Modifying Fox Racing symbol to create a desktop icon for Phex

Phex is a java-based peer-to-peer file sharing client that runs on the GNUtella network. I like Phex for various reasons I won't go into here. One of the things missing from Phex was a decent icon to represent Phex on my desktop. Unfortunately Phex's fox logo seems to be embedded in the java .jar file, so I had to come up with something else.

I've always liked the Fox Racing logo, but it didn't quite look sharp enough for use as an icon. I wanted something a bit more colourful. I found the logo while searching google images, using ggi: fox icons in Konqueror. Google found it on originalicons.com, one of those pop-up sites that actually have very little original content other than that ripped off from other sites, so I didn't feel too guilty pillaging their version of the fox racing icon for my own nefarious purposes.

There was a problem, however, after I saved the fox logo and browsed to the directory I stored it at I noticed a green "originalicons.com" had replaced the icon. Looking at the icon with the layers on it was easy to see how it was done. I simply trashed the layer with the originalicons.com green screen.

The next problem was that I needed part of the image to be transparent. This proved to be easier than I thought. I used the Select Contiguous Regions wand and the shift key to select the areas I wanted backgrounded, then I inverted the selection, copied the part I wanted not to be transparent to a layer that was transparent.

I needed a fairly quick way to select the parts of the fox icon that would be coloured in. One of the problems with the Select Contiguous Regions default setting is that it only selects the colour you're on, i.e. black. What I wanted was a quick way to select all the grays surrounding the black without selecting the white regions. I accomplished this by playing with the threshold slider. I had to bump it way up to 165 before The Gimp caught all the areas I wanted.

From there I experimented with a few orange hues. I decided to use a couple of orange and yellow hues because they looged good against the white/black and still stood out on my default SuSE 9.3 background.

I saved the icon first as a gif file, converting it to an optimized indexed file. After discovering that KDE doesn't seem to like GIF files I bumped the palette back up to RGB and saved it as transparent png. I checked out the image and discovered a new problem, the image had little white fuzzies around the black border. Using the smallest brush and the eraser tool I managed to blot out the white spots.

Initially when I tried to blot out the white spots I discovered that the eraser wasn't blotting out all spots, so I used the Eraser's Hard Edge feature and that seemed to get rid of the edges. And voila, my new Phex/Fox Racing icon!

Festival, be the life of the Internet Cafe

The other day I was sitting in Matter of Taste, a cafe with Kitchener's best coffee and a wide open wireless connection, chatting in X-Chat and working on some C code for my Iceutils suite of gaming software when I came up with the notion that it would be great to be able to listen to the chat conversations going on in Internet Relay Chat instead of having to switch between my text editor (C code) and X-Chat.

I'd heard of Fesitval before, but it seemed more complicated than I really wanted to take the time to learn, and it didn't do X-Chat. A little more searching and I found Scott C. Kennedy's X-Chat Speak Perl script.

After untarring Scott's script in my ~/.xchat2 directory speech worked, but I noticed that the volume was extremely low and setting it higher in KDE wasn't helping enough. I found a temporary hack in the Festival FAQ, but the kal_diaphone.scm the FAQ talks about isn't in the path they talk about, at least not on my SuSE 9.3 system. In SuSE 9.3 the scm file is located in: /usr/share/festival/voices/english/kal_diphone/festvox.

The speech was also going a mile a minute, and while the FAQ had a solution, the solution didn't seem to work as well as editing the xchat_speak.pl perl script Scott hacked. The first thing I did was change the $VOICE variable to voice_kal_diphone and I increased the $SPEED variable from .75 to .90, the higher the number the more pause in the voice.

With the tweaks working well I decided to check out a few IRC channels. Just as my German Chocolate milk steamer was arriving so too was a frustrated software developer expressing his frustration for the whole cafe to hear - using a few choice words that Festival seems very good at pronouncing; which makes you wonder which words they trained Festival the longest on...

Marcel Gagne, Linux Chef's IRC server Part II

Marcel Gagne, Linux Chef's IRC server
Originally uploaded by tuxspot.

In my last post I mentioned how to Add a server network name. Now click Edit to edit the list of servers, and click Edit/bold> to edit the name of the IRC server. Marcel's IRC server is accessible either at:

chat.marcelgagne.com

or

www.marcelgagne.com

Below the Servers for New Network there is a Channels to Join section, add: #wftlchat. Be sure to include the number symbol in front of the wftlchat, and voila, you can now connect to the network.

