No, really! VirtualDub is the program I use to create all those little anime clips (or almost all of them). It makes the process insanely easy; I can just mark the start and end of the piece of video I want, hit F7, and it gets saved into a file.

Without uncompressing and recompressing anything.

So instead of taking several minutes to create the typical file, it takes four or five seconds, limited by the speed of the disk. (Even faster on my desktop, which a SATA RAID array.)

But the blog? Well, Phaeron (the author) hates property grids, loves 68000 assembler, added asynchronous disk I/O to AMOS, wrote his own rational arithmetic library just to handle AVI frame rates properly... Okay, yes, it's only interesting if you're a geek, but if you're a geek, it's interesting. He's a programmer's programmer and seems to be a sensible guy in general.

Also, he notes that Microsoft have released the Express editions of their development tools as free downloads. Neat. I've hit the links for the ISOs, because download utilities? Bah! And I'm getting 1.3MB/second.

Earlier today I snarfed the free edition of DB2, which looks very nice indeed. I grabbed both the Windows and Linux versions, of course, and I'll be installing both on my notebook, since it runs both Windows and Linux, thanks to the free VMWare Player. I also grabbed a copy of Paint.NET, which is a pretty good little paint program - that is, about two orders of magnitude better than Microsoft Paint, but still considerably short of Photoshop. A great program though if you're on a budget and are seriously pissed off with Corel.

While I was at it I copied all my UFO Princess Valkyrie files onto my notebook as well, so that I could (a) watch them and (b) make little video clips to upload. Oh, and on Friday I copied my Minx development environment from Windows to Linux - all still on my notebook, of course - including the SQL dump of the munu blogs and forums that I'm using for testing.

Which is to say, I think I need a new notebook. One of these with two of these and one of... Okay, one of those 160GB Seagate 2.5" drives that nobody seems to sell. That should hold me for a year or so.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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