Older blog entries for duncanm (starting at number 27)

Got my first letter of rejection last friday from St. Andrews, but I got a letter of acceptance from U. of Arizona today.

That makes me feel better.

4 Feb 2001 (updated 4 Feb 2001 at 20:28 UTC) »

hi.

My name is Duncan Mak, this is my new nick. I used to be mustapha.

well, some people (like miguel and raph) still call me mustapha at times.

Anyhow, been working hard. It's good that the movie is shot, hopefully it won't come back all black. Been busy trying to help out the evolution build process.

Been reading Stopshowers!, a book about the creation of Windows NT. It's pretty interesting stuff. From what I gather, they did checkins without version control when they were working on NT ('91-'93, when i was still in elementary school) The book talked of a whiteboard in the Build lab for writing down names of files to check-in, and coders "working in the Build lab to hand in the code." How quaint!

Deep C Programming has been good. I really need to find time to code some shell stuff for Evolution now. Oh by the way, I'm happy that I got the only perfect score on my last AP Computer Science test.

Today Shot a movie today, really tired.

Saw the school's Varsity basketball game instead of coding. We lost, but the game wasn't too good. Lots of contact and fouls. People jumping up in the air and then slamming down hard on the floor.

Not a good sight.

28 Jan 2001 (updated 28 Jan 2001 at 21:43 UTC) »

Finally finished all remaining work. My Work Mail vfolder is empty once again.

Handed in my timesheet. I'll have money soon.

I have lots of homework, but it's also superbowl night with 'Matrix'-style instant-replay. Decisions decisions.

I am happy today

On Fridays, I don't have anymore classes after 11:45, so I decided to go into the city today.

I went into the office and met some old friends, and made some new ones. That was fun.

Looking at ettore code is really motivational, he's so good with emacs, it's scary. Maybe I just haven't seen enough of crazy coding action.

I officially signed in to become a hacking monkey, that makes me happy.

To inifinity and beyond!

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?

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