Recent blog entries for vladimir

New blog at LiveJournal: Delayed Reactions. I'm still looking for that web page with Chinese food photos... but the situation is even more hopeless, since West Coast Chinese cuisine (i.e. San Francisco) seems different from East Coast (i.e. Boston).

Happy birthday to me!

So, okay, this hasn't been updated in a while. Still working on RC, mrruperts.org is up (still in its infancy), I'm working on pimp buddy, ipaq hacking continues, etc. The stock market is crashing. ("It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine....") Ahem.

So, instead of an activity log update, I'm writing a request.

I need a web page that has pictures of lots of chinese food items.

I got this thing from pu pu hot pot once that was really good (yeah, even from pu pu).. and I thought it was 'spicy braised beef' -- what I got was strips of beef in a dark thick sauce (sauce just on the meat, not the meat in lots of sauce [i.e. not a soup]), and it was yummy.

But I've ordered 'spicy braised beef' from them twice now and have gotten some random thing with beef and a bunch of veggies in it. The yumminess factor was not nearly so high.

This also leads me to believe that chinese restaurants will pretty much just give you a random dish, trusting to the fact that noone really knows what things are supposed to look like between different restaurants, and that everything has similar ingredients -- you order a beef dish, it will have beef in it. You order chicken, it will have chicken. The only "safe" things are, say, general gau's chicken or sesame chicken (which, incidentally are the SAME THING, except you often get charged an extra $1 for sesame seeds).

So, anyway, if anyone knows of such a page, or knows of the dish I speak of (the sauce was spicy, slightly sweet, there were a few hot peppers in the container), please email me.

Fun stuff. Just got back from a vacation in California. It was nice to see my family; we also went skiing for a few days in some great snow. I still love Kirkwood. Would love to own a condo up there or something.

We also had a huge party on Saturday that included a 120lb roast pig. I'll have pictures of the pig up sometime soon, I hope.

Still continuing to work on Red Carpet; Arpeggio is coming along nicely.. I managed to capture DV video from a Bonobo component the other day, so that really had me excited (proof of concept and all that :-). Looking to move into a new apartment sometime in the next month or two, closer to the office and bigger, hopefully.

Life

'Twas two days before Christmas, and I'm at home alone. Well, not completely alone; one of itp's friends is staying over at our place temporarily. So, I decided to not go home over the holidays so that I can instead go home for about two weeks in January and get some skiing in and stuff. However, this means that now I have plenty of time to clean up the filthy mess that we call our apartment. Yay. I'm starting the Massive Orderlization Project (aka MOP) today. And then, after I'm done, we're hiring a maid; the three of us combined are obviously not enough to keep this place clean. Yay.

This being Christmas reminds me of the many many people that I should get into contact with that I just haven't because I'm lazy. Sigh. Even with email, I don't know why I can't just get myself to write out a quick email or letter or something. Well, maybe I'll try to do something about that tomorrow.

I might end up going skiing in New Hampshire with Mike Whitson on Monday; that should be fun. I haven't gone skiing for two seasons, so it will definitively be exciting. I hope I survive.

Work

Work goes good; finished my large chunk o' rewrite, and then spent most of this week writing a whole bunch of verification scripts, editing tools, and the like. Quite excited for LWE in January.

A few weeks ago I hacked up a Bonobo video player component using the framework I had done for gnomotion; it works quite well, except for A/V sync, which I will get to at some point. It uses libquicktime for the QT stuff; the library has some issues that I will have to deal with (like, there is no way to tell it "you're going be streamed this file in chunks, it will never be written to disk"), but that can be overcome. I need to write up some white papers.

Moved into additional office space across the hall; I now have a full desk to myself, with drawers and the like! It's a large space, and should hold us over nicely until we can move in February to our new space. Yay.

Wow. It's been a really long time since my last diary. Just got back from COMDEX last night. It was both fun and not fun. We stayed at a little motel (Best Western Mardi Gras) that I cannot with a straight face reccomend to anyone, even my enemies (according to one of our cab drivers, when the cabby convention comes to Vegas, they keep the prostitutes at the Mardi Gras... hmmm).

Had some really good food -- lots of good (and expensive!) restaurants over there. Lost $20. (I knew I should've have even tried in the first place :-) GameWorks was pretty fun.. $25 for 2 hours of unlimited arcade play. They have lots of games.. played Dance Dance Revolution with Tuomas -- I have to get this game for the PlayStation. We were playing on the beginner level, then some kid came after us and played on the Expert level and kicked butt -- there was a huge crowd. Then Tuomas and I went back and tried the "Standard" level, and bombed out horribly. The crowd dispersed. :-)

COMDEX itself was good; we were a very popular booth. All our big demos had large crowds. Lots of interesting ideas and questions were brought up by people about both Red Carpet and Evolution; we have lots of food for thought until LinuxWorld in January.

I'm flying home to California on Tuesday for a week.. it will be good to get out of here for a while.

