<davej> so mountain dew have made a huge fuck up.
<davej> they marketed this drink to me as 'game fuel'. but it tastes distinctly like 'ass fuel'

When I first heard that the iPhone had a camera built-in, as well as WiFi, those two features triggered the following thought:

It would be really hot if you could upload the pictures from the camera directly to Flickr.

When I got my iPhone, I figured out a workflow that I could use to post pictures from the phone to my Flickr account, but it totally sucked balls was less than optimal. For each picture I wanted to upload, I had to open the picture in the Photos app and email it to a special address that Flickr had associated with my account.

Negatives of this approach? Impossible to use for more than a couple of images at a time, primarily, but also, annoyingly, the Mail app on the iPhone scales and recompresses the JPEG images before sending - and it strips them of their EXIF data, too.

So I was mildly displeased, but there was a way I could get it to work, kinda.

Then the iPhone got cracked wide open. People started figuring out how to write third-party apps and get them installed on their iPhones, and - to be honest - the UI for it, via Installer.app, is - even though it's not from Apple - better than anything I've seen on any other mobile phone, ever.

The Friday before last (September 7th), I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. Finally learn Objective C. Start writing my dedicated "Push all of the images in my Camera Roll to Flickr, right now dammit" application. And I got a pretty good start! Got the toolchain to build working iPhone apps, and that only took a few hours. Started reading through Flickr's API documentation. Started implementing some functions that didn't require authorization to call - learning how to use Flickr's REST API, basically. Once the first couple of unauthenticated calls worked and did what I expected, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I had my app working.

And then someone pointed me to iFlickr.

My first thought was "Dammit, somebody beat me to it." And I was a little depressed for a bit.

I downloaded it and tried to get it working. No offense to the iFlickr devs, but they clearly didn't put a lot of thought into the user experience (or if they did, I posit that their ideas about "good user experience" work completely differently from mine). I didn't end up getting it to work, but it's open-source, right?

Naturally, my next thought: "Well, I've been working on mine, and this doesn't really do what I wanted. But... maybe I can steal some of their code at least!"

And then I looked at the code.

My eyes still burn a little bit from that. That ... that was not a good idea. I've had much better ideas in the past.

I worked on this for the next few nights, realized that I could completely avoid the messy minitoken crap by using the "Desktop app" authentication mode from Flickr, deleted all of my code that dealt with mini-tokens, and the other night, I finally got it to actually upload pictures to my Flickr account. (My friend Cliff's help was so valuable as to be incalculable.)

I'll post more technical details later, but the important thing is: MobilePushr is out. The UI is going to get a lot of love in the next few days, because the current one doesn't provide nearly enough feedback, but as of right now, MobilePushr lets me do something that I've wanted for almost three months.

I can push my JPEGs directly from my iPhone to my Flickr account with the push of a single, giant red button. (And so can you! If you go download it and install it on your iPhone, that is. Assuming you have an iPhone.)

Also, of course, MobilePushr is Open Source / Free Software, released under the GPLv2. If you use git, you can look at my code by cloning git://mg8.org/MobilePushr and poking around.

The really awesome thing about all of this is that, through Flickr, I can see how many people have given my app permission to link to their account, and in the first twelve hours alone over a thousand people have activated support for MobilePushr on their Flickr accounts.

I don't even have words to describe how awesome that makes me feel.

<ajax> it's like kicking a puppy
<ajax> ... in that's it's really fun

<ajax> i pick good days to go to olpc office
<ajax> free ice cream in the lobby
<keithp> ajax: winning
<keithp> ajax: where is it from?
<ajax> buckets?

x86info is awesome.

Unfortunately, SourceForge is not so awesome.

<mjg59> daniels: You'd better be getting dolla dolla for this
<daniels> mjg59: well, euro euro, but yeah

<ajax> yum, well. let's not mention yum.
<clee> ajax: I thought you were making yum not suck.
<ajax> clee: i realized life was short and i wanted to work on something that stands the remotest chance in hell of getting me laid
<clee> ajax: I thought you already got guaranteed sex.
<ajax> HEY I MADE THE UPDATER FASTER: "eew, go away"
<davej> "Hey baby, want to see multiple graphic cards working at once? huh?"
<ajax> DUDE CHECK OUT THIS GADGET IT'S WAY CUTE AND HAS WOBBLY WINDOWS: "ooh, i spreads for you"

Can't really think of anything funny or clever to say about this; I had surgery for my hernia today, and it went well, I suppose. I survived, and now I have a surprisingly large incision which has been covered in superglue. It's going to form a bad-ass scar.

My surgeon prescribed vicodin and ibuprofen. I'm not entirely sure that either of those is helping me at all.

I was told before I went under the knife that the vicodin they were giving me was basically diazepam, which made me think of Metal Gear Solid, and I was happy. Visions of long, drawn-out boss fights with Sniper Wolf danced through my head. Unfortunately, it turns out that the nurse lied to me, and vicodin is not in fact diazepam.

Incidentally, I had my prescriptions filled at Target, because of their totally sweet ClearRx bottles. If you haven't heard of them, you should check out the story about why they're awesome.

Anyway. I'm alive, and that's something.

<clee> man, git hates me.
<daniels> git does not love
<daniels> occasionally it roughly pleasures
<daniels> but there's no tender embrace, and definitely no breakfast the next morning

Christmas is always an interesting time of year.

Three years ago I had the single worst Christmas ever. The ones since then haven't been so hot either, until now. This year's Christmas is officially the best one I've ever had.

The reason?

I have finally gotten rid of a car that I hated and I now am the proud owner of a brand-new 2007 Toyota Corolla. It's got a five-speed manual transmission, and it's totally freakin' sweet.

I'm really excited about getting more than twenty miles per gallon on road trips. I'm hella stoked about having a manual transmission again. But most of all, I'm just happy to finally move past the stage of my life where I was constantly pissed at myself for being so stupid as to get stuck with the previous car.

Anyway. I'm back in Arizona for the holidays, and things are pretty fucking great right now. For the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to the road trip back home in my car.

On a slightly-less-awesome newsfront... I get to have surgery next month.

Some of you may know that when I was a teenager, I had a hernia. It wasn't really anything terribly awful, just a typical hernia; they operated on me when I was nineteen and fixed it up, and everything was great until a couple of months ago. I noticed some similar symptoms to my original hernia, and I finally got off my ass and went to the doctor a few weeks ago. She confirmed it - I am officially on my second hernia. I'm not even twenty-five yet.

However, having a car with a real transmission has made me so happy that I'm not even really that upset about the prospect of being cut open and having somebody mess around with my internal organs. It's going to suck, sure. But I made it through it last time; I've got a feeling that I'll be able to survive this time.

<ajax> and if i'm marking up every sdk header _anyway_, i want to make a pass over them eliminating all the cases where we do struct foo { a, b, #ifdef I_KICK_PUPPIES, c, #endif, d, e, f }

So it's been playing for a few weeks now, and I just felt that it needed to be shared with everyone who reads this blog:

Dexter.

I don't really know exactly how to put it into words, but there is something that is sick, and twisted, and oh-so-right about this show that makes me laugh. The writing, as aseigo noted is amazing, and the plot throughout Season One so far has been gripping.

If you have a weak stomach, you might not like it. It's definitely not a show for the young ones, either - strong language, some nudity, lots of very graphic scenes. The really amusing thing to me, at least, is that the really graphic scenes are not even of violent acts; whoever is handling the visuals for the show is an absolute genius. Simple acts like tying shoes and pulling on a T-shirt somehow take on a much more sinister undertone.

I highly recommend checking this show out. It is, by far, my favorite new show this season, so far even moreso than Heroes. Heroes keeps leading me along and throwing me a bone every now and then, but Dexter has been delivering since Episode One and I haven't been disappointed yet.

<clee> how the fuck is dobey still on planet GNOME?
<clee> (though I admit I am amused by the response to his "please stop talking bad about us" post.)
<ajax> gnome isn't just about fucking ugly software
<ajax> it's also about fucking ugly icons

(note: yes, I read Planet GNOME. And a dozen other Planet sites.)

<ajax> god. i'm really getting used to this monitor
<ajax> i don't know what i'm going to do when it gets taken away
<keithp> ajax: what monitor is that?
<ajax> keithp: dell 30"
<clee> ajax is a whore
<ajax> a whore with a nicer monitor than you

I hit another case of "Python really makes me angry" today and I thought I would share it with you all, since I know how much you love reading about things that enrage me.

I have a chunk of code that (while being significantly more complex) looks like this:

def baz():
    print kitties # This works fine.
def bar():
    print kitties # This one throws an exception!
    kitties = 'delicious' # The exception is because of this.
def foo():
    stuff = {'kitties': 'squishy'}
    for k, v in stuff.iteritems():
        globals()[k] = v
    baz()
    bar()

This is another example of Python's scoping being weird, and in my opinion, broken.

Let me explain, in case you didn't bother copy & pasting that into a python shell and running it.

baz() will execute properly. bar() will not. But the error you get from bar() is worthless - it tells you that you're trying to read from an unassigned local variable, except you're trying to read from a global variable. The problem I have is not that bar() fails - it's that it is inconsistent with baz() working. I realize that adding a global kitties makes bar() work properly; but I think that in this case, the error should really be when you try to reassign a global variable that hasn't been declared as global.

I like getting around to implementing the various ideas that I bounce back and forth inside my skull.

One of those ideas that I had for a long time was to solder a PS/2->USB converter directly into an IBM Model M keyboard, along with a USB plug so that I could just swap out USB cables to plug the keyboard into the computer.

I have finally done that, after some inspiration from zevv, a few choice purchases at Fry's Electronics, and a few borrowed parts from my friend Cliff.

I have to say, this kicks way more ass than even I had hoped. (ajax, eat your heart out.)

Still on the list:

• finish the Qt4 frontend for HandBrake
• write my own email client that doesn't suck balls
• write my own AIM client that doesn't suck balls
• hack up some apps for Qtopia/Opie/whatever for my shiny new iPaq 3670

I know there's more than that, but those are the ones that are currently taking up the most brainspace, so I'm going to have to get to them sometime.

Due to United Airlines sucking balls, Dave Airlie crashed at my place last night after they called back and cancelled his flight from SFO to Sydney. I've said this before, although maybe not on this blog, but United are a bunch of cockbags. They have fucked up at least one leg of every single trip of mine that they've ever been involved in. In any case, I know far too many foreigners named Dave.

Also, I've been growing this out for the first time ever. Looks like I'm going to have to update my various avatars...

I really love it when I can easily find something that bothers me in a piece of software, dive into the source, and start fixing things.

That's what I've been doing lately with this little DVD ripping app called HandBrake - it's a cross-platform GPL DVD ripper that makes it almost painfully easy to take a movie from a DVD and turn it into a file that you can watch whenever the need strikes you.

There are some problems, though. Right off the bat, there is the issue that (when ripping a DVD) libdvdread spews out hundreds of lines of output, warning me that a value isn't 0 and it should be. It's not fatal, but it certainly is annoying, so I whipped up this patch up to fix it.

Also, I don't have a video iPod at the moment, or a Sony PSP (and I don't see myself buying the latter anytime soon, but you know... if one were to fall into my lap, I'd probably use it and enjoy the hell out of it.) Anyway, not owning one of these devices, I'm more interested in HandBrake as a way to make high-quality compressed archives of my DVD movies that I can watch on the HDTV in the living room. There's a problem, though; HandBrake scales the picture by default as it transcodes it.

Not anymore, it doesn't. Now it has support for (optionally) embedding the anamorphic pixel ratio into the output file, and can preserve the original DVD video frames. Which means, with x264 at least, a reasonable performance increase of about 15%. Not too shabby!

Unfortunately, the only GUIs for HandBrake are on Mac OS X and BeOS. Now, I love BeOS. Haven't used it in years, though, and I don't even think it'll run on my hardware; Haiku still isn't quite there yet, either, but I'm keeping tabs on it. What I really wanted is a Linux UI for HandBrake.

So, I've been hacking on one.

Stay tuned for more on this...

I've been playing with ATA over Ethernet on my home network and I have to say, it is pretty damn sweet.

In fact, it would be absolutely perfect if I could use AOE to share drives to my media center, and then use ZFS on that machine. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't have ZFS, and OpenSolaris doesn't seem to have AOE yet. (The Coraid site has a Solaris driver, and they claim it works on Solaris 7+, but there is no source and I don't happen to have an OpenSolaris machine to test it on at the moment.)

But - the ability to pool together all of my disparate disks into one gigantic volume is awesome. It's like Voltron, but with hard drives instead of robots.

Definitely picking up one of these.

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to attend WWDC this year, and I've been looking over the session schedule to see what the sessions are, when I ran across this interesting little blurb:

DTrace, an open source project which provides insight into the interaction between your code and the OS kernel, is now available as part of Leopard. This session will explain how kernel developers can both take advantage of, and extend, DTrace's functionality to help debug and optimize low-level code.

DTrace in MacOS X? Hell yes!

I learned something interesting a few weeks ago and it just popped back into my mind so I decided to record it for my adoring fans.

Second-hand smoke really fucks with me. Savanah introduced me to a friend and we spent a few hours at said friend's apartment; they both did some pretty impressive chimney impersonations and I ended up feeling sick for days. My throat felt like it was on fire, and I kept coughing up chunks of ... I don't even know what. Maybe lung. My nose wouldn't stop running and I was constantly sneezing.

I'm not sure exactly how much later - maybe a week or so - I was at Cliff's place and we were hanging out. I lamented the effects that the second-hand smoke had on my throat, and Cliff empathized with me; apparently I'm not the only one that second-hand smoke fucks with.

However, Cliff's throat was not ravaged and he was in fact feeling fine, so he jokingly suggested that we smoke some hookah. (For those of you playing along at home, no, I'm not using code-words for drugs. We smoke hookahs, not bongs, and we smoke tobacco out of them.) I figured, at this point, what the hell could it hurt? Cliff prepared the hookah and I continued coughing up internal organs.

Soon, the hookah was ready to go - those things take like ten minutes or so to get ready if you're fast, and longer if you're not - and we started smoking. Almost immediately, I noticed something very strange - my nose stopped running.

I was intrigued.

Several minutes later, I noticed that I had also not been coughing. My nose was still not running, and I was even able to breathe out of both nostrils. You might think that's a funny thing to notice, but trust me, you don't miss it until you can't do it anymore.

Hours later, I was still feeling worlds better. I'm not sure what the logical explanation here is, but first-hand smoke fixed every symptom introduced by my overexposure to the second-hand variety. This perplexes me, but I do not question feeling well; I just enjoy it.

[savanah] I'm going to snowball you one of these days, just to show you the difference between sperm and orange pulp

Took a road trip to Arizona this past weekend. It's a pretty hefty drive from Palo Alto to Phoenix and back; roughly ten or eleven hours each way. I got to spend time with Savanah, though, so as far as I'm concerned it was worth it. Her brother kicked my ass at Halo 2, but that isn't very surprising since I suck at Halo and its ilk.

I decided that I'm not going to Norway. As much as I would have loved to go, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't really work out at this point.

I informed Trolltech of my decision last week and when I showed up at work on Monday, I was in turn informed that since I'm not going to Norway, there's not really any reason for me to stick around in the Palo Alto office; end result, I no longer work for Trolltech.

This is kind of cool, actually; it gives me a couple of weeks of free time with money to relax, and as tired as I still am from the road trip, I think I might go back to Arizona again. I might even tell some other people that I'm there this time. I have to be back in time to move into my new apartment though. Since I don't work at Trolltech, I also don't get to live in the Trolltech-sponsored housing; I'm crashing at my friend Cliff's place currently, and I don't move into my own place until next week.

At least I can't complain that my life is boring.

[ajax] zrusin has already threatened me with violence if gobject is ever attached to X
[ajax] and i can't afford that. i'm too pretty, and he fights dirty.

JACKPOT.

My girlfriend knows the cheat codes to the GTA games, by heart.

Sorry, just had to brag about that.

