Older blog entries for mishan (starting at number 73)

Yay! I've began to play less Diablo II and do more work. I released GtkHx 0.7, I still need to make the debs...I am still working on the bug-graph perl script at work and each day I'm making it better. I discovered the Net::IRC module and I'm currently tinkering around with it and writing a small bot. I was also thinking of writing some kind of Net::Hotline module but it turns out someone already wrote one =( Anyways, one of my coworkers suggested reverse-engineering the Diablo II protocol and writing some kind of Diablo II bots to play for me -- he says he did this in Quake 2 to break his addiction because, of course, it made the game extremely easy and boring. It sounds like fun and I would be learning something new =) By the way, did you see the new iMacs? I think Apple's on crack. Most of them look the same like the old ones but have new names like "Indigo" or "Ruby." How lame...

Argh! The Diablo II craze has caught me because of some co-workers. I have barely done anything on GtkHx and Hue. I fixed up the usereditor today in GtkHx but did not finish the job. Tomorrow I want to push myself as hard as possible to finish the usereditor and fix up files and hopefully make a release before Monday. I need some sleep now, Diablo II has kept me up past 2AM every night. I almost beat Diablo last night, but there was some bug in the game that made him invincible. I tried again today and I beat him along with some other players but for some reason the game did not mark it that I have beat him...Really ticks me off...I'll have a friend over tomorrow and hopefully during the time he's over and I show him Diablo II, I could possibly finish the game...I wish I had another computer in my house powerful enough to run Diablo II because then we could play over the network...Although he would have to create his own character and he would be in Act 1 while I am stuck in Act 4 (it seems that once you're in act 4 you cannot go back to the previous acts until you beat the game...kinda sucks.) What sucks even more is that I am only level 22 Amazon -- this level is a bit low to be fighting Diablo as some of my coworkers helped me get to Act 4 from Act 3 before I even finished the fourth quest...Oh well, I bet you're bored reading all these unnecessary details. I'm going to sleep..

I've released Hue as I promised it would be no later than today but I have not implemented onboard help, account templates, documentation, and a logo. I figure this will take a while and I hate delaying releases of software as I wanted to release this a while ago. Anyway, my productivity is also down because I bought Diablo II yesterday. It is the coolest game ever. Don't have much to write now -- I think I've had too many sodas and not enough sleep. I am misreading text all the time and have trouble focusing ...

Anyway, I'll definately finish these things before I release Hue 0.2 (next release.) Now that I have the first release out the door, I have nothing but time. I should work on GtkHx first as it is much more important =P

Hue is nearly finished! I have a screenshot here. There are three things I want before release: account templates, some onboard help, and a logo. A logo is in the works, onboard help should take just a few mins and account templates are easy. I expect a release tonight or tomorrow.

I'm still not completely used to the time change. I had two surprises at work. My t-shirts that I ordered from Copyleft came, and my computer was decorated with plastic frogs on my monitor and keyboard and a French flag taped to my monitor =)

Anyway, parts of the vacation I forgot to tell. My mom kept on annoying us by going to cosmetic stores or shoe stores and such. She is living in some kind of fantasy world. This decadence of fashion is really pissing me off. It's just horrible. People walking around worrying about how they look. While this is important to a very small degree, many people are taking it far too seriously! We wasted much time stopping by stores. I really see no need to have 20 purses and 20 pairs of shoes. I admit I bought one pair of shose in France but I only took 5 minutes. I saw a pair I liked, tried them on, and bought them without second thoughts. I only have one pair of shoes (my previous shoes were thrown in the trash.)

Also on the second Sunday I was gone (i forgot which day and am too lazy to look it up =) ), there was chaos in Paris. We were just entering it for the first time and went by taxi. France had just won the soccer game versus Italy. At the airport, it was not too bad. Some taxi drivers were just honking their horns. As we got deeper into the city, we saw people sitting on a statue waving the French flag and people bathing in fountains. As we got into the Opera district, we were completely surrounded by people. They were happy, and I'm happy that they were happy because if they were unhappy and sad that they lost the game, they might have turned violent...But they were just utterly insane. Some people knocked on the windows and tried to get us to cheer along with them, others, in their insanity, started jumping on our car. The pissed off taxi driver yelled at them and they stopped...It was just pure insanity. It was pretty funny though...Anyway I'm really happy I am back home. I just borrowed a Quake 3 CD from a coworker -- I haven't tried the full version yet, I have only been playing the shareware version. I can't wait to try it out.

Damn! I woke up at 8AM. I'm still not used to the time change...I'm trying as hard as possible to force it so the change will be quicker. I had another lucid dream. I'd rather not share the details of this one...

I updated GtkHx in CVS to fix the font bug by allowing the user to select the font in options. I also made all changes to the foreground and background colours apply to the news. I better work on files today as that is the only thing that is being a bitch at the moment...I slept 12 hours and still feel drowsy...I need a major dose of caffeine..

I am back! Very tired, I had zero sleep during my eleven hour flight home. It was a very smooth flight.

