Advogato blog for andrewsj

30 Oct 2001

Tue, 30 Oct 2001 07:07:36 GMT

I have been working! I swear! Really!

I have been attacking KDE! I have been working on a lot of design also. Thinking about how things should work (and shouldn't). I really like the way that kde is for the most part, but it seems like communication (for one things) is very compartmentalized. I would like to see an intergrated method of communicationing, be that email, im, irc, chat, voice mail, or voice chat. I don't know how I would like to have this integrated and have been scratching possible ideas out on paper. Once I have something more I might put it here...

I really like the idea of being able to say "any communication for person X is important" and what not. I really like the way that the email icon on the dock in Mac OS X showed the # of new messages, but it only included new messages in the inbox, but if you used rules to move them around to folders, it wasn't included in the total. I also like the idea (from what I have heard of it) of having more communications tools built-in, which XP may be doing (haven't seen it for myself).

Also thinking about MPI and Lisp and blah!

Next week is the programming contest, yah!

20 Oct 2001

Sat, 20 Oct 2001 05:24:12 GMT

code:
I fixed a lot of things in my code for the kbatmon system tray. I hope to do some more cleanup so that it is organized as:
- A generic class that creates a kde system tray icon.
- The battery monitor will be derived from that class and contain info specific to the battery monitor....
Then I hope to write a few more programs that utilize the generic class... Just simple ones that do things like check mail or whatever. The only other one I can think of that I want is an icon that shows signal strength for my wireless connection, and if you click it, you can connect to another wireless network (and get ips, etc)...
The other main reason I want to do this is to write a tutorial/howto on writing system trays... It took me many hours for something that should be simple.
life: More mpi coding to do. For my languages class I need to rewrite a lisp interpretter to allow deep binding. Midterm Tuesday in Parallel computing. So this weekend will be study non-stop.

kbatmon.tgz - KDE System Tray Battery Monitor (for ppc's using PMUD without APM emulation compiled in...)

19 Oct 2001

Fri, 19 Oct 2001 06:23:48 GMT

Code:
Well, with the help of some friends on #kde and #kde-users, I have created my first kde app. It is a kde system tray app that gives me the battery status, and tell you the time when you put your mouse over it. This is for PMUD (or ppc). Everything I had found up until now didn't work. -- an exterme hack. It works. I will probably fix it in the next few days and post it online ;)
I will probably make an 802.11b like system tray icon, showing the status of the signal....
Life:
My classes in Parallel Computation is more interesting. I am reading some more material and coding some more challenges...
Crypto is going well.
In general things are good. I just had a bad weekend last week.

15 Oct 2001

Mon, 15 Oct 2001 05:32:18 GMT

code:
Nothing :(

I read several papers but ...
Arg, I hate days like today.
life:
Today royally sucked. This weekend sucked. I didn't get any coding done (besides a homework assignment which was POSTPONED just 1 day before it was due !!!!) and I didn't get my homework done. It wasn't for a lack of trying. But things just wouldn't work out today. I had to sleep at a friends because my neighbors through a HUGE party (luckily they told us this time, as last time it was a suprise, and they broke a window, a light on my car, kept me up past 6 am -- this time we moved our cars and protected our stuff). This time I came home to a slashed bike tire. They actually sliced both mine and my roommates back wheel. At least they could have sliced the front and back. So tomorrow I have the walk a mile to class. :(
On top of that my weekly phone call with Emily was cut short :( This compacted with the previous event made today a real sucky day.
I am completely unprepared for my weekly meeting with my advisor tomorrow. Why do I do this everytime. I read so much material over the last week, of which none pretains to what I should have read. Damn me! Why does everything ELSE have to be so interesting. So I am facing a delima tonight of staying up until I am prepared (so basically not going to bed) or just asking for an extension. I haven't done the asking, and I really want to save it for a time when it is needed, so I will probably not sleep until tomorrow after classes. Arg. If anyone finds out how make it so you don't have to sleep (without using drugs), I have $$$
Sometimes the life of a bum/underachiever looks soo apealing. But then again, I like being challenged. Maybe if I do that my challenge will be to get up in the morning (which I still haven't managed to master, unless there is a grave threat if I don't get up).

