Older blog entries for jaq (starting at number 10)

meatspace

I had my last exam of the semester this morning. That's 'had' in the 'it was scheduled', not the 'I have done' sense. Seemingly coincidentally, there was a fatality on the train lines this morning, when some clown decided that their last contribution to society would be to cause chaos on the train lines. 3000+ people were held up at Gordon Station as CityRail closed the line between Gordon and Chatswood, replacing it with bus services. This would all be well and good, except for the fact that the bus services didn't show up for an hour, and then had to drive through peak hour traffic.

Needless to say, I got to uni 45 minutes after the exam had started. University policy says that once an exam has started, you can't enter it -- i.e. don't be late.

I now have a Request for Special Consideration form, in the hope that I don't get penalised and receive an Automatic Fail for not showing up on time.

Did I mention how much I hate CityRail? Shit, they're constantly and consistently screwing up, and the fares are always increasing. I'd be happy with that if the service was getting better, but all they're getting better at is giving the commuters a good servicing.

Meanwhile, I'm going to drown some sorrows, then head off to the SLUG meeting tonight. Tridge is going to be there, so it should be cool. Then off to the pub for more sorrow riddance.

hax0ring

I've been really slack lately (well, just busy with work and uni) and put off a lot of things I want to do; beefmail, flotilla, a key-signing tool for the Palm, and some ideas i've had involving a 3D shell/environment and lots of eye-candy -- all these are on the back burner, which I'd really like to be working on. *sigh*

rupert:

Damn straight, CID blocking is something I've wished for on phones for a long time. Screw phone games, lets see some *useful* features.

So we're sitting around at the spankyhouse, eating some jdub style gourmet pizza, and looking at what liedra, hypatia, spiv, nick and mark have done with their in-house wikiweb pages -- the most interesting being a collection of Markov generated texts seeded from their quotes file. I think out loud, "Mmm, IRC Markov bot," and within an hour, XFire has cobbled together some perl linking jwzs dadadodo with Net::IRC, and put her in #slug on OPN as jackie.

I've just spent most of the day researching random text generators, whilst jdub has been seeding jackie from #gnome... and meanwhile, she's becoming almost sentient :) I think she needs an advogato page, like ReadMe has.

Meanwhile, Cantanker had passed out on the couch.

I've just gone thru the People list and certified all the names that rang a bell: people I recognised from mailing lists, people who's code I've knowingly used. I deliberately didn't certify rms, however... a web of trust relies on you certifying other people as well as letting hundreds certify you as a master.

on the way home from the SLUG meeting tonight, I got harrassed by some drunk fsckwits on the bus for wearing my thinkgeek.com "got root?" cap. Made a real nice end to this shithouse week I've been having.

Oh yeah, saw anti-trust on Wednesday with Liedra, Nick, XFire, hypatia, and some others - friends of the above; then I saw it again on Thursday night with benjl. I actually enjoyed it... despite the obvious wrongness of it all, it was very entertaining. The screenings were probably the high point of my week.

it's been happening, but nothing worth writing home about... so i'll write it here instead. Relearning C++ for my OO Dev class; this OO project will take some time away from hacking fun stuff, like flotilla and lump. Real Soon Now, I tell you.

RyanMuldoon

I'd like to email you, but there ain't no email address on your personal page :) I'd like to hear your ideas though: mail to jaq at spacepants point org

ta

ork

okay, so my part time sysadmin job has finally decided to start paying me again. this is a good thing. I've also finished the bulk of some PHP based website I'm contracting on, which is even better, because the fscker was taking time away from more fun things like coding free software...

hax0ring

I've been working on my panelcam some more, and then started to write a GNOME gnutella client.. gtk-gnutella was okay, but I'm making some improvements (it's a complete rewrite, based on the same interface). Webpage for it up RSN.

