Recent blog entries for mhat

Stuff happened.

I don't really use advogato anymore.

I feel lame for not having time to write enough free software, but I have little tolerance for free-software-politics, or the semantics-of-freedom.

Users should be able to remove themselves from advogato. I figure, I'm not contributing in a very useful way.. i'm taking up some diskspace. some resource on a box somewhere.

I went back to boston.

I found space.

I'll be heading there, in um.. about 6 days. Wow.

I cant sleep.

I guess i should do something. So i'm going try and make my hacked up gronk actually work. A while back I wanted to add a concept of "playpools" to gronk; basically I wanted to be able to decide "from what subset of my mp3s should the random play operation be performed on". So I wrote some code, flamed a bit about C code that was written in perl, and generally did a gross things to keep the current UI working, but expand the contexts it could work in.

Well, the apartment hunting didnt improve any. I never got to see the apartment because the current tenet decided that she was infact not getting kicked out after all. I'm not exactly sure how that works. Now apparently the land lord and the tenet are probably going to court, which removes that as being an option at all -- so now I'm down to 0.

Who would have thought the hardest part in getting a business going is finding personal living space in an alien city. Sigh.

Apartment hunting in the greater boston metro area sucks. After 5 days of calling people, I find only one place to go look at. Oh, except that the property owner is being a dork and hasnt gotten the key to the broker yet, so that the broker can show me the apartment. I guess its sellers market++.

Maybe I'll find a house before I return to austin tomorrow. If not, well, I'll come up with something.

Sigh.

Recently i started hacking on jwz'z mp3 jukebox (gronk), to add support for "play pools". The idea came to me when I was trying to make a longish playlist; the problem with gronk currently is that I could only add "songs" or "albums". What I really wanted was a way to specify a subset of the mp3s in my archive to randomize, rather then randomizing all of them.

So apparently I'm moving to boston. I think was decided about 4-5 weeks ago. Timing almost works out really well, my current lease expires at the end of this month, and I'll be moving there some time next month. The down side of all of this is that since I don't have a place is boston yet, and my lease is about to expire, I get to move two times in under a month.

The first move, has two parts. Frist I put everything into boxes and move what I don't need into storage at my parents house, then second I move the stuff I need into a friends house where I am currently staying. What fun.

Then, in about 2-4 weeks, I put all my stuff and a hartmans's stuff into a truck and drive it from austin to boston.

Some number of weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to build evolution. I've done this a number of times, so it wasnt an amazing undertaking. That moment passed and I moved on.

Time passes.

A few weeks later, I noticed that my helix install was being super wonky. I dug around for a while, and noticed that when I last built evolution I screwed up and failed to set --prefix or $GNOME_PATH, or something.. so I got a cvs ORBit and OAF installed into /usr, which wasnt doing the best things for the apps that expected the release of ORBit/GOAD that came with helix.

After a lot of grumbling. I removed all the packages that came with helix, so I could remove anything else that I had accidently installed. Basically starting over. Well, that was great except that I managed to remove "something" of some importance, such that when I reinstalled helix-gnome, corba was "broken"... and so nothing worked.

I just reinstalled debian and life was fine. However, I was really annoyed that I couldnt find an obvious way to ask my system "what files do you think are missing", so I wrote a really short scriped that i call 'dpkg-verify'.

I wanted to find some nice set of libraries for dpkg to interface to the packaging system, rather then asserting knowlege about what files did what. After looking at the dpkg .h files, some of the apt .h files, and failing to find any useful documentation what-so-ever I gave up on having an elegent solution.

The script can be found at:
http://www.netlag.com/~mhat/hacks/dpkg-verify.perl.

It needs to be run as root, because of some permission issues. It'll work fine run as a normal user, but it will generate warnings for files that are actually there.