fsck

13 Oct 2001

Sat, 13 Oct 2001 05:54:59 GMT

code:
Fixed a smaller error I created in the parallel prefix code I coded last night. Then I worked on an MPI version of matrix multiplication. I am using MPI_Cartesian topology, and the corresponding shift function. Coding this made me realize (again) how much I need to relearn linear algebra. I suck at it. Even simple things.

Nothing done on other stuff. I don't think I will be able to code on Tux4kids stuff until after my meeting with my advisor monday. I have to study non-stop on Finite Fields, and also I have to get some "design of programming languages" done.
life:
Fixed a large bug in my house... I cleaned my room, which really needed it. I can now use my desk! In the process I found some papers I had printed out about a year ago (math related) that I thought were interesting. I still do. I think I may read one tonight before I hit the sack.
Tomorrow I have to get up early (for me) for a morris dance gig. I hope it isn't raining.

12 Oct 2001

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:00:18 GMT

code:
Today I coded a lot on tuxmenu. I have a very nice prototype done (pretty much). Now I just need to figure out how to make it so it is extensible. So that every time a new game is released, it can be effortlessly added to the menu. Plus I want it to be easy for teachers to change options. example: a teacher can set the word list for tux typing to be the spelling list for the week There are so many things to think about. The least of which is how to actually code it. What a teacher/student/... should be able to do. And how is the best way for them to interface to our software. We don't want the software to get in the way of the teacher teaching or the student learning. We want our software to facilitate.

I also wrote an MPI program to do a parallel prefix sum on a hypercube. I like my code since I used bitwise operators instead of lots of moding and if statements. Pretty compact. Other than setting up MPI and finalizing, computing prefix sum and reporting it for each processor only takes about 10 lines. Anyways.. MPI is fun.

released my mac binaries for tuxtype and tuxmath
life:
today I finally got it figured out how to chat with Emily while she is in Scotland. It was nice. UKLUG (University of Kentucky Linux Users Group) meet today, we talked about a few things and I got some people to help me try to get dvds to work on this ibook. It worked, but only about 5-10 frames per sec... dooh.
I need to study more! I spend too much time coding and reading papers that don't relate to my research topic. Damn this stuff for being so interesting!

11 Oct 2001

Thu, 11 Oct 2001 10:15:31 GMT

hacked some more on the tuxmenu system. It is looking fairly good. Got some help from #SDL last night on the best way to launch a SDL app within another SDL app. Originally I was toggling the menu to being a windowed mode, and then launch the app, and toggle back to full screen mode when I came back, but now I just kill the video subsystem of SDL, so the window goes away, and launch the new app... then re-init it when the app returns.

my seminar in crypto confused me today... i am afraid I am in over my head....

me tired. me sleep now

10 Oct 2001

Wed, 10 Oct 2001 08:26:23 GMT

A very productive day for coding. I got a lot of coding done for a menu system for tux4kids games. It should help with using themes and specifying options for games like tuxtype and tuxmath. Both of which only have command line switches as the only way to specify options. The menu system is in SDL, so it is interesting getting them both to work (both meaning the sdl menu, and sdl game it will launch). I will probably actually recode the entire thing from scratch. It is fairly klunky, but it works!

Found a few problems in tuxtype, but they must not be that critical as they have existed for a long time (and they are with regards to a patch I wrote to allow keyboard movement through menus). It should be easy to patch. I basically move the mouse cursors to specific coords based on keyboard input, but I specifed those coords relative to 0,0 being the upper corner of our SDL_Surface screen, not the actual screen. It works if it is in window mode, but in full screen mode, the 0,0 in the SDL_Surface screen is not the 0,0 coord on the real screen. So I need to figure out the real coord of the corner of the SDL_Surface screen and do some addition and it will be fixed ;) This bug affects all platforms that tuxtype runs on.

