Older blog entries for mazeone (starting at number 61)

code
I've actually been doing some coding. I sent in a patch to freeamp last night, probably won't make it in until after 2.1 comes out. I also did some nasty hackery on vorbiscomment to make it take command line arguments, and then wrote a perl wrapper around it so it would clean up my broken metadata on a few of my ripped CDs. My changes were so bad there is no way I'd ever send them upstream, tho. It does make me love open source :)
Today I pulled all the ftp/scp stuff out of webcam (sorry, no URL) so it'll just take a single snapshot and archive it. I then wrote a perl wrapper to that to upload it to my website. Oh yeah, i also updated my website a little.

!code
I read that signal11 vs. cmdrtaco log. to me it seemed that cmdrtaco was very reasonable all the way through it. I dunno, I think that people take stuff way too seriously.

Went to go see sleater kinney last night. They rule.

campd:
There is a reason aaronl has been permbanned from #e on efnet for quite awhile. Doesn't #gnome have bots?

more interesting stuff
wrote myself a script to cddb-lookup, rip, and vorbis encode (using oggenc, of course) a cd. I borrowed heavily from ripit.pl, and still have some stuff to fix (it fails on CDs that aren't in the freedb, and it doesn't fork a new process so it can rip while it's encoding the track), but it works well enough for right now...

KDE2
KDE2 is in Debian now, so I thought I'd play with it a bit last night. Overall, it is very pretty and stable. I've had a few apps crash when I closed them down, but everything has done pretty much what it was supposed to. The good stuff:

• it's quite pretty. KDE 1.0 bugged me because it wasn't.
• It's acceptibly fast
• KOffice looks nice. I dunno about how usable it is, because I've never really used any office suite

The bad:

• I couldn't get the dialup stuff to work, dunno why. Especially since dialup using the 'pon' script works fine
• the terminal prog (Konsole?) annoys me, and Eterm didn't get along with the background settings (even using Esetroot). Could have been an Eterm bug, tho, since I wasn't particularly up to date from CVS
• there weren't may applets available for the panel, and the ones there were didn't live up to my expectations--I want a clock that will do 12 hour as well as 24 hour time (i know 24 hour is "better", but I'm used to 12), the mailcheck applet is just ugly, as is the system load applet.

I have a screenshot of it in action at my screenshots page, but the png seems to not get displayed correctly by netscape. Blah, use mozilla. Overall, I doubt I'll ever use it much but I would highly recommend it to anyone who was just starting out with a unix desktop and was looking for something of that sort.

spite
finally got some work done on spite. The best thing about it is that I figured out a framework so I should be able to churn out a bunch of code pretty quickly.

frustration
Actually started working more on SPITE last night and quickly got entirely too frustrated. It's hard for me to code when I have a throbbing headache and I'm depressed. Somehow I still have to tie together 3 combo boxes and a few text boxes so that when you change any of them the rest get updated. Ick. sigh Some days i just feel like a moron.

frustation and loathing
It occurred to me today that what annoys me most about windows is the magic involved. I have about as many windows skillz as I have unix skillz and I've found that under unix when something doesn't work there is a logical answer. Under windows there often isn't. For example, I've had two brand new machines today that couldn't see 'Network Neighborhood'. One of them was fixed by adding NetBEUI as a protocol, which is weird because nothing else on our network speaks netBEUI...the other one randomly fixed itself after about 10 reboots. Like I said, magic. And not the nice kind, either, totally wild magic.

python
so the weaselly PHB has been bugging me about some survey cgi that was written by some folks no longer employed here. Since it last worked we have replaced the machine it was on but copied all the data onto the new machine. Sooooooo...

The first thing was that no one knew exactly where the project lived. OK, no problem. I looked through the cgi-bin dir, hey look, survey.cgi. Looks like it calls a survey.py script that does all the work. Uhoh. I've never looked at python before in my life. Ok, let's run the cgi and start tracking errors. First error is a syntax error in the script. Hrm, better hit google. Tracked it down to a change in python since we seem to be running a newer version of python than the script was written for. Evidently, python made the way args to functions are defined a bit stricter--no problem.

The script wants to make a connection to a MySQL database. Oops, python can't find the MySQL module. OK, this is a debian box, no problem. apt-cache search mysql | grep python shows python-mysqldb - A Python interface for MySQL. Neat. apt-get install. Hrm, the script still can't seem to find the module. Oh, it's MySQLdb, not MySQL. Hmm, i wonder what is different...

OK, pretty much everything is different. Different syntax on how to make a db connection. Different syntax on executing SQL commands. I did some nasty ad hackery (think ad hoc) and voila! It seems to work. Yay me! Sometimes I don't feel like such a moron...

abg
Enlightenment already implements window groups, dunno about other window managers...You can create a group of windows and specify what actions will affect all the windows in the group, like move, iconify, shade, etc. It's pretty slick.

other stuff
I setup JRun 3.0 on a debian box today. There is a bug in allaire's shprompt script that made it somewhat a PITA, but it is now going. Time to hand it off to the development staff. I've got a headache...

dhd
I've struggled with some of the same issues as you, but I have come at it from a different direction. I too have been into hardcore/punk for quite awhile (yikes, 10 years now) and have had some of the same thoughts that you write about. My biggest struggle has been over whether I have turned into a 'corporate drone'. However, I am fairly happy with my current position. I never bothered with the college thing, and I get overpaid to do my hobby (mess around with unix) all day. Pretty much every day I think how lucky I am, because most of my friends make a lot less than I do, are older than me, and aren't doing their hobby for a living. Have I sold out my hardcore ideals? I dunno, I make a comfortable living doing what I love, even if it doesn't really make the world a better place or help anyone else. For many years I wouldn't have been able to put up with the corporate drones at work, but it seems that as I've gotten older I've gotten more tolerant of them...

ralsina
On section 4 of the gpl, note that it says "...will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance." If you give Joe code that is in violation, Joe couldn't possible remain in full compliance with the gpl, assuming he redistributes that code. Therefore, giving it back to you is breaking compliance with the gpl, causing him to forfeit his rights.
skud
I just went up to a zero gauge eyelet in one of my ears. It's pretty nifty, i put a like 4g ring through it.
general
Someday I will actually sit down at my home computer and get some work done. it took me an hour and 40 minutes to get into work today sigh

blah, real life sucks. My father-in-law died a few weeks ago, the memorial service is this weekend. I had to call my wife while she was on vacation and tell her that her father had died. that was ...unpleasant. I haven't had the energy at home to even touch my home computers at all. sigh

books
I finally read cryptonomicron, i liked snow crash more but it was definitely entertaining. I read A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, which was pretty good. I was into it enough that I got annoyed at characters for doing stupid stuff. Hrm, i also read The Last Continent and reread Feet of Clay, both discworld books, and reread Retro Hell by the Ben Is Dead editors. Hrm, doesn't seem as if i've been doing much reading over the past couple of weeks, must be forgetting something.