Brandon Cash

And we're walking...

2010-04-15T18:54:00.000-05:00

I have moved my blog over to Tumblr. So if you would like to read more up-to-date information, please head over there!

I suppose it would also be useful for planets such as Planet Openbox to syndicate that blog instead.

See you all on the new site!

Steampunk robots ftw

2009-12-12T23:58:00.000-06:00

A recent Facebook graffiti drawing I have done. My first time drawing anything steampunk, but I thought it turned out pretty well. Definitely something I'll have to keep doing.

'Tis the Lady Jingly Jones!

2009-10-30T00:59:00.002-05:00

I make it a point to briefly check through my spam folder to see if there were any false positives. Today I came across some very interesting one-line emails, containing only a short URL and these gems:

"Lady Jingly Jones, farewell"

- On perceiving all his toes were gone

"A sea-green Porpoise carried away"

- Mr Quangle Wangle Quee

"Tis the Lady, Jingly Jones!"

- She mixed the dough with sour cream

Adding some eye candy

2009-10-20T19:06:00.009-05:00

In a bout of boredom the other day, I decided to spruce up GNOME on my laptop which runs Ubuntu. I have always been a minimalist at heart; a panel at the top and bottom of the screen packed with various tools has always been enough. However, I found myself wanting a bit more.

Enter GNOME Do. Everyone had been talking about it a few months back, but I didn't jump on the bandwagon... until now. I dispensed with Do's normal interface (a mid-screen popup) and opted for Do's Docky, a pretty powerful and eye-pleasing panel.

Gnome Do, unfortunately, was not the first piece of software that I tried. I tried Kiba Dock, which was acceptable, but not quite what I wanted. I then moved on to Avant Window Navigator which looked pretty much perfect—until I really started to use it, and all of the bugs started showing themselves. I also tried Cairo Dock, which just seemed to try too hard to be eye candy while sacrificing usability. Simdock seemed like a decent choice, but ultimately rendered pretty poorly and was not very configurable.

While not necessarily docks, I figured that desklets might be a good thing to try. I started with adesklets, which was pretty good for eye candy, but bad if you hate getting errors for each desklet. But if you really hate getting errors, don't even think about trying gDesklets, which is easily one of the worst applications I have had the honor of trying; you'll find yourself sifting through hundreds of nearly identical desklets, which are mostly useless (unless you want a hamster in every square inch of your desktop) and mostly broken (lots of errors, some which won't go away).

In the end, Do's Docky offers great usability (especially since I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts), great eye candy, and enough configuration options to make me happy. Now if only they would fix bug 316978 rather than just get rid of the option...

Facebook Graffiti: Mountains

2009-07-27T07:07:00.002-05:00

This is my latest drawing through the Facebook Graffiti application. Click play and watch how I drew the scene.

Even the Web page got better

2009-01-21T17:25:00.004-06:00

As this before and after picture of The White House Web page shows, the arrival of the new president has brought some awesome changes already. Also note Brian Warren's comment on his picture, "It validates." Hooray for Web standards and better design in general!

Spelunky

2009-01-20T20:26:00.005-06:00

I've recently started playing a pretty great game called Spelunky. It's a platformer with retro graphics and awesome randomized gameplay. It was written by one of the guys from Bit Blot, so you know it's got to be good.

Overall, the game is very fun. Easy gameplay (very casual, no real storyline besides the opening scene (which is also random!)), great graphics, and a very polished feel. The only thing I don't like about the game is the amount of buttons it requires. Even on a gamepad, it's pretty bad. Fortunately, you don't need to press most of the keys very often.

So the next time you're sitting around, bored out of your mind, give Spelunky a try. I highly recommend it!

A very interesting site

2008-11-18T14:33:00.004-06:00

I stumbled upon an interesting site just now. It's called Sleeveface, and the premise is that the sleeve of a record obscures part of a picture to create an illusion.

Some of my favorites include the above one with Freddie Mercury, this one of Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen.

Switching from Rhythmbox to Banshee - first impressions

2008-11-16T04:49:00.004-06:00

Let me prefix this post by saying that I have not used Banshee since its infancy--and that it has clearly come a long way. I have been a devoted Rhythmbox user for several years. Previously, I have been known to use MPD with a myriad of different frontends. Banshee is under active development, with new features being added constantly. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for Rhythmbox. Since updating to Ubuntu 8.10, I've decided to make the switch to Banshee.

