Advogato blog for decklin

1 Feb 2001

Thu, 1 Feb 2001 18:43:32 GMT

jschauma: No, that one has two 'e's (well, three of them, actually). [Insert random bitterness at people in my life who smoke pot and intentionally fuck up their health in other various ways and who are sucking away time I could have used doing some worthwhile hacking here.]

19 Jan 2001

Fri, 19 Jan 2001 17:42:45 GMT

Wow, two weeks of this term have gone by and I haven't written a thing. I've been really quite busy outside of class and I've had more to write in my "personal" diary than here. This is not, however, a bad thing, because I have a girlfriend now ;-)

Currently I am sifting through the autobook in order to fix more broken Gaim makefiles. Yeargh. Hairiness.

qiv 1.6 got released; please bang on it and yell at me if I've broken anything.

I think I can finish extending the parser for the aewm goodies in a relatively sane way; now I just need to find some time to implement it.

I really should stop using -pre kernels. (Hi to everyone who knows what I'm talking about...)

4 Jan 2001

Thu, 4 Jan 2001 03:46:33 GMT

goingware: repeat after me three times:

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

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

4 Jan 2001

Thu, 4 Jan 2001 01:08:08 GMT

joey: I Am Dumb(TM). Thank you. :-)

3 Jan 2001

Wed, 3 Jan 2001 20:08:58 GMT

Heisenbugs

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.

2 Jan 2001

Tue, 2 Jan 2001 05:01:23 GMT

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.

29 Dec 2000

Fri, 29 Dec 2000 04:47:43 GMT

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.

20 Dec 2000

Wed, 20 Dec 2000 06:34:20 GMT

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.

6 Dec 2000

Wed, 6 Dec 2000 05:00:25 GMT

Life

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.

18 Nov 2000

Sat, 18 Nov 2000 22:45:49 GMT

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