Recent blog entries for nullity

grrrrr. Netscape borked today for no apparent reason and forgot all its settings. So I lost my mail filters. I think I'll go back to Gnus at this point, if I can get it working with Eazel's CertificateAuthenticatedIMAP (TM) servers, or maybe Evolution. I have been keeping NS4.75 around exclusively for mail, so I'll see this as an opportunity rather than a curse, neh?
 
Looks like Nautilus 1.0 freeze is really happening this time. Even though I wanted to get all my bugs fixed, the obligation of Nautilus hell had become opressive. Nautilus has had 600% more of my time than I could afford to spend on it this week, so code freeze means final relief w/o guilt. Hey, its not my fault I had to stop working, the bastards just wouldn't let me commit anymore ;-) I am happy though because we will be shipping a Nautilus that performs, if not perfectly, admirably, on Solaris. Actually some of the Solaris code (notably MP3 playing) is better than the Linux equivalents right now, though sadly not of my doing.
 
Work on Tadpole may resume again now that Nautilus recedes in urgency... I need to dig more into the core code and wrap my head around it before I can really be productive. Its just not at the point where I could (even if I wanted to) devote myself soley to, say, writing CODECs. My threadfu has grown weak as of late owing to a year of crappy "We hate threads, we hate C++" GNOME programming....

It just feels like the time to write a diary entry. I have now been awake for 37 hours, and am going to go to bed immediately after finishing this entry. Yes...I swear it. In the interim since the last entry I have basically taken over making Nautilus/GnomeVFS/Ammonite/OAF/Medusa/etc work properly on Solaris. This was dropped into my lap for Nautilus 1.0 as something critical like 2 weeks before release, so I have been working like mad on rather prosaic porting issues (and some interesting ones too).

Added bazillions of mime types to the Nautilus mime type database too. Whee. Exciting weekend, I know.

-eek- This graphics assignment is proving harder than I had anticipated. I budgeted it one day of work...it looks more like we're looking at two+. This is bad because I also have a philosophy paper due imminently (in addition to my regular slew of problem sets!).
 
I've been working more with GTK+ lately...because that seems like a good thing for a GNOME programmer to be fluent with ;-) Honestly its really easy working with something like Nautilus to ignore massive areas of code beacuse somebody else really will do them. Also working with Bonobo.
 
Am thinking about playing with starting an IDE based on Jade. Jade is a kickass editor similar to emacs written by John Harper (of Sawfish fame). Jade has the advantage that it is bound very nicely with GTK+ through rep-gtk. Great. So we have a nice editor written in a functional language...and it binds to GTK+. What an opportunity :)
 
No really! I've missed programming in functional languages, though I have to honestly admit to having more imperitive experience at this point....ah well.

Evil. I have an abstract algebra midterm on Monday. I'm going to fail. I'm going to fail...I'm going to fail.... Maybe if I keep reminding myself of that I won't feel so bad when I fail! :-) OK, maybe I won't exactly fail, but its gonna be brutal. I can feel it.
 
They closed down the open kitchen yesterday because people weren't cleaning up their mess. Dumb shits get drunk, bring all their friends in and then leave the place screwed up. This is particularly annoying because I spend like an hour a day on weekends cleaning the place up because I want to be able to use it the next day (they close it for a while when things get too messy). So in the end...my efforts were in vain. Ah well. Dinner sounds really good now (I'm hungry!)!
 
I finally fixed my roommates video card, so we can watch DVDs now. This is good. One needs some relaxation...and plus he has a bunch of monty python dvds...bliss... :-)

Um. Yah. Its been a while, no? Lets see if we can get ourselves back into the habit of writing advogato diaries :) Actually seem to do better when I'm busier, so I have high hopes for this little run of entries!
 
Not surprisingly, my time is consumed with classes. This quarter I'm taking a fairly hefty load:
CS248 (advanced graphics),
CS242 (programming languages),
Political Philosophy,
Linguistics238 (Computational linguistics),
Math120 (abstract algebra),
and am auditing CS353 (algebraic logic) due to my already being over the max number of allowable units :-)
 
In other circles I'm working to help bratsche broadcast his recital live using icecast. If you'd like to help knock my server about a bit I'd greatly appreciate it....http://beauty.stanford.edu. Comments, flames, successes, problems, etc to me (snickell@stanford.edu).
 
I wonder what the <wiki> tag does (look below the diary entry thing for allowable tags)
 
I don't want to miss lunch again. I'm going to bed.

blah. The weekend was interesting. This is a placeholder for when I get the time and energy to write about it.

I have become worn...and I know I'm too young for this to happen. Oh well. I do look forward to school, which is a change from last summer, but I think I've become largely disillusioned with relationships. Not to say that I don't consider them worthwhile, but I think I caused myself an uneccesary quantity of angst concerning myself with them too heavily last year. Ah well.