Though Marcel holds chats regularly on Monday from 7-9pm eastern standard time, there are often others who pop in over the week on and off.

Using X-Chat to connect to Marcel Gagne's IRC server (Part 1)

X-Chat Server List
Originally uploaded by tuxspot.

While the World Wide Web and E-mail still rank as the main killer apps on the Internet, with bittorrent catching up quickly, there are other technologies that come in very handy.
One of those technologies is IRC, Internet Relay Chat. To use IRC you need an IRC client program, that program connects to an IRC server where other people who also have IRC client programs connect to.
My favourite IRC client software under Linux is X-Chat. X-Chat features things like transparent windowing, colours, scripting, and a lot more.
When X-Chat first starts up, it starts up with a server list. Most Linux distributions come with a large list of IRC servers. I usually remove most of the servers, keeping only those I actually frequent.
Every Monday I try to make it for Marcel Gagne's (Linux author and chef) weekly WFTL-lug chat. To add Marcel's server click Add to add a new server network. You can call that server network anything you want, but I usually call mine something like MarcelNet. You can also use any alias, though some IRC servers require you register your Nickname/Alias, Marcel's server does not.

Continued in next post.

Total Cost of Ownership - The Canadian Government chimes in.

I came across an interesting study done by the Canadian Government, who seem to be evaluating Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for their own needs. Their assessment really shows how FOSS really is heads and shoulders above proprietary software. The study can be found at:

http://www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/fap-paf/oss-ll/foss-llo/model_e.asp

What's particularly interesting is the cost of software, and the people cost. Some critics of FOSS have suggested that FOSS requires higher priced admins because FOSS requires more knowledge. Well, it may, but there's a lot of people attracted to Free and Open Source Software, and I think the Government's people numbers really reflect that. Almost a 3 million dollar savings each year in people costs alone, not to mention the software!

Rather than post a new post for 05/09/2005, I decided to append this last post since what I came across is yet another Total Cost of Ownership issue. Apparently schools in the UK have been told they should dump Microsoft software in order to drastically cut costs. Here's a link to part of the story:

http://www.tes.co.uk/2094985

John "Maddog" Hall

John "Maddog" Hall spoke in Kitchener last month. Here are a couple of photographs from the visit:


John Maddog Hall with Michael.


A larger picture of John.

SuSE 9.3

Novell recently released SuSE 9.3. Thanks to my good friend Kevin, of Kevin's PC Repair (no web site yet), I've upgraded my notebook to SuSE 9.3.

The initial bootup was extremely slow, but on reboot things ran much smoother. The KDE sounds which seemed broke in 9.2 are fixed, at least the startup sound worked immediately.

I'm not as fond of the new login look, but I like the plastic theme that's been incorporated into KDE 3.4. Best of all is the new pop-up icons, they look real slick without hindering performance.

Ethernet was broke on startup, and when I tried to set it up, it thought my ethernet was /dev/ttyLT0, my Lucent winmodem. I did manage to get the ethernet set up, but it was intermitant until I rebooted, then everything worked as smooth as ice cream. No word on the modem yet. The other thing that broke was ndiswrapper. I've yet to determine if I can fix it.

Screen shots to follow soon.

Kensington WiFi finder

A few days ago I bought a Kensington Wifi finder despite the fact that 98% of the reviews gave it a negative rating, most 1 out of 5. Part of the reason I rebelled against the reviews was because it was the only wifi finder that seemed to be readily available in my area. The other reason was because I'm a skeptic until I actually try something.

I must have lucked out because I give the Wifi finder a 3/5; it doesn't quite do what it says, but it's pretty darn good, and for the cash, it's a find. The problem I found was that the wifi finder detected both open and closed wifi networks - it's suppose to only find open networks. The worst problem with the Kensington wifi finder is that it's almost useless in direct sunlight, it's near impossible to see the display lights, a tone would have worked better.

I was quite surprised at the number of wifi networks it found, and I'm guessing that a few were false positives. That said, I only tested one network, my neighbours, and sure enough my notebook connected to an I.P. address that was quite different than I use on my own wifi lan.

I spent $36 CDN, but I've seen the Kensington for as little as $14 U.S. (new). In a where a lot of wifi hot spots don't seem to be published publically, this little device is a gem.