Older blog entries for cTaylor (starting at number 128)

That's the only life for me...

Well I moved to Augusta for my army school. It went pretty well. I managed to get a pass for the swimming pool here and the majority of what's going on has been redundant meetings. I'm managing well though. Waking up at 4 am and working until 9/10 pm is getting old though. Tomorrow we have height/weight check.

Other news

Working on that word filter still. It's become obnoxious at this point. uchars in C# seem to equate to byte types. Again, annoying but necessary.

Had another interview with a very cool company today - it's a shame I'm on orders. I probably would have gotten a job offer. I was told that checking back in 2 months would be prudent and I'm acting on some of the questions I had asked (most were based around how to improve a software tool - maybe I can secure a cool job if I put forth a little effort).

Time to hit the gym.
Moving

Moving north to augusta for an army school. It's nice knowing my civilian job is going to be on hold while I'm out. So Sunday I head on out to augusta and I'll be up there until Feburary - then two days from getting back, I have to go overseas for work. Sooo much fun, my life is at times...

Had an okay AT. We did usual stuff, lots of shooting, battle drills, etc.

Extending Epiphany

Been hacking some more on an 'extension' for epiphany. I managed to wrap some Python code bellin wrote in C so now all that's left is to is hack the extension out. Wow, that just sounded wrong right there...In any case, the work is coming along nicely and I'll post more about it once I get some more progress completed.

As most people know. I'm easily distracted when it comes to code. I started getting kinda bored with the grammar checker , lymric seemed like something I was going to save for augusta, and I decided this extension would be a good break from about 9 months of study and work on the grammar checker.

The extention has been a good experience so far. I'm starting to get scared b/c all the gnome code that's templated for the ext makes lots of sense - and bellin has successfully conned me into hacking this out for him.

Back to packing, the movers should be here sometime soon...
7 Sep 2004 (updated 7 Sep 2004 at 02:51 UTC) »
Garden State, the theraputic portion of today's blog

One of those movies that makes me realize that the majority of my life has been spent focused on so many other things than just living. Ever since graduation I have been somewhat disappointed with 'the real world'.

Partly b/c I feel as if I should be doing more with myself. My travel schedule complicates this desire and supercedes my ability to 'do more' simply b/c it's impossible for me to commit myself to anything long term right now.

On another note. I've spent so much of my life in fear of grade reduction, doing 'activities' and sports that I feel really disabled in the 'living' department. I just don't know myself in a way that is susinct. I have a working knowledge of things I don't like...so I just need to focus on finding things I do like. Seems simple but, paragraph two explains why it's not that simple.

Packing

Still going through the process of packing. I've so much in the clothes department to load up. I'm getting somewhat tired of it at this point. but the remainder of my things shouldn't take too much time/effort. I have the rest of this week and a day to finalize things for storage.

Code

Taking a break from some of my most recent efforts what with this move and all I'm focusing on writing some TODO type stuff for another project out there. Seems like something I could knock out in a couple days. I'll post more when more happens ;p
4 Sep 2004 (updated 4 Sep 2004 at 00:19 UTC) »
Coolest site ever

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen.

Got Army stuff next week - uhg. And once I get back from that I've got to move to Augusta for more Army stuff. So I've a million little things to line up in a row and then run over with tractor-trailer-like efficiency.

If I get time, today I'm going to pick up a book on tai chi. I've been really interested in that martial art of late and I can't really explain why. I've been looking for a sport to practice on my own that doesn't necessarally require a partner, but maybe an instructor. Partly b/c of my travel schedule.

And as the Captain of SeaLab 2021 would say, "I need to get my yin and yang in harmony because I LOVE FRIGGIN' HARMONY!!!".

I noticed my uncle in CA was taking tai chi and it seemed more like a dance than anything else. So I've figured I could practice it anywhere. Reminded me of shadow wrestling/boxing. I did a fair bit of shadow drilling in high school so I know I have the discipline to follow through.

In other news, fixed a couple bugs in pygg (my grammer checkers current name). Pretty good progress on that front. I've noticed a lot of people are talking about grammar checking these days as something abiword/soffice are lacking. It kinda excites and worries me at the same time.

