Older blog entries for sp (starting at number 2)

Hardware is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and faster, but are computers becoming really better performing? Startup times have gone up, not down, as operating systems become more complicated, and software bloat pretty much reverses moore's law.

I know this is a rather tired and often-rehashed theme, but could it be true?

Worked on my MTAC project today. MTAC is a calculator in Java, with support for simple symbolic manipulation, symbolic differentiation, and a nice plot feature (enter an expression with exactly one unknown variable, and it will automatically plot it). Also fixed a bunch of folding bugs in jEdit.

My telephone service has been really dodgy lately. It works in the morning and at night, but during the day, it gets disconnected. The teleco have been claiming they'll fix it "tomorrow" for several days now. I suspect what is happening is their lines are overloaded, so they implemented a rolling connect/disconnect scheme, a la rolling blackouts in california. Lame.

I think GNOME is trying to be too much; especially with Red Carpet and Nautilus. Not only do these two projects duplicate certain functionality (Red Carpet's 'channels' and Nautilus 'software catalog' service), they also do things which should be done in something system-wide like Linuxconf, not a _user-oriented_ desktop environment.

And KDE continues to annoy me, with its inconsistencies, poorly organized menus, and overly complicated UIs. I guess I'll stick to blackbox for now.

I doubt there are many people reading this, but I'll write an entry anyway.

Worked on folding in jEdit today; it is really starting to work well now, with the exception of various odd bugs that appear when you edit a buffer while regions are collapsed.

I can't figure out how to add myself to a project. My guess is that it is only possible after I am certified as an Apprentice.