Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 15)

diary piracy -

If someone can recommend a good source of time-in-a-can I would be most grateful.

Eeeeeek!

Uni - I loathe studying at this University (however working here is not bad), got my exam results back today, not pleasant, failed the uni I thought I was going too and life just sucks. Oh well, off to talk to people tommorow

DTP - Having to put together a newsletter tonight, the lack of a good open source page layout tool is depressing, oh well, I'll just have to use MS Word *shudder* yakk pointed me at Glayout, but that still ooks at the planning stage, any other suggestions?

reefknot - watching the mailing lists and enjoying the lively discussion/flames. Too busy at work to do anything else.

aaaaarrrrggghhhh - Exam terror strikes again. Have a really evil exam on logic this Thursday, only understand about 35% of the course, but need to get 58% in the exam. Looks like I'm looking down the barrel of a supplementary exam - and I was really looking forward to doing the whole graduation thing in March. It's partly my fault, lecturer has bad attitude (no questions in lectures), I get bad attitude toward lecturer ... it all goes down hill from there.

bjork - just watched a special from 1997 on ABC (the .au one) about the album she was producing. Very funky music, and the pictures of Iceland were so beautiful. I'm still insanely jealous of my friend who go to Finland in 1998 and probably saw many things just like that. I'm must listen more closely to her music next time it comes on the radio.

books - I agree there needs to be a free bibliography solution, however, like advogato their needs to be a certification model to stop crap biblios filtering in. This is one of the reasons that sticks out as to why companies still charge lots of money for this plus the fact that there are an insane number of books published each year and it there is a linear relation to this in terms of cataloging. Some of the effort here should be pushed back to publishers and authors which in turn probably requires a distributed solution. Hmm, I better stop writing before this gets complex.

gnome-doc-list - the debate about the mouse buttons continues. On a related topic of gnome lists, which ones are worth joining?

swiprolog - prolog is cool, although mind warping. must have a look at it's list operations

25th - yep, it's coming soon. yakk and gbowland think I should just get over it

magicpoint - used it today for a presentation, my lecturer was curious at what the program was. He's one of the old school, he understands tar and Makefiles and has probably used 9-track mag tape in his heydays.

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two months later - I haven't really been keeping up with this diary posting thing very much. I've been kinda of drifting around and not really contributing much, both work and study have been giving me enough stress and distracting me from hacking away. Not feeling particularly well doesn't help either.

gbowland - Grahame's youthful enthusiasm makes me very jealous, I wish I had more.

study - two units - one easy, one hard - I'm meant to be working on the hard one at the moment, instead I'm writing a diary; on other hand prolog is funky and I should really make an effort to learn it. I gave a lecture for the easy one recently on the topic of Internet Standards - there is certainly a marked difference between the ethos of the IETF and the W3C. The W3C puts me off, it feels like an old boys club.

choral - just performed Mozart's Ave Verum and Mozart's Wedding mass. Much better than a requiem anyday.

wow - long time no diary, must have been those exam thingies and general slackness

gnue - have been tracking the GNUE mailing list. It looks as though it could be really exciting if put together correctly. I have already written one billing application for the University and if GNUE would help me avoid the pain I'd be very glad. Although I can appreciate Derek's diary entries in relation to some of the traffic on the list.

music - peformed Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky with PUCS in late June ... sounded beautiful

rrdtool - played with rrdtool recently for a project at work, it's quite good and mind boggingly simple to use. My only wish (or itch) is that there are no nice front ends out there for my particular application, which is a SCADA style monitoring application. It looks like we may have to go with a commerical application instead, not that this is neccessarily a bad thing - it just doesn't give the warm fuzzy feeling that open source does.

evolution - downloaded the .debs of 0.3.1 it's progessing wonderfully, although the only thing I think I can offer to the project at the moment is my input on the mailing list. P75's are really painful to do any development nowadays.

it's a small world after all - saw a posting to the Australian choral mailing lists about a web site that skud wrote, is the Australian online community really that small? :)

gnome 1.2 and helixcode - set up a workstation at with the helixcode .debs. Things just worked, it's a nice feeling. It was like working on the Mac again. It's nice when you tell someone has cared about the code that they have written.

university - passed exams, although I feel that one of my units this semester is going to be painful

code_rush - watched it on TV tonight. yakk named dropped :) Good documentary, it's amazing how organisations can change in just over a year

evolution - downloaded it, compiled it, watched it blow up, whee! looks very promising

study/university - too much of it, too many projects, too little time, thank god it is the end of semester tommorow

apologies - sorry for the dull diary, will post something more interesting soon

Galaxy Quest - "Never give up... Never Surrender!" Wonderful movie, must watch when it comes out on video again.

toys, toys, toys - magicpoint is highly likely to be used for the next presentation I give. vim - met a vim developer named Michael and my friend yakk convinced me to start switching to it from years of using nvi. must get around to playing with pan and buidling evolution at some point.

libical - haven't done much on the python wrapper, too stressed about Uni, did a little bit tonight, must email Eric soon. Played with a calendering related tool called omag from a swedish hacker at lysator.liu.se, it basically is meant to change your away status according to your calendar. Found a bug there too :)

on screenshots - idea for an advogato article : how to make decent screenshots of your program -> why? there are so many bad, high res screenshots out there. It's not my area of expertise however but someone else might be inspired to write something on the topic.

on University - it's just getting stupidly busy here, I hate Visual Basic and Access with a passion, horrible, horrible tools to produce software in.

helpdex - another help desk related cartoon like UserFriendly. yakk just wouldn't understand.

people - k the reason why you were so tired the other day is you stayed up emailing us about jobs, you only have youself to blame :). Encounted notzed on the evolution mailing list today, another .au person and gnome hacker. zab we've got a BeBox here and would love to help you with the port. rakholh - every CS course has a stupid bank teller assignment :)

docbook is the way, the truth, the light. Enough said.

advogato needs a location field on accounts so we can see where we all come from

on sleep - must sleep now, goodnight........... zzzZZZ

libical - Alice is going out to lunch with me! Alice is the automated testbot. (Note: must get life) Fixed a bug in read-imip.pl and submitted a patch. Must work on python wrapper at some point, have been programming much too much Perl lately that I am actually starting to be proficient at it again, this scares me.

mixmagic - downloaded the .debs for 0.1.0. It's very funky when it's not segfaulting, I've been looking for something like this for ages.

on advogato and advo-suicide - I noticed the comments recently about lilo's disapperance, I don't think when someone disappears their diarys as a consequence should disappear into the vapour as well. Maybe a dead/zombie certification?

ObSFCon - Went to swancon, the local SF con for Western Australia. Fen are just weird and got a awful sense of deja vu for no apparent reason. "Bimbos of the Death Sun" is distirbingly accurate.

on diarywatcher - Spoke to yakk at the con, he knows it's been misbehaving slightly