Older blog entries for rbrady (starting at number 9)

Have new glasses now. They let me actually read stuff better! I can focus now! Yay!

I've found out the writing documentation is an excellent way of finding missing features. The documentation is part of my project report, which has to be handed in, with my project, in Thursday 4th May (which, coincidentally, is a parliamentary by-election for the Romsey constituency in which I live). Up to about 1400 words. (The word limit in the report (excluding appendices) is 10000 words, so that's a fair amount. Of course, the bit I'm writing is an appendix. Ooops.

I am going to be hacking on gote very late today, now I have identified some definite things to do, and the deadline is flashing in big red letters in my mind. Or at least it should be by now.

I've noticed some people have removed diary entries. Is is of course their right to do this, but removal of stuff usually indicates it should not have been put up in the first place. Remember, everything you say is on-the-record. I remember a situation when a friend of mine was very upset about what was said about them in an online diary of someone we met up with. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, just, be careful, don't say anything you will regret.

At conferences and gatherings with many hackers, we should all attempt to exchange gpg fingerprints, so we can sign each others keys and create a decent web of trust. Right now, at Southampton I'm part of a rather pathetic web of trust containing myself, zoot, and 4 others. If I get the chance to go to something like guadec again, I will get business cards with my fingerprint on them.

Have spent too long writing this diary entry and reading news and dealing with mail. But nevermind.

Need more caffeine...

Today, I had an eyetest. (I suffer from fairly severe myopia). My eyes have changed significantly since I last had one (my left eye needs a slightly less strong lens, but my right eye needs a stronger one). Wierd.

New glasses therefore ordered, at a price of GBP 133. (About $200). It doesn't seem fair to me that, through no fault of my own, I have to pay opticians money in order to read. I'm sure universtal coverage of lenses on the NHS would be a vote-winning thing to put on a manifesto, and not too expensive either.

On 10 April, I wrote <quote> Thinking about going out Friday to Oxygen, a club that I hear might be good. </quote>

  • Did so. It was good, perhaps almost as good as the Dungeon (and certainly better than Nexus)
  • Been hacking on gote. I have reached my 'bare mininum' criteria now. I have a few more mad days of hacking left, then I really need to write the report!
  • The Devanagari renderer is now in CVS. I need to do some work on it, but that can wait.
  • Argh! Why I am I wasting so much of my time?
  • My father is in India, being a textile consultant. We gather he's ill atm, nothing really worrying, but's so frustrating, being thousands of kilometres from him and not being able to do anything...
  • I read too much usenet. Perhaps I should remove the newsreader from my system.
  • Latin has no computer terminology. This needs to be rectified.
  • I now have a Devanagari render for pango. This seems to work, as far as I can tell.
  • Libglade rules!
  • >plug<If you are looking for a mud that doesn't insult your intelligence, try TerraFirmA. It's like interactive fiction online. >plug<
  • We have cats in our back garden. They stare at me through the patio door.

Maybe I would accomplish more if I stopped drinking so much tea :

  • Progess on gote. Should be at an 'acceptable to submit'. state by the end of the work. But of course, there is the project.
  • Playing with Devanagari rendering for pango. Have a design for the shaper that ought to work, am experimenting with it. The big problem, of course, will be proofreading it's output, due to all the conjuncts and ligatures. :(
  • At home (Leicester, United Kingdom) for the 'Easter break'. Have no friends here really. Rather bored. Thinking about going out Friday to Oxygen, a club that I hear might be good.
  • Thinking about modifying the house alarm system so it doesn't bleep so loudly when you turn it on. (it's currently rather loud, and wakes people up. [ which is good thing if it detected evil people enter the house, but not a good thing if you just turned it on.) But nevermind
  • Licensing laws for England and Wales are going to be fixed! Yay!
  • Somone should write a compiler for heraldry/vexicology. I want to be able to say 'red, green, yellow horizonal tricolor', and get the right flag. Same with coats of arms, and so on. This would be neat to embed in freeciv, so as to avoid shipping around hundreds of little flags graphics. :)
  • Should really start looking for a job.

Have tickets to get to Paris to Guadec now.

The schedule is silly. I will spend much more time between Southampton and London Heathrow than I will actually in the air.

It's 2000, roll on personal helicopters! :)

Wow, this link fest idea quite cool.

Today, Paul, Jodi, and myself went on the Great Sausage Hunt. We took photographs of them. There's a journal of our expedition in one of these links.

Um, I give up now :).

Not a good day for hacking, although I now know that I like the javascript embedding interface.

Managed to get up this morning and struggled into Real Time & and Embedded systems labs, where I played with making embedded system for a lift. Went ok.

Working on gote : managed to crush the "generating invalid TTF files" bug. Or at least, I made it have less bugs of that sort. In retrospect, it is rather strange that it was working at all, but that's life I guess. (I was writing out some fields in the wrong order.)

Question of the day : what MIME media type should fonts be? I am pondering registering a new "font/" type, as I don't think it fits well in "application". We could have font/truetype, font/opentype, font/type1, font/type1metrics, font/bdf, font/pcf, and so on. Will have to investigate how to register this.

Today was an annoying day. I had one only lecture. Normally this would be a cause for celebration, but my lecture was at 0900. :( Fortunately, the lecturer also agreed that this was an unsatisfactory time, and the lecture has now been moved to Friday 1350. This means I have 6 lectures on Friday. Eep!

Starting coding on Gote again.

Well, that's 3 out of four of my exams done. Remaining one, is on Saturday. Saturday Morning. Ah well. Plenty of time to learn^H^H^H^H^Hrevise the course.

Done work on lots of random stuff today : freeciv, and my pet project Gnomud, which is very nearly preferable to running tinyfugue in an xterm. (yes, I know the name is cliched. sorry.)

Unknown to me, it turns out a fellow student (indeed : someone in the same course and year as me), has written a RiscOS-like filer for GTK+ called RoX. This is notable due to it's support for the X Direct Save protocol, which is a neat little specification to support saving by dragging a file from an app to a file manager.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!