Initially, I noticed an improved startup time over my previous stint with Banshee--from about 1 minute to a whopping 5 seconds. I'm sure this improvement is not solely for Banshee, however--I am on a slightly faster computer, and I'm sure updates to Mono have made it more efficient.

The user interface has some good points and some flaws. First, the good: it's very streamlined, well organized, and just plain pretty to look at. Conversely, it has some bad parts: the "Next" button icon should never change, the seek bar is far too small, and it does not jump to the currently playing song (nor does it provide such an option).

I do not like most of the keybindings; I am used to the "find as you type" search that Rhythmbox supports, which means I often find myself hitting N, R, or T, only to find out I am not searching, but instead opening a dialog or changing/restarting the song. I would really kill to have Alt+Left and Alt+Right as previous/next keybindings, too.

I really don't want video support. I have a video player for that. What can I do to get rid of it from the left menu?

Overall, I'd say it's a superior player to Rhythmbox now. I look forward to overcoming the quirks I listed, or finding ways to customize it to fit my needs.

Stolen from P.G.O

2008-09-19T12:18:00.005-05:00

Jeffrey Stedfast, you are my hero/nemesis--this game is amazing. Light Bot is a game where you tell a robot to light up certain tiles on the screen. It reminds me a lot of Chu Chu Rocket, but aimed a bit more towards programmers. Highly addictive, very fun. Sometimes a bit challenging, but that just adds to the enjoyment.

Google Chrome

2008-09-03T03:30:00.005-05:00

Since everybody and their brother has been talking about Google's Chrome browser, I figure I'd throw in my two cents. First impressions: it's fast, it's buggy, but it still makes me happy.

It is much faster at loading than Firefox. I'd say around 1/3 of the startup time. Actual page load is comparable, it seems. I'd like to see some benchmarks about just how fast it is in comparison to other browsers. Of course, it'll all be different in a Linux environment...

It seems to be very buggy. After first opening it, I just went around trying out its features. The porn window incognito window decided that it wanted to continuously load a page a few times per second. I closed it and opened a new one, and it was fixed. Also, the first cookie that the browser tried to set erred out, but set correctly the second time.

Chrome has some very interesting things which I like about it:

The title bar reminds me of the Tango Window Experiments, but I wished there was a way it could keep your theme (at least on Linux).

The interface is extremely lightweight. There's no clutter like there always is on a fresh Firefox install.

Browser windows open in the browser. At least, for the most part. Things like history and downloads all open in a new tab, rather than a popup or a sidebar. Things seem to be very homogeneous.

With all that said, it does have its downsides. For starters, there is no status bar. Instead, tooltips pop up in the lower left telling you the location of the link you're hovering over. Options and settings are not well organized at all; they're just grouped together into "basics," "minor tweaks," and "under the hood."

Overall, it's a very good program. It seems very usable (as in, good for end users), but probably not the choice for most seasoned computer veterans. I'd like to see what Google can do with a browser and a lot of user input, however. I'm sure they can come up with some really amazing things.

Sharing calendars between Thunderbird and Sunbird

2008-08-22T04:07:00.002-05:00

When you use Thunderbird's great Lightning extension, it sets you up with a blank slate--no calendars from your previous Sunbird installation will be imported. In the future, I'd like to see a dialog similar to when you're installing Firefox; "Would you like to import settings from...?" Is that too much to ask of an extension?

Until then, a quick fix is to symlink between your Sunbird calendar database (~/.mozilla/sunbird/profile.default/storage.sdb) and your Lightning database (~/.mozilla-thunderbird/profile.default/storage.sdb). Just run ln -s .mozilla/sunbird/profile.default/storage.sdb .mozilla-thunderbird/profile.default/storage.sdb where profile is the name of your programs' respective profile names.

The largest advantage, for me, anyway, is that now I can share local calendars between the two programs. While Google Calendar is great, it does not (currently) support tasks. What this means is that you must make a local calendar solely to store your tasks. And, of course, local calendars aren't shared between Thunderbird and Lightning, nor are they easy to share: they are stored in the database for that program, but the symlink takes quick care of that.