So much for the 8am thing. It is now 4:45 am and I am awake, for the second (third?) night in a row. Actually, today should be the last of these, as I'm trying to get myself back to a normal sleep schedule (I have to before COMDEX next week; otherwise I will be absolutely hating life). It all fell apart when I started rewriting a large module that I had worked on for the past few months, and attempting to do it in a week. Bad idea. :-) However, that work is going fairly well in any case.

I was excited to discover that SGI had released Performer for Linux. I know they did this a while ago, but I didn't discover it until this weekend. The problem now is that there really are no high performance OpenGL cards for linux. My G400 barely cuts it; I'm almost definitively going to purchase a G400Max, and I'm seriously considering a 3DLabs GVX210 (as it's supported by Xinside), but a) it's expensive; b) it's already a bit old; c) the drivers aren't open source. Using nonfree drivers kinda scares me, especially now that I'm used to running stock xf4. (The 3DLabs Wildcat 4210 looks awesome, but it's ridiculously expensive -- a Compaq-branded one is $5000. And there are no Linux drivers. But it can do 1600x1200 at 90Hz with full-scene AA [and higher]. Mmmm.)

I did start playing around with Performer... here's a (large) screenshot of something (and another) I am playing with right now. I'm trying to find a place to get the Ada bindings.. and possibly source to paintball, if it's available.

There's a chance I'll be going to London for a few days sometime in December to visit a friend. I'm looking forward to that; I'm more excited about going home for Thanksgiving, especially after COMDEX.

Saw Charlie's Angels last Friday. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Fun movie.

Nice. I've been able to wake up at around 8am every day for over a week now. It feels good. Joey the contractor finished everything, and I had my bookshelf delivered today. (Ridiculously expensive, but solid wood.) And I installed one of my blinds on my windows (the only casualty was a little lamp that I'm going to have to replace that I dropped the blind on. Oops.). Saw Dr. T and the Women the other day with Miguel, Ian, and others. Horrible, horrible movie. It had a few funny parts, but they were mostly in the preview. The movie had no plot; it just had some events that were strung together.

Last night, went out to dinner with a few people, and then went to a coffee shop afterwards. There were about 6 or 7 laptops in the place, and it was tiny. The funniest one was a guy sitting next to the door with Microsoft Word on his screen, writing a paper entitled "The Internet, the future of computing." Miguel had a hard time not laughing until he got out the door.

Also saw The Candidate. Unlike the aforementioned movie, this one was very good. Great plot, very good performances, great suspense. Go see it.

I am currently doing evil things to GtkHTML. We'll see how it goes.

My furniture got delivered today! Woke up this morning at 8 (my dayshifting plan worked!), got everything out of the room and spent two hours cleaning the floor and windows. I got through one of the two windows. No, I'm not incometent. There was probably a few months worth of grime on the windows, and each 'window' actually has 4 glass panes and a screen. First I had to figure out how to remove the windows. In the process I learned how to correctly install the windows so that they wouldn't come crashing down on you. I also learned that the windows aren't the proper kind (i.e the little ledge to open them is on the inside instead of the outside when you mount them -- and no, you can't just turn them, because doing that gives you a nice 1/2" gap between the top and bottom windows), and that some of them don't have the proper device to stop them from crashing down on you. (Like they did on the cable guy!)

Joey the Contractor From Hell was the one who put them back. Ha. Incidentally, he didn't come in yesterday like his note said he would. Ian called him today at noon, and he said he would be in today to do the wall in my room and some other stuff. He didn't show up. The window people that Jennifer hired called; they told me that they needed her to be there while they came to look at the place, and that they refused to come to even look without her here. I'm not sure why they called me (I've never spoken to them before). I told them to call her.

Plus, I'm getting sick. And I need shelves so that I can get the boxes out from the other room, so that room can be used. And I think Ian is annoyed with me. And I'm sitting on my futon chair with the plastic still on the pad because I have no cover for it. Blah.

iPAQ bizzareness. (No, I haven't slept tonight. I need to dayshift.) I cannot use the latest iPAQ images since I have a PCMCIA sleeve and there is some register corruption which George tells me has been fixed, but the fix won't be available until Monday. My efforts to find it were futile. So, I have to use the images that have test6 on them to have networking. Well, there seem to be NFS issues. help-browser-skels.c (generated from idl for gnome-help-browser in gnome-core) does not compile. In the assemble step, it always gets an I/O error. The resulting .o file is exactly 94600 bytes in size; it assembles fine using the cross-assembler, and natively on the skiffs. But cannot assemble on the iPAQ. Then, I get bizzare read errors on random files while building, and since I'm building debs, I usually have to restart the entire build. What's worse is that the errors are repeatable. It /always/ wedges on the same file, in the same place. I'm hoping that test8 will fix this (magically?).. maybe nfsv3, I'm not sure. I think I'll try the v3 business.