Older blog entries for vicious (starting at number 53)

Mon Aug 14 03:51:55 PDT 2000

Eskil just announced he needs to take a shit and read comics. I think this is an important announcement and I take it upon myself, as my duty to the humankind to announce this important event to the world. No longer shall the weak and hungry of the world wonder about what eskil does before he goes to sleep.

In other news the 1.50 beer and free bbq afternoon at lucky 13 was not on this saturday as apparently no one showed up, which I don't get. Ok it was some crappy local beer this time around and the bbq is not that great. But I think people are weird.

I'm now officially a leach as I finally conned a piece of hardware out of Eazel, well you can't call it that, because I just asked and they said "ok". So I have a cool brand new laptop so that I can actually compile nautilus and do some work. In the meantime I've done a bunch of completely unrelated stuff that was very low on the priority queue, just because I felt like that. Basically I suddenly had an urge to do things that are completely unnecessary if I can't work on the highest priority thing.

To change the topic to something completely unrelated. I've finally realized what I like about the gnome politics. It's the whole kindergarten aspect of the whole thing. Unfortunately then I read a cnn story about the reform party, which makes us look like a bunch of incredibly sane and serious individuals who are completely focused at the job at hand, rather then squabbling (again I bet I didn't spell that right) about who gets to control what completely un important part of gnome. And all this time I though we were quite silly. Darn. I've watched life of brian today and the people's front of judea (or was it the judean people's front?) fighting among themselves rather then the evil empire really seemed appropriate. I think we really need to become more silly. But then again this week is LWE, which means:

Horror movie music

Yet another conference to get drunk on with fellow gnome hackers

So there's definately a chance to become more silly, at least for a week. Given current state of affairs this will probably turn out to be quite a silly week. I intend to kill quite a few braincells and get absolutely no work done this week. Oh wait, my bosses might read this. No, I intend to work extra hours this week, shall drink absolutely no alcohol and shall sleep for at most 15 minutes a day.

As a closing comment on today's diary, eskil has apparently finished taking a shit. I haven't actually gone in and confirmed this fresh piece news, so it should be treated as a rumor at this point.

Thu Aug 10 04:40:57 PDT 2000

Saturday was a 1.50 dollar pilsner night which was quite cool. We then went to some party and saw a girl in a dress made from something resembling an electrical tape.

Sunday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednasday was basically work only. I still can't get gdb to run and now nautilus hangs on me at startup and gdb says nothing. Anyway, fun fun fun. Basically haven't done anything else except nautilus/gnome-vfs work, and that was hampered by my stupidity and gdb bugginess.

Sat Aug 5 17:15:38 PDT 2000

I've become a bit more lazy about posting here in the past few days.

Anyway, what happened? Eskil's danish friends left, matheiu got his own place and thus I'm the only leach left at eskil's, maciej's and steph's place.

At work I've started to be abused for nautilus work, which would not be so bad if I could figure out how to run nautilus in gdb. The problem lies somewhere between gdb being a buggy pile of dung and .... no wait that IS the only reason. Gdb, alpha and threads just don't mix.

Yesterday me, maciej and steph went down to zeitgeist to increase revenues for select breweries. On the way back we stopped at the local safeway to get some food and maciej apparently needed to buy some large penis shaped cactii. I bought a coconut, which turned out to be rotten inside. That blows.

Today it seems that new nautilus screenshots got posted to slashdot thus rendering eazel basically networkless. I rarely read the comments but some of these were quite funny. I love it how people form concrete opinions about software from screenshots only.

Sun Jul 30 01:23:49 PDT 2000

On thursday I drove up to SF. It turned out to be a 10 hour drive this time cuz I went all the way to SF and not just to PA. This time I took some books on tape so it was much better. However one of the speakers in the car just died during the way. I really REALLY need to go find a 4x4 shop around here and by some speaker wells for the back seats so I can put in the 6x9 speakers.

