More formidable robots

Compared to the less formidable original:

A Different Kind of Evangelical?

In a blog entry entitled, A Different Kind of Evangelical, Steve Bush paints a vision of a version of evangelicalism that is refreshingly free of indifference to ills like imperalism, war, and slums. This articulation however makes an error of unnecessarily surrendering the flag of traditional Christian doctrine to its "conservative" friends:

"Conservative evangelicals tend to see salvation as an individualistic affair, postconservatives emphasize the communal dimension. Conservatives tend to see hell as a place of eternal, conscious torment after death; postconservatives are concerned about this-worldly hells of genocides, slums, and diseases."

This doesn't sound "evangelical" in the sense of being true to old-time doctrines, having a common confession-- a definition IIRC Ron Sider has used, but I could look it up.

The vision I have is one where social sins-- such as wishing torture on an Al Qaeda accountant (or worse, blindly agreeing with our system, which in reality is torture of adbucted Muslims who have nothing to do with carrying out acts of terror) -- is sin. Sin in the sense of a "personal" sin that one must either pay for in something called "hell" if one rejects Christ's payment on the cross for it.

To capitulate the old-time doctrines is major uncool.

Gosh, will someone turn up the lights?

Happy Couple ready for action

New lake image

Feigning a sun over to the right side

ffmpeg can turn PNG's into MPG-1

Here's a dump of my command and the resulting output:

greg@kan_one:/home/greg/images# ffmpeg -i zfixirishd07%02d.png file.mpg
ffmpeg version CVS, build 4758, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
configuration: --prefix=/usr --libdir=${prefix}/lib --enable-shared --enable-mp3lame --host=i486-linux-gnu --enable-gpl --build=i486-linux-gnu --enable-faad --mandir=${prefix}/share/man --enable-vorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-faac --enable-xvid --enable-dts cc --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-pp --enable-shared-pp --enable-libogg --enable-a52 --enable-a52bin --enable-x264
built on Jul 16 2005 18:28:59, gcc: 4.0.1 (Debian 4.0.1-2)
Input #0, image2, from 'zfixirishd07%02d.png':
Duration: 00:00:01.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Video: png, rgb24, 320x240, 25.00 fps
Output #0, mpeg, to 'file.mpg':
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg1video, yuv420p, 320x240, 25.00 fps, q=2-31, 200 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame= 30 q=0.0 Lsize= 116kB time=1.2 bitrate= 819.2kbits/s
video:114kB audio:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.492690%
greg@kan_one:/home/greg/images#

Golf, anyone?

After investing considerable effort getting two boxes up and running with kanotix linux, I'm finally ready to start tinkering with povray again.

Blue Conductor

Blue Mandelbrot
Originally uploaded by pterandon.

I made this using Xaos fractal explorer with a bootable Kanotix CD. (I then obtained Xaos through the "klik" feature.)

New fishin' hole. In center of this picture. Caught a catfish with my son yesterday
Posted by Hello

Kanotix Linux rocks!

And here's how to do wireless with it!

knoppix@0[knoppix]$ su root
root@0[knoppix]# iwcongif
bash: iwcongif: command not found
root@0[knoppix]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

ath0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate:0 kb/s Tx-Power:50 dBm Sensitivity=0/3
Retry:off RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=0/94 Signal level=-95 dBm Noise level=-95 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

root@0[knoppix]# iwconfig ath0 essid (myhomenetwork) key (a bunch of characters)
root@0[knoppix]# pump -i ath0
root@0[knoppix]#