Older blog entries for decklin (starting at number 48)

Moving is tiring. I did it yesterday and I'm still exhausted. Today was my birthday and I got to celebrate by starting classes... :-/ Actually, I don't think I can complain -- class was at 2:30 and we only spent half an hour there. Just 6 people too.

Various trivial software updates:

  • I had a silly typo in the aewm .deb.
  • patched gaim to fix some font-color problems.
  • hyatt keeps moving XBL under from our feet... ;-) fixed the bindings in my skin to reflect the new syntax.

Time to do some non-computer stuff...

Packing up for school. Physically this involves moving around boxes and getting sweaty. Mentally (virtually?) I released aewm 0.9.16 and made sure all my debs had Build-Depends. Emotionally, it was time to salvage notebooks for next year's courses. I tried to start a journal several times last year. Here is something from 10/23-24 that I felt the need to type before ripping out used pages.

I think the essential conflict is between the peice of paper or what-have-you as a loose network of scribbles, and as a clear and orderly representation of the idea itself. Whether narrative and symbolism are placed above or below ourselves, in a way. Are we supposed to lay out meaning, or just a few short incomplete notes in the hopes of letting someone else find their own? Where does language reside in all of this, and can we ever really figure it out...

There's something about words themselves, about capitalizing sentences and using "whom" appropriately and all that. A sort of romanticized notion of longing and reverence for the filter that linguistics places between us and the person we are speaking to. A world in which the immediacy of speech and lucid typing are not there yet, where we still have time to live and think. Telecommunications is shrinking the world, and pushing us all to far into eachother's personal space.

macricht: you are not alone on the life thing.

Procrastinated by making a gqmpeg skin that I actually find pleasing to look at. I've been using my old one for at least a year and I never liked it much. Need to get it on red-bean as response time from the maintainer is slow. Bleh. I am evil. I'm a skin person now. I'm using -DMWM_HINTS on my aewm binary. The mind reels.

Oh yes, now playing: Gescom's minidisc. This is just amazing... more Panasonic-ish than Autechre-ish really. Sort of like giving the part of your brain that hears a good scrubbing.

Skud: azz sent me these:

  ; grep lava .Xresources
lavaps.shaped:                          False
lavaps.geometry:                        200x200

Suffice it to say lavaps was a big pain in the butt while I was hacking on shaped window support, and I thank azz for pestering me about it, as I don't use it myself. :-) (P.S. other window manager people will note that there's something fishy here, but I'm too tired for that rant tonight.)

Maybe it's just me, but I seem to be getting a lot more emails lately which consist of "I'm on vacation, I'll reply later" auto-responses sent back to mailing lists lately. A sign of the impending apocalypse? For example, last weekend every bounce from xchat-discuss got diverted to me instead of the list admin. And then there was the mail loop at forwardbound...

rcassin: Yeah, I haven't seen you in #mozillazine all day. Hope you're not deluged with homework.

4 days of freedom left, whee. Need to start packing. Today was very stressful. Saw the shrink and almost broke my hard disk again.

I'm not going to say anything about... er. Forget it. I'll just wink at craigbro. (p.s. sorry I didn't get back to you... your answer was NIL ;-))

It's a small world.

16:10:37 emotionography: hullo

16:11:00 KrisTrex99: This is an email I got from a friend in England. "Incidentally, I'm on a list of people who receive bug reports about certain incidents that occur with a new browser (called Mozilla). And today everyone got one from a certain D. Foster, from Hartwick. I have never spoken to him (thank god!) but - small world and all that - I'd be obliged if you stick his head down a toilet. And kick him. He is the biggest wassack I have never met, and deserves it for being anal! I don't care about him and his stupid errors!"

For the past few days I have inexplicably turned into a hi-fi nutter, attempting in vain to get some sort of good reproduction of my old vinyl before a go off to school. For some reason it's made me very tired. I guess I'll have to wait... (note to self, find drivers which actually record for the Thinkpad 390 sound chip so I can take the computer to the turntable and not vice versa. Harumph.)

