A little place of calm

This last week i've been enjoying watching A Very Potter Musical on youtube. It's a most hilarious Harry Potter parody with fantastic acting and delightfully catchy songs!

The star of the show has to be Lauren Lopez who plays Draco Malfoy and spends most of the time rolling around seductively on the floor/bench/harry/hermione! Lauren's sense of comic timing is incredible, and the voice and facial expressions are just adorable!

Voldemort and Quirrel are beautifully played with some very touching moments together. Snape is hilarious, like all the characters, much exaggerated!

I think the best songs are near the end. "Not Alone" (Act 2 Scene 5) is a beautifully composed piece of music, and "Voldemort Is Goin' Down" (Act 2 Scene 8) is magnificently performed by the cast.

I've enjoyed it so much that i'm making myself a dvd to take to show friends and family. I love it that the whole thing is freely available. By the fans, for the fans, and yep, the fans are loving it!

I also love how linux gives me free tools to be able to create a dvd. This morning i did not know how to do it, but using todisc and tovid i've been able to combine all the scenes into a sequence, with a menu. I used mplayer to extract the audio of one song, and audacity to split out the song that i wanted to use as an introduction when the menu is shown. I used kino to look at the frames one by one and export a frame to use as the background for the menu. I used the gimp to darken the image and reduce the contrast.

The menu for my dvd is hopefully going to look something like this:

I'll update again if it works! Currently it is encoding each of the scenes into dvd format, which seems to take a very long time … and creates files 5 times bigger than the originals!

Update: it worked!! From youtube to my television!!

Thank you to StarKidPotter, youtube, keepvid.com and to free open source software and the ubuntu community! Now i can take A Very Potter Musical with me to show anyone who has a dvd player! :D

My plugin got approved, and it is available for download here: GeoURL WordPress plugin.

Apparently it has had 18 downloads already. Okay, one of them was me, just testing it zipped up correctly, but even so … have i helped 17 blogs to become GeoURL enabled?! :)

I wish there was a way to tell who has installed it … would be lovely to see it in action for other people!

In other news, Twitter has been so thrilled by the UK snow that the hashtag #uksnow has been at the top of the trending topics all afternoon! It's quite fun to watch twitterfall.com/#uksnow and see the tweets fly in from around the UK. People are giving marks out of ten for their area, and posting pictures of good snow scenes! :)

We don't get good snow very often in the UK, and we are predicted 15cm by the morning! That will require wellies to walk to work!! It's the heaviest snowfall in 6 years apparently, so you can understand why we're all so excited!

See this site: Why Git is better than 'X'. It's well worth a good read. It explains all the best things about Git, and compares other software configuration management systems to see how they measure up.

But that's not the reason i'm posting. It's more exciting than that! See those Expand all | Collapse all links? … i did that! :) The site source code is available on GitHub. I forked it, made the change, submitted a pull request. 14 minutes later it was deployed live.

Other people have been translating the site into different languages. Git and GitHub are wonderful things!

In a similar way, we had open source dinner tonight. I took Saturday's leftover stew, forked it, added matzo dumplings, submitted a pull request, which was accepted! It was lovely dinner! :D

Update: and now i see even the US government is going open source! Everything on change.gov is now freely available for the world to copy, change and redistribute, provided they attribute the source. Nice one, Obama! :) In fact, i'm going to make use of that creative commons licence right now:

President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

- Towards a 21st century government on change.gov/newsroom

Tonight i decided to write out "Mamma Mia" for my cousin whom i teach piano. I got out my pad of music lines, but hadn't even set pen to paper before thinking, "I hate doing this! I wonder if there's an open-source music notation package …"

One quick search later and i remembered LilyPond! A friend showed me this years ago, and i was really intrigued by it. As a programmer, this is very satisfying to me. You write your music as a kind of code, 'compile' it, and it outputs PDF, PS and, if you want it, a MIDI file.

We used to do this on Windows, with Cygwin. It is very pleasing to use it on its intended operating system now! :) It was easy to input, and i do love the pure geekiness of the notation! :D