One thing I realized very soon is that parking in SF, especially near maciej's really really sucks. Which is why I left my car up at Eazel parking lot and I'll just bum rides off of eskil. On thursday I parked about 5 minutes walk from the place. And when I got back, there was a parking place right in front of the house. Oh well.

Then the next day, there was a party. It was kind of mild. Nobody did anything incredibly stupid, the cops didn't come. The beer consupmtion rate however was not bad. However the place was quite a mess in the morning. Including some random person who passed out on the living room floor in the middleof the evening sometime.

Today we didn't do absolutely anything. We went up with eskil and mathieu and a couple of eskil's danish friends up to eazel and the PA fry's and then drove around for a bit around the mountains there. All in all we did absolutely nothing and are going to watch a movie right now. Basically we have achived absolute unproductivity today.

Wed Jul 26 22:47:00 PDT 2000

I must be in an "OLS recovery mode" as I'm not being incredibly productive. There is a buttload of email to read/answer/delete/forget/ignore, buttload of things I want to do, and I'm incredibly lazy. I watched TV a lot and after a while I noticed that I was watching complete crap because nothing else was on but I was too lazy to go do something else.

Well no really I did some other stuff. Did bunch of gnop/grapevine/gob hacking and interestingly enough for you all (well who cares, interesting for me anyway) dflat. Download the newest example at dflat-0.2.1.tar.gz

The biggest change there is methods. Instead of doing everything through virtual like methods, I've changed it to using normal functions. With one cool addition however. The object creates further aliases to methods of ALL parent objects. Thus for example let's say you have a 'ref' method on the DF__Object and now you have two objects, one of type DF__Object and one of type DF__Lamp (from the example), you can do:

  DF__Object *object = DF__NEW(DF__Object);
  DF__Lamp *lamp = DF__NEW(DF__Lamp);

/* now, so far normal */ DF__Object__ref(object);

/* watch this, no casting */ DF__Lamp__ref(lamp);

This all is achieved by incredibly abusing the preprocessor to make setting up such objects simple (as long as all parent objects are setup correctly you get things working painlessly without having to know the parent objects). The other addition was that I've added the zero cost typesafe upcasting. I'm gonna work up a simple thing like that for GTK+ as well, though GTK+ usually uses base class pointers and thus it doesn't do that well. I am however seriously thinking of adding it to my gob2 feature list (will have to parse headers though looking for typedefs, eek, fortunately I can ignore EVERYTHING except those and I can ignore most known system headers to make this quick).

Note to ramiro, pavel and all other C++ weirdos: Yes I know C++ does this, does it better, will make my morning coffee and give me a blowjob. To get a bigger laugh you should look at my glib static typesafe templates.

Mon Jul 24 01:19:17 PDT 2000

OLS was quite interesting. Even productive. Although I've lost more braincells then the worth of the information I had aquired. Well I hadn't actually really gotten drunk except for the first and the last day. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Staying in one room with yosh, uzi and mmarker was quite an exprience. There was a fairly crappy corel party, there was an even worse zeroknowledge party. The latter was actually held very far out in the country. It was strange but there was a ranch thing that tried to badly impersonate Texas. When you go to a party and instead of an open bar you find yourself getting two "drink tickets", you know the company must be going down the drain. Either that or they have an incredibly anal CFO or something like that. Apparently this is not the case with Helix which held a party on the last day and had an open bar in a nice pub which had a decent beer selection. After quite a bit of drinking, a couple of people (including me apparently) decided to go to some club or something. We actually ended up in some rave thing which turned out to be quite boring and quite far from downtown actually. After a couple of minutes (maybe half an hour or so), me and sammy (I think this is the person) decided it was time to get out of there and go back. Some more quite incriminating stuff happened and yosh took some pictures. Went to sleep before everyone else (I was not feeling too great by this time), but still quite late, around 3 I think. I woke up at 5:45 and realized I was wrong on when the plane leaves. It was actually at 7:15. Quickly packed up, checked out and took a taxi to the airport. All this with a somewhat of a hangover (ok not somewhat, quite a bad hangover actually). It turns out that airport terminals and airplane seats are not a great thing to sleep on and if you try your neck starts hurting as well. Oh well, I was too tired to care. The hangover supprisingly went away by around noon, and from then I was just very tired, despite falling asleep at every possible moment during the whole way.

