Well now. How's that for a "long time, no post"? 4 months. Yeesh.

I am now ensconced in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. My application for employment authorisation is in the works and I have all my appendage crossed in the hope that it will be approved. The company is really cool, one of those ideal techie companies.

Katy is coming along nicely and I've recently released version 0.3 which is a total rewrite for KDE2. Tons of things still left to do on it though 8) You are cordially invited to give it a whirl.

I also have been inducted into the glorious bliss of cable TV and cable internet access. I'd better watch out or I'm going to become one of those addicts!

Well. Today is the big day. Canada, here I come.

Heh. Well. I am now one of the unemployed. Packed up my things, said goodbye to everybody and walked out on Thursday afternoon. Bearing in mind that this is only the second job I've had (and I was fired from the first one by the samurai-sword-wielding-psycho-boss) , it's a bit weird not having to go to work every morning. ;)

But of course this doesn't mean I am without permanent free Internet access. Time to visit my g/f at university! ;)

Katy-wise, I've done some more work over the last week which has improved the rendering of the text especially when tab characters are involved (evil things that they are). You can also move the cursor now ;) You can even select text while doing so! *the.crowd.goes.wild*

Flippancy aside, next up is mouse support (click to move cursor, drag to select, etc.) and then add in CTRL-Left/Right word jumping. Oh yes, and text insertion/deletion/etc. ;) Preferences should probably come next so that the morons.. err.. users can select fonts and things.

Quiet weekend. Bought humungous suitcases on Saturday afternoon for our trip to Canada. Saw Charlie's Angels on Sunday evening. Quite cool in a Matrixy/KungFu kinda way 8)

I've put Katy v0.3 into CVS on SourceForge (project page) and will continue working on getting it up to the level of Katy v0.2.3 as soon as possible. My last day of work is Thursday, so from then on I should have more time to hack on Katy and other goodies that deserve my attention 8)

Katy

Katy v0.3 is coming along nicely. I did some more work over the last couple of nights and it now has decent session management support and is coded as a "unique" application -- only one instance will ever run and starting a new instance just sends a DCOP message to the existing instance. This all works funkily and in combination with session management too ;)

We also have a flashing cursor now. But you can't move it yet ;) I.e. next todo = keyboard support.

More EJB Unit Tests

I've had to come up with a method for unit testing our product's EJBs and I've settled on JUnit. It's quite cool. For the moment, since we're using Inprise's AppServer for our testing, running the unit tests is really simple (the vbj command sets up the environment nicely and then starts the Java VM with the JUnit test runner class) and I haven't had to add anything to the JUnit framework for EJB support. But to test this stuff on any other EJB server is going to require some sort of global setup thingy to be added to the framework which does the initialisation necessary for the EJB server in question. And that I haven't figured out quite yet because I couldn't get the TestDecorator subclassing to work which seemed to the Right Way (tm) to do it. "Bother," said Pooh.

Stackless Python and Funky-Eye-Candy Games

Stackless Python is a modification of the standard Python 1.5.2 runtime so that it does not use the C stack. This has some quite cool benefits and it seems to have convinced a game company to write (at least partially) a game using Stackless Python. The game in question being EVE-Online. Can you say EYE CANDY?

High-speed Internet Access in Canada

Since I'm going to Canada, I'm curious to know what sort of high-speed Internet access options there are? Cable modem? ADSL? Something else? Coming from South Africa where 56K dialup is the most common for home Internet access and the only faster option being weird satellite hookups, I really am clueless about this sort of thing. Info, anyone?