Did some more hardware hacking on the box. It is now quite far done. It still needs some small things, like holes for the HD, a hole in the front wall for the IrMan receiver, small rubber "feet" under it and so on. Then it has to be painted. I'm not sure what color to use for it. I'd like something cool, like Onyx or Indigo (I htink the old SGI colors/names are cool). I'd like some deep dark blue color, but good luck finding such a color as a spray paint. :)
Booted it up yesterday for the first time. Well, booted isn't the right word. I started it and entered the BIOS. I need to burn a Debian Woody net-install CD and install tonight. I think that all the stuff like TV-out will work well after all. I've got links to drivers compiled for XFree86 4.2, as well as some help from VIA themselves. Which is kinda nice.
The software is progressing nicely too, although it's not yet usable. Looks pretty lame too, but that's really a secondary thing.
Been lazy for a while. Will start fixing combat code today. msa has been adding some pretty nice line-of-sight debugging code, and Mike will apparently start working on a simple AI client.
PyRSS
Well, I've always wanted to play with this new magical thing called RSS, so yesterday I hunted a while for some libraries that could parse RSS. Found a nice one written by Mark Pilgrim. It's very liberal and has so far accepted anything I've thrown at it. Very nice indeed.
So I hacked up a quick Python-Qt based interface for it, and <href="http://www.infa.abo.fi/~chakie/media/pyrss.png">pyrss</a> is what I ended up with. Less than 100 lines of code, and you can even click on the URL:s. I do however need to add some extra dialogs there so that the user can add/remove feeds, set the update intervals, set the browser to be used for viewing links and some other things. Right now it uses a hardcoded set of URL:s, and does no updates (ok, that's a simple timer).
I'm not too familiar with MIME stuff, and when clicking on the links the QTextBrowser emits a signal linkClicked() that I catch, but it also prints out the following errror on stdout:
QTextBrowser: no mimesource for http://www.kernel.org/
I don't know what to do about that, and the QMimeSource class documentation is a little bit lacking. It doesn't even tell what the classes are for. I expect you have to be an expert on MIME stuff before you understand what it means. I don't care too much about the warning, but my text window (the QTextBrowser is cleared, apparently it expects some MIME data to fill it instead. I don't want it to do that however. The text should just stay where it is, the browser be launched (works ok) and that's it.
Will have to look into this later. But for now it seems to work ok. I think I'll integrate this into MediaCube later.
Iraq
Sad, sad. Iraq has given in to all demands, and still the US thinks they have to be bombed. "look, you know, like they are kinda bad guys"... I think there is some election coming up in the US, and a war is needed to get voters? So Iraq is not a thrustworthy negotiation partner? Well, the same could be said about the US and its backstabbing of the Kyoto treaty and thus endangering the whole globe.
The best thing for all would be a solution where Bush does not need to bomb women and children, but can still come out without losing face. He's driven this so far now that cancelling the war seems to be pretty hard.
Hmm, who gave Saddam all his weapons in the first place, 15-20 years ago? Same for the taliban? :)
Enough politics. I'm happy we're such a small shitty country over here that we can't fiddle with other countries even if we wanted to...