It's been a while since I last blogged; I know, I suck. Deal with it.

I was supposed to be in Norway as of two months ago, but as it turns out, the Norwegian government apparently hates me. My work visa has yet to be approved, so I'm currently in California working at Trolltech's office in Palo Alto on a short-term contract.

"But, Chris - how did you end up in California? I thought you were in Boston!"

Yes, yes, I was. I was in Boston until I ran out of sofas to crash on. Then I took my car and talked a crazy friend of mine (the author of naim to be precise) into doing a cross-country road trip with me. We made the trip from Boston to Phoenix in about forty-two hours, give or take.

I spent a few weeks in Chandler, leeching off of my parents, and generally trying to figure out my next move. I had a lot of fun while I was there - my friend Josh left for the Navy right before I left to come out here to CA, so I was there for his sendoff party, and that was pretty great.

Oh, and I have a girlfriend now - scarily enough, she's not completely insane or otherwise mentally handicapped, yet she still likes me. So, to all my secret admirers out there: You should've moved faster! Now I'm taken, and it's too late.

Saturday can't get here fast enough.

My friend Jeannette had a terrible time with Metropolitan Moving. If you're going to be moving anytime soon, I'd suggest avoiding them.

airlied: I'd be a lot less annoyed with companies like ATI if they shipped drivers (even proprietary ones!) that actually supported their latest cards.

The R5xx-series cards have been out for MONTHS now and there's still no acceleration, 2D or 3D, Open Source or proprietary. Good job, ATI!

Anyway. I'm excited about the way that things are headed, and I'm really glad that other people are getting excited, too.

To the people who were wondering - the "AI" in "AIGLX" stands for Accelerated Indirect - it's basically required to do a lot of neat things like using the local card to render OpenGL from a remote application. It also enables all sorts of kick-ass effects like the new bling in metacity and compiz (which doesn't work yet, but it's only a matter of time).

<canllaith> -5 points for having a seriously hot ass he prolly won't let me violate

Today is the dawn of a new era!

Today is the first day that I no longer work for Red Hat.

In just a couple of short weeks, I should be in Norway working for my new employer, Trolltech.

Also, tonight, the second half of Battlestar Galactica season 2 starts! This new chapter of my life is off to a hella sweet start.

[ajax] it's like we've entered a new level of geekhood, one which I did not previously realize existed

There is a lot of really useless code sitting in Xorg today.

I was playing with a CVS checkout and noticed a large chunk of one of the source files was commented out with #if 0; so, this piqued my curiosity and I decided to figure out how many blocks of code are commented out with #if 0 in the server, driver, and lib trees.

The current count, in CVS HEAD, as of about five minutes ago:

module	blocks of #if 0 code
libs	56
server	408
drivers	648

All combined, that's 1112 blocks of code completely disabled at compile time just sitting there in the tree.

Haven't bothered checking any of the other modules; I'm sure there's more in apps but I don't really think it matters for docs or fonts. Still. That's a lot of useless crap.

So, ajax and I are hanging out the other night.

He heads to the fridge to grab a Coke, and comes back with a serious expression on his face.

[ajax] Well, we have a couple of options.
[clee] What?
[ajax] There's only one Coke left. So, we can-
[clee] Fight. To the death.

Good times. (Obviously, I won, since I'm here to blog about it.)

My Palm arrived yesterday, finally.

I've been playing with it, and it seems to be a really cool device, barring a few issues. It feels very solid, and I like that. What I dislike is the software.

Don't get me wrong - I love PalmOS, but PalmOS 5 is trying to do things it's just not capable of and Graffiti 2 makes me want to throw my shiny new toy into a wall. For example, the hack that the PalmOS guys are using for showing focus selection? It breaks with at least half of the color themes that they ship on the device, because it doesn't draw the halo properly on the buttons. And the fact that I can't create my *own* color theme annoys me, too.

I need to figure out some way to get Graffiti 1 working on this thing. I'm using a demo version of TealScript for now but it's a little on the slow side and I don't really like the idea of paying $30 for it, especially since it's *not* a faithful reproduction.

Sync works great over Bluetooth to my Mac mini, which is pleasing. The pilot-xfer command-line utilities on Linux seem to work very well too, which is good; I haven't tried any other utilities yet, but I will soon.

ajax arrived a few minutes ago, and my inbox just hit 666 messages.

hmmm.

I blogged last month about switching my phone to Vonage, which has gone swimmingly well. I'm really happy with Vonage, in that I haven't had to deal with them at all because their product just works (which is so rare in our industry that it's scary, and I'm sad that I even find it noticeable that I'm commenting on it), and also in that the features they provide seem to work really well. Being able to check my voicemail from the web is totally badass.

That said, since I no longer have a cell phone to keep my address book on, I decided to pick up a Palm once more. After checking out a few models and consulting with coworkers, I decided to pick up the Tungsten E2.

I put my order in on Tuesday, December 6th, and I made sure to select 'Overnight shipping' because I'm an impatient bastard and I want it now. I would've gone into a store to buy it, but it came with a free 128MB MMC flash card when I bought it online from Palm, and like a sucker, I decided to go for the freebie.

(I also noticed, just after submitting my order, that Amazon was selling the same exact handheld, sans the 128MB flash card, for $150. D'oh.)

I just got a mail from Palm, today, informing me that my order has been shipped.

I won't have it until Monday; even if UPS does deliver it tomorrow, I had it scheduled for an office delivery since I expected to be at work, and I'm not planning on going in to the office tomorrow.

In other words, by the time I get it, it will have been almost a week since I placed the order. With "Overnight" shipping.

I decided that I was sick of paying too much money for my cell phone and so I've initiated a transfer of my cell phone number from Sprint/Nextel to Vonage.

Vonage assigned me a temporary number in the meanwhile, which is cool, and I've been playing with the service.

I have to say that I'm really pleased with it so far.

Installation was literally a snap - I unpacked the router they sent me (the Linksys RTP300), plugged in the power, and scratched my head over what I should do next. I figured that I'd probably have to do some port forwarding magic or something if I wanted it to work from behind the router, so I punted on that and went to Target to pick up a handset since I haven't ever owned a "real" phone.

Bought a $9 handset at Target, a GE "Slimline" thing that has call waiting, caller ID, three-way calling, and other things that are insane for a $9 phone. Anyway. I brought it back home, plugged it (and the ethernet cable) into my RTP300, and then mentally prepared myself for the frustration of having to do magic to get my main router to let the new toy do its thing.

I was a little disappointed, actually.

It just worked. No port forwarding, no iptables hackery, no headaches, no frustration - the lights flickered in a few weird patterns for a minute or so, and then I picked up the handset and I got a dial tone. I dialed my phone number and it asked me to log in to my voicemail.

Consider me impressed. Not to mention that the web-based UI for managing the Vonage account is really really sweet - I have it set to send me email when I get a new voicemail, and you can check your voicemails from the web (they show up as WAV files), plus it's dead simple to set up call forwarding and configure the different timeouts for voicemail/call forwarding/etc.

So, I don't know about the other routers - I've read lots of nightmare story reports from people using other hardware and things - or other phones or other VoIP providers, but so far I'm pretty damned impressed with Vonage. Oh, and for $25/month, I get unlimited calls to anywhere in North America, including Canada, and their international rates are pretty good, too. I called daniels up the other day and the conversation - which lasted for almost an hour - cost less than a combo meal at Burger King.

Pretty sure the future is made out of awesome.

[ajax] alanc: oh, you mean like any sensible system would do
[alanc] since when has sensibility had anything to do with how X is built?
[ajax] touché

[kfoltman] is there any way to "record" a group of drawing operations into a sort of metafile, then render that metafile on a printer "drawing surface"?
[TD] kfoltman: yeah. it's called a PDF file ;)

For those of you who are syndicated on Planet KDE and also care about your bandwidth: Please pay attention to this message.

By default, Planet KDE will now show any images that you include in your blog. If you do not wish for images from your blog to show up on the Planet (which I can understand, since we do use up quite a bit of bandwidth), now you just have to do:

<img class="hidefromplanet" src="foo.png" />

The old class="showonplanet" is still around, but it's irrelevant now and may be removed in the future.

[@ajax] i have found the greatest flash game ever
[@ajax] http://www.ebaumsworld.com/kittycannon.html
[@daniels] 595ft
[@daniels] hm, 928ft
[@ajax] 1144ft is my record so far
[@daniels] now 1022
[@ajax] i'm pretty sure that if launching kittens out of cannons is wrong i don't want to be right

Today is a pretty cool day for me because a project I've been working on at work is finally released.

dogtail is a framework written in Python which makes it easy to write scripts to automate graphical applications. It uses AT-SPI which means that (for now) it doesn't work with KDE, but I fought the good fight to make sure that it has no GNOME dependencies so that hopefully there will be a chance of KDE adopting it in the future. Now that we've finally gotten the release out the door, I plan to track KDE svn and write scripts for KDE4 apps. Ideally, we'll have KDE4 support before KDE4 is actually released.

(I know that there's a tool from KDAB which allows one to automate KDE apps, but it's not Open Source and it only works with KDE; dogtail supports anything that we can see through AT-SPI, which includes OpenOffice.org and Mozilla-based applications as well as, hopefully, KDE4.)

Fab: NetworkManager actually has a pretty well-designed separation between the front-end and the back-end; the only problem stalling us from being able to do cool things with it right now is that we have no working DBUS bindings for KDE3 (so nobody can easily write a Kicker applet to interface with NetworkManager to use on their desktop today), and KDE4 doesn't actually have anything usable at this point, whatsoever.

I brought this up at aKademy - aseigo and I were basically ready to go ahead with it but we got sidetracked with window icon previews in the window list on the desktop pager hover tooltip. (Try saying that five times fast.)

In theory, somebody could write the applet using the DBUS API from C, but the current Qt bindings in the DBUS tree are pretty much worthless, so it's not going to be pretty either way.

Wade: No, I don't have a robot answering my email. My robots are busy preparing for the ... I mean, uh, what robots? I don't have any robots.

I do have three totally awesome computers now, though (not including my work laptop). The first one is my Mac mini, which rules, but it's not the focus of this entry.

Over the past week or so, I'd run into some really odd stability issues with my AMD64 box. I decided to go to CompUSA and pick up a new motherboard, since the last issue I had with an AMD64 machine was also the mobo. Bring the new mobo back home. Remove the old one, move parts over to new one, hook up power connectors, flip the switch, and ... nothing.

The damned thing didn't even POST.

Somewhat frustrated, I decided to work on assembling my other new system. I've had a spare CPU, some extra RAM, and a slew of video cards laying around for a while now, so the only thing I really needed to pick up was a new case and a motherboard for this box. It's an "old" AthlonXP 1700+ - I figure it's probably worth me keeping a system around that can do AGP and run fast enough to prevent me from throwing it out the window.

The assembly on my new system went pretty well, until the part where I attempted to attach the power cable. The power supply I was using was a 24-pin, designed for the power requirements of the newer AMD64 systems. Normally, it wouldn't be too hard to plug in a 24-pin cable into the 20-pin socket on the motherboard, except that the mobo I picked up happens to have the IDE pins right next to the ATX pins.

And there was much frustration.

I was about to give up, but for some reason I decided to read the manual for the power supply in the new case that showed up, and if you look at page 3 in the manual, you should see the picture that made my night.

The other power supply can break off the extra four pins so that I can use it on the motherboard.

I returned to CompUSA and got a replacement for the busted motherboard, and brought it home and set it up, and this one actually works, so now I've got both systems up and running beautifully.

My only issue now is that I need a DVI/USB KVM.

Everybody else has been saying this on mailing-lists and whatnot, but I figured that it deserved saying on the Planet, too.

Antonio, aKademy 2005 rocked hardcore thanks to you and the LiMa guys. You guys kick ass. I didn't think it'd be possible to top Kastle, but you guys did it.

To next year! Helio, you ready for aKademy in Brazil? ;)

I finally got to meet a few people I hadn't met before, including aseigo. He's taller than I expected, at least. According to him, I don't look anything like what he thought I'd look like, but I sound exactly the way he thought I would. Along with Thomas Zander and Rainer Endres (and someone else whose name I can't remember) we left at around 1AM to go find a bar. We asked a couple of locals where a good place to get a drink would be, and they gave us some directions and told us to look for the 'Marabu' or something similar. After about thirty seconds of walking, aseigo was already calling it the 'caribou' and I had to correct him. Once we arrived in the area that they said it would be at, there was a building with with a bright neon pink heart sign that said 'Maribé.'

At this point, before entering, we had a couple of theories. One that we figured was likely was that the locals had sent us to a gay bar, which would have amused us. Rainer didn't want to go in, but I ventured in with aseigo and Thomas and the kid whose name I can't remember; I saw a bar with alcohol behind it and a bartender, so I went back to the door and motioned to Rainer that it was ok, it was just a bar, and everything looked fine.

Rainer took a step in and then decided that he was going to go to the restaurant next door instead; I hadn't eaten or had anything to drink since much earlier, so I decided to join Rainer instead of staying with the other guys. Rainer ordered a beer, and I got a soda. About fifteen minutes later, aseigo and crew came out to join us and they were laughing pretty hard.

Apparently, the Maribé is actually a brothel.

I think that even funnier than finding that out (which was pretty funny) was the fact that aseigo even saw the sign by the stairs that said 'Services' with a man and a woman on it, and he didn't get it until the woman told him that the price was 20 EUR.

Update: It's worth noting that the Marabu was actually right next door to the restaurant that Rainer and I decided to go to; aseigo just couldn't resist the pink neon heart sign.

Spain is pretty damned cool.

Well, ok, more accurately, Spanish women are pretty damned cool. I'm pretty sure I've seen more cleavage since I landed in Madrid than I have since I moved to Boston.

The trip has been exciting so far. There were two legs on the flight over - the stopover in Frankfurt was pretty uneventful. I was surprised by the fact that Lufthansa provided metal utensils for the in-flight meals; it impressed me, but at the same time, I had a realization. I shouldn't be impressed by metal silverware; I should be disappointed by plastic silverware. And on the flight from Frankfurt to Madrid, I was depressed - I guess the metal silverware is only for the cross-Atlantic flights. Anyway, once I landed, I wasn't too worried about navigating the Frankfurt airport; I've been there before (the last time I came to a KDE conference, actually) and in general, I find airports to be reasonably simple to navigate, even if you don't speak the language.

The airport in Madrid was also pretty easy; figuring out how to get on the metro was not too hard, but it took a bit more walking than I expected it would. Once I was on the subway, I figured out pretty quickly that 'proxima' is Spanish for 'next' and I was set. The route that I had planned out actually worked exactly as I hoped it would. I got off the metro at the right stop for the train station and almost bought a ticket for the right train on the wrong day. Once I made it to the train, I figured I was pretty close to safe.

The train arrived exactly when expected, and there were lots of taxis outside of the train station waiting for us, which was good. The taxi driver I rode with didn't speak much English and had no idea where the place I wanted to go happened to be; he got directions from the central office, though, and somehow I managed to find the student residence where most of us are staying.

That's the last of this entry - there's more to follow, I promise.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting, I think.

I'm landing in an airport I've never been to, in a country where I don't speak the native language, and I have to make it from the airport to the train station (which is not attached to the airport, but is at least two subway stops away). Once the train arrives at the destination, I still have to make it from the train station to the place I'm actually staying, which is of course not exactly close by.

Since I'll be in Spain and my phone won't work there, the best way to contact me is either IM or email; I won't be getting any voicemails until September 3 at the earliest.

Adam: I have a tax-free holiday every day of the week; it's called "Living in New Hampshire."

(There's no sales tax in this state, for the readers out there who are confused.)

Work on the tdfx EXA support is still ongoing; I have the framebuffer addresses properly set up now, but my blit and solid fill routines are completely hosed. At least I have an idea of how things are *supposed* to work now.

Lots of things going on lately.

First off, most recently, I started hacking on EXA support for the tdfx driver - it doesn't do much yet, except for display things wrong and crash, but hopefully I'm not too far from it working properly.