Pulled two packages of muddleftpd from Incoming in two days due to denial-of-service problems. I'm getting a bit annoyed at the author. Have resolved to conduct better (and longer) testing, and not believe anyone when they say "it's fixed". After patching it a bit things seem to be OK. Unfortunately this has distracted from my other goal, which was to get upstream to reorganize the tree.

Mozilla completely fell over today. Will probably post from Nav for a while. <fx type="grumble" direction="sheriff(today)" />

Today I learned (by way of my grandfather, for whom we purchased one) that I-openers don't deal with 'pre-formatted' text very well. Or tabs. Or something. It's more complicated than monospace/proportional fonts, at any rate. Incidentally I just went on a rampage and removed tabification from most of my files (and my editor).

Have a SCSI card for this machine finally. Whee!

azz: no worries! I still need to work on some stuff before I can use your input, and I'm kinda busy. I better stop goofing off and work on that so that I can put this out before school starts, if you get back to me before the week is out.

decklin: work on godawful sentence structure. See several examples above.

Ryan: you are the greatest. keep posting here, please.

I highly anticipate tomorrow's Jerkcity. <fx type="duck&run" where="very very far" />

All Mozilla, All the Time...

Been slacking off on diary entries... well, I was debating whether I should make an account on themes.org just for the purpose of uploading my skin, but then I realized i had one already hanging around registered to a year-old email address. I am really bad at keeping track of that stuff. In a perfect world, I would be able to just sign authentication tickets with my PGP key and forget about making throwaway logins. Ah well. Anyway, I posted it and have gotten severely addicted, making 7 updates in 2 or 3 days. Lots of positive comments which is nice.

A major pet-peeve bug of mine regressed today, but it looks like I was able to get the fix tested out quick enough so that nightlies won't be affected. I guess X really is broken here. I will have to see what I can do to support mutibyte titles in aewm one of these days. Sigh. Speaking of which, azz, respond to my email darnit...

Now Would Be a Good Time to Skip to the Next Entry

I'm like a freakin' drug addict with these headphones. Worse things could certainly happen than one's material possesions being damaged though. Ordering new ones tomorrow. Yum, swivel. It's been far too long since I pulled my decks out and mixed something.

I'm planning on going somewhere ``fun'' tomorrow. Except I'm not really going to have fun, I'm going to so I can have backup material to talk about in case talking to ${sort-of-ex-friend who just emailed me} tomorrow doesn't go smoothly. I can feel myself detatching from my physical situation already. Ok, ETOOMUCHINFO. I need to go to sleep.

Aieeeee! My headphones are dead! This is not good.

Been mostly futzing around with Mozilla for the past couple days. There's a bunch of races in SMP building that I have fixes for, but I still haven't gotten any word back as to why the code looks like it does. Anyway, two things that everyone not on an SMP system should keep in mind:

  1. do not do test on something and then mkdir it if nonexistent. -p is your friend.
  2. If a rule depends on generated and non-generated items, put the generated items first.

My brain is too muddled to go look at my patches and clarify right now. I've also continued to tweak my Gnome-on-Thinice-ish-looking skin, here's a peek.

Just a few things I forgot...

Whoo! Go Debian! Potato is stable!

Yesterday Chris Marigold from one of my favorite bands, Blu Mar Ten, showed up on the forwardbound list again. He had a list of a dozen tunes they had in the pipe, that I'm sure aren't coming out anytime soon, because of major stupidity at a certain record label (if you know BMT you know who they are). It occurred to me that the Performer's Protocol would do hell of a lot better job here. Given that BMT vs Aretha and BMT vs Chaka are 'bootlegs', they're not going to get a proper release in the first place, so I figure offering him some money as a thanks for BMT vs Erykah (one of the few things I couldn't buy on CD) couldn't hurt. Maybe even influence him a bit about the non-remix tracks...