Speaking of platforms, I have tuxtype and tuxmath running fairly well on mac. I had no way of checking if the port of tuxmath was working correct until I tested it for the first time under linux, and my port works on everything but it doesn't blit the backgrounds... Not sure yet. I haven't booted into mac to code, since I spent all day in debianppc coding the tuxmenu (or whatever the heck it will become).

Since it is 4:30am (or so), I should hit the sack.

9 Oct 2001

Tue, 9 Oct 2001 04:56:55 GMT

Another day, another dollar (spent).

I have been working on a menuing system for the Tux4Kids project (of which tuxtyping and tux of math command is a part). My goal is to develop a interface for educators (or homeschoolers), students (or users), IT staff... I don't yet know what would be the best for all of these and am working on creating a survey. The main goal of the Tux4kids project (in my opinion, not an official position of the organization) is to create open source software the "facilitates" learning. The word facilitates is key.

Other than starting on that I tried to port SKOBO (I have spent hours playing xkobo) to mac, just for fun. I found out that part of it is in C++, and I only have MPW for mac, and I don't think it does C++. Anyway it wasn't important, just something to try out...

Did a lot of studying of finite fields (math) for my research position. I also read a paper called "A Concurrent Window System"... Pretty nice. Need to study it in more detail just for ideas.

Anyone have any opinions on opensource software in education? Just give me a email!

Had an idea for a game involving optics. A fried recommended that we develop a "science" game. Game means fun. I couldn't think off the top of my head of a non-trival science game. The I thought of a game where you must place mirrors to have a laser move through a room without touching any sensors, which would set off a bomb.... Anyway...

nite

7 Oct 2001

Sun, 7 Oct 2001 09:04:51 GMT

If you port to Mac (pre-X) please note: (unix path format = mac path format)

./path/filename.txt = :path:filename.txt
path/filename.txt = :path:filename.txt
/path/filename.txt = path:filename.txt

Ok, I hate mac! (not really, I am just annoyed with MP W... I really miss makefiles, gcc, and vi.)

So I have been porting TuxTyping to Mac Os (not X), which something I have been wanting to do for criswell as one reason for TuxType was for his wife's classroom, which got "upgraded" to Macs. So I found that mac has MPW (Macintosh Program...), which I have basically just used to build. SDL seems to work pretty good, but a lot of file modifiers, etc had to modified... A lot of work...

But if I knew about things like :path:filename.txt is relative, while path:filename.txt is absolute. Since I spend most of my time in the *nix world, I was completely perplexed because I couldn't get fopen() to work... After researching (read this, searching google), I eventually figured this out via someone complaining about porting a MOO server to Mac os 6 or so... I even talked on #macintosh and no one knew off the top of their head...

So I have the port most of the way working. The only thing I must wait for is a serial for the Install Vise (they give out free serials for freeware/shareware installers)... The best thing about the port is that it is really easy to see memory leaks on Mac os (pre-x)... I found 2 more memory leaks, and now it seems like I have them all.

In other news I had a sucessful presentation this week on quantum computation, I came in third in a programming contest at UK (that is, University of Kentucky), and am on Team 1. The cool thing is that if the team places at regional (it has every time since we started 5 years or so ago, from what I have heard), we got to nationals in the spring, which is in HAWAII !!!

That would be so cool. Especially since my fiance and I are thinking about going to graduate school (me) and law school (Emily) in Hawaii. So if you have any info about the PHD or Law programs at a Hawaii university, I would love to hear. I am thinking right now that I want to do my PHD in Quantum Information Theory...

I have debianppc working mostly!!! Sound, Wireless networking working, only DVD to go...