Afternoon.

yack!

There. It's named. Sort of.

After hours (ok, minutes) of careful consideration, I chose "Yack" for the name of the checkin kiosk system I'm writing. (yes, yes, it's yet another "yet another"...)

It wasn't long before someone reminded me about yacc, though... so I'll probably change it soon. It fits, though... working with the old one makes me want to yack.

secrets

As I found out, the current checkin system is just an Access frontend. I found this out by going to the Documents menu (they didn't disable the taskbar, just auto-hid it).

Tomorrow, I'll get in touch with the guy in charge to see if he'll provide me with the info I need to finish Yack. I doubt it, though.. people are really secretive around here.

coding

Another problem I've encountered is how to create a looping series of dialogs with GTK. My current idea is simply to put the initial dialog creation and gtk_main() into a for(;;) loop... but that seems awfully inelegant. Any ideas?

Also, how would I recieve keystrokes without having to have a text entry box visible? The barcode scanner my school uses simply acts as though the digits had been typed, and the current system, with the text box, is ugly.

generality

Originally, I had grand, sweeping ideas for Yack. You know, the kind where it's the only system people ever use, because it's so expandable and configurable. Then I realized just how hard it would be to code that.

Now I'm just going to make an app that does what this school needs and leave it at that. If anyone else wants to modify it, go ahead, once I'm done.

social life

None at present.

Currently, "getting out" means going to Wal-Mart with my ten-year-old friend. (I'm 19. The closest people to my age that live near me are either <10 or >30. I associate better with the ten-year-olds. Don't ask why, I don't know.)

I asked the girl I've been tutoring out to a movie, but she's always busy. She works evenings during the week, and studies and goes to church on the weekends. No time there for anything else, apparently.

I'm tempted to buy a seasonal pass to Disney World, so I won't have to use up Dad's gate pass admissions. Currently I go about once every two months, but that's mostly because I don't want to waste tickets. With a seasonal pass, I could go daily if I wanted to, except for the block-out dates, and Dad's tickets work almost all of that time (except for New Year's Eve).

war and peace and long entries

I know I write long entries. I've been writing long entries for a while now. No one's ever complained to me about them. If you don't like them, let me know, OK?

I don't see why mirwin would need to have an alternate account, though. It's not like there are any per-account restrictions (that I know of)...

mozilla

Tried installing the Mozilla 0.9.3 packages from Debian Sid. However, Mozilla wouldn't start. Now, I'm going to get the source (while on my school's connection) and compile it at home.

ram

Got 256 more megabytes of RAM the other day. Now I'm up to 384 MB... the old Mozilla was orders of magnitude faster than before... but how could I have been memory-starved with 128 MB?

Also bought Soldier of Fortune. (Windows version, sorry.) That is one hell of a game... I don't know why I didn't get it earlier.

prosecution

The computer lab staff don't care what I do, as long as it's all run from the Zip drive and not installed to the hard drive, and not against their published rules (ssh isn't). At least that's what they're claiming. And it's also subject to change depending on their whims.

i love this fucking school and this school loves fucking me