Cody Russell

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Last night Horn Player Megan and I went to the Inwood theater to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was really, really impressed. First of all, it was simply a beautiful film. Gorgeous! And, of course, it had incredible choreography for the combat scenes. The style reminded me a lot of The Swordsmen 2, or whatever the title was, the old Jet Li Chinese movie. In both of these movies, the kung fu was accompanied by fantastical abilities such as flying and stuff. Crouching Tiger had a more interesting plot, and a lot more meaning I thought. I really wish I could understand Chinese so I wouldn’t have to read the subtitles, though. However, I much prefer subtitles to over-dubbing!

Princess Mononoke:

I must be on a movie kick or something. Today, I purchased the Princess Mononoke DVD and watched it. Once again, it was awesome. It defaults to over-dubbing, which, as you probably just read, I really dislike. Fortunately, there is an option to change the language to Japanese and turn on subtitles. I’m not sure how subtitles on DVDs work, but something was not quite right with this one. Sometimes they would speak Japanese without subtitles appearing, and then suddenly you would see several sets of subtitles flash across the screen in the span of about one second. It seemed as though they were just catching up. So, I’m wondering if my machine was just busy dealing with the MPEG-2 decoding and failed to keep up with the subtitles or something. It hasn’t had quite as good of performance since I switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 Professional. Anyway, the film was incredibly beautiful, as I remembered it from seeing it at the Inwood theater. Of course, when I saw it in the theater, it was over-dubbed with Gillian Anderson and others, and Billy Bob Thornton as the ugly wandering guy!! Yeah, that was really bad. It’s much better in Japanese. And, of course, it makes me wish I could understand Japanese! The movie is just as beautiful as I remember it, though.

Xft

I’m really excited. I finally got Xft working, and my xterms now have anti-aliased fonts. It looks pretty nice with the right fonts, but with the wrong ones it’s worse than ever! =)

I still don’t have the Xemacs patch working. That’s what I really want!

20 Dec 2000

I am the reason Santa even has a Nauty List!

Stupid Christmas concert

I played a Christmas concert a couple days ago at Will Rogers Auditorium in Fort Worth. The first half was pretty much what one would expect from a Christmas concert: just a lot of traditional Christmas carols and songs. It was boring, but it wasn’t so bad. The second half, though, became quite funny.

They put this choir up on stage for the second half, but they put them in a big, giant Christmas tree. Yeah, that’s right, the choir was the Christmas tree! This was a 75-person choir, all stacked up on top of one another, with a bunch of fuzzy green stuff all wrapped around them so only their heads were visible. And, of course, it looked really freaky when they were singing, because all their mouths were moving.. so it looked like this Christmas tree with ornaments made from decapitated heads, except the heads weren’t dead. Scary!

Xrender:

I started fooling around with Keith Packard’s Xrender extension. I’m just starting to get into it and learn how to use Xrender and Xft. Owen helped me get TinyX and Xrender built for the first time last night. I’d like to help get text antialiasing working in GTK+ and Zvt, plus Xrender-based image composition in GdkPixbuf.

Ultimately, Xrender will also provide facilities to use other cool video card features, such as geometric transforms in boards like GeForce. This is quite cool. Imagine being able to scale and rotate your text in real time. I think MacOS X may have something similar to Xrender, but I’m fairly certain that Windows does not.

Dallas Symphony

I went to Dallas Symphony tonight. It was cool. Andre Watts performed some Schubert and Mendelssohn. I didn’t care so much for the Schubert though. But then DSO performed Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 and recorded it (to be released with the Symphony No. 10 that they recorded a few months ago). It was cool, but it was not nearly as great as No. 10 is. They also performed a piece by Giya Kancheli. I thought it was a pretty cool work, but Cathy didn’t like it very much.

I talked to Valerie about auditioning for Donald McInnes at USC. Of course, Valerie was all into the idea. And I’m really interested in studying with him, although I’m certain that I really want to be studying with Jeffrey Irvine at Cleveland Institute next year. Perhaps for an artist diploma, after my masters degree, I could study at USC. That would be quite cool.