Giving GNOME Panel some love

2008-08-13T11:12:00.005-05:00

When it comes to user interfaces, I'm a big fan of CompizConfig Settings Manager (CCSM). That is to say, I'm a big fan of CCSM's menu. It is minimalistic (I'd prefer to call it streamlined), but above all, useful. There are many different categories of plugins for Compiz, so separating them is an essential task. The beauty behind CCSM's menu structure is that it is extensible: the "preferences" and "advanced search" buttons appear very different from the category buttons, but behave in a similar manner.

This concept needs to be applied to GNOME's Panel when adding new applets. The current method of adding applets just lists a bunch of applications with only alphabetical organization. Chances are very good that you only want to have a few of these. Maybe some you'd like to hide (Brightness Applet? Kind of useless on my desktop.), maybe some you'd just like to be able to find quicker.

My proposal is to add categories and use an interface similar to that of CCSM. I have created a mockup in Glade to reflect this:

I did the mockup in Glade rather than the GIMP for several reasons:

It shows how simply it can be done in GTK+; each menu button is a GtkLinkButton

It gives authenticity in the outcome: this is how the dialog will look (see notes below)

I can easily change the mockup based on GTK+'s rules, adding any suggestions I may get

In the current version of GNOME Panel, you have a set of buttons on the bottom of the dialog (i.e. "back" and "add" or "forward"). Whether the button reads "add" or "forward" depends on what you are adding. If each applet is clickable to bring you to the next stage, you no longer need to press this button.

In my concept, when you click on an applet on the right, the content of the dialog will change to reflect that applet. The menu stays on the left, displaying information about the applet and offering a "back" button in case of a misclick.

Notes:

The icons are merely placeholders, as are the items themselves. Categorization of applets can wait for another day.

CCSM has a different colored background for the icons on the right. It would be beneficial to have that in this dialog as well.

Comments or suggestions? I'd love to hear what you think, good or bad. You can also leave comments on the Bugzilla entry.

Sunbird + Provider + Google Calendar = Awesome

2008-08-08T06:30:00.009-05:00

I've always been pretty skeptical when it comes to calendar software. You update your online version through Google Calendar, and it'll propagate down to whatever clients you need it to... But what if you want to update your local version? There's an extension to Sunbird (Mozilla's calendar program) called Provider for Google Calendar, which Just Works. When you add a new event to your local copy, it sends it off to Google Calendar. Whether you're checking from home, school, work, or anywhere, all of your calendar events are synced.

I set up both Thunderbird with Lightning (which adds your calendar into Thunderbird), as well as a standalone copy of Sunbird. This way I still see my calendar and can update it when I check my mail, as well as gain quick access to it without the overhead of Thunderbird.
I'm absolutely loving this setup. If you check your calendar from multiple locations, I'm sure you would love it as well!

Now if I could just find a decent way to get gnome-panel's clock applet to recognize these... Does evolution-data-server update its calendar without me opening it?

Whoops.

2008-06-27T06:06:00.003-05:00

Okay, so I haven't posted here in about a year... Guess I'm not the best at keeping this up-to-date. Currently I'm trying to put together a design portfolio so I can nab some clients--anyone need some web or print design? :)
I've unfortunately gotten out of the web programming scene as of late (i.e. the last year), but it's something I'd like to get back into. I still have several C projects going on, such as my Castlevania clone, which I have some grand plans for.

Today is a good day to die

2007-06-01T12:36:00.000-05:00

"There is this old man who spent so much of his life sleeping, that he is able to keep awake for the rest of his years."

Today is my birthday. I am now 21, which is a big year here in the 'States. I'm also moving over the course of today and tomorrow, so I'm sure things will be a little bit hectic for a while.

Also happy birthday to fellow openboxer nightm4re!

Welcome to the blog world

2007-05-30T12:05:00.001-05:00

My domain expires in a little while, and I've finally decided that it's time to let it die. So, in its place, I have erected this blog: a place where I can write about what projects I'm currently working on or just various things I want to share.
For those of you who do not know me well, I am a student at Missouri State University, currently obtaining a degree in Technical Theatre (specifically for scenic design). I am a hobby hacker and web designer/programmer, mostly working in C and PHP.