Second, I finally coerced a graphic designer friend of mine into coming up with a new layout for my site. It's not live yet, because I'm not quite happy with it, but it's pretty close to ready (I think) - take a look and let me know what you think. (Yeah, I know, it's slow. It's using multiple layers of translucent PNGs, some of which are position: fixed. I prefer to think of it as "an opportunity for KHTML optimization.")

Third, I have been hacking on the Qt4 BitTorrent client from Andreas, and it's really cool. There's a very small, slow memory leak in it, though, which I have to find and destroy.

Other than that, not too much going on. I'm excited about aKademy - only a couple of weeks away!

Stroking is hard. So hard.

Every time I hear the word 'stroke' from now on, I'm going to hear keithp purr. That disturbs me to no end.

In other news, the DDC at OLS has been a lot of fun. I'm going to have to disagree with chouimat about a few things - namely, I think that Xgl is extremely sexy, and has a hell of a future, and while it's true that the vast majority of the talks here are GNOME-related or have a GNOME bias... it's because we are vastly outnumbered on this side of the pond, and you can count the number of KDE developers at this conference on one hand.

George Staikos was here for a couple of hours, I've been here for the DDC but not OLS, chouimat was here (but let's face it, you haven't been active in KDE lately, chouimat, and neither have I), and Alexander Dymo is here and gave a talk about KDevelop. We're not exactly taking over here. We need more of a presence at these shows, people. It's important.

I may be abusing my 'tech/KDE' category with this entry, but so be it.

A new tagging application called 'cowbell' is out and it looks pretty boring. Reading through it I was mostly uninterested until I hit this part:

It requires the Mono runtime, Gtk#, and TagLib to install and run.

Holy crap! GTK/GNOME apps using evil KDE technology! THE SKIES THEY ARE FALLING I TELL YOU.

Seriously though, good on them. TagLib is good stuff, and I'm glad to see that they're not reinventing the wheel. More projects need to use it.

Some asshole thought it would be a good idea to string up yellow "CAUTION" tape and block one of the one-way roads leading to my apartment building inside of the complex.

I was not amused.

I stopped my car, pulled up the handbrake, flipped on the emergency lights, got out, and walked to one side of the tape. I ripped it off, and some guy screamed out "HEY!!!" I turned to his general direction and flipped him off, and walked across the street to the other side, where I pulled down the rest of the tape and tossed it into my car.

Got back into my car and parked in my parking lot without incident, throwing out the tape on my way in to my apartment.

God dammit, I hate people sometimes.

Somehow, I just spent four hours playing Ikaruga.

They weren't kidding. This game is hard. Holy shit, this game is hard. I don't think I've ever played a game where it took me four hours to get to the THIRD STAGE before. This game rules.

I don't think I'll be sleeping this weekend.

(oh, and props to mpyne, who kicks *major* ass for dropping Ikaruga to me in the mail. The note he placed in the case reads "Let me know how Level 3 is. I only ever made it to the boss of Level 2." Holy shit this game is hard.)

(responding to ChipX86)
Dude. One word.

Batteries.

Ok, to be slightly less cryptic: Wireless devices won't ever really replace their wired counterparts until they no longer require battery replacement to run. Batteries that recharge by gyroscopic motion? Ok, cool. Batteries that recharge by quantum phase induction? Hey, even if I just made it up, it sounds cool, and as long as it means that I don't have to put new batteries in when the current ones die, I'm all over it.

The main reason I don't have any wireless peripherals right now is the battery issue. I've almost talked myself into getting one of the Logitech mice that recharges on the base station - that's pretty close to my ideal scenario. It takes the whole "there's a battery inside" detail and makes it completely irrelevant.

We had a discussion in #kde-devel earlier about what KDE's requirements for a build system are. What are the current problems we have with autoconf/automake/libtool? What features do they provide that we really care about? How hard would it be to replace any/all of them with things that suck less?

I took notes of the discussion. They're below; I'd like to get more feedback on this.

(One of the first points that I'm sure someone will make is "auto* is cross-platform! We need to support KDE on platforms that aren't Linux!" etc. Look, we realize this. However, auto* provides lots of problems for us on platforms we do care about, including MacOS X and Windows. (Ask RangerRick or js about them on IRC, or email them.)

Just because we're using auto* and friends doesn't mean that our code works; as a matter of fact, RangerRick noted that so far, all of his issues with the Mac port of the work-in-progress KDE4 have been build issues, and none of them have been code-related yet.

This is clearly a problem and since KDE4 is an aggressive new major release, we should solve it in the KDE4 timeframe. We don't want to have to wait until KDE5 for a build system that doesn't suck, do we?

Without further ado, the notes from the discussion.

Must support:

• generating binaries (duh)


• generating shared libs (on all ELF platforms + MacOS X; Windows?)


• icon installation


• uic, moc, KConfigXT, etc


• GCC visibility


• automatic dependency resolution


• manual hints for dependency resolution


• flex/bison


• non-recursive (flat) builds


• --enable-final


• builddir != srcdir


• simple to the point of being learnable within 5 minutes


• kdeinit support (?)


• multiple build targets (libfoo, libbar, libbaz) in one file


• --compile-slots, like in unsermake


• pkg-config support


• support rpath sanely


• ability to link & run uninstalled binaries


• easily integrated into KDevelop


• 'admin' needs to be shipped in KDE instead of in src of each app (if we keep the 'admin' dir, that is)

Would be nice, but not necessary:

• having a standard and distributed build system and test suite


• ability to build from svn:/trunk/KDE

Thoughts?

Matt Harrison sent me a link to a cool interview with Ivor Hewitt, one of the guys working on KHTML lately.

Looks like the interview has been taken down. Maybe it'll come back up soon.

Ivor, do you have a blog? Because you should. Planet KDE could use some KHTML blogging love...

[@hp] clee: hold me like you did by the lakes of naboo!

* clee kicks ajax
[clee] dammit, man. I really want a usable Expose feature. Like, yesterday would have been good.
[ajax] oh yeah, totally my fault
* clee blames you.
[ajax] why yesterday?
[clee] ajax: well, yesterday would have been good. today would have been acceptable. but if it gets here tomorrow, that's not soon enough.
* clee sighs
[ajax] i was thinking maybe there was some event yesterday
[clee] hahaha
[clee] no.
[ajax] like you were trying to show off X to some hottie in the coffee shop or something
[clee] hahahaha
[daniels] haha
[clee] and she whips out a Mac and she's like "Let's see your network-transparent windowing system do THIS!" and hits F9?
[ajax] but then she's all "shit boy, five year old acceleration architectures ain't gonna get you any poon"
[clee] yeah, happens to me all the time
[ajax] *smack*

Just thought I'd post a quick update about my situation re: my computer at home, since I know you all care so much.

It turns out, after wiping my partition table and starting over from scratch and getting Linux back up (which took all of about ten minutes), Windows installed fine from the SATA DVD drive.

I have no idea how this is possible - this page says, and I quote:

Out of the box, no current Windows version, including Windows Server 2003, supports SATA drives.

My best guess is that the BIOS enables some sort of PATA emulation that Windows can use to find that drive. That's the only thing that makes sense.

And I was a little hard on VMware, to be honest. I mean, I was using a feature that they specifically warn against most people using, while running 32-bit VMware on a 64-bit (unsupported variant of a) host OS. I'm reminded of a quote here...

People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die.

Granted, I didn't exactly die, but I think it somewhat applies.

Holy shit, this is awesome.

Seriously.

Red Hat, my employer, has a site license for VMware. (Well, either a site license, or an assload of Workstation licenses, I'm not really sure what the details are.)

I decided "Hey, why not play with the new release? You've got new hardware. Maybe VMware will run acceptably fast on it!"

Man, what a fucking brilliant idea that was.

Backstory: I haven't booted Windows in a few months, not since Doom3 came out and wasn't available initially on Linux. However, I have some shiny new devices in the new box, including a SATA DVD burner, which so far doesn't seem to work with Linux very well. Ubuntu's kernel enables SATA ATAPI support, which Jeff Garzik tells me is a bad naughty thing of them to do since it's not ready yet. Which results in my ability to *see* the drive on /dev/scd0, if the planets align properly, but I can't actually use it for much.

This machine doesn't have a floppy drive, since I'm a cheap bastard, and I happen to agree with Apple on this one. Fuck floppies. They should have died a long time ago. I also refuse to run Windows XP - I bought and paid for Windows 2000, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and it's the last release of Windows that I really plan on ever using. Windows 2000, being rather old, has some deficiencies, however. Like not having SATA support in the installer (unless you load a driver from a floppy, which I don't have).

I think to myself, "Hey! VMware! Raw disk support! It used to work pretty well, why not try doing an installation from a virtual machine into a physical disk? You can use the VM to download drivers, then create a new hardware profile, reboot into it, and maybe that'll work."

HAHAHAHAA

Let's just say that this was probably the worst idea I've had all night, even worse than eating that third slice of pizza. My partition table on /dev/hda now looks like this, thanks to VMware:

Disk /dev/hda: 41.1 GB, 41174138880 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 79780 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   ?      216399     1904881   850995205   72  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda2   ?      723265     1262922   271987362   74  Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda3   ?      167316      167316           0   65  Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda4         2671568     2671619       25817+   0  Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order

I'm not even sure what to say about that.

(For those of you wondering why I wanted to play with Windows in the first place - SATA DVD burner. I know that I can install Win2K drivers for the SATA chipset, and I know that the DVD burner will *probably* work there.)

My new toys arrived today.

That's one Lian-Li PC-60, one Chaintech VNF4/Ultra motherboard, and one Athlon64 3000+ CPU.

This machine is officially fast enough to scare me. I can play Doom3 at my monitor's native resolution (1680x1050) and the frame rate doesn't drop below 60fps even with baddies on the screen.

The only other goodies I need to complete this box are a couple of 400G SATA drives. The Hitachi model is only $275 on NewEgg, which means that it's now possible to put over 1TB of storage into a box for under $1000.

Holy shit life is good.

Renewed my lease at my apartment for another year.

I guess I'm happy enough with Royal Crest. It's just that Cambridge is a lot cooler. If caillon and I had been able to get our act together earlier, things might have been different, but oh well.

In any case, living at the same address for more than twelve months feels like some sort of a victory. Therefore, I win.

Heh.

I'm feeling much healthier. Maybe the title is a bit of a misnomer, since we all know that I'm not anywhere close to "normal," but my throat seems to be almost completely healed and it no longer hurts to breathe, eat, or swallow.

By some assorted cleverness, I have managed to secure an upgrade to an Athlon 64 and a much nicer new case, for a net cost of about $20 to me. I'm excited.

I need to pick a project to get back into KDE hacking with.

Not much else is new. Found a really awesome pizza place a few weeks ago, and have been eating there regularly. A $10 pizza lasts me two or three days, which is awesome. Saving money is good.

strep throat sucks. I've had this soreness in my throat since Friday last week, and it kept getting worse. Finally, on Sunday, I went to the doctor and found out "Hey, you've got strep!"

Now I've got penicillin and cough drops. Throat still hurts. Wish my white blood cells weren't such little bitches. They're supposed to *handle* this stuff for me, dammit.

Several people were kind enough to point out that this code:

for i in xrange(foo):
    print i

actually wouldn't work. Thanks, I'm an idiot. I should have had:

for i in xrange(len(foo)):
    print i

Next, yet another method of reversing/iterating backwards over a list has been suggested in multiple places, one which I didn't know about.

foo = ['one', 'two', 'three']
bar = foo[::-1]

The only thing I can possibly say to that is... but the ternary operator is too obscure? C'mon, give me a break. This provides the ability to have tons of random line noise and make your code just as unreadable.

And, Seth: Since I couldn't catch you on IRC earlier, I'll just reply here.

Multiple issues to respond to, so let me break it down.

1. You seem to be confused as to what I was complaining about with list.reverse(). It's not that I want a copy of the list, exactly, but I want the return value of list.reverse() to be sane, which in my exceedingly humble opinion, it is nowhere near.
2. I'm not upset, mind you, just mildly annoyed, by the iteritems()/enumerate()/xrange() issue. And the reason that it's annoying to me is because it's inconsistent. Some of the iterator methods are global and some of them are not. Inconsistency is lame. End of topic.
3. Ternary operators seem to be quite the polarizing issue so I'll just leave my stance exactly where it is. I think they're useful, and I'd like to have them, but obviously I can work around the language not having them...
4. Especially since Python doesn't have sane scoping, either; the method-local and class-local scoping rules provide the opportunity for way too many obscure and annoying bugs. I note that you didn't respond to my issue with scoping at all.

Oh, also, a friend of mine has offered to send you a copy of the Smalltalk book, where he says that they solved the problem of doing lambdas and maps efficiently.

I'll kindly ignore your not-so-subtle digs at my programming ability (or perceived lack thereof) and refuse to insult you for liking Python. Mind you, I still think it's a useful language, but I'm just annoyed at the inconsistencies and some pet features (like ternary operators, or sane scoping) that I wish it had.

(This is a pretty geeky entry, so if you're not a geek, consider yourself warned.)
I have a lot of little tiny annoyances with python, since I've been using it for a while now to hack on some stuff. Here's a collection of the ones that are floating on top of my brain.

::sniff::

I miss my ternary operator.

In C, and C++, and Perl, and Ruby, and PHP, and pretty much any language that I've ever written in (hell, I think even JavaScript supports this, though I could be wrong about that one since I haven't written any JavaScript code in years), you can use a very terse syntax for if (foo) { return bar; } else { return baz; } using what is referred to as the ternary operator.

The shortened syntax is more like:

(foo ? bar : baz)

Yeah, it's kinda weird. And yeah, if you don't understand it, it's not very intuitive. However, it makes for much shorter and clearer code (to those who grok ternary operators). Python doesn't support this. At all. There was a proposal to include it and it got smacked down, so that they could include such other genius ideas as reversed() instead. Speaking of which...

backwards

Reversing an array is done like:

foo = ['one', 'two', 'three']
foo.reverse()

This does not return a reversed copy of the array, but it does reverse the array in-place and return 'None' which is quite confusing. Especially if you're used to sensible languages which return a reversed copy. So this code doesn't work.

foo = ['one', 'two', 'three']
for i in foo.reverse(): # bzzzt, reverse() returns 'None'
	print i

You can iterate through an array with the reversed() keyword, like:

for i in reversed(foo):
	print i

However, this is a python-2.4-specific feature, so it's useless if you care about older python releases. Also, it doesn't create a reversed array, just hands you a pointer to a reversed list iterator. So you can't do:

foo = ['one', 'two', 'three']
bar = reversed(foo)
print bar[0] # 'three'? how about a TypeError!

Because bar is actually not a list, or array, or what-have-you, but it's a listreverseiterator object. Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. What it translates into is basically "Surprise! We hate you."

So, you have to do:

foo = ['one', 'two', 'three']
foo.reverse()
for i in foo:
	print i

Which, granted, ok, isn't the end of the world, but it's pretty ugly and it doesn't work at all the way I had expected it to, which to me is the sign of a language that sucks.

For reference, the following code in ruby does work exactly how I expected it to. And because ruby and python share a decent amount of syntactical sugar, I keep on getting annoyed when things that I expect to be working in python simply aren't.

foo = ['a', 'b', 'c']
p foo.reverse() # prints out "['c', 'b', 'a']"
foo.reverse().each { |i|
	print i
}

Ruby's list iterators are weird, sure. But actually, that's a good way to bring up my next complaint.

iterators in general

Why the hell do you have multiple types of list iterator methods in python? I shouldn't have to remember a different type of iterator method for every different type of container, nor should I have to remember whether it's a global iterator method or a per-container one. That's just annoying, and pointless.

So, you have foo = ['a', 'b', 'c'], right.
Now, to recap, you can traverse the list backwards (in 2.4, anyway) with:

for i in reversed(foo):
	print i

You can get the indexes of the members of the list with:

for i in xrange(foo):
	print i # Prints out the index of each member

You can also do:

for i, n in enumerate(foo):
	print i, n # Prints the index and the member

Although I have no idea why you'd want to. (You can always just do xrange(foo) and then 'foo[i]' since they give you the same thing. But ternary operators would be too confusing.)

