Every being in the Universe knows right from wrong

Here is one of my favorite movie moments and quotes ever.

The movie is called “K-PAX“. Lead roles are played by Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. The rest of the movie is as good as the above snippet.

Just when you thought your tax money were spent wisely

Cyprus Mail reports:

BY A close vote, parliament last night passed a law on combating terrorism and defining a terrorist organization.

The bill passed with 22 votes in favour from DISY, DIKO and European Party deputies, while 19 MPs from AKEL and socialists EDEK voted against. The Greens abstained.

The law specifies what constitutes a terrorist group according to the definition and list of terrorist organisations compiled by the European Council. It also stipulates terrorist offences and subsequent penalties.

It defines a terrorist group as “a group of two or more persons which has been established and operates for a specific amount of time with the purpose of committing terrorist acts.”

I just can’t help the mental picture of the heated arguments over the definition.

  • “It’s not the group of two or more! It’s a group of more than one!”
  • “Period of time, not the amount!”
  • “Now let’s vote on the purpose versus goal”
  • “Is it terrorist acts or acts of terrorism?”

And so on and so forth…

Day in brief

  • I love the smell of filtered coffee in the morning. #
  • Shared: The art of the animated gif http://bit.ly/duelzN #
  • How often do you get to see naked hardware these days? http://twitpic.com/35tmtv #
  • Bookmarked: Notifications in Fedora 14 http://bit.ly/bhlj1p #
  • I love our new Internet connection in the office. Torrent DVD download takes less than 10 minutes. That's 21st century in my book. #

Screencasting in Linux

I came across an excellent tutorial on how to do screencasts in Linux.  The original article is in Russian, so I just grabbed the important bits and translated them below.

  • Install screencast recording application.  recordmydekstop is available via yum install recordmydesktop and comes with a simple and straight-forward interface for both KDE and Gnome.
  • Record a screencast.
  • If you want to edit the screencast (cut out mistakes, add music, etc), install a video editor.  These came recommended: Pitivi, Kino, Kdenlive.
  • Edit your screencast.
  • Convert to AVI if needed (recommended before uploading to video hosting services, such as YouTube, as they don’t always work well with Ogg).  ffmpeg -i screencast.ogv screencast.avi should do it.  ffmpeg is also available in most distributions.  You can play more with parameters, or prepare the video during the editing stage.
  • Upload the video and share.

This is the kind of a guide that I need once in a while, but which I can’t seem to find when I need it.  Hopefully now that I have it blogged, it’ll come handy.

Day in brief

  • Beautiful morning. Unfortunately no sign of the upcoming winter. #
  • Shared: Install Android 2.2 Froyo on your jailbroken iPhone 3G over-the-air with Bootlace http://bit.ly/9w6q0u #
  • Shared: Apache Declares War On Oracle Over Java http://bit.ly/cEBjRJ #
  • I favorited a YouTube video — Speedflying in Wengen 2010 http://youtu.be/UwWLnaME0CI?a #
  • I favorited a YouTube video — WILLIAM SPENCER-HOLLARADO! http://youtu.be/BT_45XGhE1o?a #
  • Car termometer shows +30C outside. Some November… #
  • I favorited a YouTube video — Millimetres Matter http://youtu.be/Y6nshKhqyqU?a #
  • Follow @longreads if you like reading long, well written articles from across the web. Some awesome stuff there. Not enough time. :) #
  • I don't even know how to retweet the long cat, so here you go with a screenshot. http://twitpic.com/35lbrq #
  • About to teach my kid how to bust baddies in NFS Hot Persuit Demo. This way I can buy the full game for him for Christmas. #
  • Yeah, parental control is for lousy parents. :) #