Advogato blog for Penix

15 Mar 2008

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:01:32 GMT

Wow. Just under four years since I've touched this thing...

25 May 2004

Tue, 25 May 2004 15:00:16 GMT

Haven't been in a blogging mood for the past few months.

Main thing I've been focused on lately is Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I've been porting/packaging things for kfreebsd-i386 and testing out a lot of things. But the best part is, my GNU/kFreeBSD installation guide (mentioned a while ago. http://jrac.hostrocket.com/?page=gnukfreebsd) is now the official install guide. I've been given commit access to the glibc-bsd subversion repository so I can maintain the guide. I feel like such a leet open source contributor.

Speaking of contributing, I got a small patch of mine included in XFce :) Wasn't anything very significant, but it just feels nice knowing I'm giving something back. Hopefully I'll have a few more together soon.

I've been checking out the GStreamer documentation lately. I'm interested in writing some sort of graphical sample library manager to suit my needs. I use things like Hydrogen, Audacity, Beast, Ardour etc. to create songs/beats, so something specifically designed for samples that can handle playback, category organization etc. would be nice. If I can wrap my head around doing this with GTK+ and GStreamer, I'll give it a go.

Looks like I'll be moving to Coffs Harbour by the end of the year. I haven't really got a good chance of finding a job in general, but there'd be way more of a chance of getting job in a city with a population of 55,000 than in this 3,000 person shithole.

8 Feb 2004

Sun, 8 Feb 2004 10:58:54 GMT

Built some XFce 4.0.3 i386 Debian packages. Over here. Don't hammer it too hard, I've only got 2gb of bandwidth....

2 Feb 2004

Mon, 2 Feb 2004 16:10:21 GMT

I'm in need of some new hosting for my site. If anyone is willing to help me out, the latest post on my site contains the details, reasons etc.

2 Feb 2004

Mon, 2 Feb 2004 06:19:25 GMT

Not had a very good last few days. I've had a sore tooth for a while which I got checked and an appointment to get fixed. That was on Thursday or something and the appointment is on Tuesday. On Friday I woke up after a few hours sleep with an aching tooth, an aching ear and wanna-vomit-but-can't-then-a-bit-comes-then-nothing sickness all day. Thankfully I got some Panadeine Forte goodness from someone the same day. Been ok now that I've got codine. Now I've just gotta face the drills and other various pain inflicting devices at the dentist tomorrow.

When bad luck hits me it hits in spurts at the worst times.

During my doped up painfest my main system's audio decided to go on a holiday for no reason (might've had something to do with the 2.6.2-rc2-mm1 kernel I booted beforehand. dunno). One dirty hack later and I've got XMMS using the OSS plugin pointed at /dev/sound/adsp (don't ask me why that works and /dev/sound/dsp doesn't anymore. Or the ALSA plugin for that matter.). Then video playback (mpeg mostly afaict) decides to crash randomly in gxine and mplayer etc. Not sure if it's going to continue, but either way it's annoying.

Then last night, while in the middle of playing Tony Hawk 2, my keyboard's spacebar died. I threw an expected "ffs I hate this shit" tantrum and headed off to a friend's place to cool down. When I came home I started googling for broken spacebar info. I then decided I might as well try fixing it myself. Many tiny screws later, I had it open and realized the little rubber thingy that touches the membrane thingy had just started to split and broke when I removed it. I then removed the Windows key's rubber thingy as a replacement. In the end I fixed it and was very proud of myself since I'd never fixed anything like that before (yeah, it was simple, but still :P). Saved myself $50 and only lost a stupid windows key.

Spent most of my time away from home at aforementioned friend's place playing Vice City on another friend's PS2.

Development

No activity. See above.

Bloggy goodness

I'm loving Planet Debian/GNOME and other developer blog goodness. The XFce developer's weblog is very nice to see. I've also just fallen in love with kuro5hin. Never paid much attention to it before.

