Older blog entries for macricht (starting at number 115)

The Great White North

Well, went to OLS 2001. Talks were okay. The dinners and afterwards were better. Finally got to put more nicks to faces, and it's always good to see the old GIMP gang. GPG/PGP keysigning also went well, and got a few more sigs to my key. It was also nice to meet Federico's new wife, she does seem really nice, and a good fit for Federico. I wish those two the best.

However, I never got to say goodbye to them. My food allergies kicked in at the Ximian party. Had to go home and suffer through a semi-nasty immune system response.

Also fixed some Imlib1 bugs at OLS during some of the talks. Drooled over WINE doing DirectX. Also got to Montreal to meet phil and dria.

Where am I?

A week off does things to one's mind. I need to dig through my research notes and find out what is left to do. I know I have a poster to do...

Music

Manish and myself ended up in a music store in Montreal. Bought some CDs at his suggestion (two Delerium albums, Poem and Karma). Both aren't bad, and are now in my regular playing list. Also listened to my recently acquired copy of Apoptygma Bezerk's Seven. Some of the tracks (Nearer and Mourn) just reverberate in my head for some reason...

514 nm
More dynamic light scattering. For those who don't know what that is, it involves me sitting by a 800mW argon laser.

In the dark...

For long periods of time...

Ok, each sample takes 5 minutes, and 3 repeats + sample changing time. Not short enough to make the experiments "fast", and not long enough to do something else. I.O.W. tedium.

I wanna go back to my neutron beamlines now...

Code
Looking at writing a little script to go through and comment all my ogg's properly...

...and I've been getting...

The Return of Imlib1
Imlib1 bug reports. Most of them have been good bug reports. Detailed, and people willing to feed back the proper information.

Then I got an email from a Debian developer taking over the package, and we had a nice chat about the Debian specific patches in their deb.

That wasn't the problem

The problem was this one. Somehow, the person who is listed on that bug got a CC or something. I simply requested that one, the bug be put in GNOME's bugzilla, and to attach the problem file to the bug.

But no. I proceeded to get chewed out for not fixing the "fscking" bug AND...get this...that I had the GALL to ask for the file to be as an attachment to the bug.

I almost ripped the guy new orifices. Note the plural. I'm so sorry that I'm not responding to your bugs I've only been notified as of 12 hours ago. I'm so sorry that your needs for a feature that is used by maybe 1% of PNGs out there isn't working. Lemme drop my research, writing my prospectus, and my LIFE for your little bug.

I have a patch in hand. I'm going to take my time with it, just for this little bastard.

Tired.

Busy.

Stressed.

Pissed off.

Befuddled.

Damn, I hate life.

Wish I could just figure it out. Now, back to my attempts at writing a GNOME programming tutorial and figuring out why there's a BMW outside my house.

Stuff

Research spinning up again.

Really bad news from the home front.

Oh well, that's how things go.

Saturday
16W

Sunday
Pygme works. Odd. It shouldn't.

Ok, hell must be freezing over. My experiments seem to have worked. This cannot happen!

Also trying to play with the mesa-3-5 branch of DRI's X server. I think I fixed a minor bug in the MGA driver, don't know if I did or not. Damn thing won't compile. Bah.

Also, hang out on #gnome or #gimps? Going to OLS? Send me an email detailing what days you'll be there and where you're staying. We have a list of #gimps and #gnomes going. Also recording your preferred pen color. If you're meant to be on this list, you'll know why we want the pen color!

Send email to crichton ta thatprogramwithwilberasamascot tod org. Damn spammers getting better, this should throw them off for a bit...

I'm really a kumquat.

Hmmm.....

Working on a space flight sim. Wondering what I should use for OpenGL rendering of the spaceflight.

Quaternions or rotation matricies. Ugh. Any suggestions.

Euler angles are just flat out of the picture. ;)

7 May 2001 (updated 7 May 2001 at 18:54 UTC) »

Forgive me for I have sinned, it's been a damned long time since I've written.

Papers, papers, papers

Paper is proofread, and submitted. It's only a two page preprint of sorts, but I am listed as an author. Page two is pretty much most of my work over the past six months or so. Lots of neutron scattering work, which is extremely fun to do. Nothing more fun than feeling like an 31337 d00d with a rad badge and access to nuclear reactors and particle accelerators... That, and it gives me the chance to experience what it's like to be at a computer terminal at 2 AM. Sources run 24 hours...mostly.

Only downside to the early morning work is the need to stay awake. Missing a bug is one thing. Getting hand in neutron beam is another (yes, Virginia, some setups will allow you to happily irradiate yourself, if you so desire).

NG3

For the past few days in early May, I've been down at NIST at NCNR on the NG3 beamline. It's a nice setup, different than the pulsed source I've been going to. NIST's setup has a rather high flux rate, but it being a reactor-based setup, I learned about the pain of "moving the detector". Ugh. The infamous "reactor setups sample some of the neutrons all of the time" does suck when you're in a hurry. At least the samples scatter very strongly.

Cable

Well, cable modem has been on the fritz hardcore, and MediaONE blames me for having faulty equipment. Well, for a while I thought they were full of it, until I moved the modem downstairs to the basement and plugged it in closer to where our CATV comes into the house.

Now, it works. Guess I wasn't getting much signal into my room. Still makes me wonder how it's been working all this time....

YES!

I'm going to be published soon. My advisor is going to present a paper at an upcoming conference, and I'm a co-author on it!

In other news, my meager home page is now XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. My widget still doesn't work, and I'm still me. Oh well, 2 out of 4 isn't bad.

And my boots should be in soon, I hope. For my birthday I decided to obtain some 20 hole Docs. Roomie who's a product of a British military academy is going to lace them for me in some strange manner. This will be fun.

106 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!