I have been searching around for decent gif animation software for, well, ever. There are free ones and shareware ones and commercial ones with trials. Each one has been clunky in its own way, and I have spent way too much time screwing around with these apps just to make an ad image animate. Do I really need anything so cumbersome and unwieldy just to make an animation?

Here's a brief example of an experience with any number of gif animation tools:

1. start app.
2. figure out how to get an image into said app.
3. image in, but the color is all wrong. bright green has become pea soup.
4. find the color settings.
5. screw with color setting to no avail.
6. reimport higher color image, not full on pea soup, but still soupy.
7. try and find the settings to make the animation loop. takes way to long to find loop setting...
8. after finding loop setting, look for frame delay setting...even longer than loop setting.
9. save out gif.
10. gif looks like shit. start over, and screw with color settings again.
11. repeat with another gif app.

Today I found what for I had been looking. A simple gif animation tool. An application designed with so few bells and less whistles, a technology so simple and perfect and common, that I hadn't considered it. Being blinded by the GUI, I had lost touch with my roots.

I stumbled upon Gifsicle, "a UNIX command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."

Simple, concise and one line:

After a myriad of crappy GUI tools that made me, well, a tool, I was reminded that sometimes the old ways are best.

[mark@louis mark]$ uptime
 13:58:58  up 334 days,  6:49,  4 users . . .

of course, I just jinxed it, and the server will crash hard any minute now.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

note: gina's IM handle has been altered to protect the innocent.

gina (6:43:03 PM): fred durst¹ is suing gawker²
gina (6:43:15 PM): link to gawker mocking Mr. Durst for suing
gina(6:43:34 PM): "subpoena the root password ³" was uttered
...
mwilkie00 (6:45:49 PM): I just IMed fred the root password, that should settle this...
...
mwilkie00 (6:50:03 PM): so what are you called when you are a lowly sysadmin to a media whore?
gina (6:50:30 PM): a monkey?
mwilkie00 (6:50:46 PM): a dirty little monkey...

1. Fred Durst is a rock star who video taped himself fornicating with a, what I imagine is a very regretful, woman.
2. Gawker is the current internet media company for who I am contracting as a Unix System Administrator and is being sued by Mr. Durst for publishing the dirty little video tape of himself and some poor women on its website. Why the entire universe isn't suing gawker for making said video public is a question for another day.
3. root is the master account on a unix system. A user with the root password has access to all files and data on that system, they are also quite l33t.

warning: incoherent and mind numbingly boring technology rant follows:

The comment form here at bitterpill.org is set up to send me an email when, in the rare occurrence, someone posts a comment. However, the email functionality has been broken for some time. Why? To be honest, I have been too lazy to figure it out, and frankly, this wasn't a bug high on my list of bugs to fix. Today I gathered up the gumption to sort it out. It turns out that the least likely of culprits was to blame. I imagine many a reader now pondering, "You mean it wasn't your crappie code or your even crappier system configuration that was causing your mail problems?" On most days this thought would be right on the money, but today my dear friends my incompetence was not to blame. It turns out it was was those Stanford brianiacs at google.

Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to bundle the java.mail API in their google API jar, and in the process broke my mailing code. The java.mail API doesn't take too kindly to having multiple instances of its self in the class path, it's selfish that way. It took me forever to figure out why it was failing, and only after Nick pushed me in the right direction by convincing me to look through all the java APIs in the bitter pill webapp to see if some dope had bundled the mail APIs in their code. Google was the culprit, those bastards!

For posterity, a quick glance at some saving grace bash scripting:

for file in `ls`; do
    echo $file; jar -tf $file | grep mail;
done


What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

- In the Beginning was the Command Line

I read In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson last night via the prodding of nick. (available via download).

Talk about your sweet geekie unix goodness:

When Gates and Allen invented the idea of selling software, they ran into criticism from both hackers and sober-sided businesspeople. Hackers understood that software was just information, and objected to the idea of selling it. These objections were partly moral. The hackers were coming out of the scientific and academic world where it is imperative to make the results of one's work freely available to the public. They were also partly practical; how can you sell something that can be easily copied? Businesspeople, who are polar opposites of hackers in so many ways, had objections of their own. Accustomed to selling toasters and insurance policies, they naturally had a difficult time understanding how a long collection of ones and zeroes could constitute a salable product.

Obviously Microsoft prevailed over these objections, and so did Apple. But the objections still exist. The most hackerish of all the hackers, the Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software that, in 1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and founded something called the Free Software Foundation, which commenced work on something called GNU. Gnu is an acronym for Gnu's Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns ("Unix" is trademarked by AT&T) they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn't

Yesterday was a long day of sysadmin work.

Note to self: vmstat!!!

swapping bad. swapping hurt mark. mark smash puny memory.