Older blog entries for vicious (starting at number 40)

Wed Jun 28 01:08:13 PDT 2000

On monday I spent the morning at a local hospital mostly waiting for something to happen. They finally xrayed my wrist and it seems nothing is that wrong with it. However they were gonna call me when some dude who understands xrays better looks at it, but they haven't gotten to me yet. Oh well.

Mostly I'm lazy and actually didn't do much hacking. And when I did do hacking I was mostly feeding my addiction to cleaning up gnome-libs HEAD.

Today I was in a strange mood and implemented a new statically typesafe object model for C with pretty nice syntax. It works much more like Java or C++ in it's syntax when using the objects, and it is incredibly heavy on C macro usage. To see some code look at http://ftp.5z.com/pub/unix/dflat-0.1.tar.gz. Otherwise I've actually done a bit of hacking on grapevine again. I've got some new ideas about what to do in grapevine to make it more robust etc... And I really need to make a screenshot or something as people are asking me for one.

Tommorrow I'm going up to Eazel. Eazel has moved while I was away. You leave them alone for a few days and they move the company to another town... Well actually it's only about 1km away or so, but it's in Mountain View rather then Palo Alto. I should be coming back on Thursday sometime we'll see where I end up sleeping.

Mon Jun 26 01:36:20 PDT 2000

Let's take things chronologically.

Friday Maciej missed his flight and posponed it till the evening. After going to miguel's talk, ettore, my brother, maciej and me went to Tijuana since ettore said he's never been to mexico. Once at TJ, we realized that having only one drink is impossible in the local bars, I realized that my cellphone is completely broken and maciej realized that he'll miss his flight. We also all realized that ettore is italian and we also realized what that means. Details can be summed up in

• Tequila
• No water in bathrooms
• Hugging telephone poles
• -- CENSORED to protect the guilty --
• Cheap, horrible beer
• "evolution:foo" URIs are evil
• Standalone bonobo components

On saturday maciej flew home in the morning. In the afternoon miguel, federico, ettore a nd I went to a movie, then to dinner later. We discussed a lot of gnome and related stuff. Another realization: Seaport village is probably the wrong place to go pick up chicks.

On Sunday I stayed home mostly. Spent most of the day cleaning up gnome-libs HEAD issues. I intended to do other stuff, but could not help myself. I need to do some grapevine work.

Fri Jun 23 11:06:28 PDT 2000

Usenix. It's pretty cool. I haven't been to the morning sessions mostly because I was too lazy. However the consuption of beer (and bad beer) has increased this week substantially. Today I've been to the eye doctor and thus can't drive. But I definately don't want to miss miguel's talk at 2.

Maciej came down for a day or two, so I also have to drive him to the airport at some point.

As for hacking, due to usenix I have not done much. That is, I have done nothing at all. I have a couple of cool ideas about new stuff I have absolutely no time for implementing. I need to do both a lot of grapevine and some dr.genius work. I also need to finally start on vertigo with jacob. This is getting postponed too much already.

Sun Jun 18 02:59:47 PDT 2000

I actually cleaned my keyboard today probably after a very long time. It was not completely voluntary. I took off the pads that you rest your wrists on (because they didn't hold right, stuck to my hands and were just pretty disgusting) only to then reveal a surface which is incredibly sticky. It finally took some alcohol to get it off. Once I was at it I also cleaned the rest of the keyboard.

I've also finally managed to compile nautilus. So after almost half a year working at eazel I finally can play with what we've been doing all this tim Today in general was a day for fixing many different alpha/64bit related problems in different software. Also did some work on gnop. Now for custo widgets, as long as the widget supports the gnop-widget-interface, all you need to do is link it to the application using gnop. Then in the .gnop file you use the typename in the GOB form, so that gnop can make the _get_type function name and use g_module to find it. Sort of a hack, yes. If the widget has been used before (or if one just used the _get_type of a widget before, then it will be recognized by gtk code directly without going through g_module though.

Several times in the last few weeks I've cought myself forgetting to commit stuff. I've had some gnop changes on my disk from tuesday until today. I must be getting old or something.

Sat Jun 17 03:05:15 PDT 2000

Lazy, lazy, lazy. Even though I have LOTS of things to do I can't seem to get them done. Oh well. Did very little hacking, watched tv for a bit and that's it. Quite an unproductive day. Oh well.

I started writing templates for glib to make glib more typesafe. More of a proof of concept at this stage, but could prove interesting, I just wrapped a little bit of GList and did some performance testing. With optimalization turned on there doesn't seem to be any performance hit as the compiler can optimize away everything. This has an advantage over C++ templates. There is still only one implementation, and the cost is purely compile time. Unfortunately there seems to be no compile time check for types that are longer then gpointer and thus if you use those, shit really hits the fan.

