Older blog entries for Centove (starting at number 15)

Long time no diary entry:

Lets see.. I did some work on gnome-utils got that ready for 1.2, come to find out some of the dependices are screwed so I have to go tinker there and clean that up so all the docs get generated with the proper stylesheet. *sigh*

Did some fiddling with the evil of all evils c++ dug around a bit, discovered that gcc 2.8's c++ thing is broken in a couple of key places, chased down 2.95.3. Then the fun of building gcc... whee.

Installed netscape on the Alpha, now I need to find some more mem for the Alpha as there is a reason to fire up X on it now..

Spent alot of time 'testing' smac for linux (smac -- Sid Mier's Alpha Centauri) the results of such testing are here

Today was sorta productive, I got the initial code of gcharmap sucked into gnome-utils. Delt with some annoying customers. Nothing overly exciting.

Trees in the winter look so barren and really don't look like they would get in the way of anything. Well let the leaves come out. Yeesh! So off to home depot (being a new homeowner you realize you don't have squat for tools) to get a pruning saw. Shudder at the prices of the various tree torture devices, see a bow saw for a decent price, sold! Come back examine tree. Determine that the next lawn mower chasing incident shall be unencumbered by the lower branches, saw.. saw... saw.. ok We can walk under the tree now without running into branchs. Look at the driveway, oh dear, look at all the branches drooping down into the driveway, saw... saw... saw.. Ok Now the tree looks a might better.

Now look at the mailbox, its all crooked and the post thingy is falling apart, off to find a hammer and wack the thing back together. Thats all done, clean up some more sticks twigs and other assorted yard debris from the front lawn (does it ever end?).

Next project will be replacing the pool liner when that arrives. The current one has a hole that I can't find/fix so I got sick of screwing with it and am just gonna replace it.

The yard recovery project is proceeding nicely, and I discovered a nice place for a little picnic table and grill, all shaded so it should be nice once I get that all cleaned out and some grass grown in there.

Lets see today was chase the lawn mower around and attempt to catch it.. Didn't catch it so I shall have to try next week.

Did some painting while waiting for money to build up in SimCity 3000 that I'm testing for Loki (for the curious here is what my city looks like so far..)

Yesterday's grand adventure was paint ball! Couple of things made it even better. First someone else was paying for it, second the boss was there (heh) and lastly free food. So here you have engineers from 4 hi-tech company's gathered together ready for some paint ball. Ninety percent of the participants were x-military of some sort. So it was interesting to say the least. I managed to get shot four times, so I was glad of the three layers of clothes, it still stung but not as much as the other guy with just a t-shirt that I shot. ;) All in all we had a good time discovering how out of shape office work can make one. Seeing as they called it 'The River stone Annual <something>' one can guess they'll have another one.

Time for a rant now. At work we have this new color laser printer. It produces some of the best looking printed color for a laser printer I have seen. There is however one problem with it, (not really a problem depending on how you view things), It appears to really dislike Windows NT. I don't know what it is about how windows is sending print jobs to it but it crashes and otherwise becomes unresponsive after a windows printjob daily. The unix boxen that print to it have no problem at all. And can spool pages and pages of stuff to it. Stick a windows client in there and *boom* no one can print. Talk about annoying.

Today was argue with phone company about bill. *sigh* Thats one thing I hate about moving is it takes forever to get all the services settled down in the new place. First it was the cable company being impossible. Now MCI and AT&T can't decide on how much to bill us for long distance, never mind the fact that MCI shouldn't be billing me in the first place.

Also had one of those do some boring task but realize it would be virtually impossible without the unix shell environment days. Yes the unix shell is just amazing in what one can do with it and the various, crypticaly named utils. Add into the mix the piping and redirecting and some fairly amazing things can be done. Or some really trivial, but repeatitive tasks can be accomplished.

Here are some of the tasks I've had to do recently, imagine trying to do them without the basic unix factilties in a shell.

Ok, scanner is on crack. I have no clue what its problem is. Attempts to scan result in the following: 1. light comes on and the unit sits there for a min or two (warm up?) 2. Light switches off and scan pass commences (huh?) So now if I need to make a black image I know a slow way to make one. It even teased me once and spit a preview scan out but refused to scan properly. Now to find a hp dealer and see if in todays disposable society it can be repaired. On that topic I have a realitivly old powerstrip, the switch had broken but it had broken in the on position so I didn't worry about it to much. Well the other day it deceided that now was a good time to go off. Ok so I take it apart pull the switch out, go off in search of a replacement switch. Well radio shack is a shell of what it used to be, I can recall a time when one could go in and get just about any electronic part one could wish. Now the selection is the absolute bare minmum. *sigh* Looks like its off to the web hunting for a switch. Yes I know it would be easier to toss the strip and go buy a new one. But the new one will be: 1. disposable (ie breaks toss it) 2. plastic. To replace a, in theory, repairable metal one? Nope. I'll hunt around and if worse comes to worse I'll hard-wire the thing on :)

Today was run around and snap some pictures of the house. Depending on how those come out I may put them on the web somewhere (maybe on xach's photo thing) or not. Gotta warm up the scanner and see how it handled being bumped around in the truck.

Tinkered a bit with CORBA/Bonobo and perl (find a stranger combination eh?) All in the vain attempt to maybe start using other components in gxsnmp for stuff I can't write (or am stuck on)

Had a look at maybe doing some rpm type work for mozilla. (what a beast) If it was just unix it would be easy enough but that build system they have is just twisted enough to thwart any simple attempt at packaging...

You ever wonder if someone really hates you? Take for example we spent all day saturday cleaning up the yard removing all the dead branches cutting the grass and other yard type things. Everything looks real nice and trimed just right so, what does it do the next day? Severe thunderstorms, tornado watches/warnings and dump a new load of junk to clean up. If I didn't like trees so much I'd cut the lot down. As it is some of the bigger pine trees close to the house have to go. The icestorms down here like to know em down and I'd rather not have a huge pine tree falling through the roof wake me up one morning/night.