Banana:

The Bonobo UI XML editor has been officially named Banana now. I didn’t exactly go absolutely bugfuck on it yesterday or today, but I did get a little bit of work done on it. I think it’s going to be a very useful application for developing user interfaces in GNOME.

Stinky the Shithead:

Ah, yes. My new little pet project that I haven’t really started working on much yet, but which I have high hopes for. Stinky the Shithead is a metronome program for GNOME that should ultimately support all the features of the Dr. Beat metronomes, plus anything else I can think of.

mjs recommended changing the name of it. I was actually a little surprised that Regina suggested changing the name of it. I thought she’d be all into the name. However, I must admit that she suggested a name that every GNOME person would really dig: Metrognome. Yeah, it’s a good name and I’m almost sorry to see it go to waste. But the fact remains that Stinky the Shithead is a great name. However, the name is actually stolen from the Chicago String Quartet. The name of their metronome is Stinky the Shithead.

Cameron thinks I should write Stinky the Shithead for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh to cover all ground, so that students everywhere can make use of it. I don’t have a Macintosh, but I do have Windows and Microsoft’s C compiler. Writing a free metronome program would be cool, because Dr. Beat is sort of expensive, although it is generally more portable than most students’ computers. Maybe I could port it over to some palmtop computers like iPaq or some such.

Hacking stuff

No new hacking today yet. Tonight I plan to go absolutely bugfuck on that Bonobo UI XML editor though.

I’m also interested in working on miguel‘s idea for a Bonobo control and replaceable backend digital audio player. It would be cool. A single Bonobo control could deal with all kinds of audio backends: CD audio, MP3, Vorbis, from a drive or streamed through a network. Sounds very cool, to me.

Symphony slack

This Fort Worth Symphony concert is such a fscking joke. We’re doing Messiah, of course, and it contains these senza ripieni or ripieni tacent sections where only the first three violists play. And, since I’m the fourth violist I never get to play. In a way, it sort of pisses me off. I want to play it all.

The slacker in me says, “Rock on, man! You’re getting PAID to sit on your ass and do nothing!”

But, I’m not sure I like getting paid for doing nothing. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m definitely a slacker and enjoy doing nothing very constructive from time to time. But I don’t like doing nothing when I’m being paid as though I were doing something.

Quartet

I did have a really damned awesome rehearsal with my string quartet today at SMU. For some reason when we performed last week, the first movement of Death and the Maiden was very, very slow. It was very uncomfortable to me, but the others seemed to like it. Personally, I like to think of the opening in 2, not in 4. So, today, we started out in 4 in our new, sucky slow tempo, and we played through the entire piece. The first thing our coach said was, “You guys are playing this way too slow. It should be much faster, about on the border of being in 2.” That was cool.

So, we do now have a coach. Mr. Iwasaki is just way too busy to teach us, and he is out of town quite often. This new teacher is a violin teacher, but I can’t think of his name now. He seems pretty cool.

So, we began next in the new, faster tempo. It wasn’t quite as fast as we originally learned the movement in. When we first learned it, we blazed through that movement at the speed of light. Then we slowed down, to somewere around the speed of a pregnant tortoise wading through mud on a rainy day in autumn, and now we’re back up near our original tempo, although a little slower, so about the speed of light through slightly murky water.

The speed of light through slightly murky water is a very good tempo for the first movement of Death and the Maiden.

Bonobo patch

I finally committed my patch for BonoboUIToolbarIcon to do full, 8-bit alpha compositing of icons over their toolbar buttons. Right now it only considers if you’re using a theme that uses a bg_pixmap set. It doesn’t work on other themes yet, so you’ll still see simple 1-bit alpha masks on those themes. The code for these other cases is committed to CVS, but commented out, so if you can solve the problem and get it to work then I’ll buy you a beer!

Messiah

Tonight is the first rehearsal for Fort Worth Symphony’s Messiah concert. I’m actually looking forward to it, even though I’m really not all that big on the work.