Advogato blog for kbreit

9 Sep 2002

Mon, 9 Sep 2002 13:17:14 GMT

This was a most interesting weekend. Rachel's parents moved and Rachel wanted to go home to unpack. She also had her grandparents 60th (wow!) wedding anniversary yesterday, so it made sense for her to go. On top of that, it was smart for me to go since I could have used a few points with her parents and she wanted me to meet her friends. The weekend was a mixture of surpzingly good and then disappointing. I met her entire family. They are all pretty cool people. I guess that her grandparents like me, I'm "a nice boy" according to them. They are both very cool too. Her parents like me a lot more than they did before it seems too! I guess her dad likes me, which is surprising yet awesome. The disappointing part was that none of her friends were available, so we couldn't see anyone. That disappointed both Rachel and myself. But, life goes on.

I finished up my Java project, did I say that in the previous post? I decided it would be best for me to rewrite it entirely and it worked after 30 minutes of rewrite. Yay!

I am going to be setting up PSG sometime this week on my web site I think. I'm going to have to take the web site down for probably 30 minutes when this happens though. I will be posting before the anticipated downtime.

I asked Rachel a question about computers: what does she miss about computers? What is the one feature, one idea, concept that she feels is lacking that will make computers more enjoyable for her to use. She wasn't entirely sure, she knew she had some though. I brought up the concept of complete transparency of information. Why should I care a document was typed in Windows, DOS, Mac, Linux, OS/2, or whatever else? Same with the program or the version of the program.

6 Sep 2002

Fri, 6 Sep 2002 19:14:33 GMT

I saw on Mozillazine that there are Phoenix snapshots available now. I looked around and was curious what Phoenix is. I guess that it is a browser from the boys at Mozilla similar to that of Galeon. I tried it out. Much simpler than Mozilla is. It comes with only a web browser and that is it. It doesn't have all the extra cruft. It was kind of unstable, so I am going to wait a while before I start to use it full time. It'll take a while before I'll totally ditch Galeon, but Phoenix is looking cool.

I finally finished up my P1 project for Java (CS122). I was having a hard time getting the code provided to work. So, I decided to rewrite it. 35 minutes later, I was mostly done :) I just need to upload it to his web site. Moral: Use your own work, not your teacher's.

I tried to get MT (MovingType) working on my laptop. However, I try to run one of their CGI scripts (Perl) and it keeps loading up a window in my browser that wants to save or view. How do I fix thaT? MT seems nicer than PSG, but PSG is easier to setup and already customized for my web site. The part that worries me is if I choose to move from PSG to MT or something else, then I'll have to merge all the data over to the new format. That is going to require a bit of work. A really cool idea would be an abstraction layer for converting bloggers: LiveJournal, Advogato, Blogger, PSG, MT, whatever else there is.

6 Sep 2002

Fri, 6 Sep 2002 19:07:47 GMT

6 Sep 2002

Fri, 6 Sep 2002 03:51:32 GMT

Rachel is laying in bed, ready to sleep, so I must keep this short.

Today was the most interesting day in my Java class yet. He went over the history on how IBM got started, his sorting machine, his sorting methods, and all that. I found it to be actually interesting, in that geeky way. We're doing a sorting unit, so it fits. We learned about the bubble sort today. It's really simple and easy to learn.

I don't think I am going to work on developing kdjournal for a while. I don't have the time to make it a high quality product. Instead, I think I am going to use Project Steve Guttenberg. It writes to a flat file, so it's simple to setup. It took me 10 minutes to get a working setup, and it took me an hour to merge it 100% to my web site. I'll be uploading it in the next few days. Another blogger I am considering using is Movable Type. It has a slightly more restrictive license, which doesn't really affect me. It is more challenging to setup though. I couldn't get it to use the Berkely db library as it wants to. I may try it again in a few days.

I'll be gone this weekend. I'm going to be going to Rachel's house to hang out with her parents, friends, and help her setup her new house.

Anyways, Rachel is on her way out of the washroom, ready to sleep. NITE!

