Recent blog entries for cipher

Time warp

Whoa. It's been a while since my last diary entry. Time to catch up.

The return of Eucalyptus

I've decided to resume development on Eucalyptus. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I'm starting over. The original program was very Amiga-centric and doesn't (obviously) want to port cleanly to Linux/Unix. Plus, it just doesn't feel right. Some may agree with me: coding is very much an art form.

I've spent the last couple months in what little spare time I've had jotting down new ideas and working things out. Now, I can finally start hacking things up a bit.

Rugrats

I remember last year conversing briefly on IRC with raph about our respective sons when they were still "in the oven." It's nice to read about how Max is growing. They really are rewarding.

My son, Teddy, is also growing at an astronomical rate. His older sister was, and still is, petite. At 2 years, she is still shy of 30 pounds. At 6 months, Teddy is quickly closing in on 20 pounds. Yeesh.

He's starting to rock back and forth on his hands and knees, and will sit unsupported for quite a while. And he has this obsession with my keys....

The house that Jack bought

Michelle and I are buying a new home. It's very exciting! It's also very frustrating to have to wait for it to be built!! We drive by the site once a week to see the progress and take pictures. Electricity was finally run, and we are waiting for the drywall to be put up, which has been sitting in palettes for weeks. ARGH!

My rowing station

Work is going well. My issued laptop is finally usable. (It was given to me sans power adapter. So it sat on my desk for two weeks until a new one was ordered.)

On the other hand, internal politics are flaring up more often now as our little startup moves more toward a corporate feel. Such is life in the world of dot-coms.

Just registered a new project with SourceForge, The Iron Hells. I've always loved playing Angband, but it seems to lack the "prettiness" of most modern games, not to mention being only a single player game. The Iron Hells is my effort to add real-time play capability, as well as multi-player. I also want to separate the game into a client/server model, which would allow a running "game world" where players can join and play with or against each other. It would also allow development of whatever type of client the player prefers, be it graphical or Angband's original text-based interface.

The website has (literally) nothing yet, but I have some artwork ideas and such. I do need a (or several) good artists for the client interface and game art, as well as better sounds.

Anyway, enough rambling....

Ah, lovely California. It's good to be back. I accepted a position with a L.A.-based startup and Michelle and I have moved back to Cali. The commute can be nasty sometimes, but the job is well worth it.

Just got back on the net today, and we're still settling into the house, so I haven't had much time to work on Eucalyptus, but I've been working over some of the ideas in my head. Don't even really feel like coding right now. We'll see....

Last entry before I go offline for a bit...

Flew to L.A. yesterday for a job interview. Things look good, so I'm hoping to get an offer soon.

Today we pack the truck for the big move back to California. (I hate moving, but I'd rather be back in California, close to family, friends, etc.)

Eucalyptus is still coming along. I'm going to look into doing socket read/writes better. It's too ugly right now, and doesn't handle "non-standard" error conditions very well. Gnet looks like it might be a good way to go. Given that, it might be possible to merge the POP/SMTP code back into the main thread, and avoid the pitfalls of potential deadlocks, mutexes, semaphores, and the like. I think threads might be more suitable for sub-tasks, like decoding attachments, printing, saving to disk, i.e., stuff that doesn't require an event loop.

Anyway, time to get packing/loading. The time away from the computer will give me much needed subconscious processing time for these ideas and others. And that's why I'll keep my notebook handy. :)

Y2K draws ever closer, and my work at Epixtech nee Ameritech Library Services is winding down. But now we (the family) are gearing up to move back to So. Cal. with this new job. We'll see how everything finalizes when I fly out there on Wednesday.

Major changes on the Eucalyptus front. The multi-paned interface is here to stay (it seems to be the most popular), so I'm shifting things around a bit for that. I'm anxious to get some sort of address book into Eucalyptus, but I don't want to end up "writing it twice": once, either proprietary or reading GnomeCard's files (which I hear is going bye-bye), and 2nd, implementing a container for a Bonobo component. I imagine the Evolution guys are working on that, but I've no idea where they are, or what their plans are for the address book.

Christmas was good. Had family up here for a couple days, and Katy is being spoiled rotten by her grandparents. But that's a grandparent's job, is it not? :)

See you all on the other side (of 2000). ;)

Getting ready to release Eucalyptus 0.1.4. The POP3 code is working wonderfully (albeit, no progress window yet) and I tracked down a couple bugs regarding opening newly arrived messages. The message display code doesn't handle anything other than text at the moment, but it shouldn't be too hard to add image display, etc.

I got an email from Corel today, which showed me that the message parser chokes on multipart/alternative, especially when they're nested inside a multipart/mixed message. Eek! I got some ideas this morning on how to rework the parser to handle this better, basically by peeling away the layers like an onion. It works in my head, let's see if it works in code! :)

And on an interesting note, that mail from Corel was an acceptance for their beta-test program for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux! Cool! I'm still interested in seeing an open-source office suite, but I really do like WordPerfect. Too bad I have to wait 'til February.

Eucalyptus' filters window is now 99% operational, and the settings dialog is getting very near completion. Still need the viewers/mailcap dialog and some mail transfer progress windows, and we'll be right as rain. Eucalyptus is coming very close to being a usable mailer!!! Wheee!

What's left after that is what I'll just call "flash": viewing attachments (esp. images) via internal (or see next) viewer, and (what seems the coolest to me) Bonobo, so anyone can use their favorite text editor to compose messages, as well as using the appropriate program to view attachments. (Do any editors support Bonobo yet? No? Say it isn't so! Guess I'll have to port my favorite over from the Amiga ;)

Totally rewrote Eucalyptus' settings dialog, reducing it to one window from four. Much nicer, I think. Started work on the filters and viewers dialogs (making them operational).

I'm tossing around the idea of using GtkPlug/Socket for mail transfer progress windows, which may solve the whole issue of using threads for these things. I wish I knew definitively if GTK is totally thread-safe. More digging is in order.

Gah, which reminds me, I need to finish documenting GtkCList!!!!

Not much work done on Eucalyptus in the last couple days. Y2K looms ever closer, and I've been on the phone almost constantly with customers and Cisco getting things squared away and putting out fires.

On the home front, Michelle's ultrasound for Schifferer, v3.0 was today. The ultrastenographer (?) showed us undoubtedly that the baking bun is a boy. His name will be Theodore Alexander, partially after my father-in-law. Life is good. :)

Well, I'm staying home this morning because the snow is terrible (to me, I'm from California) and the wind just makes the driving conditions worse. I might go in to work later if it clears up. But, I digress....

A very nice person has taken it upon themselves to build RPMs of Eucalyptus 0.1.3. I guess I can put off further learning how to do that. ;)

Eucalyptus is coming along surprisingly well. The week-long rewrite of some of the parsing code took about 10-15 minutes (woohoo!), and now reply and forward work for the most part. Next, I think, will be folder creation/edit/deletion/etc. Very important. :)

I'm also considering taking copious notes of some of pine's feature-set.