Older blog entries for dto (starting at number 66)

I have been doing a lot of work on Octal's graphical interface. I want very much for the program to reach usable beta as soon as is possible, and since I have this entire week off I'm going to try the best I can to bring it there.

The new widget builder is in place... the most common three widgets are implemented and functioning. I also incorporated a little bug-fix that solves a glitch in the connection drawing code; thanks to Richard Todd from the mailing list.

Check out the screenshots page to see pics. The weekly tarball should be online Sunday evening.

In other news, I am very pleased to hear that Gnu.org is modernizing its administration tools. I was recently told that updating of www.gnu.org has been moved entirely to CVS (which means I finally have to learn it :-). Overall this is a good thing---as has been their use of SSH tools on some machines in the gnu network. I just never could get Kerberos working correctly for very long... it always seemed to break. Kudos to GNU for upgrading.

Testing.

Last week before vacation... oooohhohohhhooooohhhhh!

Octal. Very pleased. We're about to renovate the old Octalmachines sourceforge site and turn it into a repository for machine developers and gearlib folks. Basically, a community site with real potential. I've got some folks to help out with that side of things while I continue to focus on the main application and its development.

School. Today I had a doctor's appointment in the morning, then visited the town hall to pick up Zero's new dog license and also to get a notarized proof of my Massachusetts residency (for the grad school application.) I also ordered a transcript from the community college I went to in 1996-1997 (whoa, long time ago!).

Octal stuff

Got the "default parameters" thing working. Also fixed a nasty "variable not getting initialized" kind of bug while I was at it. That DDD program is saving me lots of time---thanks again GNU/FSF.

I'm putting the tarball online tomorrow or so. No matter how difficult I think something is going to be, just working for a little while makes it better :-).

Other

Ari and I went to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon today. What a wonderful movie!

Good mood today... last night I typed up a quick proof for a problem the students hadn't been able to figure out, and sent them a PDF. Tutored some more between 10-12 (mostly we went over how to construct an NFA from a right-linear grammar, which is a neat procedure) and then came home. I'm going to try to get my art project done today, and I want to do some Octal work as well.

Last night's show went very well. Twenty minutes before I went on, Ariane showed up. Ten minutes before I went on, Ari pulled out her microphone and suggested we do another spontaneous abstract-girl-vocals accompaniment, like we had done in NYC last june. Steve hooked us up and we were ready to go. I'd say it went pretty well, the audience seemed to have a good time, and Ari's vocal improvisations were fabulous.

I even made thirty bucks,but my parking ticket will cost half of that :-(. Anyway I'm tutoring later on, will work on Octal after that.

What an incredibly long day. I awoke at 7:15 to leave for school, and then had that calculus exam. Between 10:20 and 12:30 I tutored, then after Physics class we had our robotics project meeting. I decided to build a base much like the tank-style one in the Mindstorms Constructopedia (but with a better processor and sensor system.) I'm most likely going to be doing a subsumption-style architecture... nerves, signals, responses etc.

From 5PM to 7:30 I tutored in theory of computation... we went over the correspondence between NFA and regular expressions, conversion of NFA to DFA, lambda transitions, etc etc etc. What a long process. Many of the students had inadequate discrete maths background, so if we are talking about how the transition function of a DFA is going to map {states}x{alphabet} --> {states} and they don't know what the cartesian product of sets is... eeh. I hear some of them are on their third try with this course! I can't blame them, really. I have been to several state schools here, and Discrete Maths is not taught very well. Plus, this is a 7AM course that combines day and night students, and some of the night people haven't had discrete math in years!

I'm not really sure what to do. From what they tell me, their understanding is helped by the explanations and examples, so maybe it will be enough. To get them through. Otherwise they don't graduate :-( the course is required.

I have a 3-day weekend coming up. I can't wait to attack Octal and get some more coding done. There will be a developer's release this weekend, including plugin-testing interactive bits and the revised/finished API.

I'm basically over that cold I had. I spent almost all of today studying for tomorrow's exam---I will be at school from 8:30AM - 7PM!! For those last 2 hours I will be tutoring Computability Theory students, but besides that and the robotics meeting I must complete that Java assignment and also my Visual Design project for this week :-(. Gonna be a big crunch, probably worse than today. I'm planning to write the program at school, type it in at home and debug. I don't know what I'm going to do about the art assignment---I may have to leave it for the nighttime and stay up late.

Better remind myself to pick up some 3M Spray adhesive and my Rx in the evening.

I've been sick this week... I finally got that bug that was going around seemingly everywhere. My family all got it, all the Computer Science faculty got it, and now me :-(.

I'm getting over it though. I have so much to do!

Ari and I watched Silence of the Lambs last night. It's our favorite movie, and we wanted to get up to speed in preparation for the release of the sequel next week. Pretty exciting!

I don't know what it is about printing out code to reread it and make notes with a pencil. I find it clears my head, lets me see the code in a new light. Lots of fun. I also printed out Owen Taylor's GTK drawing tutorial, as it shows how to do backing stores to prevent flicker. I'll probably take these pages all to bed tonight to read.

I've been using Nautilus for about 2 days now. Pretty schweet. This app has a lot of potential. Now that I have kernel 2.4 running, my IDE chipset can run in the much faster DMA mode. My machine is noticeably a bit more peppy.