Older blog entries for nymia (starting at number 766)

DOM Is The Future

Looking back, hindsight somehow has this great way of showing the past in a different view. Laying out the events as a series of steps taken. I wondered how certain parts just fit together as simple as dropping a control to a canvas, pulling a component there and putting it here, mixing them until a consistency begins to form. From a distance one can see what part of the entire structure really made it happen, validating each as if it were the one. Only one part stands out from all, though. DOM seems to be the one capable technology designed to provide the semantic navigational tool necessary to dig and burrow into the solid structure.

Wishful Thinking

While working in the backyard, sitting down hammering the chisel into the 4x4 beam, my mind wondered a bit doing some wishful thinking.

And so I wished the programming language fairy would give me a language with the syntax of C, C++, C# and Java. Complete with all the native OS facilities support, including the workplace shell being scriptable like Flash MX. A programming environment providing a runtime that can emit code to an optimizing compiler. The runtime being the simulation of the compiler and the target environment itself.

If it exist, I would call it Trinity.

17 inch Tires

Time to go to the Tire store and look for the latest and greatest. Currently looking for a 17 inch wheels and tires for the Lancer. The wheels I'm looking should have enough protection from being stolen since my last 17 inch tires stolen 3 years ago really showed thieves can easily get anything even if it is lock protected.

Racing

Someone mentioned there was one Subaru WRX owner in the neighborhood wanting to race a Lancer OZ on a legal strip. I've seen the car, color blue, really sporty. Looks stock, no mods, though. Maybe I should give it a go?

Tail Lights

Found the replacment tail lights here.

Watcher Deployment

Just released the setup files for deployment. Should be fun using this program.

Lancer 2003

While driving home, I happen to pass by one of the house with the garage open. After glancing a bit I noticed the shiny new 2003 Lancer Evolution parked right in front of the garage. So it is true, the new Lancer Evo [ 1 ] is out! Oh my goodies! I want the new one, what will I do with my 2002 Lancer OZ?

And here are some pre-pro pics from the FNF mov.

New Customer Watcher

Out of sheer laziness in typing SQL strings in figuring out what is going with our app real-time, I managed to write a small tray-based app called 'Watcher' that simply sniffs the DB tables and report back any changes. The 6x6 green pixels change to 6x6 red blinking if there is a new customer sign-up. The blinker is placed under the company logo for aesthetic reasons. In addition to that, the Watcher can tell me who the customer is and show the state of transaction in real-time.

This is the ultimate tool for lazy DB admins, though. Well, I guess not, maybe this is for the Marketing guys who are sensitive to events like these.

Might write the same app using KDE. Think I can have the same functionality since KHTML supports DOM.

Text-To-Speech

Just figured out how to connect to the text-to-speech component by sending me an audible sound of the new customer info.

I'm tired of reading, I want this proggie to serve me well.

CVS, xinetd

Currently, I'm maintaining a list of URLs mostly CVS for grabbing stuff, building them locally so I can play with it. Unfortunately, this task became a little bit too tiring, so I had to do something about it.

Been playing with a small xinetd proggie "A" that does all the remembering for me. It basically stores a cvs server URL along with the Nickname, Application ID, Description, Version and Modulename. I can call the service and it returns the information.

Also, there is another proggie "B" running under xinetd that does the work of bringing all the files down to a certain location.

Outdoor Lantern, Bench

We are spending most of the evening hours at the backyard now. The air is perfect for spending the time there and doing all sort stuff, like doing some woodwork.

I got to nail two little projects down. First was the 5' bench for the table. Decided the bench was prefered more than the chair simply because of tradition. Second was the Hampton Bay outdoor lantern ($14.95) I got from Home Depot and installed the lantern on top of a 4x4 6 feet wood post. Thought of getting the larger and pricey lantern, but settled for the cheapest on the lot since they will only be used this summer, though. Might get the larger one next year when they go on sale.

Walk Path, Arbor

Last weekeend, we also managed to upgrade the walk path and the three arbors for the rose climbers. We placed Weed Blockers along the path and placed stones along the border. The path now passes under the three arbors straight to the backyard.

Getting Serious

Thought about the things my neighbor told me on getting serious on developing a commercial app for Unix/Linux. There is a small office for rent in downtown Portland, along Burnside street that can be rented for $100 a month that would serve as an office. But I wondered why an office was needed in the first place? It could mean setting up a real company with only two persons running the place, maybe operate the place on weekends only. What if I ask the other neighbor about setting up her planned AS400 dev shop there as well.

Redhat 8.0, KDE, KDevelop

Chakie wrote "I hope you don't code UI code manually? You do use Designer to get all the gory layout and boring widget fiddling right?"

I'm using KDevelop to manually code them, it's pretty hard and kludgy, though. The QTdesigner works and can save to .ui and .pro, but qmake is broken on RH8.0 so I am left nothing but KDevelop.

Mandrake 9.1

Installed MDK9.1 on one of the box here having the Radeon 9000 card. The install went OK including the X setup, but fails miserably when I typed startx. So I had to reinstall RH8.0 and stick with the environment for a while.