On a completely unrelated note, I hate it when people are too stupid to give up.

There's something I need to look at today for aewm... I forget what it is... hmm, early signs of Alzheimer's. azz, thanks for the project page. :-)

Writing this whilst over at the grandparents' looking after the dogs. It's eerily quiet. Living alone is going to suck. What bothers me is that I probably wouldn't care if i had net access right now. I need to listen to Ryan. Probably the most of anyone here...

Finally got around to dealing with azz's MWM hints patch -- I never particularly liked them, but I can deal with having if there and #ifdefed out. Having found another polish item in fixing that, I think I can get the next release out the door.

A really funny thing happened while azz and I were working it out -- we both did almost identical patches for rxvt, and sent them to each other at the same time. Of course, mine used override-redirect and his used MWM_something_or_other_no_border_please_etc, but this isn't too surprising if you know our respective personal tastes on the matter. Hopefully upstream will include them both and users will have the option.

Transparency in rxvt and derivatives is still broken and evil, but I'm not losing sleep over it.

I tidy-ified and XHTML-ified my web pages, and in doing so, I somehow changed my stylesheet so that it doesn't break Navigator 4.x completely anymore. I'm so bummed. I remember when it completely brought down the browser on a Windows system... ;-) At any rate, I highly reccomend tidy.

Decided I am a bumbling idiot that a certain newsgroup shouldn't have to skip over for a while. I know there's one or two of you here... I suppose I'll think about it again when school (and thus work at the STA) starts up again.

As if I needed further proof of having caught the Perl bug, I spent from 4 to 5 AM rewriting a perfectly good C program in Perl. I think it's because I wanted an excuse to fork off my revision, seeing as the author had seen fit to putting in all sorts of bloaty features since then.

Speaking of bloat, XText in Gnapster -- yuck. I'm only wary of it because it comes from XChat, and XChat is leaking memory like crazy as we speak. There are no good IRC clients... and I've become horribly addicted to tabs and Perl scripting. And I suppose I don't like the fact that it was put in before a way to fix the palette back to normal black-on-white was written. However, I am grateful that 1.3.11 is out at all. I sent a teensy patch to jasta back in the 1.3.10 days and I guess it got lost in the deluge of bugmail he surely gets[1]. Now that I'm sonewhat up to date with him, I can expand it and tweak every little UI thing that fits in same category. It's too bad there's no CVS, but I imagine that anything napster-related would attract a bunch of lusers who think they should expect CVS code to always work perfectly and that the author of course has time to answer all their complaints.

And with that, cue a luser rant... Burning off some much-unneeded steam in a good old classic flamewar. It's funny (but not really, I guess) how most people think they are so special that the rules for everyone else don't apply to them. Getting threats of action against ``my ISP'' for something as simple as replying to an insult is funny as hell, especially considering what the non-ISP entity in question actually is.

I am an evil pseudoromantic sap, and I still can't write decently.

Finally got to pinpointing (more like sledgehammerpointing) where the problem that's causing newer 2.[34].x kernels not to boot on my cra^Wlaptop. I've got about half of patch-2.3.11 to look through for the culprit, and sent a hopefully-not-too-clueless request for help narrowing it down further to l-k. I hope everyone isn't too completely locked onto doing 2.4.0-test or 2.2 work.

Taking pills makes me sick. It can't be what's in them, because they can't possibly dissolve that quickly. It has to be the act of swallowing. I think it's psychosomatic.

Pet peeve: CD-ROM drives that skip. I wouldn't even be using this one if my Discman wasn't horked. *sigh*...

[1] Eep, I just used ``bugmail'' as a generic, non-Bugzilla word. I'm getting enough of the real thing to necessitate a dedicated mailbox now, and I'm not even the one doing the fixing... :-)

jlbec: oh dear, don't use that.

if /bin/foo -bar; then

Never involve test unless you really must...

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