Older blog entries for julian (starting at number 362)

Jabber now has an IETF Working Group! Sweet!

raph: I would very much appreciate a topic tag, I used to write a lot more here about what was going on in real life, but whenever I do so my diary tends to be rated down more, so I was getting the impression people don't like it. :)

I do keep a second diary now for more personal thoughts which probably wouldn't be a good idea for certain people to read at the time being... but I do wish to go back to talking about anything here.

I got gnomemm compiling under OS X this weekend. Unfortunately, libglade2/libglademm2 don't seem to be working properly... need to look into that.

Fuck. My desktop machine really does hate me. It's not starting anymore. I really hope the power supply died and not my new motherboard or processor...

To continue its cry for love and affection, however, OS X has treated me nicely. Thanks to F. J. Franklin, I was able to beat gtkmm2 into submission and actually compile it under OS X! Once I get gnomemm going, I'll be able to do gabber2 hacking right on this pretty TiBook.

fejj: Dude, I'm at CMU. I can't get away from computers :) -- seriously, there seems to be so little to do... when I try to hang out with friends we end up doing computer stuff. Everything closes so friggin early around here.

I wonder if this is somehow like writer's block... for some reason I just don't feel like hacking at all. I'm really feeling rather lazy. I know that in a situation like this I normally would love to start hacking on Gabber or something, but I really just don't feel like doing that. I don't know what I want to do. The lust for creating just isn't there. I'm even pretty sick of video games. I just can't stay interested long enough to keep playing... blah... I need to do something

Garrett LeSage is traveling the northeast US trying to get some good autumnal colors and just generally having a good time on a well-deserved vacation. He was in Pittsburgh last night and today and dropped by CMU campus to hang out. It was fun talking with him about what he's been up to at Red Hat and with life in general... I think last time I saw him was 2 or 3 LinuxWorlds ago. 'twas fun. Thinking about it, Linux really has come a long way from a few years ago. There are a lot of things which now Just Work. It's quite spoiling :)

It is kind of nice to not be particularly concerned with anything for a change... I really am not deathly afraid of getting low grades in my classes right now. Basically, I either am going to get into the HCI program, at which point I'll go for a masters and my undergrad intro classes won't matter much in the long run, or I'll switch to something completely different and... my undergrad intro classes won't matter much in the long run. So screw getting stressed over papers for English class or Freshman Seminar (I do of course still do them with a decent amount of effort -- I just don't stress like I did over this stuff in high school). In the end, it doesn't even matter. I'll spend time learning what I want to learn.

Apple gave presentations today... I think I need to work for them at least once. mmm... usability.

I got O'Reilly's "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" -- looks pretty good so far. I love my TiBook.

So after I've already ordered a new DVI cable from Cables-n-Mor, a friend of mine just got his LCD monitor (he's been waiting for over a month because of the shipping problems in California) and lent me his DVI cable. I tried connecting my computer to the LCD (by the way, it took *five* restarts after installing my new motherboard before Windows saw my USB mouse -- Red Hat 8 detected and installed USB 2, FireWire, etc all on the first boot, and it all works as far as I can tell) using his DVI cable, no luck. I tried connecting my laptop to the LCD using his DVI cable, no luck. I tried connecting my laptop to his LCD using his DVI cable, it worked fine. I tried connecting my LCD to my computer using VGA, it worked fine, same with my laptop. So I think I can state with modest certainty that the problem is in the DVI connector in my LCD monitor.

I guess I'm going to try to convince Planar to take a look.

I am not having good luck with computers.

But hey, my new motherboard is great!

jfleck and josef: I've been pondering the street sign discussion some, especially with reference to the KDE post josef linked. While I definitely agree with most of what is said, having recently started using Mac OS X for extended periods of time I find it hard to dismiss Apple's decisions so easily.

I think that while the street sign analogy works really well for things like toolbar icons (Apple still does follow it for some of the toolbars, like the one at the bottom of iChat), the difference with program and file icons in Mac OS X is that they are not street signs. I don't have milliseconds to react to my Navigator icon. Yes, street signs aid in finding what I want quickly. However, I am staring at my Navigator icon the entire time I'm using my computer. The Dock puts all those photorealistic icons in my face almost all the time. Icons on my desktop are always there. I do agree that simplistic street-sign-like icons would aid me in finding my programs faster, but I would get sick of them pretty quickly. The current icons are more aesthetically pleasing, and for the most part apple has made attempts to differentiate the icons shape and color-wise as much as possible. The majority of the icons sitting in my Dock have very different outlines and different main colors.

I think designing interfaces requires walking the line between what is the absolute easiest to use and what is pretty. Obviously it's very easy to fall too far into the latter, but let's not fall too far into the former either. I wouldn't want street signs in my Dock.

Gabber2 is progressing nicely, even though I haven't been able to touch it lately - temas and James (and reatmon!) are doing a good job. I really wish I could just compile gtkmm2 here under OS X...

On another note, I normally think I can figure out people fairly well, but the past week I've been blatantly wrong a few times and unable to figure out even if a certain person is happy and joking around or depressed and sarcastic. I don't know if I'm all of a sudden interpreting everything wrong or if people are being weird. I do have confirmation from a sane friend that he couldn't figure out the certain person I couldn't figure out. The certain person was saying one thing, but in a very different tone from which one would normally say this, leading me to believe another. He was kind of weird. That still leaves several other cases in which I did not interpret people correctly. I wish the whole social thing were not so complicated.

I'm doing ok in classes so far, but they are for the most part uninteresting enough to make me not care about them and therefore make it harder on myself... I have an English paper due Monday, and I'm so completely not interested that I'm certain I'll put it off, even though I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to write about now.

I really think that being able to mess with gabber2 on this box would help take up more of my time -- anyone want to get gtkmm2 working on OS X? :)

I think my desktop machine is jealous of my TiBook, or else maybe it just doesn't want to have to live through college.

So over the weekend I decide to format everything except my home partition to get a nice clean install of Red Hat 8. Well, I accidentally formatted the home partition as well. Good bye music. Good bye config files. Good bye pixmaps.

So fine, I recovered some of my music from my TiBook and some other bits from Dekar, but I'm still missing quite a bit... and my CDs are at home.

That, of course, was not the indication that my desktop machine is jealous.

Today my desktop machine was frozen. Which has been an incredibly rare occurance for me over the past year, so it was really quite odd. I couldn't ssh in or ctrl+alt+backspace or ctrl+alt+del. The reset button wouldn't work.

I hit and held power. It went off. I hit power again. Lights flashed on. Lights flashed off. That's it.

I'll investigate later this week and find out what died. I really hope it was the processor (I was going to buy a new one this weekend anyway). But it could be the power supply or motherboard of course... or something even more expensive, like my video card :(

I got the last laugh, though, because there was nothing important on that hard drive. I made sure of that earlier!

Now I just have my TiBook hooked up to my LCD monitor, speakers, keyboard+mouse, etc. Good enough for now. I just wish I could get gtkmm2 (and thus gabber2) compiling on OS X.