still too cool for wordpress.
choose one: a few recent posts; links to embarassing things; rss was for robots.

May 1, 2001

phil: dude, i so did not want to see driven.

so i've read some books now. the three by the author of fight club. the movie is better than any of them, sadly. or not so sadly. i found it odd that i wanted them to be different, even though i liked the movie.

so i could type some stuff about the montreal trip since i am feeling all typing-like.

anyway so the post gnome 1.4 mini-vacation to montreal started out in an interesting manner. there was a websaver to ottawa, but non to montreal. so it would be $300 (US, i think) more to fly to montreal. so we somehow convinced shaver and phil to meet us in ottawa and we'd ride the bus together.

so we were actually almost maybe late to the airport, but we did make it on time. there are some funny things about that that i am actually embarassed about, so i'll skip them for now.

so nat finds on his blackberry that we are to meet phil and mike at a bar in ottawa. we get off the plane, and go to the customs thing. they start asking me where i'm going, to which i reply montreal, and then of course they want to know why i'm going through ottawa rather than to montreal so i say how i am all cheap and what not. then he wants to know how i know the people i'm going to see... i decided "through the people i came here with" is better than "i met them on the internet," so i go with the former.

so then we go to get a taxi and phil and mike come running out, and they decided it would be cheaper to rent a car than for us all to take the bus. unfortunately, they require some things of the people they rent cars to, and it blah blahs.

so they finally give us a car and we head to montreal, where we played some virtua tennis.

the next day shaver has a mean cookout at his place, with tons of different meats and what not. lots of people then went out, and i think i might have played virtua tennis. oh, and i finally met mkp.

the next day we played some virtua tennis and watched some hockey and went to see driven, which i didn't want to see. it was pretty bad. phil said the worst he'd seen since coyote ugly. unfortunately, i cannot make that comparison since nat didn't let me see that. i had a funny email i sent about it, but i can't find it.

anyway after that i forget what we did.

then yesterday we ate a a burger/fries place and then tried to find ottawa. that took a long time and we missed our flight by 2 hours. ottawa is unlike new york in that they don't have boston flights every two hours. so we had to get a hotel and take a 7 am flight the next day. whee.

so we walked around ottawa and i made nat and joe mad at me.

blah blah, flew home, blah blah, built some packages, blah blah.

* * *

May 2, 2001

it was warm so slept with the windows open. this provided a large amount of noise in the morning, as a house across the street is having an overhaul or something. ended up sleeping close to 12 hours which was nice since in only got 2 or 3 last night in ottawa.

continued having lots of weird dreams; woke up after 3 or 4 of them due to the noise noted above. one had someone trying to break into our office, and i was trying to call 911 and then they started accusing me of something. i guess you had to be there.

it feels like winter went straight into summer here in boston, totally skipping over spring. either that or spring happened while i was working in the office, or something. anyway it was in the 80's today which was nice.

i've started biking to work again, and i find myself very much out of shape. i don't know if my completely anaerobic ride will help much, but at any rate it should give me an extra 40+ minutes per day, as it takes much less time to ride there than to walk.

did some hacking on abiword on hp-ux. fixed some multi-depth visual bugs (surprise) and abi almost works. well, the splash screen no longer crashes it and text actually shows up, but the scroll/status bars still don't look right. i will be sending the abi guys a patch as soon as i can get my evolution composing mails.

there are still some fun problems with fonts. hp-ux's x server doesn't seem to natively support type1 fonts, so i have to do some things to get the font server seeing the abi fonts. after i had that finally working, i've found that the fonts still aren't matching to what abi thinks they should. hopefully i'll get this taken care of tomorrow, as it would be nice to move on to another package.

the hp-ux port is coming along nicely. libtool is behaving more nicely, which makes imlib/gdk-pixbuf modules working. also, librep and sawfish are working nicely these days too. whee. there's still a lot of stuff, as quite a few applets are not multi-depth visual friendly, and there are still surprisingly many hard coded use of .so (hp-ux shared libraries have the .sl extension). i should probably write a nice summary of the fixes i am having and post them, so i have to do less work in the future.

hp-ux's c++ compiler rules. really. i'm serious.

i also got an aphrodite cd (the one alex nicely lent me whilst i was in canadia) and did a small bit of hacking at algiers.

* * *

May 3, 2001

more weird dreams.

it takes between 10-15 minutes to bike to work.

spotted in xchat source:

#undef GTK_WIDGET #define GTK_WIDGET(n) ((GtkWidget*)n) #undef GTK_OBJECT #define GTK_OBJECT(n) ((GtkObject*)n) #undef GTK_OBJECT_CLASS #define GTK_OBJECT_CLASS(n) ((GtkObjectClass*)n)

got gaim, gnomeicu working on hp-ux. xchat still doesn't.

