Older blog entries for Phoon (starting at number 25)

my joystick twitches

I got a force-feedback joystick. My Wingman Extreme Digital 3D crapped out, so I returned it to Wal-Mart (yeah, yeah, I know) and got a Wingman Force 3D. Same as the Extreme, but force-feedback. Oh yeah, and it's USB only, so I had to recompile my kernel to support it. As if I needed an excuse to recompile my kernel.

Just out of curiosity, I tried the XMMS joystick control plugin. It's fairly nice, but it only supported 4 buttons, which left 3 of mine out in the cold. Anyway, I hacked on it for a while (2 days), and now I have a patch to make it support as many buttons as the joystick driver says yours has.

Next I'll try to add support for a hat switch, and/or throttle and rudder control.

Either that, or I'll rewrite the whole damn thing just to get rid of some of the cruft. Either the original author was on crack, or I am.

other stuff

I would write about how my classes are going well, or how ithought has gone into complete stagnation, but I'm too tired. Maybe next time.

advogato suggestions

I've been pondering some things that might be nice to see implemented in Advogato. Some of these ideas come straight from LiveJournal, and some are my own crackheaded idea. Here goes, in no particular order:

• The ability to delete an entry. You don't know how often I've wanted to either post a diary entry and then delete it, or create a 'test user' who no one else can see.
• Likewise, to be able to replace one entry with another, from an external program (such as ithought). This would allow the entry to be edited offline.
• Threaded comments under a story.
• The ability to directly comment on a user's diary entry.
• <project> tags!
• Just in case you missed it the first time, <project> tags!
• Umm... that's about it.

Just a few ideas.

on ui holy wars

I tried KDE recently. I don't like it.

I especially don't like the general look and feel of Qt. It feels like it's made for idiots. Don't know why, but it just does. Besides, most of the apps are just annoying.

Why can't someone start porting most of the neat stuff KDE has over to Gnome?

employment?

Yes, my loyal readers, I might be getting a job. I went for an interview yesterday, and it seemed like I made a good impression. I'll be basic office help, typing, copying, filing, etc. For the life of me, I can't find any computer companies that are hiring, and that I can work at while I'm still going to school.

It'll be nice to have some income, finally... even though I get paid monthly. At least it's probably non-taxable.

i didn't think, did I?

I didn't do a blasted thing on ithought. I'm still trying to get an idea of how the menu bar should work.

Besides, we're probably going to rewrite soon...

Someone emailed the devel list with ideas. I still don't know how we're gonna implement any of them, but they all sound good.

i do good in skewl...

I got a surprise in the mail today. I was invited to join Phi Theta Kappa.

(For those who don't know, Phi Theta Kappa is the national honor society. It recognizes outstanding academic performance.)

I thought at first it was a mistake; my cumulative GPA is only 3.0. But I talked to the professor responsible for the local chapter, and it turns out that it's based on my GPA at that school. I have a 3.8 GPA at my current school.

So, I'm in kind of a moral dilemma. Should I accept? If they invited me, they obviously believe I'm worthy. But, my local GPA is somewhat unrepresentative of my overall academic standing; it's amazing what a couple of Ds and Fs can do to one's GPA.

I'm going to either go ponder this, or go play Falcon 4.0. Either way, wish me luck. ;-)

soup? err... bowl!

Watched the big-football-game-that-happens-in-January. It was rather boring. The team I was rooting for won. Yay. Some of the commercials were good. Yay.

hey baby, wanna grab my joystick?

About a month ago, I bought a Wingman Extreme Digital 3D joystick. Yesterday, I exchanged it for a new one. For some reason, the rudder control had a dead spot at the center, so I couldn't keep the rudder centered. Verymuch annoying.

I'm glad it works in Linux.

speaking of things that pop up...

I'm still stumped about how to create a simple yes/no dialog in GTK. I was told to look at gnome-dialog.[ch], but that's way too complex for something as simple as I'm trying to do.

What I want is to be able to call a function, which pops up a modal dialog with yes and no buttons. When the user clicks on one of the buttons, the function should return a gboolean indicating which was clicked.

Can this be done? I thought the recursive gtk_main() call would work, but it seems only slightly less crackheaded than the setup we have now (with five separate levels of function-call needed for a simple yes/no question).

ithought. really.

voltron is on hiatus from coding on ithought. I'm still trying to get stuff done. Eventually, we need to rewrite the entire codebase, which shouldn't take more than a week or so once we get the design work done. (The "codebase" is only about 11 main source files, plus 4 modules.)

I'm wondering how much code I can steal^Wcopy^Wborrow^Wre-use from other projects. Pan has a really nice text widget, Gnome has a decent dialog setup....

I need to get to bed, before I start spouting more crackheaded ideas. Yo estoy muy cansado....

gtk spaghetti

I've been racking my brains trying to figure out how to create a yes/no input function in GTK. The only method I've found is recursive gtk_main() calls:

pseudocode:

gboolean yesno_dialog(void)
{
    foo = new yesno;
    gboolean return_value;

    yesno->window = gtk_blah_blah(quux);

    gtk_window_set_modal( GTK_WINDOW(yesno->window), TRUE );

    gtk_main();

    return_value = foo->retval;
    destroy foo;
    return return_value;
}

And of course the callbacks all set a value in foo->retval and call gtk_main_quit().

Can anyone think of a better method?

[ < tt > doesn't work. We need a < code > tag. And man, this was ugly first time around. ]

program ideas

From talking with my professors, I've found a couple of program ideas that might be useful.