But, if you have a dict instead of a list, all of a sudden...

foo = { 'a':1, 'b':2, 'c':3 }
for i, n in foo.iteritems():
	print i, n

Using enumerate() gives you the index of the 'a', 'b', and 'c' keys. Also, note that enumerate() is a global, like reversed(), but iteritems() is a member of the dict class type. This is the kind of inconsistency in a language that kills me.

white space

Surprisingly, I don't mind the whitespace thing. It just doesn't bother me that much. (Ok, so that's not really a complaint. Still, enough other people complain that I figured it was worth noting that it just doesn't irk me.)

scoping

Scoping is weird in python. Let me explain.
In regular languages, a variable declared inside of a block of code only lives until the end of that block; this is the 'scope' of the variable. So if you have:

if (condition) {
	string foo = "hahahaha";
}
print (foo); /* Error! 'foo' didn't make it past that last '}' */

(Yeah, that's not a real language, though I suppose it could be valid C or C++ or something. I don't care, it's just there to illustrate a point.)

But in python, guess what?

if condition:
	foo = "hahahaha"
print foo # This actually *works* - wtf?

There are other issues that annoy me, but these are just the ones on top of my head. I'll write another rant if this one pisses off enough python devs.

The other day, I was on Dell's website. They had the 2005FPW for 25% off, and I thought to myself, "Self, that's a damned good deal."

However, I didn't have $561.75 free on any of my accounts, and the deal expired in a few days. Then I saw the "Apply now" link. "Hmm, instant loan. Nah, you already have too much credit."

Wait, though. If you apply for credit and you get rejected, at least in the US, you're automatically entitled to a free credit report. What the hell, why not? I can always use a free copy of my credit report.

About three minutes later, the Dell website comes back with the result. "Congratulations! You qualify for a $1500 line of credit."

Shit.

Needless to say, now I have a sweet 20" widescreen LCD. It's gorgeous. I liked it so much that I bragged to pretty much everyone that would listen. And I even convinced ajax to buy one, but he went and bought three instead. Crazy bastard.

I'd post pics, but I don't have a digital camera. Mostly because when I buy one, I want it to kick ass, and the ones that I want are still over $1000.

Note: All amounts in USD.

[@ajax] so working on DRI for i128, i turned off XAA
[@ajax] in the spirit of experimentation, i ran xcompmgr -a
[@ajax] it feels _much_ faster now
[@ajax] like, firefox doesn't tear when scrolling
[@ajax] it's kinda weird
[@daniels] hmm
[@daniels] maybe we should rename it to XDA :P
[@ajax] totally unaccelerated, but just fast enough to feel useful
[@ajax] the only unpleasant part is switching desktops

I hate caffeine deprivation headaches.

(For those of you following from home, yes, I had successfully kicked my caffine habit but then I realized that not drinking it sucked. So I started drinking it again. And just now, I went a couple of days without - again - and all of a sudden I've got the headaches. Fuck.)

Also, Smallville is still one of my favorite TV shows. I honestly can't decide if I like it more than Battlestar Galactica or not.

Major kudos to Zack Rusin for getting hired at Trolltech.

(Not like it should be a surprise to anyone, since Zack kicks ass and Trolltech also kicks ass.)

This bodes extremely well for KDE4. World domination!

"You are like, so much better than a bathroom stall."
-Brandi

Donnie: Planet KDE, and every ten minutes. I'm thinking about changing it to update every fifteen, though. We're getting enough feeds that we're spending more time updating than idling.

[mgalgoci] policy I'd like to have set: "When people ask for email aliases, the aliases are granted on the grounds that IS gets to decide what the alias is."
[clee] mgalgoci: oh, oh! what's mine?
[hp] clee: I think your native american name is he-who-hopes-to-get-laid-using-enterprise-groupware-solution

It's 5AM.

I'm blind, and it's dark. Music from Metal Gear Solid 3 floats through my apartment and yet I can still hear the drops of blood hitting the surface of the water as my nose drains.

Nosebleeds have been a pretty common occurrence for about as long as I can remember; I've had them ever since I was a little kid. They've started back up recently, after I had gone several months without having any. I'm not sure exactly why but I think it might be somewhat related to drinking soda. (While I was caffeine-free for that six weeks or so, I didn't have a single nosebleed.) I've recently started drinking the stuff again, since it's easier to drink it than not to, but I may have to rethink that choice in light of this.

Oh well.

Speaking of Metal Gear Solid 3, I finally sat down and played through the rest of it. I had gotten farther along than I thought before I stopped playing it back in November, and the game is just amazing. I can't think of enough words to describe how much I enjoyed playing through this game.

[ajax] clee: i was wrong, you were right
[clee] ajax: ?
[ajax] clee: the Model M is a superior product

[cliff] Hm. If I get a raise, I will buy a Powerbook. That will be like donating my raise to charity. (In the sense that the raise will not be reflected in my paychecks.)
[cliff] And it will make the world a happier place. (Where 'the world' is me.)

davej and veebl are on my sofa. They're sitting in what currently acts as my bedroom.

Just thought I'd blog that. ;)

One of the things I keep thinking about with KDE's much-vaunted CVS->SVN migration is... why don't we just leave the CVS server up as it is, and screw the whole "import the entire history of our repository into SVN" idea?

Think about it.

The cvs2svn script is good. Don't get me wrong - it's pretty impressive. But we've done some evil to our CVS repository - manually moved files, etc, and cvs2svn is not perfect; why don't we just leave the CVS server up and running read-only and import a snapshot (say, 3.4) into SVN without trying to drag all of the history along?

People who want to pull absolutely 100% accurate checkouts of a given revision can do it with the old tools and we can evaluate subversion without having to deal with any possible issues brought up by weirdness caused by cvs2svn.

I personally think this may be the smartest way to move forward, but I'm sure that others have differing opinions. Care to share them with me?

Our Intel rep managed to secure me an 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI card for my ThinkPad. Direct from Intel. Totally sweet.

Somehow managed to get the ThinkPad apart, and dropped in the new card, and connected the antennae, and turned it on, and was greeted rather rudely by two beeps and the infamous Error 1802.

I was prepared for this though. I expected to spend the rest of the day hacking around IBM's evil authorized-miniPCI-card whitelist and being otherwise 1337 just like mjg59. But instead, I found the source for a neat little hack that resets part of the nvram to a magic value and disables the whitelist check.

All this means for those of you who don't speak Geek is that I overrode some IBM stupidity and made my hardware work the way it should. Which should have been much easier, but hey, this is Linux, and we like things like lseek(fd, 0x5c, SEEK_SET) just fine.

I spent most of this week at LinuxWorld in Boston (and the very beginning of the week at the XDevConf, which ajax took notes of) so my legs are killing me. But last night, Google sponsored this amazingly kick-ass dinner for a few dozen of us free software hacker types, and it was completely badass.

They had some issues with their food distribution algorithms though. Hopefully next year, if they roll out Google Dinner 2.0, they'll have that algorithm sorted out. (It took an inordinate amount of time to get our food since everyone had to wait in a huge line to get served - there's definitely room for optimization there, I think.)

I talked Dave Jones into coming along and we had an awesome time. As soon as we walked in, we were accosted by Google folks who made us fill out some registration cards. One of the fields on the card said "Desired position" so I asked the woman (who had an amazingly kick-ass Google shirt, one with a female symbol on one of the 'o's in Google, but I digress) "What does this 'desired position' field mean?"

"We want to know, if you were to work for us, what position would you want to have?"

This stunned me. What an amazingly smart way of getting people interested. So davej and I filled in "spaceman" and "Batman" respectively. I mean, if Google is going to be hiring someone to be Batman, I certainly hope that they'd consider me for the position, because I think I could do really well in that role.

Got to meet some cool people there, including Mako who apparently wanted to meet me because he knew who I was. Finding out that other people know who I am and want to meet me.... that's kinda freaky. I mean, granted, we're not talking about Havoc Pennington-style rockstar status.

Yet.

Zack Rusin flew in and Adam Jackson drove up last night and both are crashing at my place.

We're at the X Developers' Conference in Cambridge. ajax is taking notes, so I'll link to them once he uploads them.

Anyway. Back to the discussion about freedesktop and current level of desuckification.

I attempted to hunt down a copy of World of Warcraft a few weeks ago, in vain.

My searches were fruitless. I went to several Wal-Marts, Targets, and Gamestops. All were completely devoid of World of Warcraft loving. This made me sad.

I ended up going to go visit Tony (who I'll be dropping by to see again on the sixth for the Chinese New Year) and I crashed at his place after he, Rob, and I stayed up until way too late watching Battlestar Galactica at Rob's place. The following morning, we got up and I talked Tony into going to the Apple store. It wasn't that hard to convince him, actually. I just said "We're going to the Apple Store," and he complied. Once there, I had the instant flash of realization that the wonderful bastards at Blizzard put the Mac and PC versions of their games on the same CDs. Those crazy fools. I searched for the gem and - lo and behold - there were FIVE copies of WoW. I picked mine up, made sure it wasn't some book or gift card (like Target had. For shame, Target! For shame.) and I carried it to the line at the register and bought it.

The game is incredible. It's seriously just amazing. If only I had a decent video card, one that didn't overheat when I played it... And dealing with Windows is shitty.

Which is why I've bought a dedicated World of Warcraft box. It hasn't arrived yet, which irks me. But it should be here "on or before" the seventeenth of February, according to Apple. Huzzah for that.

That's about all that's new in the past few weeks. I'll attempt to blog more frequently - hey, I should dump my .plan on here sometime and see what people think - but it'd probably be easier if I had my blogging app working again. Sounds like a fun project for tonight!

Spent the entire weekend hanging out with Dave Jones, kernel slacker extraordinaire, and his wife Victoria (aka veebl). Great people, great times. I dragged them down to Boston so that we could hunt down this comic book shop I had found once by accident with daniels, and after we walked around quite a bit we managed to find it. Note to self: Kendall Square is nowhere near Kenmore Square. Need to remember that next time.

Dave also handed me a kick-ass Voodoo3 card, which is awesome, since I've been trying to hunt one down for a long time now. Problem is, it appears to be an AGP1 card, which would be great except that AGP1 cards do not in fact fit in AGP8 slots. So I can't use it in my badass desktop. It looks like I'm going to have to build a machine with older parts. Good thing I still have 512M of RAM and a spare Athlon kicking around here.

Steph moved out of the apartment again. She and Mo moved into a two-bedroom in the same complex, but we haven't hung out in weeks. It's kinda nice having the place all to myself again, now that it's actually quieted down around here. People have been over non-stop for weeks because I've been hosting Battlestar Galactica fests with the miniseries DVDs. I think that BSG is probably the most ass-kicking show on TV right now, and I've imparted this wisdom unto my coworkers and friends, even when they didn't necessarily want it.

Oh, speaking of forcing my will on others. So the whole reason that we went down to Boston was so that I could indoctrinate veebl with Transmetropolitan. I'm happy to report that davej and veebl are both already huge fans of Bill Hicks, Invader Zim (and by extension, Jhonen Vasquez), and Ed Wood. Which means that Sam needs to come up here and visit me at some point, because I think we'd all get along great.

I have ordered the Canadian release of Ginger Snaps. If you're into really awesome B-movie style monster flicks, it's perfect and you should already own it. If you're not a fan of the genre, you must suck and that's why I don't talk to you. And if you are a fan but you don't know it, GET IT. It's a story about two loner sisters who make a suicide pact with eachother but one of them ends up being bitten by a werewolf. Their mother is played by Mimi Rogers (who is amazingly hot for an older woman) and she does a scary great job in her role. The rest of the movie is also filled with great moments, but I'll leave it to you to pick it up and find out what they are. I picked mine up from DV Depot - if you do go there, tell'em that I sent you. (I have no idea what they'll do if you do, but I think it'd be cool if a dozen people went and bought this DVD and put a comment in saying 'clee sent me' - maybe they'd give me some sort of freebie or something.)

So on Thursday, I get a phone call around five in the evening.

It's my mom. I flip a coin and decide "WTF, might as well answer it."

She says, "I'm at the airport. You should come pick me up." I respond with, "Haha, mom. Very funny, but that'd be my line, remember?"

(Backstory: Around Christmas, I was on the phone with the family and I tell my mom this plan that I've been cooking for a few weeks, which was basically that I was going to neglect to inform anyone in advance of my plans to come visit. Meaning that, once I did show up, I'd be totally unexpected and unannounced. It's more fun that way. I explained that the only notice that she'd have would be my phone call from the airport, saying, "Hey, you should come pick me up or something.")

Apparently, my mom and I think more alike than even I want to admit. She had already bought her ticket to come up here by the time that we had this conversation around the holidays. She's here now, sitting on the sofa near me, rocking out to Bon Jovi.

And there's food in the fridge again.

Damn, I love having my mommy around.

Wow.

It's been waaay too long since I updated.

The holidays were relatively uneventful, as were the days leading up to them, so there wasn't really too much to blog about.

However, the past week has been complete insanity. Where should I start?

Starting off: Kyle got here on December 28th. Seems like a short amount of time, and yet so long ago all at once. His arrival coincided with the arrival of my copy of a used copy of Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo (which is arguably one of the best video games of all time). We opted instead for the classic Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, however, and spent a few days playing that and fucking around with Super Metroid as well.

Once my paycheck rolled in (on December 31st), I made sure to remember to write the rent check, and then Kyle and I rolled down to New York. We dropped my car off at my uncle Ed's place in Amityville and then took the train into the city where we walked around for a couple of hours trying to get close to Times Square for the ball dropping. We ended up about two blocks away, at the corner of 40th St and 7th Ave. Amazing time. I couldn't have imagined what a million people on the streets of New York City would look like, but I can say that it was absolute insanity. We then hooked up with Ray, Mo, and Dan at the corner of 38th and 7th and we walked around for a while hunting things to do. Had a pizza in Little Italy, then managed to make it back to Penn Station for a 5AM train back out to Amityville. Slept.

Following day (the first of the new year, huzzah) we drove out to go meet up with Kyle's dad, who still lives on Long Island. Met a *ton* of Kyle's family. Had amazing Chinese food at the Golden Dragon. Slept at Kyle's dad's place.

Woke up, had breakfast at a kick-ass diner. Kyle's little sister is shockingly bright, and only six years old. We left from there, and met up with Sharissa and our buddy The Cabeza in Middle Island. Had ice cream at Friendly's, went to Wal-mart, picked up Shaun of the Dead (fucking brilliant, loved it), and then went to go see Meet the Fockers at the theater. Tickets were $9.75 apiece (ow) and we didn't even think about popcorn or food. Sharissa talked her mom into letting us crash at her place.

Next day started, we spent some more time with Sharissa and then we had to leave to get back to my uncle's place in Amityville. Had dinner of leftover Chinese food and pizza. Slept there, then woke up before the sun to start the day since Ed and his family had to leave the house by 7:30AM and so we had to be out so they could lock up. Bummed around the island a bit, picked up some bagels that are so good they scared us, drove back over to the Longwood Public Library to see if it was open at 8:30. It wasn't. We brainstormed for a bit and decided to pick up some soda. Picked up said soda, went back to the car, decided to go check out our old elementary school and see if any of our old teachers were still there. Answer: Negative. Every single one of them has either retired or moved on to the middle or high schools. Kind of depressing, that. Then we went back to the library, as we'd killed enough time for them to open up, and I promptly got a call from Vinny. We went over to his place, geeked out with more old-school video games and had a good time hanging out and catching up with his family. His mom got married a couple of weeks ago and failed to inform anyone. The wedding is August 19th. Have to go to that. From Vinny's, we drove back up here to NH, where we slept, bringing us to today.

