Older blog entries for decklin (starting at number 63)

The X Window System
The X Window System
The X Window System

There is no such thing as "XWindows". Thank you. ;-)

Well, this is weird. There are two problems in qiv that I still can't track down:

• the jump command (j[f,b,t][number]) doesn't work.
• adjusting brightness/contrast/gamma back to zero doesn't update the image properly.

The funny thing is, Adam sees the first one and I don't, whereas I see the second one and Adam doesn't. So if someone would be so kind as to download pre4 and try to figure out which one of us is on crack, it'd be very helpful.

To be honest, the code responsible for both things is a mess, but I'm working on making it nicer.

Life

Life? What life? I don't remember having a life.

Had a nicely productive day today... finished my qiv prepatch[1], made a bugfix stable release of aewm and whipped my devel tree into a releaseable state. I don't know why the fonts are still screwy on my setup... if there are no new .debs of X by the time I get back to school, I'll have to try compiling from CVS myself. For now, I'll just blame the implementation and warn people that their heads may fall off if they try to compile it.

I also noticed that after the "incident" last weekend, my laptop's hinges were wobbling oddly. Apparently a screw fell out on the underside, and I have nothing to replace it with. I think the only way I'm going to be able to ask for one from the Clueless Helpdesk from Hell (without a work order and leaving my computer there for a week, that is) is by utilizing the fact that I "know" someone who manages there. Heh heh heh. Not that I really expect them to just have a box of screws lying around, but it's worth a shot.

Hobbit is still around, and answered my email quickly. Cool.

I've also been selling a lot of computer junk I don't use anymore on eBay. If anyone knows how to figure out the speed of a modem by the chipset name/number, let me know. I am a lazy bum and don't want to plug them all in.

I listened to Synthesis on WWUH for the first time since getting back home today. Yikes. Anyway, I had forgotten just how much I'd missed it. If you have a local community station, please support it, because decent radio is really dying out.

[1] ObNewMillennium: yes, I was writing code while everyone else was watching the ball drop/drinking champagne/etc. God, I'm such a dork.

My life just flashed before my eyes. I was about to go get something in the next room, and I knocked my laptop off the balcony. Luckily, it didn't fall 12 feet down the other side but only about 3 and onto my foot. the LCD assembly sort of popped apart, but I put it back together. The dongle for the network card is, however, kaput. I have a nasty feeling that when I get back on campus they are going to try to force me to buy a whole new card to get a dongle. Hello, eBay...

azz sent me Xft patches for aewm. The anti-aliased text doesn't look nearly as nice as I thought it would, though, because I can only get X to display it in one font, which appears to be Courier New on crack. The bizarre thing is XftFontOpen always returns sucessfully, giving me this particular face, no matter what sort of garbage name I give it. Maybe the calling conventions are messed up. It uses very weird semantics, like

  XftFontOpen(dpy, DefaultScreen(dpy),
    XFT_FAMILY, XftTypeString, foo,
    XFT_SIZE, XftTypeInteger, bar,
    NULL);

This is almost the same as XtVa*, but why in the world do we need to specify the type and the option name separately? Am I going to have a font family that's an integer? Who knows. Call me crazy, but I kinda like those hairy old X fontspecs.

Oh, and the aaronls of the world will probably have a field day with this (ahem):

          Stripped Bin /   RSS / Share
No Xft:          17k /  804k /  696k
With Xft:        69k / 1460k / 1108k

I have to admit the bin size is curious. It is, of course, dynamically linked, but I had to double-check just to be sure.

As I want to eventually release this thing at some point, I'm thoroughly self-LARTing myself for leaving my in- progress .deb work on my main computer (not on the network, as my dorm's power has been cut over break. Just when you thought these people couldn't be cheap enough... anyway...) I will have to remember what it was and reconstruct it if I want to be timely.

Since Iain did it (whoo, thanks for the excuse!), I might as well recap what I bought after meeting James for our keysigning yesterday.