1. A program, similar to gnuplot, that can handle symbolic calculus, etc. Something similar to Derive, preferably with a nicer interface.
2. An OpenGL program that allows a professor (or student?) to create molecules on-the-fly, and to demonstrate certain ideas, such as polarity, etc.

I would write both of these, but I have no idea where to begin, especially on the molecule-creator one. Email me if you're interested.

ithought

ithought-a4 is out. Yay.

The UI has changed somewhat, but I like this version better. There is no 'save' button anymore; entries are auto-saved whenever they need to be. If you're sick and tired of Netscape crashing, or "oh crap meta-q kills netscape", give ithought a spin. (External editor support will be included Real Soon Now.)

life, the universe, and everything

School is going... umm... well, it goes. Luckily, I'm able to keep up in all of my classes.

No further hassles from TLCC staff... which is in itself a small miracle. I think they got suspicious, though, when I asked if there was any way to print double-sided pages from the laser printers.

I'm now the proud owner of a K5-133 computer with 8 MB RAM... it's destined to become my firewall. Eventually.

more about ithought

Gee, I posted that last entry without updating from CVS first. I thought the only thing that was changed was the copyright message... maybe I was wrong.

[ Update: It still works for me. ]

ithought weirdness

Everyone keeps telling me the "convert to HTML" switch for ithought's advogato module is broken. I'd just like to mention that it works for me, but if it doesn't work for you, feel free to submit a bug report at SourceForge, and I'll see what I can do.

creamy bbc goodness

Yesterday, on a lark, I decided to bring my (burnt) BBC in to school and try it on a computer in the TLCC. (Well, I can't really call it a Bootable Business Card, since it's on a full size CD-R...)

Anyway. I didn't get noticed, but I didn't get it working, either. Let's face it... the default FVWM color scheme they include is UGLY! I also couldn't get networking set up, because I don't know the values required. Besides, I was hoping for something I could use to present a good image of Linux.... that wasn't it. (No offense to the BBC crew; they created a tool that is perfect for what it was designed for.... but it obviously wasn't designed for advocacy.)

i think, therefore ithought

Sadly, I'm posting this with the Advogato web form, since I broke ithought on my system by upgrading to libxml2. I was going to try to configure ithought to work with both, but then I realized I knew nothing about libxml.

I'm working on that right now, though.

Big bugs, that shouldn't be there... why? I can't figure out why one module works perfectly, while another breaks, and another segfaults... and they all have virtually the same code!

Now I remember why I cut my hair so short... so I can't tear it out.

school news

School has been in session for four days now. Whoopee. Spanish class is going well, it's easier than I thought; chemistry is going to be a pain, and calculus is just weird this time.

Calculus is a mixed telecourse this semester. That means, the professor is here for three days a week and at the other campus for two. No matter how hard they try, the 'other campus' always seems less involved. Not to mention the professor can't use her mad chalkboard technique. <g>

Interesting event happened yesterday. I was sitting in the TLCC (Teaching/Learning/Computing Center, my school's name for "computer lab". Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but I didn't make it up.). Anyway, I'm sitting in the TLCC, sshed (using PuTTY) into my home box. I'm sitting at a computer with my back to the supervisor's desk, so she can see what I'm doing.

Said supervisor comes up behind me and asks, "What are you doing? Is that DOS?" Obviously, any window with white text on a black background is automatically a DOS box, no matter what it actually says.

Me: "No."

Supervisor: "What are you doing, then?"

Me: (How do I explain ssh to an intellect the envy of apes worldwide?) "Umm, telnetting into my home computer."

Supervisor: "Did you install any software on this computer?"

Me: "No." (Actually, a copy of PuTTY was sitting in My Documents, but I don't consider it "installed". Besides, I usually run it from a floppy.)

Supervisor: "Are you doing chat?"

Me: "No." A bald-faced lie, because I had a second PuTTY session minimized with BitchX running. (The one I was using was only running Emacs. No, I don't have the Emacs IRC client installed. Maybe I should.)

Supervisor: "OK." Moves on.

About ten minutes later, I repeat the scenario with a man in a suit who I later find out is a network manager. It seems the supervisor had to call in reinforcements.

Later still, I notice the supervisor hovering behind me. She was obviously seeing what I was doing, making sure I wasn't cracking the Pentagon, etc. I was still in Emacs, so I didn't worry. (I had closed out BitchX by then.)

Why are people so afraid of anyone with any knowledge? "Oh my $DEITY, he actually knows how to use a command line! Quick, call the FBI, we've got a hacker here!" (Yes, I know the difference. They don't.) I mean, I've never done anything like that (except that one time I put NetBus on a bunch of computers in a lab at my last school, and I paid my debt to society: my internet access was suspended for a month. That was because I intended no harm, as evidenced by the use of my real username.) I've never done anything malicious, anyway.

Let's just hope they didn't realize I printed about 200 pages of code, because, "Printing from the Internet is for Academic Use Only!" First of all, it wasn't from the Internet. It was from the lab computer. I downloaded it to the computer, and printed it from there. Second, it is academic. Just because I'm not enrolled in a class on a subject is no reason to say it isn't academic. (I'm learning how to use GTK. It's a learning activity.)

ithought news

We released alpha 3. It's still got some bugs, but it's usable. I'm posting with it now. You can post to Advogato and LiveJournal, with full Kuro5hin support soon to come.

I wish I could figure out how to debug a module loaded via g_module_open(), etc. gdb doesn't want to recognize it, so I can't debug it. Shame, since there's a strange error: for some reason, GTK thinks the label in the LiveJournal dialog is actually a ScrolledWindow, which it isn't.

life news

Are you kidding? You mean there's life outside of school?