Older blog entries for chipx86 (starting at number 58)

jcv: I completely agree, though I've switched to a Python script to maintain my diary. I love editing my diary in vim :)

One thing I would personally like to see in Advogato is message boards for diary posts. This already exists for articles. There may very well be speed or space issues with this. I don't know enough about the backends used for Advogato. However, I feel this would allow for more of a community feel. People could reply to another person's entry without creating a diary entry of their own.

Just my $0.05. Keep the change :)

Quantum

Got a bit done on Quantum today. Route management is all there. Invoice printing for individual customers, multiple customers, and full routes is all there. Working on the customer search interface today, and then I'll go on to some other smaller tasks. It looks like this will be ready to go hopefully soon.

Life

I saw the movie John Q. today. Excellent movie. It was very well done. Good cast of characters, good story, good message. I recommend seeing this movie.

I also bought a couple CDs today. The first was Poem by Delerium, and the second was.. well, I thought it was a Final Fantasy soundtrack :) Guess I should read these more carefully. Above the giant "FINAL FANTASY" text was some small text saying, "Music Inspired By." Oh well, it's still good music, and was only $6.00.

Let's see.. Got my homework all finished up for tomorrow. Maybe I'll sleep soon. I only had approximately 6 hours of sleep last night... School tomorrow.

Slef

You know, Advogato is a nice place in general. I enjoy being able to write my journal entries, and read other's journal entries. However, watching slef's lilo-bashing and OPN-bashing is getting a bit annoying, and I'm sure we could do without it.

When you say:

Of course, as you just keep whining in an advogato diary while refusing to engage in discussion in any meaningful way, don't expect anyone to give your opinions weight.

I'm aware that that quote wasn't directed to lilo, but it is very hypocritical. You know, OPN isn't such a bad place. IRC used to be a place where I had to deal with little kiddies and trolls all day long. On OPN, I can get away from most of them.

It's fine to post your thoughts to the journal. It is, after all, your journal. However, I'm sure that most of us would like it if you kept debates and insults either to yourself, or share them with the other party in private. I believe This shouldn't be used as a message board for flames, but then that's my opinion I guess.

That's all I have to say on the subject. lilo, keep up the good work.

GNUpdate

We'll be releasing new versions of libpackman and gpkg within the next couple of weeks. I haven't been following the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy, because things just haven't been usable for awhile. Now they are, and I think it's the best time to get the updates out there. Hopefully I'll pick up some new developers or beta testers.

Life

I attended the orientation today for Phi Theta Kappa. Unless I missed something stupid, I meet all the requirements to join, and will be sending in the application within a few days. Phi Theta Kappa should provide a lot of benefits down the road. Scholorships is one of the more important parts. It will be cool to be able to wear the Honors Stole during my highschool graduation ;)

Oh, and I met this cute girl the other day. She came up to me at the bus stop on Monday and we talked for awhile. She's fun to talk to, and is a good artist. Now I just have to get her to show me her writing. It's rare that cute girls come up to me and want to talk. I guess I've always just considered myself an uninteresting geek. She'll probably stumble across this now. Heh.

I think I'll get some more work done on GNUpdate.. Prepare for the release and all. Anybody want to volunteer to do some language translation? :)

Quantum for QuickBooks

Been working on Quantum today. It's really coming along. The user interface is beautiful, and full route management support is implemented. The invoice generation also works. Next on the list is to generate invoices for the different routes, and also to allow for more customization in the invoices, such as assigning each customer their own service charge.

Olympics

The closing ceremony was pretty fun to watch. Makes me wish I could have been there to see it. It was a shame that NBC spent so much time talking about things. I would much rather have seen everything and listened to the music. I can understand the need to do the interviews and stuff, though. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to go out there and see the Olympics.

School

School is going to keep me busy the next few days. I managed to get most of my Japanese homework done tonight. It's due tomorrow, but I can finish the rest before class. I'm hoping I have nothing due in English tomorrow, but I just can't remember. Too tired.

I do, however, have a *cough* fun *cough* assignment due Wednesday. I have to do a small write-up on John Wesley Hardin. This kind of requires that I get a book on him, but nobody in town carries one, so I'm kind of stuck. There are resources online, but I really would have liked to find the book...

Package Management Article

I plan to start the initial draft of an article tomorrow on package management. I want to submit it to FreshMeat. It will contain my thoughts on what package management is missing, how it can be improved, the requirements we'll need in the future, etc. Boring description, yes, but it'll be better than that I think ;) I'll also talk a little bit about GNUpdate, but the article isn't really about that.

Sleep time.

School

I think I did pretty well on that Japanese test. I know I got several things wrong, but not enough to give me a bad grade. Guess it helped that I crammed all last night and this morning.

GNUpdate

Progress bars are now implemented for gpkg's database import functionality. It makes things look much nicer! Soon I'll set it up for package installation/uninstallation. I'm thinking of having a reverse progress bar for uninstallation. It'd start out at 100%, and then go back down to 0%. I'll have to see what I think of that after I implement it, but it'll be awhile still, as I have to finish up a few things first.

School

I have a Japanese test tomorrow at 13:00. I've been trying to cram for the past couple of hours, but I've realized long ago that cramming does me very little good. I just kind of have to know it, and I don't. While I pick up programming languages and concepts fairly quickly, I'm not as quick with foreign languages. I did strengthen my understanding of some things, but it may not be enough to do all that well on the test. Fortunately, our Japanese teacher is more concerned with getting the concepts than being right on paper, and I know in the past I have received grades on my tests that I felt I didn't deserve. Guess I'll see how it goes.

GNUpdate

I'm in the process of redesigning the event callback system, so that packages using the libpackman library can receive status information during the install/uninstall of a package, database creation, rebuilding, and importing. Once I feel mostly satisfied, I'll implement some progress bars in gpkg.

GNUpdate

I got a ton of work done on GNUpdate last night and today.

• The target package database for various operations can now be set on the gpkg command line by calling gpkg --db=_database_name_.
• Package databases can now be created from the gpkg command line.
• The total number of packages in a database can now be returned.
• Added support for settings parameters (--db=..., for example) in gpkg.
• Lots of speed improvements.
• Various bug fixes.

And now, bed time.

GNUpdate

Made some speed improvements to GNUpdate today. I'll be making some more later tonight, as well as a set of other improvements to gpkg, the command-line package tool.

Importing from the RPM database to the GNUpdate database is now down to 30 seconds on my computer. My RPM database consists of 783 packages.

Here's a few quick examples of the speed differences between using RPM and GNUpdate (as of right now on my box):

gpkg import-db rpm  17.68s user 6.75s system 84% cpu 29.037 total

rpm -qa  0.34s user 0.23s system 84% cpu 0.677 total
gpkg -A  0.06s user 0.02s system 70% cpu 0.114 total

rpm -qi zsh  0.02s user 0.00s system 125% cpu 0.016 total
gpkg -I zsh  0.01s user 0.00s system 359% cpu 0.003 total

It's not as fast as rpm in some cases, but it's close, and now I can go back to concentrating on functionality.

Mail Server

I decided earlier today to setup SquirrelMail. It unfortunately wanted an IMAP server setup, which I did not want to do. So, I went to go install Courier, as that's what everybody recommended to me. However, I was unable to get it configured correctly to work with everything else. I'm probably just doing things wrong, but I don't have time to mess with it. My ideal setup is Postfix + Courier (or whatever) + SquirrelMail. I guess it'll be a task for another day.