Saturday 22 January 2011

Hacking Kdenlive.

This is quite a good one, and not too difficult.
When 'wiping' in or out with Kdenlive, there is a considerable choice of standard wipe patterns, in .pgm or .png grayscale images.

You can choose from the list.

What if you want to expand the list?
Simple.

Load any photo you like into Gimp, and convert it to a pgm.

Open a file manager as root, and add the new file to /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdenlive/lumas.

Then start or restart Kdenlive; your new wipe image will be in the list.
And the wipe system will use it.

Sunday 16 January 2011

Political

'Politics' is the word which describes the external constraints on behaviour in a society of men.
These are enacted by laws and practised by the application of force.

Politics can only restrain. Any attempt to force a particular action to happen is illogical, since this would mean a political attempt to force actions, which should be determined by Ethics.

Politics and Ethics cannot be interchangeable, they are two discreet, distinct and consistent concepts, one purely to restrain behaviour in a social context, the other a more general system of positive behavioral edicts which applies in both cases, social or not social.

It is the job of Politics to maintain the social validity and separation of all ethical systems by preventing any conflicts of physical action from arising.

This leads inevitably to the recognition of certain commonalities in behaviour which must apply to all ethical systems.

Thus, Politics is a science which enforces Metaphysical coherence in the social context, whether or not the constituent ethical systems of a society are objective enough to include metaphysical fidelity.

A political party is the crudest and least effective political organisation that there is, seeking as it does to harness numerical mass via the sacrifice of its constituents' ethical systems on the basis of crude commonality in a few areas.

On the other hand, a business or company is also a political organisation, but an ethical one, which, instead of concentrating on common inessentials, concentrates on a few, purposeful activities which serve to produce material wealth for all of its members. Each membership is freely chosen through individual value judgment, and the wealth is distributed among the members according to the material wealth each produces.

The distributive process is delayed if anything other than free bargaining is applied, but when allowed to function, this process reflects the priorities of the business function and permits people to judge for themselves whether there is a good living to be made from a particular activity.
However, a business, as a political association which is free, realises a set of Ethics and lasts only as long as its particular physical activities are of value, is effective and efficient in ways which political parties are not.

The problem is that parties are mistakenly regarded as effective and productive entities in themselves, when in fact they never can be. They are only social, and have no metaphysical function, which means that insofar as they attempt to violate political generality, they aren't even political parties, only criminal gangs.

Friday 14 January 2011

Facebroke

Just for a change, Facebook is unreachable.
Well that's never happened before.

Sunday 2 January 2011

Or...Old School.

Friend of mine just launched a blistering attack on the 'heirs' of Ayn Rand.
Of course, as reported here five years ago, the copies of 'Atlas Shrugged' without revisionist introductions were selling at a premium to those more recently produced.

My guess is that they are no longer available, and the age when Ayn Rand held sway over her own work is passing, to be replaced by the mean-scaled repute of people who lack the self-respect required to reject any inherited credit for works with which they had nothing to do.

If I was Ayn's 'intellectual heir', I would have shut my damn mouth and allowed the work to speak for itself.