Woke up at about 1PM, finished off Zelda (damn, that game is still awesome even after all this time) and had some of the bagels we picked up. Stayed mostly comatose the whole day long, until Steph decided it was time to go get dinner. We had dinner at Pizzico, then I had to take Kyle to the airport.

All in all, a damned good time and a crazy hectic week. The only regret is, total hacking activity of the past week: zero.

Hopefully now that I'm back I'll get to kick things up again. Email was surprisingly merciful while I was gone, so there isn't that much to catch up on.

::yawns::

All right, I'm out. Later, everyone.

I got glasses yesterday.

It's the first time I've had glasses since the eighth grade. Definitely taking a bit of getting used to. Not having peripheral vision is a very strange thing to get re-accustomed to. Also, the fact that things blur slightly around the edges of the lenses is a little weird. Seeing reflections of people and things in the lenses is also strange (yay for my rearview vision!)

Reaction to the glasses has been pretty positive, overall. Lots of people had no idea that my vision is this bad. I may in fact have the worst vision in the entire Westford office.

Good times.

"You're so, like, trying to buy my friendship with naked men." -Cassie

Also, for the record.

Mixing brownies with pink lemonade in one's stomach is what I would like to refer to as a catastrophically bad idea.

Thanks.

I have Final Fantasy III(US, VI in Japan) on the way. Super Metroid has already arrived, and I am Super Nintendo-less.

I wonder if this is what it feels like to die of thirst in the ocean.

Should have brought the fucking SNES with me when I moved. I SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT IT. Failing that, how the *fuck* did I manage to not grab it when I was back down there in May? HOW?

The mind boggles.

My addiction to caffeine may actually be completely over.

I succumbed to the desire to have a can of Coke on Friday night but the really strange thing is that it didn't even really taste good. And I haven't had any headaches all day so I don't think that I'm actually caffeine-dependent anymore.

I'm still not sure whether or not I should count this against my Operation Zero Caffeine initiative. I didn't even finish the whole can, sadly. (And I think we all know how much I hate wasting things.)

But I did crumble, and then found the soda to be less than I had remembered it. Somehow, it just wasn't the same. I feel... disenfranchised, I think. Maybe a little disappointed.

Oh well. At least the headaches are still gone.

So I've got a new revision of the Super Nintendo sound chip emulation code from antires, and after modifying a few parts of my own code the GStreamer plugin is now working.

Reliably. No more magic, no more crazy kludges. Feels good.

I think that the filter development branch is ready to be merged into the mainline, which means that the typefind code is next to be written. Being in deep hack mode is damned refreshing.

No thank you.
No no no. Thank you.

Today's subject is somewhat related to this entry though; I got a phone call this morning from my friend Randelle, who I haven't heard from in months. She's in the Army, stationed over in Germany at the moment. She isn't a big fan, apparently. We talked for a while - I was amazed. I shudder to think what the phone bill will be like for her friend, who had lent Randelle her phone.

Other new things... I saw Blade: Trinity last night. I liked it. I was a fan of the first two movies, though, and I love comics, so you probably shouldn't allow my opinion to sway you unless you also liked both other movies. If you did, this is more of the same - not much new, aside from Ryan Reynolds making lots of jokes about mostly stupid shit. (Right up my alley, of course, so I loved it. As did Steph. She is a huge Ryan Reynolds fan, of course.)

Steph was pissed that I withheld the name of the actress who played the lead vampire bitch in the movie though. I honestly couldn't remember her last name. Steph couldn't remember anything except that her name started with a 'P' - I got 'Parker' stuck in my head for some reason but the 'Posey' just didn't click.

Afterwards, I mentioned this to Steph and was immediately met with the Silent Treatment for being such a dick. Good times. (I wasn't intentionally being a dick, but oh well. Such is life.)

Must convince more people to learn Esperanto. I'm getting tired of speaking English. (And I could have sworn I caught some Esperanto in the movie, but I may just be hearing things.)

Found out something mildly amusing today.

Apparently nobody has bothered building anything from the xlibs or xserver trees on an AMD64 system yet.

These modules contain such gems as:
# if defined(__AMD64__) || defined(AMD64)

Which doesn't actually *work* on these machines, as gcc defines __amd64__ and not AMD64. (Yeah, kids, case matters.)

Daniel added me back to the xlibs and xserver groups, so I should be able to commit some fixes for this stuff; however, there are still a lot of other issues on AMD64 that haven't been fixed yet. ::sigh::

So mpyne had implemented a somewhat working SPC plugin for GStreamer which was pretty limited and somewhat useless. (As he admitted :)

His version had a hardcoded path to the SPC file, didn't work as a filter - just as a src - and was performing quite strangely on his system for some reason. I've since rewritten it (from scratch) as a filter and not a src. It works on my system, kind of. I haven't gotten the typefind implementation done yet, and it's pretty fragile at the moment - I haven't figured out exactly why, but somehow removing a printf from the spc_setup function causes the plugin to segfault (I think LoadSPCFile may be doing something strange, but I'm not sure...)

If you have tla installed, you can do:

tla register-archive http://c133.org/arch/
tla get clee@kde.org--2004/gst-spc--filter--0 gst-spc

If you don't have tla, you can try poking around on the site but seeing as how things aren't quite ready for mass consumption, I'm not making any releases just yet.

Now, to go take a shower. All of those 'g's and '_'s make me feel so dirty.

It strikes me that I should note that I'm now caffeine-free, and have been since the day after Thanksgiving. Which, by my reckoning, puts me on Day 11 of Operation Cold Turkey.

The funny thing is, I sort of quit by accident. I didn't really mean to stop drinking soda; I just sort of ran out, and then after I'd had some pretty nasty headaches for a few days I realized that I had been going without soda for a few days. By the sixth day, the headaches were pretty much gone, and I'm feeling pretty good about not drinking that stuff at the moment.

Others have mentioned that they have lost surprising amounts of weight simply by not drinking soda anymore. I'm interested to see if this proves true for me as well.

(Mixing some Zim quotes in now...)

Michael Pyne, brilliant guy that he is, was trying really hard to get this SNESAPU code working on his system. I couldn't even get the crap to compile, let alone to run and dump a bunch of zeroes like he was getting.

I had mpyne tar up his work and send it my way to see if I could find anything new. About forty-five minutes later, after we'd both looked in a lot of unrelated areas, I found the missing link: A call to ResetAPU. Added that in, and all of a sudden, it works!

Now, that wasn't enough. Since I finally have this library compiling, and running, I don't want to simply dump the first five seconds of every SPC to a wave file named output.wav. I want to play them to my speakers!

Having no prior experience with libao, but remembering somewhat vaguely that the API didn't look too disgusting, I decided to try to get SPC->libao output working. And now, just under an hour later, I have it working. And I even cleaned up the code a little bit so it's not quite as embarrassing.

This code probably won't do most of you any good, but this is mostly for mpyne's benefit as I'm not convinced I'll still be conscious when he gets back. However, if you are interested in playing with it, you can grab the tarball from my site. You'll need g++ and nasm to build the stuff, and since most of it's in assembly, you'll need to be on x86.

The only point of this post is to point out to everyone that aseigo fucking rules.

That is all.

I guess somehow I've been talked into being a packager for Fedora.

Man, life is weird sometimes.

Well, ok, no chainsaw hands, but I got my replacement laptop from work today. It's an X31 - smaller and sexier than my old T41, which was stolen from my car while I slept.

Don't think I'll be leaving this one in the car. Ever.

But yeah, I'm excited. FC3 actually isn't as bad as previous releases, so I'm keeping it on there... I'm probably going to see about taking over those KDE specfiles so I can have less-shitty KDE packages on Fedora, but we'll see. Don't want to go around making promises and disappointing people.

I should really do a TODO one of these days and list out the stuff I need to take care of. Like that pyblosxom plugin. Damn.

I finally relented. People have been asking me for weeks to add/change the current class name for images which will show up in blog entries on Planet KDE, and I've finally made it possible for those of you who do want to have images show here without using the word "rape" in your image classes.

(Man, people get upset over the strangest things.)

So, if you want to embed an image and have it also show on the Planet you can still add 'class="rapemewithachainsawthanks"' but you can also add the less-risque and more boring 'class="showonplanet"' tag as well. Your choice.

For the general readership out there, this makes absolutely no difference whatsoever, incidentally. Images will continue to show or not show depending on whether or not the blog authors decide to put the images here.

The machine which was previously hosting c133.org (my domain) was compromised recently. So I set about finding new hosting, and I did thanks to Warren Togami (a coworker of mine at Red Hat) so you are now seeing c133.org on a brand-new box.

One interesting side effect of this is that my weblog is now statically generated instead of dynamically so. I haven't really changed the layout or anything, or even the design, but the filesystem paths have been played with a bit and the configuration has been gently tweaked. So now my blog should be even faster.

Oh, and planet KDE has a new home as well. Thanks to Stephen Depooter, it's now on a separate machine from c133.org and very unscientific cursory testing shows to me that it's even more well-connected than it was before. So, despite the fact that the breakin shut down the sites, I think that they're both better off now. And my mail seems to have mostly caught up with itself. Which is good.

now that I've been forced to get off my ass and actually look over the files on the site, I've done a little tiny bit of maintenance and cleaned up a few things that were previously still around. I may even get around to doing the aforementioned redesign at some point! But I don't want to make any promises, so I won't.

So, I have a confession to make.

I've been using Gossip as my Jabber client for a while. Which has been working out fairly well, since the UI is nice and clean. But there's been this slight annoyance with it - every time that I close a chatwindow in Gossip, it forgets how big the window was. Just completely forgets it.

This behavior finally got annoying enough that I put some gloves on, dug down deep, closed my eyes, and massaged some GNOME code.

The good news is, I lived. I have survived to tell the tale.

The bad news is, it was scary. And I feel sort of dirty.

It took a few hours to work out exactly what needed to go where, but overall it wasn't quite as terrifying as I had thought it would be. My underscore key did get quite a workout though. And I got to determine a few more reasons why I'm definitely glad to be a KDE developer. (Namespaces. Classes. God, I never thought I'd be so happy to look at classes again.)

So geiseri hosted a hackfest at his place in PA last weekend. I showed up and brought manyoso with me; Nadeem Hasan came down, as did Mirko Boehm. Zack Rusin was already there, and it was fairly awesome. My only regret is that, despite the awesome time I had, I didn't get any hacking done since I don't have a laptop anymore.

Oh, yeah.

Somebody broke into my car a couple of weeks ago. Shattered the quarter glass behind the passenger window, and stole my IBM Thinkpad T41 out of the back seat. (Well, the footspace behind the passenger seat. Close enough.) I have no idea where the laptop is, and, while the police have been informed, they haven't really proven to be that useful.

End result: I have no laptop. So I was fairly useless at the hackfest as far as actual hacking goes. And my workstation at home is set up in a rather decidedly non-ergonomic fashion, which means that I can't really use the computer for extended periods of time without standing up and stretching out my knees.

I do have plans for stuff to hack on and plenty of things to keep me busy though. So don't worry about that, guys. Just need my replacement laptop to come in from work, and maybe I can pick up a computer desk with my next paycheck somehow.

Realized that I haven't blogged in a while, so these entries are a bit longer than the usual length. I doubt anybody will really care that much, but yeah. Maybe I can kick myself into blogging more frequently once I get some Tack hacking done again.

and I never thought I'd say that.

Things with Cassie are as complicated as ever. Still trying to figure out the whole situation; she has officially given me the "Just Friends" label, but I keep getting this vibe that she wouldn't mind being more at some point. Maybe it's just hope.

Lon tried talking me into buying a motorcycle at one point in the past couple weeks. Blizzard also recommended it, as he's the proud owner of a new bike. I suggested the idea to Steph, who promptly called me an idiot and threatened to not be my friend anymore. I'm still surprised by the things that anger her. She doesn't seem to have a valid reason for it, and when I probed for more details she pretended like she had already brought up the "But you'll kill yourself!" argument (which she hadn't).

Cliff's new language is shaping up to be interesting. I never really dug the Smalltalk syntax (from what I saw of it) but I do like ObjC and Ruby is my preferred scripting language these days.

Tia came to visit, and she kicks ass. It was awesome while she was here; it sucks now that she's gone, because I have nobody to cuddle with. Steph has a boyfriend, and even when she doesn't, she doesn't like cuddling with me so that's out. Oh well - it was awesome while it lasted. Hopefully Tia'll be back up soon. And more of my friends will come out to visit me.

cassie: "I'm not lying! I'm half-lying! ... which means I'm half-truthing."

mpyne has called me out and made it public that I have Grand Plans for a pyblosxom plugin which will read (via XML-RPC) a chunk of text and then throw it on the blog if it likes it.

The trick is getting the plugin to like it.

My idea currently is to make the chunk of text a valid GPG-signed message. Have the server plugin read it in, decode it, check the signature against the configured key ID from the pyblosxom config file, and then if all of the criteria match, post it on the blog.

Have a few small issues to work out, but it looks like a lot of the hard work has been done for me. daniels wrote a Perl script that sort of does this if you filter email into it, but I hate Perl and the setup for that is annoying. Editing pyblosxom's config files is easy; I doubt that I'm going to end up losing data that way. If I somehow misconfigure a mail server, such that everything for my email ends up at blog@c133.org or something, I'll be fucked.

And I don't like that. So, I guess this is the part where I formally announce that I have intentions to actually finish this module (since I have a half-aborted attempt at it from a while back), clean up the code so that my key ID and stuff are no longer hardcoded into it, and then there might actually be a public release.

(Of course, once it's out, a KDE app which will be able to post to it, probably by using DCOP to communicate with KGPG, will be forthcoming.)

I blogged earlier about KDE potentially moving our repositories from the ancient and archaic CVS system to the new hotness known as Subversion.

This time around, I've got more ammunition for discussion and a lot of thoughts about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each system as they apply to KDE. Hopefully other KDE developers will read these notes and at least take them into consideration when discussing our eventual move away from CVS.

So - first off, a few words about CVS. CVS has served KDE faithfully for years, and has been (for us) fairly stable and reliable. It doesn't change much. And, believe it or not, CVS does have some strengths.

CVS
Strengths	Weaknesses
Ubiquitous (practically every operating system on every platform can run CVS) Relatively light on resource usage Comparitively light on disk usage It actually works	Branching is painful Lacking in certain very basic features Lack of atomicity with commits; no transactions Not very well-optimized for low-bandwidth Difficulty handling binary files properly

Now, Subversion fixes a few of these issues, but at the core Subversion's goal is to be a better CVS than CVS. It doesn't implement wire compatibility, nor can it natively use the old CVS repository format; instead, it maintains the same ideas as CVS (namely the same centralized development model), as well as a compatible command-set except for areas where changes are needed to deal with Subversion having features that CVS doesn't.

Subversion
Strengths	Weaknesses
Little to no learning curve if you already know CVS Atomic commits, with transactions File renames More efficient wire protocol for low-bandwidth	Disk usage is significantly higher than CVS for a converted repository Subversion seems slower than CVS, quite a bit so in some cases Not nearly as ubiquitous as CVS (yet) Resource usage is relatively higher than CVS

And, just for good measure (basically, because I like it) I'll throw in a little bit about Arch, also known as 'tla'.

Arch
Strengths	Weaknesses
Super intelligent merging support GPG signing support Seamless inter-archive branching support Very easy on server-side resources Offline commits	Relatively high learning curve Nowhere near as ubiquitous as even Subversion Rather difficult and verbose user-interface Disk usage is also higher than CVS Speed is not very impressive

What does this mean for KDE?

I think that Subversion is a much more natural fit for KDE than Arch. We have a very centralized development model; however, the disk usage issue is depressing to think about. I ran a test conversion of our kdelibs repository from CVS to Subversion, once using the Berkeley database backend and once using the new fsfs backend; the bdb backend takes up 1194M of space, and the fsfs backend takes 1130M of space on my system. In comparison, the CVS repository takes up 281M of space for the same revisions. Some of the Subversion developers have offered me a few hints, but I cringe to think about how difficult the migration will be for a large module such as kde-i18n.

