Kirsle.net

Welcome to Kirsle.net! This is my personal homepage where I upload my software projects and other creative works, and it's where my web blog lives.

The site used to be on Cuvou.com but as of September 28 '09 I've decided to move it to kirsle.net -- all the old links on cuvou.com will redirect to their new locations here.

Perl-Powered Desktop Environment

A few interesting links I found recently:

perlwm - An X11 Window Manager Written in Perl

http://perlwm.sf.net/

This is an allegedly fully standards-compliant X11 window manager. It appears to be very minimalistic however, but is pretty interesting nonetheless. The window manager, if you don't know, is the software that draws title bars and window borders around all of your windows.

perlpanel - A GTK+ Desktop Panel

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/perlpanel

This is a desktop panel written in Perl, using the GTK+ toolkit (same as GNOME, Xfce and Lxde). While meant to be used in conjunction with minimalist window managers such as Blackbox that don't tend to come with panels of their own, it could easily replace gnome-panel or xfce4-panel in their respective desktop environments.

I played with it for a few minutes by doing a `killall xfce4-panel` to nuke my panels and then started this one in their place. It comes with 36 panel applets, some of which require additional perl-Gtk modules to be installed for them to really function properly.

perlbox-desktop - A Perl/Tk Desktop Environment for X11

http://rpm.kirsle.net/tarball/perlbox-desktop.0.1.8.tar.gz

Nowadays, Perlbox is all about voice control software for Linux. But apparently a long time ago, Perlbox was an X11 desktop environment written entirely in Perl/Tk, which is the GUI toolkit I used in my Perl CyanChat Client, and you can see how ugly it is if you look at the Linux screenshots for that program.

I played around with this one. It creates a "panel" of sorts that it sticks on the bottom of your screen. Besides being ugly as sin, this panel doesn't even hook into your window manager to show a taskbar list of your running applications. It's really clunky and not very fun to use, and did I mention how ugly it is?

I logged in with the Blackbox window manager to test it and I forgot to grab a screenshot of it, but there's a (scaled down) screenshot on an old freshmeat project page for it. Also, it's here:

These projects are interesting and I'm definitely gonna save a copy of their source codes for reference material in case the day comes where I get the utterly insane idea to ditch all the existing Linux desktop environments and create my own, from scratch, that does what I want (the only complaint on my list so far with all the desktops I've tried is: when a panel auto-hides, they like to destroy all their panel applets, so that when the panel is unhidden you see the contents jump around as all the applets load back up. Why!? Just move the panel off the screen, don't destroy all its applets.)

Just one complaint isn't enough (yet!) for me to roll my own desktop environment though. :)

Categories: Linux

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PulseAudio with rdesktop

rdesktop, the command-line-driven Windows remote desktop client for Linux, is a kinda old program that uses OSS (Open Sound System) for its audio, so it tries to open /dev/dsp as your audio device.

In modern Linux distros this device doesn't exist because now we have PulseAudio. So how do you get rdesktop to play sounds from the remote server on your local machine? Using padsp from the PulseAudio pulseaudio-utils package in Fedora (and probably a similarly-named package for Ubuntu).

padsp "starts the specified program and redirects its access to OSS compatible audio devices (/dev/dsp and auxiliary devices) to a PulseAudio sound server."

Then just put padsp in front of your rdesktop command:

$ padsp rdesktop -u Kirsle -f -r sound:local 10.10.1.100

Categories: Linux

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New Favicon

After moving this website from cuvou.com to kirsle.net, I never got around to making a new favicon.ico for it (the icon for cuvou.com can be seen as the emblem on my tutorials page).

The new icon in 96², 48², 32², and 16² sizes:

(These are PNG images with alpha channels, if you're using a lame browser like IE 6 that can't show them correctly, then... I pity you. Catch up with the rest of us in 2010 and use a real browser.)

It's an emblem I made up at least 7 years ago, it's a composite of the letters "CjK", as in my Internet alias, "Casey James Kirsle."

Speaking of favicons, I created the icon using a command-line tool in Linux called icotool. In Fedora it was provided by the icoutils package from the fedora yum repository.

# create (-c) favicon.ico (-o) from source PNGs cjk-16.png and cjk-32.png
$ icotool -c -o favicon.ico cjk-16.png cjk-32.png

Categories: General

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Charter Breeze

I've recently put together a web design for a friend's business, Charter Breeze - it's a transportation company based in Los Angeles. It's the first web design I made for somebody else that actually went on to become a full website. And it's running the same content management code I wrote for Kirsle.net. :)

Here's a screenshot from the homepage:

Categories: Design

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KAGE: Multiple Heroes and Maps

Progress update on Kirsle's Adventure Game Engine (KAGE):

Spiky blue-haired hero...

Spiky red-haired villain! And the debug-mode actor selector window.

I made some new character sprites (the ones pictured are temporary. I created a template spriteset and then hurriedly threw these guys together so I wouldn't have to show naked sprites in the screenshots).

The engine supports multiple heroes now (the blue and red haired guys are the singleton heroes), and multiple maps (each of the singleton heroes are on different maps), and it keeps track of what's happening on each map at all times.

Next on the to-do list: teleporting between maps (and when a singleton is the last one to leave a map, the map gets purged from memory and non-singletons left on it are forgotten about and reset if the map gets reloaded in the future), and animations.

After that: on-screen text and dialogs. Then shortly thereafter there will be a public alpha release of it that you can mess around with.

See other blog posts about my game engine: KAGE.

Categories: KAGE

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