Had a strange idea for a business model that I could run in my free time, writing software people could like and use, which would be a nice pursuit. It's like donation-ware. It's a little more in-line with what I'd like to be doing with myself professionally and how I think things "should work".

In any case, I've dilly-dallied on this site for too long. Time to stop blogging and start doing!!!!

30 Aug 2004 (updated 30 Aug 2004 at 14:59 UTC) »
My weekend

Spent this weekend with Surphaze, Joe&Est, and John&Erica (wow, J&E^2!) going around town. It was refreshing to be around people for a change on a weekend.

I got to see Hero which wasn't really my cup of tea BUT, for a movie in which people are dancing on water and fighting each other with water droplets... it was okay. The story was really good - some of the fantasy kung-fu stuff was on the verge of being obnoxious, then again, I kind of chalked that up to a cultural story-telling mechanism. The only problem I really had delt with the audience. Everyone was expecting something probably in the Kill Bill/Pulp Fiction department since, you know who, is producing the US Release. The marketing gurus, I feel, have unjustly advertised this flick as a matrix-style shoot 'em up flick. Unfortunately, this is not that kind of movie. It's an eastern-fantasy tale akin to Crouching Tiger. So some of the snickering from the people around me was a bit... lame.

I also managed to see Donnie Darko: the Director's Cut last night. It was wonderful! The added footage isn't on the DVD and it really fleshes out some of the details that were lacking (ie: what made it so strange for most movie goers). Don't get me wrong, I loved the bizzare portions of the original cut - it actually gave my friends and myself something interesting to discuss as opposed to the usual bitching that happens after seeing a movie about time-travel. The Director's Cut is done in a book/chapter format. With each chapter's beginning coming from "The Philosophy of Time Travel". Each of these excerpts overviews what is currently happening to Donnie and the people he's trying to save. So, if you didn't like the mystery/unanswered questions of the first movie or would like to see how far off your thoughts about what was going on are, see it. Or if you just love the darn movie... see it. Or, if you haven't ever seen it... see it.

Moving + Computers

Since I'm moving to Augusta soon (thank you army!), I'll be packing this week after work each day and I'm getting all the other ins-outs tied together.

What's fun about this move is that I'll be leaving Atlanta for Augusta until Feb. Then 2 days after my return to Atlanta, I'll have to go overseas again for a month! Man, my stuffs going to be in storage forever.

Got the AC adapter for my laptop so, that machine is hard at work parsing a gutenburg webster dictionary. I'll soon have 2 databases of word & parts-of-speech maps to compare and merge. woohoo! Working on this grammar checker has really given me a "good old days" feeling from the summer I spent working in PARL. I kinda miss the days I spent working on the cluster. ;)

Newegg just shipped out my new desktop power supply today. I'm getting anxious b/c the entire world has wrapped up doom 3 and i've yet to get it going! grr!

Scout

Scout has a really strange bug right now and I'm not sure why it's happening. There's a runtime error when it tries to perform a simple floating point operation, which leads me to believe that an object that I'm drawing out of my datastructure isn't the right type.

Tomorrow

I'm soooooooo psyched about seeing the Burning Brides tomorrow night! This show is going to friggin' rock!
27 Aug 2004 (updated 27 Aug 2004 at 17:54 UTC) »
Coding

Well, I finally got fed up with Windows.Forms and started using wx .NET for Scout's UI. I've got to admit, wx .NET project kicks so much booty that I'm sure Pirates in the Caribbean can feel it.

Installation was totally painless. I unzipped the package, copied the dll's to my dev directory and then downloaded the M*VC*.dll plopping that also into my development directory and started writing my interface.

What took me all of 4 hours to (offically) half-ass in Windows.Forms (due to hunting and pecking for example code and making sense of strange, undocumented behavior in ListView) took me about 2 hours to pull off with wx.

What made it even nice, dare I say...fun, was the fact that the .NET bindings followed the C++ bindings so closely that I could acutally "wing it" (it being undocumented classes) by using the C++ docs.

wxWidgets, in general, rocks the house.

Now I have a nasty runtime bug in my graph traverser. Once I squash the punk, Scout should be available for beta testing.

