Older blog entries for duncanm (starting at number 19)

Life:

Back in boston now. It's nice and cold here and everywhere is covered in snow.

So pretty.

I'm happy to be back here.

Others:

On another note: I'm really jetlagged. Hong Kong -> Chicago -> Boston. Luckily, i didn't get stuck at O'Hare.

Oh.. the new galeon is really nice. 0.8.4, go grab it quick.

Mail:

Lots of Mail.
Lots of it to process. Thank god for Evolution.

Weekend:

Planning on staying at voltron's place this weekend and we're gonna go see AntiTrust together.

Also hoping to officially start working this weekend.

Life

Oh... did I say I love Montreal? Anyhow... a lot of college application work to be done now. Lots of other school work too, as the semester is slowly coming to an end.

Coding

I have a quiz/test tomorrow on structs, it shouldn't be too bad.

Sidenote: from what i understand of structs in C (well, my class teaches C++ with the AP classes)

struct FOO { int bar; int baz };

would create a struct 'handler' named FOO that has two int elements... from that onwards, if you want a FOO struct, you do:

FOO x = {1,2};

and x will be initialized such that x.bar is 1 and x.baz is 2.

so, why in a lot of GNOME code and other code, do i see this:

typedef struct {
	int bar;
	int baz;
} FOO;

so that the struct has no 'handler' at all, and only typedef'd into a type? what's the difference between doing this and just naming the struct with a handler?

I just got back from Montreal from Thanksgiving.

Living is pretty busy right now, so I don't have as much time as I used to have to do computer related stuff.

I forgot to add that I'm using voltron's ithought to post this. The posting dialog is pretty sweet. This has lots of potential.

i have been quiet.

Bought the sigur ros CD last weekend. as iain said, it's very pretty. I made a copy of it to Minidisc immediately after I bought it and it's been in my MD player since last saturday. As I was browsing thru sigur ros' website, I was pleasently surprised to see Chinese reviews from hong kong... that's pretty nifty, i say.

Things have been quiet on the computer front. tried nautilus PR2 when it came out and liked it a lot. the vault is a particularly cool feature.

AP Computer Science class is getting a little more interesting lately, since we stopped just C++ language learning and started to talk about algorithms and analyse how efficient they are. we got thru 4 sorting algorithms by now: the selection, bubble, merge and insertion sorts. today we worked out how to use Euclid's method to find GCDs and also ended the lecture with an brief intro topointers and references that would continue tomorrow. it'll be fun and nice to finally pin down my understanding of how pointers work, i'm looking forward to it.

while reading lilo's diary entries... hmm, maybe i should start writing python again. it's all depends on how much time i have.

leaving for Montreal in a week for thanksgiving break. hopefully i'll get to see Quebec city too... also need to contact dria, or phil; maybe I can get a tour of the ZKS facilities... ;-)

oh, i plan on buying stephen northcutt's book on intrusion detection to read during my Montreal trip. Dan Farmer and Wieste venema has been putting out an excellent series of articles on that topic on Dr.Dobb's.

listening to sigur ros' sevfn-g-englar... sleeping angels....

saturday

went into the city today (again) with voltron.

we met george france from the Compaq Cambridge Research Lab. We stayed there for around 2/3 hours in the afternoon, mucking around with crazy hardware and just having lots of fun hanging out in a research lab.
Interesting sights:

• George's 48 nodes Beowulf cluster for iPAQ development (kernel compile time: about 4 seconds)
• The 5 iPAQs in george's briefcase.
• Brilliant iPAQ screenage in daylight.
• dragging windows on an iPAQ in opaque mode.
• Beautiful view of the Charles River waterfront from the office.
• Big computers, more big computers, and then some more.
• Talking to George about school.
• And something else too.

Thanks George!

shopping

things i bought:

• bought the new radiohead CD, _Kid A_.
• bought _Tigermilk_, by Belle and Sebastian.
• magazines (3 in total).
• Alexander Besher sci-fi book, _Mir_, from the MIT bookstore. (Cheap, only $3 bucks. it's hardcover too)

things i wanted to buy, but didn't:

• more gap long-sleeve stretchy t-shirts.

btw, george is easily one of the coolest hacker i've met. hi george!

went out into the city today, hung out with voltron in cambridge.

bought the new Channel Zero book (the whole thing, #1-#5) and also the new bjork CD.

Pad Thai is good, esp when crispy.

* * *

I lugged around the Edward Tufte book i checked out from the library today, it's heavy.

The new kids in school are pretty stupid these days, it's weird to be old.

mozilla is getting to be really nice.

• Talked to mathieu today on the phone. It was great. Great to learn more about bonobo, also great to hear a frenchman speak english ;) I must work hard on my french, so that one day mathieu is willing to speak french to me ;)

• lurked around on irc, still can't get cvs nautilus to compile due to some OAF errors. Need to clean up my build system and/or update more code.

• Spoke to some younger kid at school (woohoo, i'm a senior now), some of them seem to have some computer knowledge and are interested in learning how to use linux... maybe the lab would work out afterall. That gave me hope.

aaronl: I acknowledge that I don't understand Bonobo too well, but I have to say, even I think you argument doesn't make any sense.

You said that by using components, you end up using a big mega-app for launching everything. While it is true that this can be done, it does not need to be done. Therefore, the only answer to "Doesn't this defeat the purpose of having a multitasking operating system?" is simply, no, it doesn't.

The purpose of component-based design is to split frontend interfaces from backend functionality. Features in a gnapster bonobo component that iain mentioned in his entry can only be worked out if an extensive component system is in place. Using components won't lose any functionality, it would just increase flexibility.

Why everything should become a component rather than a chuck of code in a library that the application using it calls directly.

Rather than forking gnapster, why don't you try to do what iain suggested to do with bonobolizing gnapster by just "using its calls directly"?

And when there are no pros, the answer is usually very simple to arive at: the flexibility of this particular thing has no purpose, and therefore sucks.

Wow, you need to get some clue, dude.

Wow

I just saw Fight Club on DVD with an iMAC DV in a friends room. kick ass movie.

Began building parts of Nautilus to help out on the testing work.

Talked to voltron for a bit in the afternoon. Gotta visit him sometimes.

Talked to jdub for a bit about his project with intl developer information, could be a really fun project to work on.

it's time to post another diary after the whole summer and stuff.

So i went back to hong kong for the summer and found a job mid/late July at Linux Center in Hong Kong. They are a pretty cool Linux startup in hong kong and i'll have to say it's one of the best place in Hong Kong.

Got hired as a cluster engineer and worked on building an LVS cluster for demos at LW Expo Hong Kong. Went pretty well, got to meet some important people in the Asia-Pacific Linux community, spread the world of open source to a lot of Hong Kong business managers and had a pretty good time.

Then I worked on doing some Chinese GNOME stuff for a week or so... it's a work in progress.

Now i'm back in Boston and going to thru the final year of High school now. College making things a bit hectic and school work is also a bit crazy... the Student Linux Lab is stalled right now, so i'm a bit bummed off, but it's good to rethink the entire stretegy for the Lab.

Mozilla nightly for Linux kicks ass, btw.