5x3 Table, Tile Inlay

The table is almost done. There are approx 36 tiles used for the inlay work, quite minimal when compared to others.

Remaining work left is more sanding stuff. Staining the wood will come last. Decided to use the mahogany stain and then apply a polyurethane finish for the last coat.

From the looks of it, the table has somehow the antique look, though, which is really what I wanted in the first place.

Most of the inlay work were done by the kids. They managed to learn how to inlay the tiles very quickly that I had to hand over the tools so they can have some fun.

One of my neighbor saw what I was doing and asked if I can do something for them in the future. We can barter by skills and trade without using money, though.

Karbon14

Found Karbon14 interesting, might dig into the code and see what parts can be pulled out from there.

Gentoo

Downloaded the ISO images (two of them) and was able to set them up from stage one.

Timeline Widget

Spent approx.3 hours writing the initial part of the code, using QWidget as base. Used QSplitter as the container for the Layer and Timeline classes. Work on the code is proceeding very slooowwwly. Partly due my distaste for coding in Qt and KDE. I don't know why I'm coding this way, maybe I need more time to get settled-in. It feels so yuccky.

Saw a lot of reusable code from KIllustrator, Aztec3D and KOffice. Will have to pull it out from there and install it here.

Thougt about the scripting part of animation sequence. It looks like the scripting object will play a big role here as most of the movieClips must be scriptable, even without the IDE.

The scripting engine can be pulled from C-sharp, though. The language (grammar) is pretty much feature rich it would really be nice to use instead of Javascript or even Java.

5" Orbital Sander

Went to Home Depot and got the Ryobi 5" 8-hole Orbital Sander for about 29 bucks and immediately used it to remove the rough spots of the table. The Sander is great, saved a lot of laborious sanding task, though.

Simula

Played around with Simula code, wrote the first "Hello World" and three sample classes. Need to get up to speed in this Language because a large contracting job of porting Simula to another language might happen within the coming 15 months.

Tile Inlay

Went to Home Depot again to find the tile closest to ivory. Found one tile mat having the look similar to ivory and marble stone. Went back home and did the inlay work, it is currently in-progress at the moment and it looks very beautiful.

Aztec3D

Downloaded the latest and greatest zip file from Aztec. Did the usual code walkthrough, looking for interesting parts. Found lots of reusable code in the process.

RH 8.0, KDevelop, KDE, Qt

Played with the above tools trying to put some classes together that were taken from other projects. Was a bit bothered by KDE's and Qt's way of connecting signals to slots, but prevailed in the end. It might take some time in accepting how things get called in KDE, though, as I really am not a real fan of this mechanism.

Anyway, this is a Good Thing since time is all what is needed in getting up to speed in KDE.

Outdoor Table

Been working on the outdoor table for two days now. I got two 4x4 8ft and two 2x6 8ft beams. Made a simple table out of it by cutting the 4x4 into 4 pieces of 30 inch high and the 2x6 into two 3 feet and two 5 feet. Drilled 1/4 holes near the corner and bolted the joints using 1/4x6 threaded bolt.

Also got some nice tiles (1x1) designed for inlay work near bottom part of the legs. Might look for alternatives like fake ivory tiles, rounded or square is preferable.

Also bought a quart of wood stain for darkening the wood. Burgundy is nice along with the fake ivory inlay. That would be really sweet.

Will also be getting from Home Depot some 3/4x6 6ft or 1x8 6ft wood planks for the tabletop. Fake ivory tiles will also get inlaid there as well. [ 1 , 2 ]

Fire Pit

Also started working on the Fire Pit yesterday as I made initial prep on the ground. Dug a feet deep and layered it with 2 inches of gravel. Next is probably line the wall with cheap used bricks, stacking it high up two and a half from the base. Diameter of the pit was, I think, 30 inches.

CVS

The $BIG_MAN mentioned something about implementing a code repository for managing the growing codebase here. He openly asked me about what I was using and I told him about CVS, its features and limitations. He was (I think) interested since there are now numerous issues about code being lost or overwritten. So I might step up to the plate and let him see my personal CVS running on Linux and probably install CVS on a Linux or W2K box and have it connected to the outside world so the Russkies can dig in there.

KOffice U-Pullit Lot

Downloaded KOffice figuring it may contain reusable code. Found a lot of them, like a lot full of second hand parts. Maybe it might be interesting to cobble up the Flash look-alike using KOffice code?

Cellular Automata

This is probably way beyond me getting into this stuff, but exploring how far can it go seems to be feeling I'm getting. Playing with a DNA bitmap to control how cells generate is definitely the right thing to do. One would wonder what kind of shapes are possible given the combination, though. Thinking about it is like counting the sands on the beach.

With all these, how does the concept of God fit in?

Getting Serious

One of my neighbor told me to get serious on developing csvg for the Unix platform. A flash clone or look-alike will probably get his interest, though. My response was creating a Flash clone for Unix is not simple, it takes 5 to 10 man years to get to a commercial grade release.