"Thank you wxWidgets!"

Now if that wasn't as commercial as I could make it....

Music

Been listening a lot to Bad Religion and Burning Brides. I figured (bad religion) it's probably due to political atmosphere of work, and television, and everything. Man, I've been blogging a lot this week.
26 Aug 2004 (updated 26 Aug 2004 at 15:34 UTC) »
Hooah!

Let me start by saying I'm a big fan of source based distros for a large number of reasons. The primary reason for this bias deals with the fact that getting any kind of new software installed on a binary distro can be a real bitch. Source or binary package - it doesn't matter, this problem is something unholy and can poison your soul.

I finally got Redhat9 working with linux-2.6.8-1. This effort took a week for a variety of reasons (mostly management related stuff) but, it works. So, I'm happy. We have a software requirement to use Redhat9 and since our hardware is new...things like old network drivers and power management code just didn't work well. Hence the desire to trouble about this new kernel on an unsupported distro.

I'd also like to note that many of my friends would agree. I am a sick person. I like to do things like this just "because". I also have a remarkable ability to crash any software system on the planet within 3 minutes of sitting down to it. I'm reknown in some circles.

Since I had such a tough time getting this bizarre configuration working here's how I troubleshot the hell out of the problem (this effort required ninjary built up from years of binary-package and source based distro experience):
  • Fresh Redhat9 install.
  • RPM install of the 2.6.8-1 kernel
  • Source installation of modules-init (making sure to `./configure --prefix=/` and `make moveold` prior to `make install`, running `./generate-modprobe /etc/modprobe.conf` at the conclusion of the build installation.
  • Source installation of the 2.6.8-1 kernel.
  • mkinitrd vmlinuz-2.6.8.1.img 2.6.8-1 && cp vmlinuz*.img /boot
  • Update grub
  • Reboot, make the sign-of-the-cross, and cross fingers.
Now for a review of what happened. B/c I've been a Gentoo user for the past 2 years, my brain has been subject to some un-binary-package-friendly ways of thinking.

The first step is obvious. For some reason the only way to get binary-package systems "cleanly" installed/updated usually requires a fresh reload. The db backend is unholy and hates it when you make major dependency alterations.

Second step, this got all the init.d and rc.d scripts patched for the 2.6 kernel on the Redhat9 machine I was working on. It also provided me a good testing ground for my next step.

Third step, do this with source. It's sexier. And when you reboot if you see "Q_MODULE" type stuff floating around. That means your modprobe, etc programs are in a bad path. And the kernel can't get modules loaded and stuff.

Fourth step, seems redundant, no? Well, let's just say I needed special tweeks for my platform. That and on my hardware, the rpm version of the kernel's acpi support (I suspect) kept shutting the machine off for a reason I've yet to determine (well, that's what the Magic 8 Ball told me).

Next step, this was brutally important. I've never-ever-ever had to use mkinitrd. Apparently, est muy importante for Redhat9 initalization scripts and grub. (I use lilo at home). Do this. For the love of God and all things holy on this earth...do it.

The last two steps are trivial and require no explaination.

End rant. Back to Scout. It's *kinda* working. MFC ListView objects hate me.
Scout

Today I get back on the Scout for Win32 train. Ouch, my shoulder hurts.
24 Aug 2004 (updated 24 Aug 2004 at 19:23 UTC) »
More Fun

Woke up this morning and discovered that someone had broken into my car again (second time in 2 weeks and on the same night as the first break-in) - except this time they managed to leave fecal matter in the back seat. What amazes me is that they took absolutely nothing from my vehicle. Not-a-thing.

Strange but true. I've notified the police and the property management firm. I'm tempted to buy a Louiseville Slugger and some zip ties - maybe pull an all nighter next monday evening watching over my car. Possibly nab the perp in the act next week. Another point of fact that really stranges me out. There are electro/magnetic locks leading into the parking lot and it's about 3 stories from the earth. This leads me to believe it's possibly someone from the local university that's started picking on older cars in the lot (I drive a very ancient lumina).

In other news, still waiting on my power supplies. I'm getting really antsy b/c they are due in another day or two.

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