5 Sep 2002

Thu, 5 Sep 2002 01:00:06 GMT

"So my teacher tonight [Shattuck] was writing groups on the board of groups of people who have low suicide rates. She put Jewish up on the board, but didn't write it with an 'h'. She said it looked funny, so she erased the 'w'." - Rachel

4 Sep 2002

Wed, 4 Sep 2002 03:19:23 GMT

I've been working on kdjournal quite a bit over the past few days. I decided it's time to rewrite it. I wasn't using any classes, just functions. This caused my code to be really inflexible and spaghettish. It seems to be quite a bit cleaner now. I just need to figure out how to conceptualize it.

I tried yoga with Rachel over the weekend. I didn't really like it. It was interesting, and I could see how it could have potential. The problem is that it requires a bit of balance. I have always sucked at balance. You should see me walk, I don't walk straight.

Tonight we bought some Thai food and ate it, good stuff like always.

I'm writing a web page/blogger for Rachel. It'll be a basic blogger till kdjournal comes out.

Last night we had a huge rain storm. Rachel, Rebecca and myself decided to go outside in the rain and play frizbee. I got myself really dirty, as did everyone else. It was a great time though. It was one of those things you can only do if you're in university.

I haven't been able to get emacs to indent properly. My code looks like:


int main()
         {
                 printf("Hi");
         }

instead of


int main()
{
       printf("Hi");
}

If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know!

Rachel is doing this exercise thing in the morning (6AM!). We were going to sleep together like normal. She's ready for sleep now and I'm not. As a result, she decided to sleep in her room, and I'd be in mine. *sigh*

I am finding the past day or two that I have been more depressed than I was before hand (only 3 days before). I think that the next while will give me a lot of time to spend in the Walmart parking lot.

2 Sep 2002

Mon, 2 Sep 2002 18:10:59 GMT

Lots have gone on in the past few days. Rachel and I went to Gladstone to take a weekend vacation. It was relaxing and enjoyable. The motel we stayed at was kinda quirky. None of the stuff was plugged in when we entered the room. The hot water took 5-10 minutes to get hot. The shower drain didn't work well and the shower water would easily go outside of the shower becuase the shower curtain sucked. We went to Escanaba and had dinner one night. I found a Chicago Style Hot Dog joint there. My god, what a surprise. Diamond in the rough I tell ya! One of the highlights of the Gladstone visit was when we went to the abandoned train by the lake. There is an abandoned train down by a lake there that we were climbing on. I took a great picture of a rail road crossing sign.

On Friday in CS122 (Java) there was a guy wearing only a towel. Hmmm...I wonder if he's joining a frat.

That class is such a bore. My professor taught us about ASCII stuff in Java, such as s.charAt() and other such nifty methods. At the end though, he took 10 minutes to teach us all about \n, \r, and \n\r. I knew about it and it serves no purpose to us in Java. Peterson rambles too much.

I was reading that Jabber may get an IETF group. That would be sweet. In the end, Jabber holds SO much potential, it's absolutely crazy. It's like .NET in some ways in my view. A cool project for someone maybe to create a whole portal around Jabber.

Allows users free registration of a Jabber account on the server
Creates an email with the same name as the Jabber account. If I choose kbreit@jabberportal.com as my Jabber name, my email will be identical. The advantage to this is that will "merge" the two items together. This would of course use spamassassin!
Add support for reading your email into Jabber. Either this could go into the client or the protocol.

I think that Jabber holds so much potential, it's out of this world. I'd love to see them put together something which is flexible and integrated enough to rival MSN on that level.

30 Aug 2002

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:40:44 GMT

I was right about Rachel's roommate Rebecca. I said that she seems like she's going to try to get Rachel to do things I wouldn't like. Rachel said that Rebecca mentioned they should party or something like that. *sigh* I hate it when I'm right like that.

I see that we (Ximian) have made RCD public. I've been using it for a bit. RCD is a new setup for Red Carpet. Before, everything was done using the GUI part. Now it's broken up into two parts: the cli and the daemon. The GUI works just as it did before, no changes to that. Now, I just need to rc install packagename and it goes! It is pretty sweet. I like it a lot and look forward to people submitting bug reports and those RC hackers fixing it up.