• Rinocerose: Installation Sonore (this is incredibly good; it even cheers me up, which is no small feat)
• David Holmes: Bow Down To the Exit Sign
• Spring Heel Jack: Disappeared
• Medeski, Martin & Wood: The Dropper
• Speedy J: A Shocking Hobby
• PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
• Underworld: Everything, Everything (disappointing)
• Reprazent: In The Mode (let's hear it for leaking MP3s before you finalize the track list...)
• Philip Glass: Symphony No. 3
• A Guy Called Gerald: Essence

And then I adopted the netcat Debian package. I'm pretty sure I've taken care of all the issues behind the 'normal' bugs with my upload, I'm just waiting on some responses from submitters. I'll get to the wishlist stuff pretty soon; it seems like a fun project. What I didn't realize when I started is that the last upstream release was in 1996, and I have my doubts that the author is going to reply to me. At any rate, the FTP site I supposedly downloaded the source from is down at the moment. I don't think I'd mind taking it over upstream if needed though. It's a cute little piece of software.

Finished housesitting this morning. I don't know why I find it surprising that I was asked, "could you upgrade AOL [motioning to CD, they even bundle them with the McNewspaper around here now...] while I'm gone? I don't know how to do it." Oh well.

Something old,
Something new,
Something borrowed,
Something blue...

Got back home last night; we're finally getting some snow as I speak. It's lovely. I suppose I just like snow in general. It gave me a name for my new mixtape, anyway.

Apparently I may be needed for a keysigning while I'm here, which will be nice. I currently have no sigs on my key, and identified for Debian through other means. Given recent rumblings about PKI and "unstable" people, (raise your hand if you have received inpatient treatment for depression... keep it up if it was not your idea.. ok) I'm not too happy that I went that route.

Since my last update most of my hacking has been small gaim tweaks. The code base is a bit tangled, but the progression from only-TOC to TOC-and-maybe-experimental-Oscar and then fully plugin-ified modular protocols seems to be shaking things out nicely. There's definitely a lesson here: I'm going to write up a design before starting any brand-new big projects.

Finals were, for the first time, not very stressful. Well, other academic things were stressful, but nothing collapsed. Bent maybe, but still intact.

Taught a friend a few things about CSS. I'll save the world from bad HTML yet... for some reason yesterday I was thinking about freshman English, and it occurs to me now that way back then I was posting like mad to ciwah and waiting for CSS to save the world. I think I've posted maybe one or two things to all the groups I read since taking a break from Usenet in September (real September, not, well, you know). In real life I think I've finally become somewhat more comfortable with my essentially quiet nature, instead of agonizing over it as a fault. I wonder if I was simply trying to make up for it back then, or if everyone just takes a while to find their own October.

I just found Avalon and read all the archives last night (I'm never going to kick the up-till-3AM habit). Definitely something which passes my "things which are so good, I feel compelled to pass them on to everyone on Advogato" criterion.

Must hit up Jackie for more literature reccomendations. She's just eerily spot-on. It always makes me grin when people ask what class I'm reading $THAT_BOOK for. Of course, the better stuff on these shelves tends to be pre- highlighted and margin-scribbled, that may have something to do with it...

There's a "quadruple-platinum selling" band on the TV in the next room which I have never ever heard of. This is also strangely satisfying.

I had forgotten that I put a "Kill Your TV" sticker my little brother made me on the printer here. There's a host on the internet called kill.your.tv, somewhere. Don't know who runs it, but I'm jealous.

It's been tough lately. Don't feel like writing much more about it. Instead of depressing everyone, I'd rather cheer you up: listen to this set on Groovetech.

Joe Marin - 45RPM Jam

Yes, I know it's icky RealAudio, but it's worth it.

Dune

Well, it was decent. But I definitely want to read the book now, as I feel that I'm missing something.

I have a new favorite kernel option: CONFIG_HAPPYMEAL. Now we just need CONFIG_MAKE_COFFEE and I'll be all set.

I've realized that I'm much younger than I thought. Not because of committing another stupid blunder, but because I've failed to fully grok something that I "knew" in an intellectual sense. And this is it: people will believe that any sort of metaphysical-sounding bullshit is intelligent.