* * *

May 7, 2001

frustrating day!

hacking on gtk size negotiation and object subclassing stuff for two days in a row makes for interesting dreams. i don't really remember them, though.

the building management continues to suck. i went to put my bike in the cage place only to find that the bike rack was no longer in there. so, i took my bike up to our office again. which of course they didn't like. apparently they moved it (with a bike still attached to it!!!) to somewhere else in the garage.

so i then took my bike down there like they wanted, and one of the guys gave me a hard time because i had my bike there (even though i was taking it down there (which they wanted me to do)). anyway, it is pretty fun when you get people to the point that they want to push you or something, but can't because they'll get sued.

after reading the weekend's email, i started doing more hp-ux building. the low quality of the code in a lot of these apps is scary. someone should publish the GNU "C" language spec somewhere. got pan, pilot-link, gnome-pilot, and the gnome-pim conduits building.

my right eye has been bothering me the last few days, and got bad enough that i threw out my contact at work and went home (since i couldn't see all that well). i put in a new contact at home and it's fine now.

* * *

May 8, 2001

I think my drive had this today. either way, /home is now xfs. and i have a recent backup of my mail!

"Of all the things you love about Boston, shouldn't your job be one of them?"

Today's task was gnucash. lot's of fun. between having packages not fail when things they need aren't found, and people not understanding C, it took a lot of time. sigh. oh, and there are still run time unresolved symbols. i should try to get the hp-ux guys to put finite() in math.h. it would save me some trouble.

did i mention that i spent pretty much all day on gnucash, and it still doesn't work?

yet another gnome-vfs release came out without api documentation. so much for progress.

i don't understand why people think you can't make money off of free software. quite a few people i know seem to be making quite a bit.

ie5 on hp-ux isn't all that bad.

* * *

May 9, 2001

my bike has a flat tire. suck.

i am an idiot (again, or still). i had defined FINITE() to be isfinite() or finite(), depending on which was present, but forgot to change the actual call in gnucash so like, it just still called finite(). so yeah, that thing is like done now and stuff.

lunch at pizzaria uno - the one by the office, which i had not been to yet even though it is all close-like to the office and also nat's apartment.

my emacs now shows me how much battery i have. it says "5%". i should not have left my power dingus at work.

i am hungry.

* * *

May 15, 2001

spent a lot of today filing bug reports in evolution. yesterday i actually fixed a long standing bug, which turns out to have fixed a couple of other bugs :)

went to buy american beauty today, and noticed that they had elp's pictures at an exhibition. that's another one of the records my dad has that i hadn't seen on cd, so i got it.

so my laptop broke again. wheeee. this is like, the fourth time the pcmcia stuff has stopped working. fun fun. fortunately the m505 still works fine (and actually wavelan is working after unsuspending, which i don't recall worked before). that's a nice laptop. slow, though.

oh and through incompetency of certain people (not at ximian) the laptop isn't being sent back to sony until tomorrow.

it's funny to watch people look at cute girls on the t.

sony evidently has a new policy - so i have to complain to the office of the president (of sony, not the US) that my laptop keeps breaking. sigh, if only i had paid attention when they went over that stuff in english class.

since i had the sgi monitor which did 1600x1200 and a laptop whose internal screen didn't, i set up 2 X configurations and what not. this led to me having to restart X often, which sucks for xemacs. so now i just run an xemacs on vt2 and run gnuclient in X. wheee.

seen in my .gtkrc.mine:

* * *

May 17, 2001

whee.

yesterday and today started trying to get the current gnome 1.4 building/running on hp-ux. i've gotten a lot further than my previous try (mostly due to having some clue about hp-ux this time). going to start trying to get my patches merged tomorrow.

in building bonobo i found a nice little compiler bug on hp-ux. fortunately, the code it was compiling was again GNU "C" and i could find a workaround.

i've started hacking mig's file selector widget a bit this week. i'm "porting" what he has to gnome-vfs, and hopefully it will be at all usable soon. it's hard because gnome-vfs is *cough* undocumented, but this should change as more people need to use it.

requiem for a dream

so eazel is done. it's be a long road from 1.5 years ago or so when they started, and an interesting one. hopefully all the fun details will get out, as it is yet another interesting chapter in the pc history. of all people, arik probably has a very interesting view as he's the only one to have worked at both companies (and now he's at aol/netscape/mozilla/time/warner/kitchen-sink).

my thoughts are that basically, they got really unlucky. the timing of their funding needs sucked, and it's pretty unfortunate. hopefully ximian's learned a thing or two from eazel's demise, and we'll be around for a while. i know i've learned quite a bit from them.

i'm about to lose my worryin' mind

love sucks. one the one hand, it's a big con to try to get you to further your species, and on the other it's a way to add meaning to your life. it would be convenient if you could disconnect the two, but that would be like making unix not suck.

blah blah blah blah.

got american beauty on dvd the other day. it's a lot like fight club, and most people i've pointed this out to hadn't noticed it which i thought was weird. but maybe i am just an idiot (which seems like the case more and more).

i would mention how my allergies have been nicer the past couple of days, but i know what that would cause.

mr bt mr bt mr bt mr bt mr bt mr bt

the bbc sessions heartbreaker is just, like, so good. so so good. most of the rest of that cd is, but that one track is like, beyond what not. i prolly do like the since i've been loving you from the song remains the same.

the battery on the n505 is so nice.