23 Jan 2004

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 06:29:28 GMT

Wrote a Debian GNU/KFreeBSD installation guide

20 Jan 2004

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:10:03 GMT

Development

I'm about half way through my current project. It's a GTK "frontend" to Xnest. Basically it just runs a nested server based on what the user specifies to be run. I'm working on the interface now. To get things working (ie. get the callback to run the server) I just set up a text input field and entered the window manager. Now (as I had planned from the beginning) I want to replace that with a menu full of window manager choices. The problem is, I'm not used to dealing with that type of menu. The only menu's I've ever dealt with have been in a menubar container. The menu I'm referring to is just the generic gtk type you'd see, for example, in xmms' output plugin selection. Should be a fairly simple task, but it's making my head hurt. Any tips would be appreciated.

RSS

Like many others, I too have fallen in love with RSS. I've always loathed it due to the hype around it, but I got bored and did an apt-cache search rss to see what the big deal was, and installed straw. I love it!

Games

Went shopping after Christmas and found some really nice games. I was in Big W (Australian department store), and had a look through the cheapo dvd-case games they have (got Tony Hawk 3 there). I found Soldier of Fortune, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear and American McGee's Alice. All for $10 each. Bargain! Excellent games, and they all run fine on my tnt2.

donscarletti: I think I met you once at a LAN party held by Brad (stidnam). Nice to see you here.

15 Dec 2003

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:38:59 GMT

GtkItemFactory rocks. Don't know why I ever bothered with stupid manual menu creation.

29 Nov 2003

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 03:38:54 GMT

Been quite lazy when it comes to Advogato lately...

Development

At the moment I'm getting started on writing some patches and panel plugins for XFce 4.

Rhythmbox

I've been hearing good things about Rhythmbox lately, so I gave it a try. It's a very nice application, but IMO it's certainly not what some people have made it out to be (XMMS killer etc.). The main problem I have with it is the fact that it's the only audio player that constantly skips when I change workspaces and use applications like Evolution etc. (obviously might be specific to my system) Besides that, I'd like to see ID3 tag editing and something similar to xmms-dev (like xmmsctrl.h). Once it's at XMMS' level for what I want to do with it, I'll certainly switch.

Linux 2.6

Another hype-filled piece of software (not meant in any negative way). I've always tried out various 2.5/2.6 releases, but after a particular unknown release my VolumeUp hotkey on my keyboard is completely dead on 2.6. It's killing me. I want to use the latest and greatest Linux kernel like most people, since 2.6 runs flawlessly on my systems except for the keyboard thing. I assume the whole thing's caused by the input layer changes in 2.5. If anyone's had the same problem and/or has managed to fix it, tell me how!

Misc.

I can finally get a DSL in my town. Yay! I'm signing up with Internode hopefully some time around Christmas. I was planning to go with 256/64 with a 4.5gb cap for AUD$70 a month, but now I can get 512/128 with 6gb for the same price, or the original plan with 10gb. I only do around 2gb a month on dialup, so the 6gb 512 plan should be fine. The only thing worrying me is that I'm pretty sure Telstra's got half my street on a pair gain or RIM.

4 Jun 2003

Wed, 4 Jun 2003 06:21:47 GMT

Blah

Note: I'm actually on my third replacement 7VA motherboard now.

Right now, yet again, I'm stuck with my K6. My Athlon started having some BIOS problems that are extremely similar to what all the other boards had. So, with nothing to lose, I flashed the BIOS, which managed to fix most things...
Then all of a sudden X, Mozilla etc. started randomly dying. Then the box started randomly rebooting, which is something I've had happen to my K6 before, which was a power supply problem. Now the machine doesn't boot at all. So hoping the PSU is the entire problem and no new motherboard is needed yet again, I'm hopefully heading down town soon to pick up a new one. If it's the motherboard again...I think I'm going to have to burn down Gigabyte HQ and urinate on the ashes.

P.S.
I asked for my money back when I returned the last dead board. They wouldn't give me the money at first, but after weeks of fierce nagging, a replacement board and a cheque for $200 turned up. So, really that means I can't send the board back if it dies again (which is fine with me since I don't ever want to deal with those idiots again). So, if this board is screwed I'm gonna have to get $250 together for a new one since I spent the $200 already.

Development

Started playing around with the Win32 API. So far I don't think I'm going to like it. ~70+ lines of code just to create a window.