I had a fairly bad sunburn today and hence didn't feel like doing anything outside. Plus it was hot. I stayed inside and watch Brian play FreeCraft (Warcraft II clone - if you haven't seen it its pretty amazing, I had no clue that they had a playable game!). I'm going to spend the rest of this evening trying to get cross-compilation going for HURD so I can finish porting GNOME to it. Wheee!
 
Maybe I'll write some and forget to go to sleep....but probably not. That made me a wreck last week.

Whew! My ass is grass. I went riding today with Mike Flemming (from Eazel). The ride itself was fairly short, but a particular ascent feels like it took an eternity. I ended up unable to make the entire ascent, and had to end up walking part of the way. SIGH. I suppose there's a tiny chance I could have made it the last little leg (it was actually quite short...) to the "Country Store" (read yuppie bike refreshment mini-mart - soooo glad it was there for us yuppie bikers!) Better luck next time.
 
The great part was the descent though! It was fairly steep and twisted through a dark forest. There were some very classic "dark forrest scenes" there, like the deep creek surrounded by tall straight trees fading into the mist, etc. Very cool!
 
The story is a little more intricate, beginning with me checking my bike into the bike shop around 9am, and being told it would be ready by noon (it wasn't of course). So Mike came by and noon and we went and had lunch. Fortunately after a leisurely lunch it was finished. Too bad they didn't bother to fix the thing I brought it in for...sigh! Better luck on monday. Then, lets see, I forgot to bring along water and my spare tube. The water was immediately a problem, the tube became a problem on the descent when it punctured. It took two rounds of patching (seperated by like a third of a mile) to get it back into working shape. I suppose I'll actually have it replaced because I'm suspicious of patches, and I need a new rear tire anyway.
 
My two sisters, whom I haven't seen for some time owing to them being not within reasonable proximity, are in town. My father and mother too, but I saw them previously. That leaves Drew, my brother, left to come. I look forward to his arrival, though I have no idea when it will be (rumours are that it will be later rather than sooner?). Anyway, I haven't seen them yet, and I'm most gruelingly tired from the bike ride, and they're on their way to pick me up...soooo..... I'm going to go shower!

Writing
 
I have been dissapointed in the lack of response to the first chapter of my book (which I will shamelessly plug again!) Its not that I expected rave reviews and heaps of praise - what I really wanted to solicit was constructive criticism. I want to clean this thing up, because I know it needs work! Instead I have heard almost -nothing-. I begin to wonder if hackers are barbarians? ;-) It is odd, because within a few hours of putting my Nautilus theme up on my web site I was receiving lots of comments, even lots from people I had never interacted with. hmmmm.... (update: heaps of thanks to those of you who have begun writing me...more! more! :-)
 
Life and living
 
I am annoyed because Advogato ate my first entry today when it was already completed. This one won't be as comprehensive, because its always hard to get up the gumption to rewrite a longish segment...grrrrr!
 
Basically my family is returning to the US from the Philippines - and they've decided to move into this area. My father has taken a research position at Xerox PARC, and they are now embroiled in looking for a house. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this, but I think I'm very glad on the whole. There are obviously downsides, the most noticable of which is friction I'm recently experiencing with my father.

 
The long and short is that I've recently become acutely aware of all his failings and idiosynchratic behavior. Maybe you're protected from seeing a lot of this as a child, but it has begun to bother me immensely (probably because I fear seeing it in myself). Comments that others have had the grace to make to me (if nobody tells me its hard to change....) I see applying 10x to him. So what's happened is that I have grown immensely over the past year being young and malleable while he has staid set in his ways, of course. Which means that I have trouble just accepting all the things that I've tried to prune from myself that I see in him. Maybe this is good, because it suggests that I've grown somewhat myself....
 
Hacking
 
#$%&**!!!! I'm sooooo tired of the symoblic link code. Gnome-VFS is incredibly imalleable in some ways, and I'm having to deal with all of them it seems :-) Its like I do one thing and the library just slaps me back. I'm making progress but its tedious and slow. In other fronts I did some trivial work that enabled the simple search bar in Nautilus. Hopefully when the symbolic link stuff is off my plate I'll take a crack at writing the unescape/escape code in Nautilus once and for all - just put that stuff to rest! I like that sort of coding because I tend to be working in environments where I can just write code - the interfaces to the functions are very well defined and narrow. I like architecture better, but if I'm just going to code this is what I want to do.
 
In other news, I'll now be moving into spending most of my time labouring over purify. I hate C. Its final. It seems ironic that the person most supportive of garbage collection and not having to do memory management will be tasked with cleaning up the memory leaks ;-) Of course, I knew this would be coming when I signed on but that doesn't make it any more fun now that its hapenning. The upside to this is that I hope to drastically improve my ability to read other's code. I have oft respected that in Darin and Pavel (and Maciej to a lesser extent, it probably develops with years in the field) and I hope to develop some of that in myself.<shrug>