So there's some pretty heavy discussion on the kde-core-devel list about migrating from CVS to Subversion for the entire KDE project.

All I can say is, the sooner, the better.

Of course, I'm very much of the mind that tla > svn > cvs, but as long as we're moving up the stack, even if marginally, it's still progress. Plus, svn has the feature that it is much more like tla than CVS is, and the cvs2svn guys have already written an impressive script to convert the ancient RCS files into changesets. And since both Subversion and Arch are changeset-oriented... I'm very excited. In my mind at least, it shouldn't be too insanely difficult to migrate from svn to tla in the future...

Damn. The past week has been awesome.

• Did the functional testing and RHNQA on a KDE errata here.
• Filed bugs against gnome-panel, evolution-data-server, bonobo-activation-server, and ran into a terribly amusing metacity crasher.
• Did the functional testing on an ugly cyrus-sasl vulnerability.
• Did a *new* round of functional testing on a bug caused by the fix to the ugly cyrus-sasl vulnerability.
• Pushed a release of redhat-artwork sometime last week anyway.
• Continued hacking on the Qt port of BlueCurve.

All in all, dangerously productive. Not to mention keeping track of email and IRC.

I crave brownies.

That is all.

I was reading Cliff's LiveJournal and I started thinking about my own life, especially the past year.

Overall, I have to admit that I'm surprised at where I am today.

I mean, a year ago... well, without going into too many details, I don't think it's really an overstatement to say that October 2003 was by far the worst month of my life. (So far, anyway.)

In short - I got laid off from my previous job; Mickey had sex with another guy while we were "on a break;" and I got into a car accident.

All in the space of about three weeks.

This October is looking to be a lot better; I'm working at Red Hat, and they absolutely kick ass. I've still got the Tercel, and that car is awesome to drive. (The manual transmission continues to make me surprisingly giddy.) I'm living in my own apartment, and the weather is getting cold enough that I can see my own breath. I finally managed to get the fuck out of Arizona, where it hit a hundred degrees last week. I'm still single, and I continue to have the amazing luck of The Nice Guy, but I'm used to that, so it's not really surprising. Being single is both better and worse; my relationship with Mickey was so fucked up that it was worse than being alone, overall, but I hate being alone.

Still, taking everything into consideration... I think I'm doing a hell of a lot better where I am now. And it's good to know that - no matter how bad this month might be - it's going to be awfully hard for it to be worse than the same time last year.

WARNING: Story involving earwax follows.

About a week and a half ago, I took a shower and got some water stuck in my ear. This has happened many times before, but I was impatient this particular time and instead of waiting for it to drain I decided to take matters into my own hands. I grabbed a Q-tip and plunged it deep into my ear, and instead of freeing the water and making everything better I apparently pressed something shut and turned off my hearing in my left ear.

This condition of half-deafness lasted for over a week.

Just yesterday (well, the night before last night, anyway, but at like 3AM) I got so pissed off that I started digging at the inner canal of my left ear trying desperately to shake out or loosen up whatever it was that had gotten caught. Amazingly enough, I succeeded, without causing any damage. And now I can hear again.

It's amazing how much I took the whole being-able-to-hear-from-both-ears thing for granted. I shall never do so again.

I dropped tberman off at the Westford Regency Inn and on the way home, I took exit #35B from the 495. That particular exit is a little bit sharp. I was going about thirty and I probably should have been going about twenty, and my car started to slide as it hydroplaned. Amazingly enough, I managed to control the slide and even though I did pull a *sweet* 180, I didn't even scratch the car. Nor did I get hurt.

So for all you folks out there rooting for my death, I have cheated you once again. Bitches.

Ran out of disk space on tycho for a minute there.

For those of you who don't know, tycho is the machine which hosts not only c133.org (and this my web site and email) but also planetKDE.org and Daniel Stone's fooishbar.org.

So when it runs out of disk space, planet KDE goes down and my email stops arriving which makes me sad.

It was getting to be about time to archive the email off again anyway. I'm up to 100M again in my Maildirs. Ugh.

HDTV service was installed and turned on yesterday. Still feeling a little sick and not so hot, but I'm going in to work today.

The new Smallville season looks good so far. I love that show. I have to admit, I didn't really like Lois at first but her personality has already started growing on me. I just wish that Comcast offered the WB in HD up here.

Steph got me sick.

She had a runny nose and a little tiny wussy cough when she came up this weekend but it hit me quite a bit harder last night. This morning doesn't feel quite so bad - my throat is still a little sore, and my sinuses are a little clogged up, but my nose is mostly not running now. Which is definitely an improvement.

Even my tattoo can't make up for the inherent unsexiness of coughing my brains out.

Still evaluating whether or not Cassie will be safe from infection if I go to see her today. Should probably find a doctor... I have health benefits for a reason, right?

Nothing's going on. Everything is just kind of laid-back and I'm cool with that, except that I have nobody to hang around and do nothing with.

Doing nothing alone is weak. Doing nothing with other people around is fun. At least then you can have conversations and good times.

I just don't feel like getting up though. I mean, I'm typing this laying down on my sofa, in my living room... the keyboard is resting with one end on the sofa and the other propped up against my leg, the mouse is on the armrest, and I'm laying down with my head facing out, tilted slightly up so I can see th emonitor. I don't know if I can get much lazier than this.

Life is good.

mattr just asked me on IRC why exactly it is that I want to write YAIMC (Yet Another Instant Messenger Client) and this is my response, for those of you who aren't really paying attention.

09:55 [mattr] clee: then why don't you spend time to either suggest improvements or improve the other existing ones?
09:55 [clee] mattr: Because the kinds of "improvements" that I'm going to suggest for kopete and for gaim and for every other client out there will get A) Laughed at or B) Ignored
09:55 [mattr] clee: and you know this how?
09:55 [clee] mattr: Ok, let's see your reaction to these suggestions.
09:56 [clee] 1) Drop every protocol except OSCAR.
09:56 [clee] 2) Strip out most of the 'plugin-based' API for everything.
09:56 [clee] 3) Redesign the UI to not suck.
09:56 [ShawnLaptop] clee: what kind of IM protocols will it support than?
09:56 [clee] ShawnLaptop: ICQ and AIM.
09:56 [clee] Which are the only ones that I give a flying fuck about.
09:56 [ShawnLaptop] MSN, Jabber, Yahoo?
09:56 [clee] Fucke'm.
09:57 [clee] er, Fuck'em.

There was a lull while mattr went to go get lunch, and then the discussion started back up again.

10:36 [mattr] clee: you better hope your IM client isn't any good, because then people will want you to have plugins, and support other protocols. :P
10:36 [clee] mattr: Oh, it won't be.
10:36 [clee] mattr: As a matter of fact, I'm going to hardcode my username and password into it.
10:37 [clee] mattr: There will be zero preferences, because all behavior will be hardcoded to exactly the way that *I* like it
10:37 [clee] mattr: And if anybody doesn't like it, they can go fuck themselves and/or fork it themselves
10:37 [mattr] heh
10:38 * mattr notes that he neither laughed nor ignored clee's suggestions. :P
10:38 [clee] mattr: But you won't implement them.
10:38 [clee] mattr: And if you did, you'd ruin Kopete.
10:38 [clee] so it's ok.

To be honest, I may not even release the code to the rest of the world. What with my username and password being hardcoded into it. But we'll see.

My evil plot to subvert GNOME is slowly taking shape. Todd Berman is talking about having me help him with some C# bindings for libgaim. Not only will this rock because I may have a decent API to model my own IM client's after once the C# bindings are working, but it has the benefit of letting me learn a lot more about C# and Mono.

So many things I need to take care of tech-wise... still have to actually run a power cord to the quad PPro in the closet, have to set up LDAP accounts on it and Kerberos with some sort of filesharing for the home directories and then get the client computers here to work properly with that. Want to set up Ubuntu on one of my machines here since it seems to be pretty cool and I'm all about Debian without the brain damage. Need to figure out whether or not to leave the Radeon 9600 in my desktop or put back in the Radeon 8500 (or the GeForce4MX since the nvidia driver is the only one that actually gives reasonable performance with Composite right now...)

Not to mention work stuff. Oy. Not enough hours in the day. And where the hell are my clones, dammit? I'm kinda under-staffed here.

Can't figure out why I can't sleep. Normally I have no problems falling asleep, but the past few days have sucked pretty badly. No idea what the fuck is going on but I'm not digging it.

The other thing that's really screwing with me is that even though it's taking me forever to get to sleep, my body seems to think that waking up at about 7AM is perfect. My brain disagrees pretty violently. It goes something like this:

06:59 [body] HEY IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP WAHOO MOVING NOW
06:59 [brain] what the... son of a bitch, CUT THAT SHIT OUT
07:00 [body] hmmm.
07:02 [body] NOPE! MOVING AROUND AND GETTING UP NOW
07:02 [brain] I swear... you will pay for this.
07:28 [brain] holy shit, why am I awake?

Ugh.

Steph came back up today. Kinda caught me by surprise since I wasn't even sure if she was going to come up at all. She picked up Super Troopers which is absolutely hysterical. I got the new Bowling for Soup album, with the song 1985 on it for her at Barnes & Noble. (She loves that song.) Typical whiny punk stuff, but the song is definitely catchy.

The ride back from Long Island last night was unbelievable. The fog was incredible - I literally could not see three cars ahead of me at times. Not that there were any cars on the road anyway, but still - the visibility levels hit some pretty scary depths on the 495. And the temperature dropped pretty low as well; not sure if that was a side effect of the speed I was driving at, or both windows being down, or what, but it was pretty crazy.

The weekend in general was just a crazy wild ride. Got to see Kyle again, which is always a good time. I'm proud that he's my friend. His pimposity has reached awesome new highs, and I have to salute him; we had a blast. Watched the Punisher on DVD as well, which was awesome.

Not everything went perfectly, of course, but hey. Life goes on.

Got another new keyboard. The Logitech one that I was happy with before ended up not being nearly as rockalicious as I had initially thought. Programmable keys, yada yada, USB blah blah, shitty. No, caillon was cool enough to buy me a Model M keyboard. CLICKETY FOR LIFE!

And since I have had this one in my hands, I have realized just how much faster and more accurately I type on these keyboards. I missed that feeling. If only someone would make a USB-native Model M... (Oh, and I ordered another one from eBay which was apparently delivered to my apartment's office building this morning but I wasn't here.)

Seriously. These keyboards totally rule.

Incidentally, the one that caillon purchased was in fact not an original Model M but remade by the Keepers of the One True Keyboard, those saints at PC Keyboard. These guys rule. I have no relation to them save that of the delighted recipient of one of their fine products.

Work continues to rock. I was at the office until about half past ten tonight and I didn't even realize it. Crazy, but in a good way.

Talked to Kyle. He's flying up to Long Island tomorrow. We're working out the whole schedule for me to go visit him while he's there - I think I'm driving down on Saturday but we'll see what happens. Haven't seen that crazy bastard in months, so there's no way I can miss this - he doesn't come up here that often. Have my fingers crossed - hoping that I can score the condo out in Moriches bay for Saturday night and Sunday morning, but I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch...

Cassie continues to surprise me with new levels of ass-kickery. I'm still absolutely shocked that someone as cool as her is remotely interested in me. Not complaining, mind you, but this kind of thing simply doesn't happen to yours truly.

Still haven't gotten tired of macaroni and cheese. Which is a really good thing, I think, since I suspect I'm going to be eating it pretty frequently for the next few days. Until I get paid on Wednesday that is. (Which dovetails nicely with Cassie swinging by. Should remember to clean the apartment before she gets here. It'd be terribly embarassing if she got lost in the mess.)

Steph continues to amuse me. I have high hopes that she'll figure out what it is that she wants someday, but I don't know when that day will be. The sooner the better. Should be interesting to see how she and Cassie get along... they still haven't met yet.

For some reason, the scent of saltwater was really strong in the air when I was driving home from visiting Cassie at the dorm. This was unexpected, but extremely pleasant. I miss the ocean.

I have decided that from now on I'm going to use random Sealab quotes (or maybe one-liners from bash.org) as my blog titles.

Cassie totally kicks ass. (Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while now may ask yourselves - Cassie? Who is this Cassie? And what happened to Libby?)

No, my blog has not in fact turned into a soap opera. As cool as that would be, I think that the technologies involved are nowhere near the level that they would need to be for real soap opera goodness. However, my own personal life has been pretty complicated lately, so I'll lay it out...

Libby was awesome and I hit on her at Hot Topic, where she works - however, despite my initial interpretation of good signals, Libby apparently doesn't want a boyfriend, and she doesn't actually seem to want to hang out with me even as friends, so she's been written off.

Cassie on the other hand, completely rules. She hit on me on the Internet, which is a first, and she also lives relatively close. She just moved into the dorm at a college that is about half an hour away, and I went over there today. We watched Underworld, which was awesome in the same terrible way that Starship Troopers was. Some of the worst acting I've ever seen, coupled with impressive special effects and the most predictable plotlines you could ever imagine, and I'm hooked.

Let's see, what else? Cassie is short. Really really short. Like five foot one short. And she's really cute. Her hair is brunette (which is ok, as redheads are all batshit insane anyway) and it's terrifyingly long. She's eighteen, which is ok, since I'm still only twenty, but she acts a bit more mature than most of the other eighteen year olds that I know, so we'll see how that works out. She also is a huge video game fanatic, which is ridiculously sweet. And her favorite Final Fantasy was VII, which is a pretty damned good choice for a favorite.

She also knows every single Sealab quote that I've thrown at her. Which for some reason is a huge turn-on to me. She laughs at my jokes, too, and she even completes some of the quotes when I start them.

So, life is interesting, at least. Just when I've actually really decided to give up on women, fate throws another one at me. I should really do this whole "giving up on women" thing more often, if this is the result...

Sashmit, your site appears to have moved to a new host, and cron has sent me a few dozen emails about a 404 on your blog. Drop me an email when it's back up so I can uncomment your feed again :)

caillon is buying me a new keyboard soon.

Poor bastard. :)

In related news, Steph is back in town for the weekend. It really sucks that I miss her so much when she's gone. Son of a bitch, I really wasn't expecting that. Gah.

Watched Requiem for a Dream and Frailty tonight. Both of those movies rock. Steph had never seen either one of them; she ended up liking Frailty more, which is interesting. Requiem still fucks with me. The music in that movie is excellent, as is the cinematography.

I definitely feel bad for caillon though. The forty-five minute drive home has got to be killing him.

new CPU and 1.5GB of RAM arrived yesterday to bolster my hardware so that I can actually play Doom 3.

That game is the first game since Silent Hill to make me actually afraid to go around the next corner.

It's awesome.

Playing it in the dark, on my TV, with the sound turned waaaay up, is absolutely terrifying, and by far one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

If only they'd release Linux binaries. Carmack, are you listening? I hate Windows and I'm sick of putting up with weird random shit just so I can play your masterpiece of a game.

::sigh::

ugh. Errata suck.

that is all.

Wow, lots of news since last time I blogged. First off, sorry about the server being down; apparently we had a hardware failure on the machine that my blog and planet KDE are both hosted on, and I was ill-prepared for it; my mail was down for a few hours, as well, which was no good.

Steph got hired as a nanny in New York. She's moving her stuff out this weekend. I'm excited for her - I think she's going to do an awesome job as a nanny, and she's great with kids; but I'm also really going to miss her. Steph is awesome, and the apartment isn't going to be the same without her.

In other news, we went down to Long Island last weekend. I had a blast; it felt so great to be home again, and I got to see a couple of my friends. We went to the beach at Smith Point and I got my ass kicked by the waves. I still have a couple of sand burns on my back to prove it.

caillon, J5, maureen, and halfline came over last night. There was hookah and Gamecube, and much rejoicing. Found a smoke shop in Salem, NH that sells shisha, and I picked up two packs of grape. If it's good, I'll be going back frequently; if it's not, I guess it's back to ordering from the internet. I don't know why, but there's just something satisfying about the whole instant gratification thing.

