python bindings: pylzma and pyliblzma, anyway I use the latter.
pyliblzma-0.5.3.win32-py2.6.exe
pyliblzma-0.5.3.win32-py2.7.exe

Playing MIDI with Gstreamer

Yay this is cool! I finally understand how to use wildmidi.cfg :lol and playing pachelbel canon midi.


This is GPL Gravis Ultra Sound pats: http://freepats.zenvoid.org/ (download freepats-20060219.zip)
edit: and someone will release CC-BY 3.0 GM set here
for reference the original wildmidi binary can be found here

gstwildmidi (already patched, see update)

Now take a look at ".wildmidirc" inside wildmidi.7z for a while, this is a modified wildmidi.cfg from freepats which contain standard instrument channel assignment with optional tweak (amplification, sound panning etc.) at the top you'll find "dir C:\Users\Public\APPLIC~1\WildMidi" which told wildmidi where you put GUS pat (the freepats). This path by default is "C:\Documents And Settings\All Users\Application Data\WildMidi" in english Windows XP. This file need to be placed in C:\Documents And Settings\[username] a.k.a %USERPROFILE% or %HOME% or what whatever equal in your Windows.