Older blog entries for cTaylor (starting at number 133)

Life stuff

Boy, it's been almost a month and a half since I've chatted on this-a-here-blog. I feel so slack. Then again, I've not really been slack, just worked to a point in which reflecting on my day is sort of... well, borish.

I've been doing this full-time 'Army thing' for a couple months and lets say for the last month I've been taking IT classes, electro-statics classes, basic circuit classes, radio classes, etc.

I've been a bit frustrated by the course layout not so much because of the material in the courses, that's merely been an affirmation of something I knew little about before - that I actually learned things in college, the least of which was an ability to think! My frustration has been with the overall attitude exhibited by the 'professionals' teaching the material.

In college, I was often *extremely* critical of my course work and my university, so much that it was just a real bummer of sorts dealing with the day-to-day grind of it all.

Now, I can sit back, hear a half assed explaination of basic electro-statics and recall hours of lecture and review gratis Dr. Moyle with some coherancy. I've felt so confident of my abilities, that I was teaching night classes on the material during the evenings to many of my non-science oriented classmates at the school house here.

They seemed to appreciate the gesture and I take their coming back on a nightly basis to be an extreme form of flattery. Overall, I've enjoyed the experience of teaching and it's really rewarding to see someone move from struggling to mastery in a short period of time.

Boy. When I read what's above to myself - I sound so haughty. I need to slow down on the Neal Stevenson books. Quicksilver is waking very old and unused english-type parts of my mind. Oh, the H.P. Lovecraftish mapping of my mind.

Code stuff

I've continued the PDFBox port to .NET. I'm staying the course this winter and it seems like such an annoyance. I wish this process could be simplified and while projects like IKVM kick so much ass, but I have a C# requirement to meet. So all this java code rocks but at the same time, it needs to be rehacked into C#. ugh!

I've also been writing some tools out in python for some automation issues I've seen pop up in my day-to-day work with military documents. I've been tempted to work on a document suspension tracking software system with some additional features for personnel management and whatnot. the pdfbox code i've been hacking may make a python appearance eventually since one of my goals is to have that code integrated into this tracking software.

the grammer checker is still in existance, i've just been taking it easy for now. my priorities have changed again and now that i can see some opportunities to contribute to less academic projects... i dunno, they just seem to shine more readily.

in the same token, i've been talking with an old friend from my lymric days about possibly working on a video game for gnu/linux. and that work seems to be coming along well. we're a lot more organized with this effort and while i still lack a laptop or desktop with 3d support, we seem to be doing just fine without. go fig.

When all's said and done

I've been keeping busy. I feel a lot more 'with it' these days and less mopey which has been a nice change of pace. I attribute this rejuvenation to the people i'm surrounded by (beats the crap out of feeling alone in an appartment), the environment i'm in (i'm losing weight again! woohoo! 1 hour of running in the mornings combined with 1-2 hours of swimming/running/weight training) seems to be helping out tremendously. In anycase, I'm out for now...

Post-it notes

Blade Trinity :: friggin' rocked out. I really enjoyed the darker tone of this flick over the last one - the continual iPod commerical that was the new female character (Whistler's daughter) became a bit obnoxious, then again the wise-cracking dude from Mall Rats helped lighten the tone and bring some self deprecation to the movie that was a bit refreshing and reminded me of some funny stuff I saw in AvP. Overall, this movie kicked booty.

Ocean's 12 :: a lot of people felt this one was way too busy. The multi-plot-line stuff that the Matrix made famous is deployed in the flick with some success. There was a lot of good humour in this flick and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's definitely not the first movie.

School House Rock

So, it's been a long and tragically slow week. I managed to roll my ankle monday on a five mile run so, i've been recovering from that experience - i went for a jog tonight, did about 2 miles with some annoyance, so i should be good for tomorrow morning.

on the coding front, not much has happened, my work schedule here has picked up a bit and by the time i get around to hacking i'm usually straight out exhausted. today was my first shot this week to hack on the pdf filter for beagle, made some progress. i'm mostly dealing with differences in Java/C# apis at this point. had to add 1 more class to my ported list.

beyond that, i should get my desktop up before the vets day weekend. at that point i'll get my 'gentoo on' and i'll start hacking on my filter a little more regularly (i'm tired of dealing with the laptop).

enough for now. later all.

The most addicting hazelnut spread in existance.

So the past couple of days I've been doing a lot of hacking...well, atleast I'd call it hacking.

The PDFBox port continues to amaze the heck out of me, while it was deceptively easy porting this lib to C# - initally, it's now become a bit of a pain in the arse. There are just somethings about Java and C# that are annoying.

Bellin, convinced me to help him write an 'extension' for Epiphany so's that we can hackout some python modules for ephy. Thus far, I've started wrapping up epiphany GObjects into python a la example code from pygtk.

Speaking of which, the delicious/python extension is still in the works but since versioning is so strange in gentoo for epiphany, i've halted focusing on this until i can get that resolved. Grrr, versioning!

I've also been fiddling with the grammar checker. It's still going slowlybut my grammar definition gets better by the week.

One of the things that's cool about the place I'm stationed at, is this. When I first drove around the area, I noticed that I am only < a 5 minute walk from that place.

My daily swimming is paying off, my endurance is improving and now my breathing is starting to become more relaxed.

So, it's been a couple weeks since i've posted here. Feels like forever. My stay in Augusta is alright. I don't really connected with most of my peers here. Many of them have some growning up todo.

in other news, i've finished building my desktop. except i've found some weird linux errors. gentoo's live cd page faults into a system halt when i try building a reiser and ext3 partition.

when i install suse 9.1 personal edition, installation works perfectly. yet, when i try downloading debian's iso, after 10% of accomplished work, my computer hard locks.

i'm intrigued by this situation and i'm a little concerned.

in other news, the pdf filter for beagle is coming along well. just a couple more compile time bugs to squash and i should get to testing.

the delicious extension for epiphany has turned into a 'lets embed python' project. i'm a little annoyed right now b/c the ephy dudes are telling me that my testing modules aren't loading b/c of a linking error but, i've patched said error and they still aren't loading :( if anyone has written an epiphany 1.3 or greater extension/plugin, please contact me, i'd like to get the delicious one working before i start embedding a programming lanugage into the browser :P.

and with that, i go to sleep now. ubuntu looks promising.

Update

Hey everyone, the army thing has been coming along well. Augusta isn't as bad as I originally figured it would be - reminds me a lot of a 'developing' Columbia, SC. There's a very suburban 'Irmo-ish' part of town that houses a large movie theater and the usual places (Best Buy, Borders, CompUSA, O'Charlies, etc).

It's pretty 'staple' here. I've taken up swimming of late and it definately has been a good investment of time.

On the hacking side of things. I got a plugin written for epiphany and unfortunately it seems like the darn thing isn't initalizing or anything. What's even more strange is that some of the code, I jacked from the beagle plugin and when I build the plugin, gcc complains about some pointer stuff not being 'correct'. It's obnoxious but I think that's the root of my problem.

Some beagle filters I've been hacking are coming along steadily. I'm just porting some java code to c# - it's uneventful and uh.. i'm just crossing my fingers ;)

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...

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

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!!!!