Advogato blog for justin

4 May 2000

Thu, 4 May 2000 03:35:51 GMT

Gladiator is going to kick ass. 18 people are on the list so far.

Hi JB318. Glad to see you on Advogato.

I need better diary entries. Perhaps doing more hacking would help. Discovered EveryBuddy. I may have to work on something like this with Wojtek, as he is also interested in instant messaging.

30 Apr 2000

Sun, 30 Apr 2000 18:19:20 GMT

I know Latin. I seem not to be the only one.

Who knew bowling was so much fun? Went bowling with Stefan, Lauren, and Simon last night. The world of bowling is not ready for me. I actually broke 40 points in two of the games :) Actually, by the end of the last game, I was getting pretty good. Threw a bunch of spares and strikes to finish the night off. Will have to do that again some time. U-571 followed, which was also quite good.

Other than that, my life is quite boring. Got all A's on my report card for the first time. Did a good job speaking about Helix Code to the YHSLUG. Linux Journal also finally printed my article, which I am not really sure I like that much anymore...

25 Apr 2000

Tue, 25 Apr 2000 03:34:01 GMT

Oh dear

This morning sucked. My dad felt that it would a good thing to stay up until after 3AM, and keep me up with him. He had the TV in the kitchen on so loud that I could literally tell he was watching the British Grand Prix. Then he decided to go downstairs and use the loudest IBM clicky keyboard in the house. So I slept late, since my mom was going to pull me out of school for a TB test anyway.

I hate needles. I cried, as usual

So finally, school with the new haircut. Approval was overwhelming. A few people laughed at me, but almost everyone seemed to like it. Basically, it's made me realize how shitty people thought my old one was. I think Stefan described it as a "goober haircut".

My dongles arrived, no thanks to UPS

So I migrated most of my stuff to the new laptop, including GTicker. Of course, it didn't want to work on the laptop. So I tried commenting out three lines of code, and it seemed to work. Uncommented them and it worked fine. It didn't work with or without those lines for Dan Mueth, and it seemed to work just fine without any messing from Jacob. Weirdness. So then I fixed a bug where you would get valid XML, but not valid RDF. Now, I basically need to make the config dialog less dumb. I don't know what I was thinking, putting one entry for host, and one for filename. I should have just had one for URL, and that is what I am going to do. So, it should be finished tomorrow, including documentation.

23 Apr 2000

Sun, 23 Apr 2000 23:14:46 GMT

More boringness

This weekend was basically the highlight of my spring break. Alex decided that he needed cookware, a blender, a VCR, and maybe a TV. So we decided to go to the mall. The first mall we went to didn't have a Sears, so we decided to split. We were there for about 10 minutes, but they still charged us for parking. Bastards.

So we headed to Tyson's. After browsing the cookware section of J.C Penny for an eternity or two, Alex just said "Screw it, I'm going to buy it online." Alex also decided to be silly and buy a $70 "watering can". Silly Alex. Then I introduced him to Orange Julius, or a generic derivation thereof. Thankfully, he had some sense left, and loved it. We ended up having two each, actually. Yummy

So then there was not much left, except to stop by the CD store. Thankfully, they had the Spaceballs DVD out on the shelf early, so I snatched that immediatley. It has provided me with much amusement since. Then, at last, we were off to our final destination: Eddie Baurer. nym apparently loves cashmere socks, so I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. But of course, they do not stock them :(

The rest of the weekend was basically spent struggling with GTicker, which is now in a decent state. It is almost documented, and very configurable now. Use It(TM).

20 Apr 2000

Thu, 20 Apr 2000 19:23:09 GMT

Ahh, much better

I (finally) did my income taxes for the first time this year. Even though Andover didn't withhold, I only ended up paying $241. Next year I should get a refund, as Helix is withholding. Doing taxes didn't actually seem so bad, though I did have TurboTax to help me through the process. Of course, this is assuming my e-file application was accepted...

I finally bought myself a new laptop. A Sony VAIO PCG-505TR. Only a Pentium MMX 300 with 64MB, but that should be fine for light hacking and mailreading on the road. Thankfully, it has better battery life than my last laptop (VAIO Z505SX, which will soon be my sister's). It says 3-6 hours with the supplied double-capacity battery, but I tried it last night and only got 2:54. Still, better than the 12 minutes I was getting before. Maybe I'll get a quad-capacity battery :)

So, SlashApp. Soon to be renamed GTicker. I finally got that configuration dialog working. Now all that's left is to get it working with different panel orientations. Seeing as how I saw some documentation on that earlier today, it shouldn't be too hard. I was even able to stay off IRC for most of the time :)

Decided I need to visit shaver's new place when he moves in, as he requested my presence.

15 Apr 2000

Sat, 15 Apr 2000 18:12:19 GMT

I have decided to majorly cut down on the time I spend on IRC. Instead of staying on LinuxNet 24/7, I am just going to come on when it strikes my fancy. This will be much easier when I have a social life again. All of my friends left town since we have the entire next week off from school.

I have decided my room needs office furniture, since my parents are not going to let me have an office. This is sort of a problem, as my room is pretty much full. Oh well. I'll probably go to Office Depot today and find a nice hutch.

Work-related: A little work done this week. Mainly fixing up Slashapp, and a little bit on the screensaver capplet. Slashapp now only has two real things that need to be done to it:

Make the site changes actually take effect
Handle resizing of the panel properly

Craig Small or I will hopefully finish that up any day now. With this, your Slashapp will be configurable to read any site on the net with the appropriate RDF/XML file. While we're at it, we're searching for a new name :) The screensaver capplet is going much better, now that I scrapped all progress and started over. I'll probably submit a patch, with a ChangeLog, to jrb in the next couple of days. Wish me luck.

19 Jan 2000

Wed, 19 Jan 2000 01:48:17 GMT

Hacking can be so frustrating. Gave up on the idea of using Glade, reverted stuff to old hand-done UI. Moved to work on keyboard-properties capplet, but got stuck on a really stupid bug forever. Current status: hacking onward.

Personal stuff: watched Swimming with Sharks with my mom. She picked me up from school since it was snowing. I hope it snows tomorrow. A snow day would kick an immense amount of ass.

15 Jan 2000

Sat, 15 Jan 2000 23:44:36 GMT

Decided to start over on my control-center work. I think Glade use may be relegated to the capplets. Was sure to watch plenty of annoying music videos, as well as most of the original Highlander movie.