Older blog entries for Dodger (starting at number 4)

Well, took the code I was working on for Glade and refactored using GTK code. There's no use rewriting my own stuff when this will eventually be going into my copy of Glade(whether it gets accepted is another story). Now I just need to get the object instantiation up and going, then I can do a lot of the busy work that will have to get done before integration. No mythical widget call, but I can almost feel it ;)

11:32am CDT

Wow, it's been busy lately. Lots of work related stuff to take care of. Had a good weekend. It was my girlfriend's birthday Saturday, so we went out Friday(Patriot is a damn good flick, even if you don't worry about the historical incongruities) and then went out again with her parents on Sunday. The more I work with XML, the more ideas I come up with places it could be used. I think it's really going to be a huge part of computing in the future. Things are coming along nicely with the XML widget definition for Glade. However, I'll probably have to spend some time refactoring it, because Jeff kindly reminded me that there was already a linked list type defined in glib(I forgot :). Maybe I'll see my first widget call today.

Three more days until I fly to Las Vegas for DefCon. It'll be my first time going to Vegas, so I think I'll have fun.

Well, I guess I didn't get as far along today as I wanted to. Mostly a combination of Wednesday night TV and not enough time during the day to work on my project. I think CBS and TLC are in kahoots, scheduling Survivor and then right after that 2 hours of Junkyard Wars. I really didn't know there was that many things you can do with stuff from a junkyard, it's just amazing. The season is over for Junkyard Wars though, so maybe it won't be such a time sink. Maybe things will go faster tomorrow. Off to read more Into the Darkness before bed.

jpalme2000 brought up Big Brother in his diary entry today and that reminded me that I always want to post something about that show. Even though CBS has always said that the show was started boost ratings, I think they have another motive behind it. The show plays five days a week, and from the shows that I watched(before coming to this conclusion) the people in the house aren't shown that often. Most of the show is filled with interviews of family members, occasional happenings in the house, and lots of commercials. With so little "meat" it's a wonder the show is popular. However, there is one thing that makes up for all of this. They have four live feeds(with audio) on their website that run all the time. The website has plenty of interviews, goings-on, and ads. I really think that the television show is just a hook to get people to watch the live cameras on their website. The feed is continuous, so people can watch it whenever they like, for as long as it's interesting. Meanwhile, CBS gets lots of info about how many people are watching, what banner ads they click, how often the revisit the site, etc. I really think that CBS is using the show as a test market for online broadcasting. They don't have anything to lose with their ratings being as terrible as they are(were?). I think the Internet is going to see a lot more of this type of content in the future.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong and CBS is only doing this to get hits, but JenniCam and others seem to be making a living off of it.

Well, things are coming along nicely with the XML interface for Glade's widget palette. A lot of the basic code is roughed out now. I think I might even be able to call an XML defined widget by the end of the day tomorrow. That's the goal I'm setting for myself, anyway. At least I remembered to put it in CVS so I can check it out from anywhere.

I think I'm going to finish the evening reading some more from Into the Darkness by Harry Turtledove, before I hit the sack. It's a very interesting book so far, with a LOT of characters. A list of all of the major characters, which country they are in, and a short description, was included at the beginning of the book. I'd certainly be lost without it. I hope it doesn't rain again tomorrow, I want to ride my bike into work.

Wow, the Salon article was the first time I'd ever heard of this site. I've just recently stopped reading Slashdot because of the terrible misrepresentation of news and horrible ethic of the people who comment about articles. I was spending too much time simply trying to sort the signal from the noise to bother anymore. It's nice to find somewhere else I can go that looks a like a more friendly place. These diary entries are very interesting as well(I just wonder if I can keep mine going :).

Program development has held my interest for a long time. I started learning C in 1994(I think). Over the years I've learned a lot, but I really haven't contributed anything to the open source community. One of my problems that I have been trying to kick, is that when I get stuck on something, I tend to give up and go on to something else. I'm very interested in graphics programming. I've been a member of SIGGRAPH since December of 1999. OpenGL is probably the 3D graphics API I am most comfortable with.

Lately(well, since yesterday ;), I've been working on modifying Glade to have an XML interface for it's supported widgets, rather than being hard coded into the program. I was talking to one of my co-workers(Jeff Epler) about how I didn't like Glade's custom widget, because it wouldn't generate the code I needed to use with a GtkGLArea widget. Looking at Glade's source code showed that I would have to modify the source and recompile to add support for the widget. Jeff and I then went on to talking about ways of using object introspection and an XML description of a GTK widget to allow Glade to populate it's widget palette at run time. Today, I've been looking at libxml, which looks very easy to use. More on that later, time to get back to work.