Thu Jun 15 23:13:24 PDT 2000

The last day before I left the bay area we went out to a pub with yosh, uzi eskil and others I can't remember. I managed to fall down the stairs in a Palo Alto bar (yeah I did have a bunch of beers at that point, but I wasn't that drunk). I managed to not land in broken glass, nor falling flat on my face. My left wrist and knee got quite fucked up however. Oh well. It's also hard convincing the bouncer that NO you are not too pissed to walk when your knee hurts like fuck.

Hmm, it turns out I picked the WORST day to drive to San Diego. There is some sort of a heat wave, and I went on the I-5 which just goes through the desert as much as it can. So I drove for 9 hours in 40+ degree (100+ for you farenheit weird people) heat. I also didn't have a cooler for drinks so whatever was in the car for more then like half an hour was about the whatever was in the car for more then like half an hour was about the temperature of hot tea. Oh btw, do you know how much fun it is driving a stickshift when your left wrist is so fucked up that you can't really grip anything too hard (like a steering wheel). Fortunately most of the way is just driving in fifth gear on the highway. Plus the wrist got better by the end of the day.

Because of all this I was sort of unusable yesterday evening and most of the day today.

My dad brought my granddads (which I seem to have now inherited) camera from Prague. This is a quite cool Leica III, probably from 1933-35. This means I spent some time looking at leica sites trying to identify it (leica's don't seem to have the model name on them, just the serial number, which doesn't help all that much). It is a real mechanical wonder compared to my pentax which is mostly electronic. So I spent a good part of the day figuring out how to work it and what all the little doodahs do.

On the good side of things, my wrist no longer hurts that bad. It still hurts, just not as much. Hmm, I do all these things not to hurt my wrists such as using real ergonomic keyboards, trackballs, etc... Then I manage to fuck them up while making a complete idiot out of myself as a bonus.

Mon Jun 12 01:52:00 PDT 2000

Woke up quite late. For the fact that I went to sleep at like 3am, and I woke up at around 2pm. So I sat around and finished the ibm article for june, for some reason the may article never made it. I also did a bunch of minor useless changes on my website, but didn't actually have the time or inclination to actually make it not suck. Then we went out for sushi with eskil, maciej, steph and some of their apparently microsoft friends.

Then me and eskil went to eazel to actually do some work. Although I haven't gotten much work done.

Yesterday we went out with steph to some really weird, but quite funny movie. I also realized that I truly suck at parallel parking. I also finished the book I was reading for the past couple of months.

Eskil pointed me to the fact that I have left out many highly important things from our rampage through SF. Thus, here is a short list of keywords:

• Beer
• Tequila from strangers
• Car alarms
• Extremely sticky trees
• Parking tickets
• Traffic cones
• Candles from bars
• Yogurt
• No beer after 2am
• Puking in random bathrooms
• Displacement of various items found on street

While there was no Seine to piss in, we did piss outside of some yuppie cafe, and eskil almost pissed onto a homeless dude.

Uhh, getting lazy with these things. Although today and yesterday was particularly memorable. Yesterday (actually now 2 days ago since it's just after midnight here) we went to celebrate maciej's birthday. After trying to get him drunk, I managed to get myself somewhat wasted. After leaving the bar, we wanted to go to Robin's place as it was near and he had a couch and a bed. After taking a wrong turn (eskil would like everyone to believe it was my drunken self who's at fault), we ended up somewhere completely different. We drank some more beer and were generally rowdy, but managed somehow not to get arrested (strange). We then met this strange couple who invited us in for some tequila. After taking a shot I immediately puked in their bathroom (I did politly ask first though). The trouble was that I puked about an hour before this and had no food (except beer) in the meantime. This made the morning, and in fact the entire day far more enjoyable. I did manage to basically sleep till about 5pm with some breaks for puking or feeling generally horrible. Now I feel ready to intake some more beer. I also had no chance to take a shower nor change yet since I couldn't get to maciejs place. Thus I'm quite dirty and stink fairly bad.

On a completely different subject. The gegl shirts came in. I don't want to do another mail distribution thing, and thus will only sell them to people at usenix and OLS and stuff (given how well they sold before I might have to get some more for OLS).

Yesterday was a dinner for bart who's leaving eazel to do bigger and better things (wait ... there is nothing bigger nor better then eazel ...). It was in this Mt.Everest restaurant. The most supprising thing was that they had something which looked and tasted like shrimp. I never knew they had those in nepal.

Then we went out drinking (or it seemed like we did). After a walking tour of san francisco, we ended up in a bar with loud annoying disco music. Fortunately they had Pilsner Urquell so it didn't suck THAT bad. Well, actually it DID suck that bad.

Eskil actually drove the car there and today back to palo alto and it was almost safe.