WRT54Z is a short no-budget live-action film being produced by the UK Film club. It chronicles Claudia and Michael’s attempt to survive a zombie infection on campus and prevent it from spreading elsewhere. Additionally, this film is being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Have fun watching! And, we hope to see you at the premier later this month. It has been a lot of fun working on an open film project and we think you’ll enjoy it.

The film will premier on October 30th at 10:00pm in the Worsham Theatre of the Student Center.

Download the trailer!

Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-grumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.
-Shel Silverstein

If you’re interested in having a look at the text used you can find it here.

Below is a wordle I created using Obama’s portions of transcript of the first presidential debate. Before simply copying and pasting the transcript into the wordle creator I parsed the text myself in order to remove words and phrases that would simply clutter and overshadow the key issues mentioned during the debate - from over 4000 words to about 1500. You can find the text file here.

I’ll post McCain’s portion of the debate soon.
UPDATE: I’ve posted it here.

Adobe AIR, the runtime environment I’ve written about before, has moved out of Alpha and into Beta. Expect apps to run more consistently with Windows and Mac.

Be sure to uninstall any previous releases of Adobe AIR before moving forward. This can be done in a number of ways depending on how it was initially installed.

Enter these commands to get the newest version (currently 1.1):

cd ~/Desktop

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Give the .bin file execution rights:

sudo chmod +x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Run the bin file to install/upgrade AIR:

sudo ./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Instead of keeping your browser pointed towards the Facebook web page, Pidgin users should take advantage of an open-source plugin which enables Facebook chat via the XMPP/Jabber protocol. Users can then chat with friends, view the online status of their friends, and set their status through the third party chat program.

To install the plugin follow these steps:

cd ~/Desktop

Download the .deb and .zip to your Desktop (one line):

wget http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/pidgin-facebookchat-1.37.deb http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/facebook_icons.zip

Extract the .deb file containing the plugin:

dpkg -x pidgin-facebookchat-1.37.deb ~/Desktop

You should notice a folder named usr on your desktop now. It contains a few .so files, however, you only need one for the plugin to function. Depending on what your system is running determines which of the three you need:

32-bit Linux users enter the following command to install the plugin:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/usr/lib/purple-2/libfacebook.so /usr/lib/purple-2/libfacebook.so

64-bit Linux users:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/usr/lib64/purple-2/libfacebook64.so /usr/lib64/purple-2/libfacebook64.so

Now, before starting Pidgin, you’ll need to install a few icons. Enter the following two commands to place the icons in the correct location:

cd /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocols

sudo unzip ~/Desktop/facebook_icons.zip

Fire up Pidgin and head to the Accounts window to enable your Facebook account. Enjoy.

Earlier this month Google released its web browser, Chrome. Unfortunately for Mac OS X and Linux users, the beta release is only available for Windows. Within a short period time intrepid Linux users had already gotten it up and running under Wine. Better yet, the nice folks over at CodeWeavers took it one step further and ported the browser to Mac OS X and Linux before Google could. However, it should be noted that the developers do not recommend using Chromium as your full time browser.

Also, the stock icon isn’t very big. Here’s a larger version I made up if you’re using Avant Window Navigator or another dock type program.

Bonus: Also, I don’t know if there is a video of this, but I found this via StumbleUpon a while back. Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

As I prepare to move to my new apartment I’m trying gather all my little doodles and drawings which seem to have skattered throughout the house over the past year. I’ll try to post more as I prepare for the move.