FWIW, I used Glade again to build the interface. What Glade needs is a way to write snippets of code to link widgets together, like gtk_main_quit() on the exit menu, or showing the prefs window when that menu item is selected. I'm finding that I will spend a good day or so working on the interface, exporting the code, adding small bits, building; but those small bits of code get overwritten when you re-export the code :( I'm aware of the "don't overwrite this file" options, but that doesn't help when you add widgets/callbacks/signal handlers, and rename some others :)

I rewrote about 90% of the autogenerated code anyway :) (personality clash with the autogen code maybe? :)

Anyway, it's 2am, i'm tired, and i've got to get up at 7 :( G'nite all

Telsa wrote:

Someone was complaining about #gnome ignoring auto* questions and the lack of auto* docs. They too have a link to their home page and I can't find an email address, so in case they didn't know: the ORA-published auto* book is also online. Hope it helps. I tend not to answer questions I don't know answers to on #gnome. Sorry. :)

$DEITY bless the recent diary entries list... this was at the bottom of the page, and I'm glad I didn't miss it. Either my visual grep is buggy or google didn't return this link; Telsa, thank's heaps. That Journeyer status is well deserved. Let's hope that this one is more newbie friendly than the info pages.

As for #gnome, it was middle of the night UK time, so I'll give you that. The thing that irked me was that conversation occurred around my question, and yet there was no ACK that people didn't know the answer. Is that a trait of the channel? Here in .au, people tend to give a NAKs as often as ACKs. Maybe I'll come and lurk for a while.

Oh, and as for the personal page info, I've filled in all the fields, email address inclusive, but that doesn't get put onto the page. FWIW, my email address is on my homepage (which as you've said, is linked to from my personal info), right there on the front page.

meatspace

Gah, what a weekend. Friday night, coding until 0130. Saturday, up early to drive to Mt Tomar (2 hours away) for a wedding, then back to Pennant Hills for a 21st... again, not into bed until 0130 :) Sunday, up early again for rehersals and then onto the Regional Rover Council AGM... until 2315. Thank $DEITY for Mondays. "And on the first day, Jaq rested."

hax0ring

I spent most of today writing a gnome panel applet, which I'm calling panelcam, partly because i want a webcam app that doesn't take up screen space, and i want to learn how to write applets for the panel anyway. So i create a template from Glade, and read up on panelising the source...

Auto(make|conf) is pants. I don't know what's going on there, and i've read the info pages and the few tutorials on the web about them, and i'm still lost. all i wanted to do was get the darn thing to stick a -lpanel_applet in LDFLAGS, is it too much to ask? obviously.

In the end I did some heavy rm'ing, leaving me with 4 source files. A quick vi later and I had a working makefile that actually compiled the damn thing. As an applet, too.

So, not too impressed with Glade and Auto* at the moment (nor at the folks in #gnome on irc.gnome.org, who just ignored my questions -- I was under the impression that a couple of developers hung out on channels named after big projects, maybe I'm living in a fantasy world with elves, faeries and leprechauns.) I'm sure they're useful tools, but the learning curve was too steep today. Next time i'll pack my climbing tools.

meatspace

I went off to the doctors today... long time no visit. Just for a checkup. The results? well, the moles I was worried about aren't anything to worry about, the lump in my side is just a lipocyst (or something, sounds bad but is harmless apparently), and i've got bad posture and high blood pressure.

I'll willingly place money on the source of those last 2 ailments :)

social life?

Going to a wedding tomorrow, SWMBO's friend from school. She's way too young to get married :) Anyway, there's also a codefest at uni over the weekend, which i'll miss :( Not happy, Jan. I think I'm too involved with things, I deal superficially with each and don't go into any depth at all, and that's not really how I want to spend my life. Gunna have to kill off some processes.

Interweb

Aargh, I've just been billed for my hosting (after 10 or so days of free use), and just as I send off my credit card details, the DNS gets updated so that spacepants.org no longer exists. Furrfu.

Uni

Just hacked up a quick php script for a subject at uni, to work out an efficient solar car design. Well, until the above issue is resolved, this link is void.

Meatspace

Just got renominated as treasurer for the rover crew, which is good, as I've just worked out how to do the account books (it's only taken a year :) The admin in me says to write up a methodology so that others don't have to work it all out from first principles.

Wow.

I just saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Wow.