Sat down with Ed and Zack yesterday and basically did a mind-meld; we had an hour-plus-long braindump session where I let loose all of the ideas, concerns, and issues that I've been thinking about as far as desktop QA goes here at Red Hat.

John Flanagan dropped in towards the end of it, and he seems to be quite open to a lot of our ideas, which is awesome. Hopefully we can get the budget/machines allocated to implement the desktop testing lab that we want to set up; that would be perfect.

Number of times I've forgotten my cardkey at the new office: Two

Number of days since someone has passed out in the bathroom: Nine

Talked to Scott James Remnant today, and asked him about the bug with atom.xml parsing and <br/> elements; he pointed me at his arch tree and told me to update from there, which I've done.

Net effect, a tiny bump and all of a sudden atom.xml feeds are looking dead sexy. Anybody who's currently blogging on blogspot - your feeds should no longer look like crap! There was a small bug for a minute with the old template, where the (feed) links in the sidebar on the right were all pointing back to planetKDE.org instead of pointing to the actual RSS feed from the developer. That's been fixed.

If you notice any other issues, please let me know!

Do not click on these if you are faint of heart, easily disgusted or offended, or otherwise a dumbass.

That being said, I thought that these were too funny to NOT post.

(Girl in photos is my roommate, Steph. She rocks. Funny-looking chubby topless guy with tattoo is yours truly.)

Steph and I get awfully close with our tongues and Steph is amazed by my wang.

These photos are posted for amusement purposes only. If you don't find them funny, well, I'm sorry. If you find them erotic, please see a counselor or seek other professional help.

... When you realize how much of a geek you really are.

(sitting here on the sofa, listening to music, sending messages back and forth with my roommate, who happens to be sitting on the same sofa. Three feet away.)

::grin::

So Maksim (aka SadEagle) did some awesome hacking on my crazy widget style and fixed a few of the bugs that I've been too lazy (or too stupid) to fix myself lately. This has kickstarted me into looking at some more of my code, and I've actually been hacking on things lately.

I also have an evil plan regarding kdelibs... How much would everyone hate me if I split out the sub-libraries within the kdelibs package into smaller individual packages and ported them to use pkg-config instead of the voodoo that is our admin/ build system?

Comments, replies, sexual favors?

Went rollerblading for the first time in a couple of years yesterday, and found out a few interesting things.

• One of the axles in my left boot has cracked.
• My bearings are all rusted.
• I need new laces for my boots.
• I'm woefully out of shape.
• No, really. I hurt.

Also did some pushups. That was interesting. Made it to 73 without stopping, but my back is punishing me for it today. And my chest, and my arms. Ah, what an awesome feeling... The burn from physical exhaustion is actually a welcome pain.

Heh. Just remembered this snippet of conversation between Steph and myself:

clee: http://www.thinkgeek.com/oreilly/tshirts/5eb7/
clee: For me
clee: http://www.thinkgeek.com/oreilly/tshirts/6388/
clee: For you
steph: We should get those and wear them at the same time and then go out!
clee: :D
steph: Geek Central
clee: That would be awesome :)
clee: And the best part, of course, would be us taking pictures, and then posting them on our blogs :D

We will have those shirts. Oh yes.

I scare myself sometimes.

Daniel and I originally planned on staying in Canada until Tuesday or so; instead, we left yesterday and got a head start. We made excellent time on the trip home; it took just over five hours for us to make it from Ottawa to Nashua, including two stops for gas.

OLS registration: $250 CDN
Hotel stay at Les Suites: $215/night, CDN
Pizza at 2AM: $20 CDN
Two tanks of gas: $40 USD
The look on Steph's face when we showed up three days early: Priceless

(Incidentally, that Mastercard marketing campaign was simply stunning. Hooray for corporate marketing!)

Seriously, though; the look on Steph's face was just awesome. The apartment is a total mess; she didn't do any laundry, and everything is awesome. Her hair looks dead sexy though. (She dyed it red, apparently just finishing the process before we got home.)

OLS rocked. Daniel and I both agreed that we definitely have to do it again next year, only next time 1) We're taking our time getting up there. Two or three days each way. There's too much fun stuff that we missed out on this time. And 2) Steph has gotta go with us. Maybe we can get her involved in some sort of documentation effort, or translation, or something; it doesn't really matter. I'm sure we can get her involved in the community somehow, and once she is she'll have a valid reason for coming.

And one of the few things that sucked about OLS was not having Steph around. I really wasn't expecting to miss her that much, but I did.

Now. Since we're back home, there's this rather large Netserver LXr Pro which needs an operating system. I've got the idea into my head that I want LDAP user accounts and Kerberos passwords in the apartment, so we'll see. I need to get an OS booting on this thing first though, which looks like it may actually be easier said than done...

From Josh: "You give us mall employees hope"

(said after I told him the story of how I hit on Libby)

Daniel and I drove up with Chris Blizzard for OLS, and we've been here since Sunday. The conference is kicking *major* ass, and I've gotten to meet tons of awesome people.

The bourbon that Bdale and Keith picked up completely knocked me on my ass though. I was completely out of commission on Tuesday, and barely managed to recover for Wednesday's activities.

Canada. What more can I really say? Like home, but just different enough to fuck with me. It's cool here, though; the wifi from the balcony is sort of spotty, but otherwise the room is awesome. More alcohol than I thought could be consumed has been.

Trying to convince Steph to start blogging. No luck as of yet.

Daniel is cramming hard for some deadlines. Which sucks for him. I feel kind of weird, being alone out here on the balcony, knowing that everyone else is asleep already. Good time to blog, though.

Kind of missing home, oddly enough. Never been homesick like this, not since the parents moved me to Arizona. Also, my mind keeps wandering back to Libby.

::sigh::

Overall, though - surprising quantities of ass-kickery have shown up in my life lately, and I'm still frankly quite shocked at it. If only life could be this badass all the time.

Just got back from an awesome date with Libby. I met her at Hot Topic while Daniel and I were shopping for some ass-kicking Nintendo shirts - she works there. I hit on her and asked her for her phone number - which apparently caught her off-guard, as she actually gave me her real number - and we just had a pseudo-date tonight at Pizzeria Uno.

Reasons why Libby kicks ass:

1. Redhead.
2. Cynical.
3. Killer sense of humor.
4. Gorgeous.
5. SEXIEST. VOICE. EVER.
6. She knows what Linux is.

There are more, but I'm stoked enough right now that I can hardly concentrate. I'll update more later on.

In other news, Chris Blizzard is hitching a ride up to Ottawa with Daniel and myself. We're doing the road trip with Rik van Riel and his wife, as well as Dave Jones.

Life kicks so much ass that my cheeks are starting to hurt.

So I've taken the time out of my day to gimp up a picture of myself to use as a hackergotchi head. It's not a particularly great pic, but I figured it had the most potential for hackergotchi status.

I like the way it turned out. Any other guys here on Planet KDE, if you take the time out to do this, send me the PNG file and I'll upload it and get it set for you so that you too can have a floating disembodied head.

If you do decide to gimp yourself up then please note that the image should be about 64 pixels wide to fit properly. Anything from 60 to 80 pixels tall will work for the height, but let's try not to make the images _too_ large.

(And yes, I'll host the images here so that your web server won't melt.)

Sandro Giessl: Your feed seems to be down. Can you fix it?

Thanks.

{lady friend}: no you're my examplar of what the guys i date have to live up to :-p

Wow.

I'm humbled. I had no idea that I was anywhere near that cool.

Of course, this means I'm just going to be that much more insufferable in the Real World, because I rock so much. But yeah, I was really surprised that someone out there thinks that of me.

Heh. I almost forgot that we went to go meet with a couple of Ximian guys in Cambridge last night. Ray, John Palmieri, Dan Reed and myself all met up right outside the T and we were completely pimped out in our stylish red fedoras (those hats rock). We had dinner at this cool place called CBC - can't remember what it stood for - and then we met the monkeys over at a pool hall.

Dave Camp is a funny motherfucker.

And Luis Villa is also pretty funny, but in a more quiet sort of way. Dave is funny in an "I'm the asshole that everyone loves to hate" way, which is fine with me. Upon seeing us in our (ridiculously sexy) red hats, he told us to get the hell out of his bar. We laughed, and then someone mentioned that I'm the guy he should kick out since I work on KDE. (I think that it might've been me who mentioned it, but anyway.) So then he looks at me and proceeds to tell me "Ok, they're cool, but YOU definitely need to leave." And then we had a fun time bullshitting about various things, including the whole Novell/Ximian/SUSE craziness.

Dave's version of a meeting with one of our KDE guys over at SUSE in Germany:

"So, what're you gonna do if they pick GNOME?"
"I'm going to quit." ::pause:: "What're you going to do if they pick KDE?"
"I'm gonna quit."
::silence::
"Well, cheers!" ::drinking::

Heh.

I'm personally fine with broadcasting my personal life over the internet to whoever's interested. It's sort of an exhibitionist thrill, but I understand that it's definitely not for everyone.

Having said that, I've got the good sense not to blog about anything too personal on here, as I know that anybody could read it.

As far as "the goal of planetkde" - the goal that I've set for it is exactly what it says in the disclaimer. It's the aggregation of public weblogs written by KDE contributors; that means that if they only want me to feed from their KDE topic, then I will; but if they don't mind having the rest of their info on the site too, then I'm fine with that as well. So long as the blog content isn't direct obvious flamebait, I'll have no reason to mess around with things. Also, although I think it sounds cool to rule with an iron fist, I'm far too lazy to do that.

Now, since this is actually a personal entry (and not a tech/KDE one) I have to say that I'm super excited because my friend Steph is moving up here and she's leaving in less than three weeks! Seriously. My life just keeps on kicking more ass. On top of that, Daniel's coming up in three weeks and three days, and we're leaving for OLS on the seventeenth, I think. Everything rocks. And Red Hat is the coolest place to work, ever.

Ah... I love it when things work out.

So, mere minutes after my last post, lyp pinged me on IRC and we sorted things out. He's uncomfortable with his personal posts being on Planet KDE anyway, which I totally understand, so he's set up a new RSS feed for KDE-related posts. And has thus been re-added to the blogroll, as has mornfall.

Good times.

I've been friends with lypanov (aka Alexander Kellet) for a while now; at least, I've considered us friends for a while. He's a great guy, he's really cool, and we've always gotten along pretty well.

Yesterday, he posted an entry to his blog stating that he was giving up on KDE, and immediately thereafter, he logged off of IRC (before I had a chance to ask him what was going on). Within the hour, I had received half a dozen emails asking me why our own developers were giving up on our project and if KDE had a future.

Now, I don't consider myself to be a fascist dictator by any means, but at the time the only options I saw were to leave things the way they were and field the questions, ask him to change his entry (which I vehemently disagree with), or to remove his blog temporarily until I had a chance to chat with him and find out what was going on.

Unfortunately, as a result I've been asked remove Peter Rockai's blog. Peter's also a really cool guy who I've gotten along with pretty well so far, and he brought up a really good point - which is that I should have done this (replying in public about the issue) from the start. I wish that I had. Now apparently Alex doesn't want to be back anyway (which I can understand) and Peter is gone as well.

Ugh. What does everyone else think? Feel free to email me your thoughts, or if you've got a blog syndicated here, feel free to post a reply on it.

Well, it looks like KDE.org and even Planet Debian have picked up on the existence of my little project, so I guess it's time to officially say "Yes, we're live!"

Disclaimers are up, layout is (mostly) finished, other planets have been linked, seats are in their upright positions... And we are live, ladies and gents!

Now if only someone would fix up KBlog (or Tack! Tack needs love too!) Oh, and we need hackergotchi icons. Any artists want to volunteer?

In response to Roberto's query: If you have a blog with a working RSS feed (e.g., one that includes the <pubDate> tags) send an email to clee@kde.org with your name, what you hack on, and the URL of your RSS feed, and I'll add you to the blogroll here.

Hopefully Ian will fix up kdedevelopers.org soon so that I can start pulling those blog entries too.

With the advent of planet KDE, we need a decent blog posting utility for KDE. This isn't it, but it might become that utility if enough people send patches to me (or hey, you can always fork it!)

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present to you:

Tack 0.0, the most minimalist and feature-starved blog posting utility KDE has ever seen. It needs loving, lots of it, and as I'm going to be on an airplane later on today I can't give it the loving it so deserves.

So download it, marvel at its simplicity and lack of functionality, and then hack on it and send me patches so that it stops sucking so much.

That is all.

I was discussing how addictive Planet GNOME and Planet Debian are on #kde-devel with a few KDE developers and we lamented the lack of a Planet KDE. However, unlike them, I actually decided to get up and do something about it.

Behold! Planet KDE!

Yes. It's ugly. It's also fairly empty. Until Ian fixes up kdedevelopers.org (see how messed up the feeds are?) so that it includes <pubDate> tags so that the blog entries get sorted correctly, we're pretty lonely over here.

The good news is, if you're a KDE developer with a blog on your own site, mail me the URL of your properly-formed RSS feed, tell me what you do in KDE, and I'll add you to the blogroll as soon as possible.

Tonight is rocking hardcore.

I spent about twenty minutes autotooling the 'nv' driver from the old monolithic X server tree, and convinced it to build under Daniel's Xizzle/Xorg tree.

After a bit more hacking around with the build system (to get it to properly generate the Makefiles in the nv dir, and to get the new NV driver module loaded into the libdrivers.a), it actually worked!

It loads the driver, and it sets the proper resolution, and everything!

Now the only thing missing is composite support. Which is a little out of my league, but I have faith that the guys at Sun working on it (yeah, I'm looking at you, Stu and Deron) will pull it off.

Damn, this has been a good night.

I've had this domain for a while; I personally thought it was cute, and kind of a good tongue-in-cheek joke amongst my friends and myself, but it's about to expire, and so I'm in the process of transferring the domain registry to another registrar. (Rick at dns.vanrein.org is really cool, but I don't have e-gold, and his rates aren't the lowest... so since I'm rather strapped for cash these days, I had to find someone cheaper. Of course, I can't afford to lose any email, either...)

in other news, I've been trying to grok a lot more design knowledge from a few guys with some really good taste. Namely, the Design Fab Five. Good stuff from them, and I like a lot of their ideas. Except for Flash - which I'm not diametrically opposed to, but I just have no use for. So my site really is getting a redesign; I'm not sure exactly what it'll end up looking like, but I'll leave the option for everyone to continue to use this particular design if they really like it. This one is a hybrid of a couple designs I saw on OSWD, plus a few custom modifications that I made myself.

Moved into my new apartment on the 25th and I've been chilling with Tony down in Boston for the past few days. Life is good! I have no furniture, but I have a TV, my computer, and cable internet.

I also have no food. Nor do I have any cooking tools, like pots or pans or knives, to cook food, if I did have some. My fridge looks pretty typical of what I'd guess most bachelors' fridges look like; there's donuts and some leftover pizza (if you can call Pizza Hut pizza, anyway).

Steph was supposed to fly up this weekend, but her boss was evil and told her she wouldn't have a job to come back to if she did. Which sucks. And my aunt was supposed to come up to visit, but she had to put out some fires with one of her tenants, so that hasn't happened yet. So they've both ditched me but it's ok; everything is going to work out just fine. Steph is on another "I think I want to move up there" kick. Hopefully this one will actually result in her moving up here. I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm not holding my breath.

Other than that... the tattoo looks awesome, still, and damn, but I need a desk and a chair for this computer. Hrm.

Finally feels like things are going places. I just got back from a great week and a half in Arizona on Wednesday night; for whatever reason, I came down with a fever almost immediately after I got back, which included a really nasty throat condition where it hurt to swallow. Fever broke a day or two ago, but the throat still hurts. Nasty.

For the first time since I can remember, Arizona was actually fun to be in. I had a BLAST. Kyle came down from Colorado; I got to see pretty much every single one of my friends; I got a tattoo; and I did some other things which I'm quite proud of, but which aren't fit to print, especially not on a public blog like this. I even got to say "goodbye" to a few of my old teachers from high school, which was awesome.