My Trip

I stayed a day in Auxerres; a night rather after we arrived. We rode for about 10-11 hours to Barcelona but before we entered Spain we lost all of our maps of Spain. As we entered Barcelona, some natives helped us on our way to the hotel. Barcelona was mostly eventless; we saw all the major monuments. Oh yeah, in Auxerres when I was really tired I had my very first lucid dream! Nothing really happened in it. Actually I had two or three; each one minute in length. I didn't have much control over it. I was able to walk around in my dreams around my hotel room but wasn't able to make objects appear...I know it was definately a dream; the lights were on and the way I realized it was a dream was that the view outside the window was not what it was supposed to be. I did, however, succeed in making my parents disappear in my dream ;) While en route to Spain, I saw two nuclear power plants in France. I've never seen one before so I thought it was pretty cool.

Thievery

On the last day at Barcelona as we were in our car studying maps, some man came up to the car and opened two of the doors and started distracting us. He was tapping on the ground saying "Mira, Mira!" while someone opened up, quietly, another door. I sensed this and turned around to see someone taking out one of our bags. I yelled at him and he promptly dropped the bag and ran away. I was so pissed off. If I had the chance, I might have killed him although I wouldn't have now. I was just furious...Well maybe not kill but I really wanted to hurt him...

Paris

Paris was pretty nice. Almost everyone spoke English there so I was fairly comfortable. The subway system there was fairly easy to grok (as easy as London was) but to get from one line to another required a lot of walking. If you want to have a really good dinner, I suggest the restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel tower. The veal was exceptional but prices were a bit high. I went to see Moulin Rouge, which was basically a bunch of topless women in skimpy costumes dancing around to different musics. I liked it ;) In the US, they wouldn't have let a person my age see this show probably (I am 15.) But in Europe, toplessness is something normal; I was at a beach in Spain and many women were topless...

I am really tired now and I will tell more about the trip later...I can't wait to get back to work on GtkHx and I have many cool things planned including a fix for the evil font problem...Please excuse all typos made...Very tired...By the time I am used to it is way past the time I am accustomed to sleep at.

Hi from Spain, everyone. I´m in Barcelona now, leaving in a few hours to some place or another. I´ll tell more about the trip when I have time or when I get home; whichever comes first...

Notes to self: lucid dreams, nuclear power

Wow, I haven't written in a while. Been too busy. Where should I start...Yesterday was my birthday, I am now 15 =) Work is pretty fun, I am finally doing something interesting than just boring QA stuff..At the moment, I am writing a perl script that connects to the bugzilla SQL database, gets some data, and then makes graphs of it. I have a recent version posted on my site, it's at http://olympusmons.dhs.org/monthly-bugs-graph.pl. The script is almost done, all I have to do now is make it do weekly reports rather than monthly reports. This will be a bit trickier but I'm sure I can figure it out. Maybe I should also generalize it so it will work with other databases and post it somewhere...Today I am leaving on a two week vacation until July 9th. No internet access, unless I stop by some Internet Cafe =\ I'll make sure we stop by lots of internet cafes ;) I will be going to Spain and France. I just hope people speak English therem because my knowledge of Spanish is at zero, and I have only just passed French I.

I released GtkHx 0.6 but soon after I realized that I still have a few #include <readline/history.h> in the source. I haven't released a 0.6.1 to remedy this error yet but I have committed the fix in my CVS repositories. Things I want to accomplish in the next release (0.7):

• Improve user editor UI
• Ability to select font, to remedy the problem of broken fonts on some people's machines...
• An option to use chat colours (have certain elements in the chat's text be a different colour than others, such as name changes
• Fully working uploads and other file-related features

Once 0.7 comes out, all I have left to do is fix bugs and I can make a 1.0 release! Then I can also do other small details such as steal ror's latest code and add encryption and other miscellaneous details ;)

I installed Debian on my workstation but still have not gotten it to dual boot. I guess it's not important, as long as WINE can run my phone simulator but so far all it has demonstrated is that it is broken in CVS and can't find my keyboard layout if i download the package =)

Worked a bit on GtkHx. Thanks aaronl and CodeToad for testing out my builds and catching all the big bugs I have missed =) I want to make a 0.6 release soon but there are at least three things I want to add before I release it. Ability to clear chat buffers, a better UI for the user editor, and fix uploads.

I just realized last night that my birthday is very soon. June 23. I haven't thought about my birthday until just now. How time flies when you are having fun. Unfortunately I can't have a party until after July 9th because I am leaving for vacation on June 24. Ah well...

Work was pretty fun. At the moment, I am doing some QA testing and learning Perl. Later, I'll do something more fun. I don't understand why many people bash Perl, it's a pretty cool language. I'll have pictures of my work-area later =) They gave me a 700Mhz Compaq with a Voodoo3, 128MB RAM, and 7GB HD. And yes, I did install Quake 3 on it =) I'll install Debian on it later when I have the time, I already prepared all the installation floppies. I worked a little on GtkHx; I am trying to implement a feature to view text files instead of downloading them. The tricky part is that I have to pipe the data from another process to the main GTK+ process (so I am streaming the file instead of reading it when it is done downloading) and I am having difficulty with it. I'll work it out later..