Older blog entries for mathrick (starting at number 76)

Been to København yester-yesterday, it’s cool, full of interesting places, big and noisy, and I prefer my Smallville to live in :). And it’s cool when you can usefully communicate in Danish, and I’ve been able to do that more and more over the past months.

developerWorks published another piece, this time about i18n in GTK+ context. Never before was so much of tricky knowledge (attempted to be) stuffed into so few words, let’s hope it manges to give people the right idea where to begin.

Also, preparing for the trip to GUADEC, and by implication, me leaving DK for 2 months, not to mention trying to catch up with my SoC that’s been lagging way too much. Fun.

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Here’s another small xchat hack I wrote to add missing functionality: privflash. It makes private messages behave the same as nick highlight you get in channels, ie., blue highlight + taskbar flash. Why it isn’t like that in default xchat I dunno, but finally I got annoyed enough to fix it. One day I’ll also add some sane nick availability notification, current “notify: <nick> is online” is completely laughable, but that’s later.

PS. The usual drill to install it: needs python plugin, drop it into ~/.xchat2/, it’ll get picked up next time you start xchat, or /py load privflash.py if you don’t want to wait. Enjoy.

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Wow, a post. A rare sight indeed. Anyway, I got accepted into this years SoC, with the project on making Pango support vertical writing. Coolness! There’s also some movement towards getting us (the students) to GUADEC, even though the registration process is formally over. Coolness too, especially if it works out.

Some other pimping I didn’t get around to before: My writing for IBM developerWorks went nicely, and in addition to the previously contracted series, I got to write 3 more articles. One of them is already up, this time our fine bindings guys get some love and fame. You might have noticed it’s published in “AIX and Unix” section this time, that was a kind of sekret projekt they got going on, which basically increased demand for new stuff, and by extension my opportunites to write something. I must say that writing on stuff you know and love is a joy, the only thing that sucks (besides my perennial ability to stick to schedules, sigh) is the hopelessly low word limit, I hate it with passion.

Ah, and since it’s apparently going to get syndicated by p.g.o, it’s a good place to ask: If you are in the GNOME Village and have some free places and are willing to host me, drop me a line. I need that to apply for sponsorship and to, well, have some place to crash at GUADEC :). I can be reached by the comments form or email, mathrick at gmail.com. Unfortunately my ISP is braindamaged and blocks outgoing mail, so mathrick.org is currently out of reach :(.

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(This post is written in Japanese. I don’t think it’ll look pretty on advogato, but I can’t help it either)

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• ã,ãYã[TM] ï¼^ä½*ã<åOE--ã®æ-¹è¨€ã ã¨æ€ã[dagger]ï¼%0
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• ãã,OEãOEã--

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Looks like another issue is out.

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Since yesterday, I’m back in DK. Bleh.

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Here.

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My calendar says it’s Dec, 21st today, which means it’s been one day since my article got published. Yay!

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Introducing CCharset!
If you were ever annoyed by XChat’s perpetual inability to follow per-channel encoding settings, then be no more! CCharset allows you to override encoding on a per-channel basis, so now you can use iso-2022-jp in the ever stubborn #nihongo and utf-8 everywhere else. Isn’t that cool? It does exactly this one thing, manages your encodings, nothing else, particularly won’t spew stupid messages on all channels you’re on and fuck with your colours, unlike certain other plugins (coughfreecharcough). Also supports saving your settings, so you don’t have to ever enter that info more than once.

Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, so if this plugin runs over your cat, then sorry for the cat, but you have only yourself to blame.

Update: It has come to my attention that the plugin messes with non-ASCII topic setting badly. So there. You have been warned. I’ll probably (attempt to) fix it someday, but right now, it’s not a top priority.

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Today, kids, I have <s>so fucking maddening that I want to stab people in the eyes with a toothpick</s> an amusing story about computers.

Dramatis personae:

• Me
• Windows Remote Desktop
• Firefox
• Putty
• Mysterious Stranger

So, I was working on a friends machine via remote dekstop (which, by the way, is pretty sweet, with sound forwarding and stuff), and in the course of matters, I upgraded the copy of Firefox instaled there to 1.5. Then it stopped connecting to the net. IE works. Ping works. FF does not. Hmmm…

Okay, so I did what I needed with IE (bleh), and moved on to the part which required SSH access to the Uni server. Downloaded Putty, installed, ran, it dies with timeout. HMMM. Some thinking later, I figured it’s probably a firewall. Opened firewall settings, it’s OFF. WTF?. So I fiddled with it harder, and some 15 minutes later, I was able to determine that Windows’ firewall was indeed off, but Sygate Personal Firewall was ON. Okay, I thought, strange I haven’t noticed any indication of this fact, but ran Start->Applications->Sygate Personal Firewall. And then (enter Mysterious Stranger), it’s shown me this.
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WHAT. THE. FUCK!?
Just how incredibly, unbelievably cretinous shithead you have to be to invent something like that? Because it was blocking stuff, just not showing any indication of this fact. Of course, when I went to this machine, sat by the console, logged out, logged in again, and then connected via RDesktop, Sygate was magically able to show its UI! Person responsible for this should have all teeth removed without anaesthetics, and all programmers involved in creation of this abolition their fingers broken, just to make sure they won’t commit similar crime ever again.

(As an aside, I’m not sure that it showing its UI is a significant improvement over lack of UI, as then it regularly, every couple of minutes shows little info popup WHICH STEALS FOCUS OF YOUR CURRENT WINDOW, and also has “don’t show this again” checkbox which doesn’t work, so next time it’ll popup it again, with the same non-working checkbox again, and then, when my friend came back, and we tried to transfer some files via FTP, so he installed FileZilla or something, but it wasn’t working, despite us trying for some 20 minutes, and then I discovered that fucking Sygate was showing blocking question popups, but it was doing that on my account, which was fast-switched to his, fuck, where’s my toothpick, I’m gonna stab them to death, ARGH)

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