Louis' Footprint

I ran into a weird spellcheck problem with pidgin in kubuntu 9.04. Pidgin uses the gtkspell library, but it kept telling me every word was spelled wrong. If I ran it with
LANG=en_US pidgin

Everything worked fine. I didn't find much on the net, but installing aspell seems to have fixed the problem... somewhere o.O.

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I recently wanted to make some widescreen dvds to pass on to my parents. I remember trying this before, but having nothing but headaches. Fortunately, software updates have made dvd authoring pretty easy. Here is how I did it in linux using only command line utilities.

I wanted to make a disk that just had the movie (no menu's, etc), and have it play in a regular ntsc dvd player.

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The nice weather recently allowed me to try out the gps on my iphone. I tracked a nice walk I took across the Ben Franklin. I accidentally stopped the tracking before I got home, but most of it tracked pretty well. Map below.

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I've been preparing a paper for publication in CVPR, and ran into some problems getting my pdf to pass the IEEE checks. Specifically, in PDF eXpress I got the following errors:
Document contains Link annotation(s) (98x on pages 1-8)
Font Helvetica is not embedded

The fixes on the IEEE website aren't very helpful if you are using pdflatex (they all reference editing the pdf in acrobat pro).

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I've been doing a lot of MPI development recently, and had a few MPI programs that crashed. After this happened, I kept receiving the following error on when using mpi-lam:

The selected RPI failed to initialize during MPI_INIT.

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Strawberry Pie

With Jennie visiting and the last of the pear pie meeting its timely death upon the season 1 finale of "Bones", I decided to try making a strawberry pie. I wanted to be a little more experimental this time, so the recipe below is more like a best guess as to what went into mine. One thing is for certain: buy a lot of strawberries! I don't think you can have too much, and I was debating how to put more on before I went to bed. I did a lot of research for this one, and specifically wanted to avoid any "cheating", specifically with regards to using strawberry jello, food coloring, or kool aid. I settled on a vartiation of this recipe. I also tried a different crust recipe that makes more of a pastry. I based it off a recipe from here, but changed a bit since the provided recipe just seemed to much like a pastry. I'll put the crust at the bottom as you could just use whatever or buy store-bought. I also made lemon whipped cream to top it off, which turned out amazing!

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Picture from wikipedia

Tonight Missy and I went to the Lawn Chair Drive In and saw Gold Diggers of 1933. Contrary to the title, the movie isn't really about Gold Diggers, but is a musical about show girls during the depression. Overall pretty entertaining, and much better to watch outside on 16mm if you have the op. Also, there were some pretty amusing situations that fans of As You Like It and Sabrina may find familiar. I would dig finding some of those swinging tunes from the picture, but I imagine that would be a feat. Most of the music was dancey-showy music or classic romance, as expected from old films. One thing that threw me for a loop was the last song, which suddenly became a huge world war 1 statement directly proceeding the credits. It seemed really out of place compared to the rest of the movie (first act: comedy, second act: romance), and didn't bode well with the previous "numbers". Overall the movie was meant to be an uplift for people dealing with the depression, and hopefully relate to the situation and drive some sales to the box office (they hung this lantern pretty high aka- producer's style), so I figure the last song must have been along those lines.

Probably more entertaining than the actual movie was a short that aired before it about the jitterbug, posted below.

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This weekend I was visiting Kristin and she mentioned to me her recent successes with pie making. Being extremely susceptible to the power of suggestion (and pie), I decided to try my wits about it. Kristin was kind enough to lend me her recipe for crust, and suggest some simple pie approaches on allrecipes.com. I opted for the Fresh Pear Pie, as it was rather simple and I only needed to buy two ingredients. After a quick trip to the market I was off messing up my kitchen that Sean and I spent so much time cleaning this weekend. I'm not sure how it tastes yet, as I am waiting for some friends to come over and try it, but here is the recipe! I didn't change anything as I figured my first pie shouldn't be experimental. In addition, I forgot the butter in the pie, hope it turns out okay. I had a terrible time rolling out the dough, but figure its a practice thing! I'll change the picture if I ever get a digital camera.

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Photo by bitmask under a creative common license
This evening I checked out the Silk City Diner on Spring Garden Street. They remodeled a while ago, and though I never went to the old one, I heard good things about it. The diner is adjacent to a bar/club that has live music at night, but being it was dinner time we headed to the red-silvery tabled section. The atmosphere is welcoming, like an old fashioned diner, but has a modern, philly cafe overtone. The lighting is softer, and more colorful upon a closer look. I started off with a Sly Fox Rt. 113 IPA, which was quite reasonably priced at only $3 for a draft. I am not sure if thats a happy hour special.

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If they ended the show now, I'd be happy. On a side note, I recently discovered www.lostpedia.com, which I could probably spend hours reading (as Jennie and I did last night). Most interestingly, though, is the information that was revealed from the ARGs. I don't have the patience or time for ARGs, but the resulting videos were cool. Check http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/Sri_Lanka_Video and http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/The_Orchid .

</dork>

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