Older blog entries for duncanm (starting at number 22)

Hi guys, not much to say today.

Started reading Defying Grafity, a book about the making of Apple's Newton that I borrowed from voltron. It's really neat stuff. Looking at what people want to do with iPAQ and porting Linux/GNOME to it now, it's freaky to released that the Newton team envisioned a lot of that nearly 10 years ago. They were even able to ship a product. Wow.

Yeah, Happy Chinese New Year to All.

Another I saw AntiTrust diary

I went to AntiTrust with my friend voltron last night. It was fun, I guess. I walked into the theater all psyched out and ready for a kick-ass movie, but I guess the stupid ads they show before the previews depressed me. The previews they showed sucked too. The movie started, and I felt like the movie sucked already.

It was an 'okay' film, with some interesting plot twists, I guess. Anthony (aka voltron) liked it, actually, despite the fact that he seemed to think otherwise before we walked in. We move agree that it might not be an excellent movie about the Free Software (Open Source) movement, it is an good/ acceptable starting point to get non-techie people interested in Open Systems.

I think he is right that the movie was actually technically quite accurate, for a Hollywood movie. I also remembered that there were definitely scenes cut out from the movie that you can see in the online trailer... ie. the scene where you see Rachel Leigh Cook in her underwear. Oh well.

Claire Forlani is so hot.


Iron-Chef and Giant Lopsters

Saw Iron Chef with tony after the movie. They cooked giant lopsters... Iron Chef Italian vs. Tokyo-style Chinese cuisine chef. Of course the Iron Chef won, he definitely had the cooler appearance sequence. They show him raise to the Kitchen Stadium holding a bright red ripe tomato... with a full orchestra (or was it just the strings section) surrounding him.

I love Japanese TV.

ps. I wish raph would let me change my username, obviously even something like my friend voltron (Anthony) thinks I'm duncan on advogato, when I'm still mustapha, that being my old nick that I used for 1.5 years.

Hands too cold, must stop typing.

10 Jan 2001 (updated 10 Jan 2001 at 18:59 UTC) »
Duncan tries voltron's ithought.

Looks good, use it!

10 Jan 2001 (updated 10 Jan 2001 at 00:47 UTC) »
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.

1 Dec 2000 (updated 1 Dec 2000 at 02:37 UTC) »

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?
29 Nov 2000 (updated 29 Nov 2000 at 00:34 UTC) »

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.

15 Nov 2000 (updated 15 Nov 2000 at 14:07 UTC) »

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!
1 Oct 2000 (updated 1 Oct 2000 at 17:15 UTC) »

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.

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