* * *

May 19, 2001

since it is the weekend, did some evo hacking and sent a patch in.

overheard at wendy's:

* * *

May 20, 2001

boston is being beautiful today.

* * *

May 23, 2001

i've been having interesting dreams the past few nights. last night, i had one dream where dave mason was using the foobar and complained that it wasn't configurable.

another from last night was that taylor came back from the bahamas early, and had gotten a new haircut which was of the style of kid n' play, except that it had plastic around it so it looked like he had a glass of beer on his head.

the night before, i had dreamt that i was at kind of like an amphitheater, and it was a church or something, because i was going to talk to the guy in one corner of the seats and he was a minister or something, and he asked me how my tumor was. apparently, i had one because my stomach hurt, but neither me nor my parents would acknowledge it, because that would mean that the church was right and stuff. it was pretty odd.

over the weekend (i think) i had a dream where i had another sister, a year younger than i am (my real sister is 2.5 years younger). i couldn't remember her becuase i didn't have any memories before my real sister was born. i asked my mom (in the dream) about her and i guess she couldn't remember or something... anyway now it is vaguely similar to the cancer dream.

also last night i had dreams about the file selector, which is going pretty well despite e-table's attempts at slowing development. most of the rendering side of things in the flist are done, but there is some stuff i haven't committed because i thought i had added a crash, but it is (i think) e-table.

i've been torturing my laptop with the new gnu build tools. the new libtool is somewhat wonky, and the new autoconf totally breaks the xml-i18n-tools (although they seem to have been doing a nasty-ish hack). and the new xemacs is interesting. can't get it to do fonts right yet :(

got the big lebowski on dvd. it is a very funny movie.

listening to (disc 1 of) SAW vol. II which i haven't heard in a while. it's pretty cool. it does however remind me of last summer when i got it, which is probably the last time i had listened to it. it's pretty amazing what your brain associates with things, and how much you probably do remember.

sleep.

* * *

May 24, 2001

and then there's last night, where i had a dream about friends. it was weird because they were doing the whole episode with joey as fat joey, and ross was avoiding him until joey confronted him. then joey came up with this choice phrase (talking to ross): i really like getting to know you better. there are all these sides to you, and each one makes you look more like an octagon than the last. well, except for the ninth side. as alf used to say, i kill me.

bonobo hacking tip o' the day: if you are going to be calling qi() on something, make sure the interface it implements inherits from Bonobo::Unknown.

got the file selecter invoking the flist as a control rather than a widget. this actually wasn't something we were going to do for 1.0 but i did it anyway :/

"Sitting alone in the sun, wrote a letter to you, gettin' over myself..."

i can't believe how much ima rules after i've listened to it so many times... so much fun to hack at algiers to it, especially when the hacking goes well.

i am really sick of the soda/pop/coke conversation people who just get to college have.

* * *

May 25, 2001

file-sel hacking continues. did an initial icon list view. it sucks being worried about performance of things in corba. someone should do some benchmarking of in-proc eventsource/listener interaction and gtk signals.

yeah all i did was hack. it is really nice to be able to say that.

* * *

May 28, 2001

Start mounting filesystem: ide0(3,6) Starting XFS recovery on filesystem: ide0(3,6) (dev: 3/6) cmn_err level 1 Filesystem "ide0(3,6)": xfs_inode_recover: Bad inode magic numbe r, dino ptr = 0xc4853600, dino bp = 0xc6da2460, ino = 17595334 XFS: log mount/recovery failed XFS: log mount failed

* * *

May 29, 2001

after much apt and cvs nonsense, i almost have a recent evolution again.

* * *

May 30, 2001

more file selector hacking. things are actually becoming sane interface-wise.

* * *

May 31, 2001

spent half the night dreaming about the file selector. fortunately it isn't as confsuing when i am awake as when i dream about it.

since i've eaten around 30 burritos, got the quesadilla and corn-on-the-cob today.

more file sel hacking. have the shortcut bar hooked up, and did the path option menu. i need to hack up the icon factory better. looked at nautilus' icon factory and found some interesting things. did a couple of tests on running nautilus and closing the window, causing it to exit:

jacob@wet-pants:jacob$ strace nautilus 2>&1 | egrep -c "(pixmaps|emblems)*ENOENT" 9999 jacob@wet-pants:jacob$ strace -c nautilus execve("/gnome/bin/nautilus", ["nautilus"], [/* 32 vars */]) = 0 % time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall ------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ---------------- 26.32 0.340169 33 10298 9811 stat64

so i need to emulate its behaviour a bit more. i also want to have it load some standard icons for known directories such as home, desktop, etc. which mac os x does but nautilus doesn't.

blah blah blah.

got some dave ralph cd's since alex insists that i like him.

blah blah blah.

my laptop is supposed to be on its way back soon.

* * *