artm

Here you go, some Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) trivia.

1. The chocolate is made by little foreign slaves
2. They are better off as slaves - otherwise they would had to eat bitter maggots
3. The key to success is to have riversfull of chocolate
4. There is only one nice little boy worthy of running the Chocolate Factory
5. He ain’t one of the little foreign slaves
6. Willie Wonka had set up a fair competition to get rid of Charlie’s concurents
7. The Russians would try to sneak in by forging the lottery ticket
8. Specially trained squirrels are emplyed to crack the nuts

If you think I’m too lazy and each bullet deserves a link: there is a friendly corporation to help you find them. Pay special attention to Sponsored Links.

Pictures

Top: “When (people) eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh.” Drissa was forced to work as a slave on a cocoa plantation in Cote d’Ivoire Bottom: 2005 Copyright (C) Warner Bros. Entertainment, used fairly and all

On some of the feeds I’ve collected on reader people were mentioning the new “Film Quality 2D Vector Animation” open source package - synfig. I went to the site, downloaded, patched and followed the intro tutorial.

Synfig is indeed a very nice tool, it’s a bit too slow and crashes on many, probably useful, functions, but considering its (open source) age I don’t mind.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to work it, which I tried to document on flickr (the images are tagged “screenshot” and “synfig”, hopefully I’ll set the trend - so far I’m the only one with “synfig” tag on flickr). The result - 3 sec long “Femistofel: the Movie” ;-) (There you’ll find the synfig sources (.sif), some PNG shots and an MPEG2 movie. Everything is Public Domain). Bear in mind - I had to discover all the animation functionality on my own, because wiki was down (if it is useful at all) so may be I found a lot of non-kosher ways to make the Femistofel move, but I like the end result.

Yesterday I tried to fix some of the persistant crashes while minding Dima, but got lost in the C++. The most annoying aspect is inlined functions which won’t show up on a stack trace. Of course I can follow the code manually (mentally?) but that’s not very convenient. I did specify --enable-debug but apparently ./configure thinks he is smarter then me (I personally saw him sneaking -O2 in, the bloated bastard).

Nevertheless, I’ll continue the struggle in my spare time.

Update. ./configure --enable-debug --disable-optimization but the problem was not with optimizations but with inlined functions, I guess. I’m getting somewhat corrupt stack traces which confuse ddd. gud is too simple to be confused though, and he is my friend.

synfig

Just found a partial archive of artm.org starting Oct 13 2001 (about the time i bought the domain) in Internet Archive Wayback Machine . Before that I was hosting my shit on nerve and they backed it up as well (Feb 2 2001 - Oct 2003). I wonder where my even older pages were hosted…