In MA240 we're learning about basic logic. Ya know, "p not q and i" or whatever. We're learning about truth tables. Man, that's some geeky shit! It's kinda fun though.

Speaking of geeky shit, I read a bit more in my C++ book. It's an advanced book, kind of refreshing. I'm sick and tired of having to pick-up a text book and constantly have to deal with learning about variables. He spent literally a paragraph talking about int and char. It was nice to not be treated like a moron.

In photo news, I have updated my photo gallery for my web site. I added a photo of myself, a few of Rachel and I, and a couple flowers in the Nature/Plants/ section.

30 Aug 2002

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 00:26:34 GMT

I was picking up my lost wireless card from the CS/math office yesterday. On the secretary's desk I see a LaTeX book. I say "Is that your LaTeX book or someone elses?" It was hers. I guess that she is a big fan of LaTeX. She said everytime she uses it, she learns something new about it, which is always a wonderful feeling. We both agreed that its output and finished product is second to none. It's really great to see people using LaTeX in the educational scene. Save money on Word too!

I have been reading my C++ book more the past day. It's really nice to have a book which doesn't walk you through everything. He writes it assuming you already know what a variable and function is. If you don't, this book isn't for you. I'm on page 30 and he's already using stacks and namespaces. Granted, they are both used in very simple ways, but he's using them, none the less. The problem is that I know very little about namespaces and stacks. I will have to learn. I've learned a lot already though, I will admit.

I have been disappointed with some Gnome apps lately. We really need a good Gnome 2 Jabber client. I realize that it takes quite a bit of work to get a client together. But if Jabber wants to take off, they're going to have to write more and better clients.

I have also been sad to see that Galeon isn't producing Galeon2 snapshots in RPM format. I understand that you need to build Mozilla + GTK 2.0 in order to use Galeon2 or something like that, all of that takes a lot of CPU power. But, it'll be more work to QA in the future if they don't release snaps. I have come to love snapshots. :)

I am missing an IDE for my Java/C++ classes. I am currently using Anjuta. The problem is that I want something Gnome 2 (I want to get everything I can onto Gnome 2 ASAP). It also won't do projects in Java, so I can't get the speedbar like I can in C++. emacs is there, but it doesn't work as well as I want it to. The syntax highlighting doesn't work, etc. kdevelop felt a little rusty. To their credit, I was using 2.1.2 which was distributed with Red Hat 7.2. However, the buttons were rendering wrong, etc. I know, I'm picky. Eclipse is nice for Java. Two problems though. I had a hard time figuring out how to make it run an applet instead of an application. I also couldn't figure out how to get it to use g++ instead of gcc for my C++ stuff. It kept telling me that Makefiles had no target. I don't know make, so I can't fix. But I want a good, powerful, polished IDE for my development.

Mr. Peterson is my Java (CS122) professor. For some reason, my CS120 professor sits in this class. Today, Ellerbruch (my old professor) stood up and bitched at us for typing while Peterson talked. He said that he wasn't able to keep up with what Peterson was saying when he tried to type during a lecture. I am EXTREMLY kinesthetic in learning. I have to type what they say and debug it myself or I won't learn what he's saying. Ellerbruch can fuck himself. Ellerbruch said we'll all leave with non-working projects if we don't listen to what Peterson becuase we're typing it up. Funny, the demo which Peterson did today works fine for me (I typed it up during class). Whatever.

29 Aug 2002

Thu, 29 Aug 2002 03:47:06 GMT

I got my C++ book in the mail today. So far, it looks like a good book. I really like how he cuts to the shit and just goes into tech stuff. He takes a whole 1.5 pages to talk about all the loops and the statement options.

Today is the most social day I've had here at school. Rachel and her roommate have been talking about things all night long. They talk about partying and it kinda makes me nervous :/ My roommate has never has had Chinese food. Wow!

I like Rachel's roommate. She just seems like a type who would pressure Rachel to do something that I wouldn't be keen on. I realize that Rachel wouldn't, but it kinda worries me a bit to begin with.