Older blog entries for mobius (starting at number 155)

Bah, gestures. This is why they are not a good idea(IMNSHO):

Let's all play "Guess the gesture"! I just drew some shapes in the gimp, and dutifully copied them into ASCII. Here they are:

     ____
    |__    |___-_
  / |               |
 |                    \
/                      |
|                     /
 \                /
  |               |
  |              /
   \____---'
------------____
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|____             |
|      |____-----
            ___
             /   |
             |    |
             |      \
            /         \
            |            |
           /            |
      __-'              \
     |         ____     \
     |_-----'        `----\

These are the twisted products of my low-quality mouse, which seems to have issues with the X axis. Can _you_ write software to figure out what I was trying to draw?

I just fixed (for Microsoft values of fixed) a friend's b0rken win98 hard drive. It would no longer boot, apparently due to having the boot files deleted and/or win.exe. I dug up my old DOS super-rescue floppy, which contains everything to bootstrap a DOS machine to a usable state. It's been a while since I used edit; I think I need a new floppy with vi on it. It's an interesting project; create a floppy containing everything to make me productive in DOS. I'll be making disk images for general distribution when I'm done.:)

Awwww, I can't upgrade my debian box to windows XP. That makes me Sad(for Happy values of sad). [My regards to the hard-working WINE developers who made this relevation possible. <vbg>] See the screenshot link previously posted if you care.

There's nothing like telling the world about a pet project to make you notice the HUGE bugs in it, and how ugly the code is. I just finished fixing said problems(mostly) in clab(now version 0.1). If you downloaded it, the new version works much, much better. Like, deleting entries when you tell it to, and not having magic options.

Good night, everybody.

I just spent an hour pissing around with my icewm preferences. I got rid of the 'start' menu on the taskbar, in an attempt to break that bad habit. Key combos are the way to go. Now a button to pop up an xterm owns that real estate. Screenshot of my new background image and nifty-ized taskbar.

I also cleaned out the crap from the global 'menu' file, since debian's menu program handles everything anyway.

What else? Midterm today, I think I did not too badly. Midterm tomorrow night, which is going to suck.

clab(command line address book) now has a webpage here. there's even *gasp* some documentation.

And my project for the day: write a lightweight address book/rolodex thing that doesn't require a DB or X. If such a beast already exists, let me know. In the meantime, Ive got a 3k perl script that lets me add, view, and update real-life contact info for people. like phone numbers and such. If my website ever gets back online, I'll post a link. Or if you're interested, I can mail it to you.

Sadly, I really could've used this while I still knew where the contact info for certain people was. Oh well. ... Wait! just found my years-out-of-date contact list, explorted <tangent>new word!</tangent> from Outlook back in the dark ages. I can get phone numbers for my family, at least. They never move.

--------------------------------------------------

Hey! Didn't MS say they were changing their TOS?!? While attempting to re-activate my old hotmail account, the TOS I was presented with contained the following:

MATERIALS PROVIDED TO MICROSOFT OR POSTED AT ANY MSN WEB SITE

Microsoft does not claim ownership of the materials you provide to Microsoft (including feedback and suggestions) or post, upload, input or submit to any MSN Site/Service or its associated services for review by the general public (each a "Submission" and collectively "Submissions"). However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, without limitation, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission.

What gives?

Yesterday, I spent 8.5 hours in a computer lab, and wrote a decent Java GUI for my second graphics assignment(the GUI was chrome; I had a panel doing the interesting stuff by hand). 8.5 hours to complete a programming assignment in a language I started learning less than a month ago. Not bad.

Course, I don't want to be a Java programmer any more than I want to be a web designer. Good thing it's being cancelled out by me learning Forth...

I just installed berlin and 3dwm. Now to figure out how to make them work.

Why am I still awake?

I've been playing with WINE(as a user). I managed to start up various MS-Office products and do decent things with them. I also played minesweeper and freecell.

The reason for emulating is that one of my classes requires us to use VMWare, which is EVIL. I also needed to run a couple of windows self-extracting archives to get at the code I needed. WINE does more than enough for me. :)

I've also learned a decent amount about forth for the same class.

I'm trying to convince a friend to stop using pico. It might work, eventually.

Life status: slighly better than crap, still not great. I'm trying to volunteer myself to death.

jschauma: you didn't mention catdoc, a command line tool that works like cat, but on doc files. It's not 100% accurate, but it's close enough for my purposes. The article was excellent; I'm passing it along to one of my friends who I'm convincing to use linux. :)

ldunbar: Chill. That was aimed at everyone who is claiming that $evil_guy_of_the_month is the the very incarnation of capital-E Evil, aka the antichrist. I never claimed that their actions weren't small-E evil. I apologise if you interpreted my comments as saying that the media has manufactured these people; I meant that the media has taken a nasty guy, and painted him in such a way that even 80 year old grandmothers(who still remember hitler) want to shove a grenade down his throat. That is all.