Maybe a week or so ago, someone (I've forgotten the name, my apologies) posted a link to Peter Suber's Nomic page (as a snippy but well-deserved jab at the Debian voting process), which I read with great interest (unlike most of what happens on -vote, but back to the point). I wrote a paper for my economics course based on comparing a memetic view of economic modeling and Nomic. And it was complete bullocks. I made vague generalizations, swept theory under the rug, and filled up pages with "look at me, I'm smart" circumlocutions. The whole thing vaguely made me want to vomit, but I am cursed with a inability to fill blank space on a deadline and I tend to take what I can get. So I go to class today, and not only was the paper handed back to me with a perfect grade, but the majority of the lecture was based on stuff I said. It's depressing.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, a friend of mine wrote some very interesting literary stuff in her online diary (elsewhere). I hadn't had a real discussion with her in a while, and she's one of the few people left these days who seems to actually care about this stuff, so I just went off on how I saw A Clockwork Orange and associated things through Barth and Snow Crash and my own (lack of) religion and whatnot. I tried to be honest, because I rarely have the chance to, even (especially) to myself, but it still felt far too dense and wrapped up in metaphysical indirection (or perhaps $20 vocabulary). And in responding she flattered me just enough to really get my goat. She says I treat here like she's more intelligent than she is, but I feel like it's closer to treating her like she's dumb enough not to see through me.

The third thing that got me thinking about this topic was an article forwarded to alt.music.jungle by Lee Stoiser. I know, unfortunately, that there are very few if any people here who feel the same kind of connection to this culture that I do, so I can't imagine anyone will experience the same sort of disgust watching someone ripping into it for the sake of their own mental masturbation. But I read it and I said to myself, "This is what you are doing, however much it's exaggerated. And you should be ashamed." I know that it's the content pissing me off as much as the form, but still.

Maybe I'm developing an ____-complex? (oh, fill in the blank yourself, you know who I mean.)

Been listening to: Outkast, Pet Shop Boys, Seba. Some things are still good...

Elsewhere

It was a day for clipping and saving. argent wrote:

The problem is: the Internet is overflowing like a septic tank full of rotting condoms, and every day more and more people standing there with their finger in the dike are realising that the thing on the other side isn't the sea.

The horrid thing is, it's true. Not necessarily of any specific place, even -- of everywhere. But I still feel guilty. At any rate, his presence will be missed.

Then I read the school's newspaper today and found out that someone I "knew", but didn't actually know, died. And I remembered when I was still in high school and he showed me around the place, and how impressed I was with the spirit and individuality that he was able to maintain. I said to myself, "there must be something good about this place if he can thrive like that, if it hasn't burned him out the way my milquetoast suburban town has done to me." I decided to come here, but I never found an excuse to talk to him, never went out to the place he lived off campus, or anything. I didn't see him around very often, but every time I felt that I should have thanked him. And I feel guilty.

It's funny how what you do, and what you don't do, are often flip sides of the same cowardice.

"Once you hear music, it's gone, in the air. You can never listen to it again."

I had this funny thought today. I said to myself, "you know, I bet that looking back, today will be seen as some sort of tuning point. Maybe people won't think of today's date, but they'll notice something." Then a little while later, I remembered that today was the .us election. "Hmm, I suppose that adds to it a bit, doesn't it?" I must be going a little loopy.

(I voted in absentia a couple weeks ago. Anyway...) Today I went on a quest to remove TO_ from my .procmailrc. The proliferation of different mailing list headers out there has restored my faith in rugged individualism somewhat. :-) I also decided that I have accumulated too many web comics, and went through that perennial rite of geek passage, Writing A Program To Download All Your Comics Before You Get Up. I'm suprised it took me so long to get to this point...

Did some boring software updates. Not too sure why I feel "bored", but I've resolved to pull Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days out of the dusty part of my bookmarks and actually read it. That and someone posted it Crackmonkey today, giving me a reminder that it actually existed. Should be good for some new ideas.

and finally, in the Scary Things department: I actually turned down an offer to see a movie at 2AM yesterday because I had to get up for class. I feel ooooold. The class was canceled.