Older blog entries for Nafai77 (starting at number 8)

Ten Days and Counting

On Saturday, May 27th, my sweetheart Torie and I are getting married!

Ten days!

Torie and Travis engagement picture

Syndicated 2006-05-17 19:41:00 from Travis B. Hartwell / Software Craftsman

Iswitch-window handler update

I keep meaning to announce that my iswitch-window deskbar handler as described here, has now been included in the core Gnome Deskbar Applet distribution, as seen in the 2.15.1 announcement. Any further changes or improvements will go directly into deskbar cvs.

Enjoy! Thanks Raph and team for a great project and including my contribution!

Syndicated 2006-05-01 10:43:00 from Travis B. Hartwell / Software Craftsman

ncm: My lack of strength in C++ shows here. Why is using delete considered sloppy thinking? I would assume that the use of new is acceptable. For example, when you are allocating memory for a dynamically sized array (yes, I do know about the STL <vector> I thought it was prope, and in fact necessary, to pair new and delete calls as in C with malloc() and free. What am I missing? Standard C++ doesn't have garbage collection, so I'm a bit lost.

An update: in just 6 weeks or so, I will be done with school forever. My last final is on December 12th, and I will be finishing my bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics at Utah State University. Finally!

On the free software front, I've been doing a little hacking. I've worked more on my Gnome Alerts Panel Applet, now with clients for an e-mail watcher, web page monitor, cvs monitor, and a regular standalone messager. I need to finish the UI and then put it up for others to use.

I just recently started using Spam Bayes as Spam Assassin wasn't catching all of my spam. Spam Bayes is doing a great job of catching nearly all spam that SA does not, and only a few false positives and unsures. I need to tweak how I train it, but overall I am pleased. I was annoyed with having to start a Python process for every single message that comes through, so I wrote a spam bayes daemon that listens on named pipes and then a small C program that acts as the filter that procmail calls that interacts with the daemon via the pipes. I was pretty proud of myself. After doing that, I added the named pipe capability to the e-mail watcher program for my alerts applet. Anyway, I want to release this stuff to the Spam Bayes community, I just haven't taken the time to clean it up and put it out there.

Other than that, my free software stuff is slow. I'm waiting for all of the Gnome 2.4 packages to come through on Debian PPC Unstable, and am excited to try that out. As soon as the Linux 2.6.0 final kernel comes out, I will be trying it out as well. Hopefully it will make my boxes feel faster, as I have slow machines right now.

I went to PyCon a few weeks ago, it was a very enjoyable experience! I got to meet the rest of the Twisted team and a few other interesting people. It was very fun and synergistic to work with the Twisted gang. They are amazingly smart! While there, I gave a tutorial on using Twisted.Web: Slides are here

While there I started working on Gnome Panel Applets for CVSToys and then enventually for BuildBot with the help of warner. The hard part at first was just figuring out how to integrate the applet with the Twisted mainloop. Now I have to learn how to write Gnome programs. Being busy with school and other things hasn't allowed time to really write any code.

I am also really getting into Woven. fzZzy has started writing some docs and it is really exciting. It seems like this is the way that writing web apps was meant to be.

10 Nov 2002 (updated 10 Nov 2002 at 05:39 UTC) »

I haven't posted here in nearly two years though I read these diaries near daily. I guess I'm not doing enough development to feel like anyone would be interested in my life.

Stevey: Pardon my ignorance, but what is your main beef with the example code you posted in your entry today? Is it that they don't use strncpy and strncat? I'm assuming that it is a security problem given your current project.

*sighs* Work is frustrating yet again. It has turned into being more than just frustrated with the tools and operating system I am being forced to use, to being frustrated with my own abilities. I am starting to feel as if there is not anything I can do at this job and be sucessful at it. I am constantly having to rely on my co-workers and manager for help. I really don't know what to do. It's a matter of confidence and determination I suppose. I just wish I could make a change soon. On the Free Software front, I'm giving a presentation at my local LUG tomorrow night on the 2.4 version of the kernel. And, on February 3, I am giving a 2 hour workshop on Beginning Emacs. I am excited to actually be helping people get started using Free Software. It was because of an Emacs presentation that I started using it.

Well, I haven't done much toward contributing to Free Software a lot lately. I haven't even done a lot of programming in general on Linux lately either. At work, I have been stuck doing Windows development for the last three months and it has been a frustrating experience. But, as of late, I have started to get the desire to start contributing in a meaningful way to Free Software. Because of my frustrations, my confidence in my skills has waned. I'm hoping to at least start out by helping with documentation efforts, particularly with the Python project. I also have some ideas for things written in Elisp for my use in Emacs. I just hope to find the motivation to start exploring and become a true hacker.

First diary entry:

Haven't done much hacking lately. Been playing with a new server at work. First time installing Linux on something of that caliber. Got the RAID controller driver working and now need to set up the array.
Only major hacking projects on the horizon are some Lisp and Python based things. Don't seem to have much time.

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