Despite all this, I actually did get some time to hack on stuff and I released a new gob with a pretty important bugfix. It is the first fatal bug in gob since 1.0 really. (well the finalize/destroy problems of 1.0.2 were also somewhat bad). Overall I think gob is quite stable to begin with and when things break they are usually corner cases. I also had a whole bunch of ideas about signal marshalling etc for gob2. I've also had an idea about how to do the typsafe downcasting of generic C objects without any added cost. I will also try out some new stuff how to do dflat methods in a way that doesn't break bincompat all the time. So expect another dflat thingie soon. I don't think I will ever use it. It's more of a "let's see if this is possible" thing.

Well, don't have my diary making script tonight...

If it seems I've had enough beer, it's probably because I have (is there ever such thing as enough beer)

OK, what happend: the parent'scamehomeand the house was still in ok order, thus I haven't got my ass kicked.

Now I'm in ottawa. After some confusing stuff whenI got ripped off of $30 canadian dollars for beer (they made me pay twice). we went to some placewith mmarker and got some pilsner and then radegast. After an unsuccesfull attempt to pick up the waitress (by now it's sure, you CANNOT pick up waitresses) we went to thehotel and met yosh etc ... and ended up at linuxcare offices or something. I wrote GEGL on every whiteboard, let's see if I get barred from the premises.

Fri Jul 14 05:52:23 PDT 2000

Well today I spent solely on gnome-libs. I've managed to clean up a bunch of smaller stuff but there still remains to be a lot done. While gnome-libs work is mostly somewhat boring and restrictive in what you can do (since it should stay at least mostly source compatible) it has some sort of weird attraction for me. It however seems that other people are becoming interested in doing some gnome-libs work too which would be good. I hope it gets stable and out as quick as humanly possible as it's just a far cleaner library then gnome-libs 1 is in terms of the api.

Thu Jul 13 04:04:53 PDT 2000

Another day of hacking on everything. Mostly gnop, grapevine and gnome-libs. After the gnop release someone sent me an excellent idea. A command line tool for loading up gnop dialogs. This means that coupled with gconftool, you can now have shellscripts have gconf configuration dialog boxes. Plus you can run the dialog of any app that uses just the stock internal widget stuff or glade stuff, by just running gnop-tool on it's .gnop file. I still need to do the "many configuration" stuff for gnop so that I can have per applet dialog box for configurations. These needs some schema shuffling and stuff like that. Then I can get done more grapevine stuff. Also will have to test out gnop's support for gconf lists. Another thing that needs some ideas is internationalization of gnop. There are several possibilities:

  • Put strings in a .c file and use gettext (disadvantage: only your program can really be translated then)
  • Put strings using the xml:lang stuff or gconf like stuff into the .gnop file (disadvantage: incredibly messy large file, hard to edit)
  • Put strings into separate files (disadvantage: incredible mess of files and problems with finding stuff etc...)
Right now I'm leaning towards the second one, though I think the third one is also good. The second one can be made much better if there is a good tool to edit .gnop files (meaning: improve gnop-edit). The advantage over the third one is, that having only one file makes it much more convenient. We get all the power of having all the config info inside the XML file. So you could pass files around even accross network to easily setup apps. I guess you can still do it with the third option, though somewhat more clumsily.

So I've managed to be an incredible geek today and not even leave the house and hack on stuff all day (except for watching tv for like 2 hours)

Wed Jul 12 02:51:39 PDT 2000

Today was a hacking day. I managed to hack on just about every one of my projects. In the morning I did a gnop 0.1 release. Then I worked for a couple hours on dr-genius, then I spent a few hours on grapevine. Then I went to a movie. Saw "Perfect Storm", pretty good movie. Kind of makes me glad I'm a hacker and not a fisherman. After getting home I did some gnome-libs hacking. Haven't touched the panel nor gob today though.

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