Older blog entries for jaq (starting at number 27)

Names have been changed to protect the guilty (i.e. myself)

[Q] I've gotten the shits with $program, so i tried $alternate-program which does $thing better.

[Me] Aww, but $program is so good!

[Q] Nah, I just don't like it anymore. Not for $thing.

[Me] Ah well.

[H] Yeah, $program has always sucked for me! It's so slow! It takes ages to do $thing!

[Me] Actually, it's $libthing that $program uses that does $thing, it's not $program doing it at all.

[H] WHATEVER! $program still sucks! $alternate-program rocks!

[Me] "Actually, it's $libthing that does $thing" already!

[H] $program uses crappy library to do $thing, therefore $program is crap, see? Now stop being a dickhead. I'm an end user, I dont' care what happens on the inside.

[Me] Me dickhead? I'm asking you to be correct in your criticism, and you're just being stubborn.

[H] Look, I used $program, I see what $program does, and it's slow. I don't care what it does to do $thing, the fact is that it's crap.

*sigh of frustration* let's just ignore the fact that once $libthing improves then $program (and $another-similar-but-not-alternate-program, which H uses) will be much faster.

H is a good friend, I really like them, but just sometimes it can be frustrating talking to them -- sometimes they can really be quite stubborn.

Knowing my luck, they'll read this and work out who it's about, and then go postal on my butt.

SteveMallett: I don't want to burst your bubble (well, I guess I do or I wouldn't be writing this entry), I haven't seen Titanic either.

Released a new version of glsnake today. apt-get it if you know what's good for you. Hacked a lot with cfengine to get the proxy machines for the satellite offices configured nicely... up until 2 days ago I had 4 machines at various states of Debian potato installed, one hadn't been touched for a year. All with various daemons running on them. I've now cleaned them up and am working on getting cfengine, the admin's friend, to take good care of them. Hacked up an equivs package to ensure all the necessary tools are installed. Equivs is a nice hack tool ;) I've drunk about half a bottle of this really nice port that Steph got me for her birthday. Yeah, you read that correctly. She wanted to thank me for organising her birthday music and her speech, so she got me some Draytons Old Decanter Port. Very tasty... I'm tempted to drink the rest of it right now. got paid, got a Halfdave gig lined up, christmas just around the corner... everythings good right now. Now to play RtCW again... ultra-mega-mega hard was too easy. I wish there was another level to do it at :)

PROBABLILITY OF JERKING OFF: SLIM TO NONE -- WILL GET REAL SEX INSTEAD.

sneakums elides too often.

grr.

some fucking arsehole has decided to send some kind of outlook worm to a whole bunch of linux lists using one of my email addresses. I have just received about 10 or so bounce messages letting me know that mail I never sent with a subject I can't read was intercepted whilst being delivered to mailing lists I've never heard of before.

I can just ignore it, but the style of bounce and intercept message are many and varying, so there's no simple way to procmail it under the carpet. I could send a mail to these lists informing them that someone is spoofing my mail address, and suggest they don't accept mail from people who aren't subscribed to their lists (as I am not), but that's a hassle.

I decided I should automatically sign all my mail from now on, but I'm reluctant to do that because it's a hassle, and the more mail I sign, the more likely my key will be compromised (more data means increased likelihood of a crib).

Meanwhile, in the real world, I spent the last 2 days revelling in They Might Be Giants. They came to Sydney for 2 shows, and an in-store signing. I got Then and Mink Car signed by the Johns, and Lyndall got the Man It's So Loud In Here single signed... and John Lynnell said that John F misspelt his name on her single! ;) I am making the call, TMBG are the greatest rock band of all time. Both concerts were the greatest show I've seen for a while.

I'm currently listening to all my TMBG records, not quite all 270 songs, but pretty close to it ;)

Ilan wrote:
Buffy and Spike finally got it on, and Willow speaks TCP/IP.

Damn, still waiting for this next series to come out in .au! :(

In other news, it's 4 minutes until my last exam for this semester is over.

*chuckle*

mbp gets a gold star for the Election Chaser reference ;)

So SF dies, VA dies, /. dies, K5 dies. I think T.I.S.M. said it best, with BFW. Life goes on, people.

In other news, jaq.age++;

Finally got this semester's graphics demo night over with, expect 2 new OpenGL xscreensavers Real Soon Now(tm).

haxoring

I've just spent the last 2.5 days trying to rotate an object in my scene in OpenGL -- I tried angle/axis using cross and dot products, I tried using quaternions, I tried sacrificial lambs. Every time the object would just be at some seemingly random orientation. I'm sure most people know, 2.5 days of pondering the same problem can make you a bit jumpy.

Anyway, just before lunch today, my train of thought went back to first principles of a rotation, namely breaking the destination vectors up into components and adding them onto the source vectors. I decided that was too much computation, I'm repeating calculations, too; why not just... stick them in a matrix... why not just turn these 3 basis vectors I have describing the target orientation into a matrix? I do so, run the code and it works.

I am stunned.

I am so stunned, because after 2.5 days of nothing working, you really don't expect some fantastical whim of an idea to actually work first go, especially if you haven't thought about the solution at all to verify that it'll work. I get some food, and the maths behind it falls into place, and I kick myself for not seeing this solution earlier.

And I'm still on schedule. There's hope for me yet.

meatspace

Oh, and I got paid today! /me does the dance of happiness

hax0ring

Whoot, glsnake has been released finally :) It's still rather rough, but it's getting a lot of attention.

Good to see that mirwin is still a nutball.