And, to top it all off, I move into my new apartment on Tuesday (yeah, I got approved!) and two weeks from that, I start at redhat. Even cooler is that daniels is coming up on July 11th, and we're gonna go crash OLS and kick some ass in Canada.

Oh, and apparently (according to Steph) I've become some sort of a pimp. Can't argue with that. :)

Published Asteroid on looky today. Should be interesting to see what kinds of responses I get to it. I'm sure that nobody will ilsten to my "If you don't like it don't use it and don't bitch" disclaimer, but oh well. Such is life.

In other news, I should be able to hack on my dotNET config page Sometime Soon (TM) so hopefully I can finally get that uploaded into CVS. I know I've promised it before, but honest - it's coming!

And other stuff is on the horizon. I love KDE development. Also, the guys from Sun's Project Looking Glass team kick ass. (I met them at the xdevconf last week.)

Picked up a new toy yesterday, a Logitech USB 200 headset. Hooray for USB audio! I'm amazed at how nice it is. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but this headset is a lot better than I was expecting. And it works great under Linux, as well as OS X. I hear it even works nicely under Windows...

I love this stuff. Had fun trying to get everything to play to the headphones, but it wasn't too difficult. Highly recommended.

I've been looking at a few laptops lately. Apparently the model I've been ogling - the hp nx7010 - is very much similar to the Compaq X1000 (which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone). I have decided that the specs that I want are:

1. Centrino. Pentium M or bust, I say. (It's the only way I'm likely to get any decent battery life out of a laptop these days.
2. Wide-screen 8:5 aspect ratio. I suspect that 1280x800 may be too small; 1440x900 seems about right, but I will probably love 1680x1050 as well, but the important thing is that it's wide-screen.
3. I would really prefer it without an OS but the other two specs have so far made this look extremely unlikely, as the only manufacturers I've seen happen to be stuck with nasty evil agreements with Microsoft. (see previous rant.)
4. Oh, also. I need at least half a gig of RAM, a 40 gig hard drive, a mobility Radeon would be nice (since it seems like the mobile GeForce chips aren't that prevalent in the Centrino machines...), a DVD/CDRW combo drive, Firewire, and gigabit ethernet.

Yeah, it sounds like what I want is basically a Powerbook, I know. Except that since I'm going to be working at redhat, I get the feeling that an Apple laptop would be sort of ... bad karma.

We'll see what happens.

How's this for a reason?

I called up HP/Compaq, Dell, and IBM today. I can't get a notebook/laptop computer from any one of these manufacturers without paying for a Windows license.

That's right. I can't even get any of these systems blank, sans operating system. I explained to the guys over the phone - and especially the HP rep seemed sympathetic - but the problem is that Microsoft has strongarmed these manufacturers such that they can't ship any laptops without a Microsoft OS.

This is complete and utter bullshit. I'm just going to wipe the hard drive and put Linux on it anyway; I'd rather that the hard drive just came blank, as I don't expect any of the hardware guys to install Linux on it for me.

Ugh. I was hoping that one of these guys might be able to set themselves apart from the rest by satisfying this one wish. Looks like I was wrong.

I wrote a new style from scratch a long time ago called Asteroid. It was done half as a gag, and half because I was bored. I also decided to implement it from scratch (instead of following my usual method of hacking on the dotNET code) so that I could provide a better platform for others to build their styles on. (As an aside, I also took out all of the Asteroid-specific code and put it into a Skeleton style, which is BSD-licensed and available on my site).

However, being that I'm lazy and Asteroid got Good Enough TM for me to use without being too annoyed with it, Asteroid was put on hold at version 0.2. Until today, that is. I got an email from David Chester, with the Munjoy Linux distribution, and he has implemented much more of the widget style code, and submitted his changes back to me. (As an aside, Munjoy looks quite nifty, and I'm going to have to try it out. KDE + Debian = Righteous.)

So, yeah. I started something neat, and somebody else picked it up and ran with it. Open Source code rocks.

Have to go apartment hunting today. (I'm in Boston for the week, looking at the area and seeing what's around here.) Basically, it looks like I'm going to get face-raped by someone with a running start. A grand a month for a one-bedroom... it makes me want to cry.

Oh well. This is a good problem to have. Much better than the "homeless, jobless, and starving" problem I was facing a few months ago. Although if I can't find a place for a low-enough price, I may be facing that problem again.

On the bright side of things, the X Developers Conference starts tomorrow and that should be a blast.

Changed the oil on my car this morning. Heading up to Boston today to go look for an apartment/housing, as well as to go to the X Developers Conference - hooray!

Something about doing an oil change is satisfying. I don't know exactly what it is, though. Just feels good. I'm also glad to note that my car appears to not be burning oil, which may have something to do with my satisfaction.

Oh, and I got hired by Red Hat.

My jeans rock, especially since they're these $10 jeans that I can beat the living shit out of and kick ass in. And they look badass on me, too, because they make my ass look hot. Which is no easy feat, but they do. I want my own ass at this point. It really looks that hot. If I saw my ass in these jeans, walking down the street, I'd be like "DAMN BITCH, THAT IS SOME FINE ASS YOU'VE GOT" and then when I turned around I'd smack myself in the face and say "What the fuck did you just say, bitch?" And then I'd kick my own ass all over the place, Tyler Durden style.

Got a phone call from Brandi for the first time in weeks. Scared the shit out of me, as I had almost given up on her ever calling me again, since she does it so infrequently. I tortured her with descriptions of delicious buffalo beef. She wasn't amused, but I took great pleasure in it. When she finally gets up here, I'm going to have to make sure to stock up. We're talking five pounds, easy, of buffalo meat. Mmmm. Buffalo meat.

If you still haven't tried it, you're probably a terrorist, or at least a vegetarian, which is just about as bad in my book. I feel like I should reiterate a point that I've been making to my friends - for some reason, the women seem to take particular offense to this one, but hear me out. I would eat (cooked) baby seals if they tasted good. I don't care how cute they are; if they tasted good, I'd be sitting down at the table with a fork and knife ready and waiting. Determining your willingness to eat an animal based on how cute it looks while it's alive is total bullshit, so stop doing it. Base your willingness to eat animals on how good they taste. (For example, I don't think that buffalo are significantly far from cows on the cuteness scale, but I'll tell you what.... I'd eat buffalo over cow any day of the week, that's for damned sure.)

The only depressing thing about buffalo meat is the price tag. I mean, it is definitely well worth the $5/pound price, but I wish it were cheaper anyway. Anyway, I'm about to collapse, as it's getting light outside again, which means that it's time for me to go to sleep.

I feel like the Russian hacker from Goldeneye. I AM INVINCIBLE! Over the course of one day, managed to wrangle IE into actually rendering my site halfway decently (which it should've done in the first place), and also finally figured out a solution to an annoying problem with Apache and customized header/footer templates for automatic indexing. If that doesn't make sense to you, good.

Other random things of coolness: Xcode has amazingly well-integrated CVS support. Apple kicks ass. Also, Safari kicks ass. I like Apple's implementation of the CSS2 text-shadow property in KHTML. I'm also thinking about redesigning my site once more since I've had the current design up for over a year now, and I'm bored with it. It's a pain in the arse, especially for cross-browser compatibility, and I'm itching to try out a few other look'n'feel combinations. DanielS has suggested that I should try to become a DD. I find this amusing, mostly because of how many discussions I've had with DanielS where I have ranted about how much I hate Debian. Good times.

update: check out the customized output that I struggled for hours to achieve! Marvel at how much less cool it is than it should be!

I hate Internet Explorer. If you happen to be unfortunate enough to be using it, please, consider either upgrading to Firefox or convincing the people in charge over in IT to give it a shot. Firefox actually supports web standards - those neat things that make it possible for people to write all sorts of really neat web pages, without having to resort to evil nasty hacks.

I have no idea what this page looks like under IE5. My closest guess would be that it looks like a plate full of ass, and if it does, then too bad. There are at least a half dozen other web browsers you can use that will render this site properly, and if all else fails you could always upgrade to IE6 since that works for now.

In the future, my "compatibility" with IE is going to consist of hiding things that the browser doesn't understand, instead of trying to get it to work.

I love MacOS X. I don't mince words about it; the UI is gorgeous, simple, to-the-point, and I love it. I love Linux as well, but mainly because it's usually a challenge to get working right. After getting particularly bored the other day, and I thought to myself "You know, self, this iMac works entirely too well." Seven hours later, Gentoo is up and (mostly) running.

Major props out to the guys who wrote parted, the guy who wrote the patches to parted to let it resize HFS+ filesystems without destroying data (if I ever meet you, I owe you a beer), and whoever wrote the driver for reading HFS+ volumes under Linux. All of this stuff makes using Linux on a Mac a much more pleasant experience.

Back in OS X land, though, the guys who I'm the most impressed with are the team behind Colloquy which is hands-down, the single coolest Open Source application I've seen on OS X yet. I've seen a few other apps that I consider to have great user interfaces, but Colloquy is the only Open Source one. These guys are seriously awesome.

I'm on IRC the other day and my pal Daniel asks me if I'd be interested in taking care of a sysadmin task for him on the freedesktop.org box (pdx). I wasn't doing anything so I said "Sure, what is it?" and he tells me he needs a script to:

• Copy over the entire CVS tree from the CVSROOT
• Check out the latest code from each module in each CVS tree, and package it up
• Also, pants

I wrote it. It's neat. Hadn't done any shell scripting in a while, but this was relaxing and it gave me a chance to exercise some of my skills, which is always good.

so for all of you out there who have yet to experience the absolutely delicious taste of buffalo meat: I pity you. and for all of you who refuse to partake in such delicious food, I have no clue what's wrong with you, but I will sponsor you if necessary.

in other news, I'm extrememly psyched. I don't want to jinx myself yet but there is a potential job prospect that I'm very excited about. I'll announce more if something comes of it. that's all for now.

oh, and also... badger.

ok, I have a problem. I have a problem with women, specifically. I won't name any names but I know you're reading this out there, and this entry is all because of YOU.

with that said, what the hell? I move to NY and all of a sudden, it's like "Hey, you know... It's really too bad that you're in NY. And it's too bad that I have a boyfriend."

as if that's not bad enough, then it becomes "Oh... well, I guess since you're in NY I can tell you that I did like you. hahaha! Doesn't that suck? You're 2500 miles away! And you can't do anything about it! But I do have a boyfriend anyway. Still..."

so. completely. uncool.

I'm going to be beating myself over this for weeks. I can tell.

maybe Josh has the right idea. although apparently, the same sort of thing happened to him after he went gay - only it became "Hey, you know... It's really too bad that you're gay. I really liked you."

I mean, seriously. I'm not gay, and I don't think I ever could be, but you women are all evil.

today's quote (from Tia):
"hell if i would have known that you were moving i would have handcuffed you to a bed and stuck you in a basement somewhere so you couldn't leave"

good to know that I have friends who would abduct me and keep me in a basement. definitely good to know.

I went to Boston on Wednesday last week for an interview that I had at a community health center in the city. I got a call the same day from Red Hat asking if I wanted to come in for an interview the next day, so I told them "Of course!"

the interview went great! I had the most fun I've ever had interviewing. I got to meet a bunch of cool guys and I had a blast chatting with them, about all sorts of stuff. they had me show up at 10AM and I was supposed to be done by 3, but they kept me until a little after 4. which hopefully is a good sign, but I don't want to get my hopes _too_ far up.

the hospital was basically a dead end, though. they don't have any positions for the IS department, but they swore that they would call me as soon as they do. they did seem to be pretty impressed though, so I think it went well even if nothing comes of it. it's experience, anyway. which is always good.

so, where to begin - it's been way too long since I wrote anything down; my apologies to anyone out there reading but I haven't had nearly as much internet access as usual lately, and I can't seem to find any decent blogging software for OS X so I may end up having to write my own.

in other news.... Steph has decided not to move out here. shocking, I know. it's actually kind of sad, because she's really cool, and I was kinda looking forward to her moving out here. on the other hand, it's rather freeing, and I realized the other day that I'm officially more free right now, at this very moment, than I've ever been before in my life. I have no responsibilities to anyone, really - I have no obligations to maintain, no relationships holding me down or keeping me from doing what I want, and it's sort of a scary place to be. hopefully things will firm up a bit soon; it's an interesting place to be at, though.

have been going to interviews and submitting the resume at tons of places up here. no solid results yet, unfortunately.

I'm finally in New York, and I've actually been here for a couple of weeks now. been a while since I updated the blog so I figured "what the hell" and decided to go ahead and post a bit of info.

the job search hasn't been too promising so far, but Syracuse is gorgeous. I really love the area, and the fact that snow is all over the place probably has something to do with it. everyone here thinks I'm insane because I love the cold; maybe I am actually crazy, but I still get a kick out of it.

haven't had much time to hack on KDE lately, what with trying to find viable employment. my aunt has this great idea that I should be the Easter Bunny or one of his assistants; I'm really not too into the idea personally, but I do have to admit that it'd probably be pretty funny if I had to resort to that. I mean, it'd suck terribly for me of course. but it'd still be hilarious, and maybe in a few years I'd be able to laugh about it. maybe.

So, I have had a lot of respect for the GNOME hackers for a long time. I have been incredibly happy that the core hackers in each camp have got along with cheerfulness, decorum and mutual respect - even while some overzealous members of our user communities have flamed and bickered, generating this idea of "The Desktop War".

But this week, a bunch of actual GNOME developers - not random gimps being idiots - have acted like children and made everyone working on the Linux desktop look like a bunch of juveniles. I'm very disappointed.

How do they expect corporations to take Linux desktop efforts seriously with a release name like "That and a pair of testicles"? Some people have mentioned that this won't reflect badly on KDE since GNOME and KDE are only related by virtue of being alternatives to eachother; they might have a point, but in reality, nobody in the Windows world knows the difference between KDE and GNOME and this sort of crap makes Linux desktop acceptance that much more difficult for everyone involved.

Very disappointed.

so now that I have a local kerberos server, and it hands out tickets like a champ, and life is good, the next (logical) step is to want to have single-sign-on for things like (say) my email.

KDE has a custom ground-up SASL implementation that supports LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5 and DIGEST-MD5, but not GSSAPI (which is a layer on top of Kerberos). I took a look at it and decided that I could implement a GSSAPI function for the KDE SASL implementation. I had no idea that it'd be so damned frustrating. why is GSSAPI so complicated, and poorly-designed to boot?

if you think I'm joking, or complaining about nothing - the main function, gss_init_sec_context, takes THIRTEEN parameters. that's a lot of margin-for-error. one would think they might use custom data structures, ones more complicated than the standard struct with a void pointer and an int to indicate the length of the data, but no. of course not.

oh well. when I'm done, KDE will have a GSSAPI implementation, meaning that it should Just Work (TM) with any Kerberized service that uses SASL. Namely, this means IMAP servers and probably a few SMTP servers - having single-sign-on for these services will be great.

so I finished setting up a working LDAP server here at home. with Kerberos, for that single-sign-on goodness. I can see why people dig this. I can also see why people fucking hate it. awesome features, complete and total pain in the ass to set up. honestly, I think I probably would rather have installed openBSD, and that's saying a lot.

but now that it's working, and I have it set up, I am a golden god.

everybody else is blogging about it, so I guess I'll join in too. orkut is nifty. I don't have five thousand friends, but I think that maybe instead of being obsessed with collecting as many as possible I'm going to just use it to keep in touch with the ones that I do have. well, the ones that are on the service anyway.

other than that, not much news. been listening to Massive Attack's 100th Window lately. good stuff. really starting to dig Thirteenth Step, as well, for some reason. I didn't like it that much when I first heard it, but it's grown on me quite a bit.

so I was doing it wrong. ceebx's code works great. (I was checking for currentTab == 0 && cornerWidget, but I needed to be checking for currentTab == 0 && !cornerWidget. one simple little bug...)

of course, I said I'd probably commit this stuff last night. now I want to integrate a ConfigPage in with my commit so I can have a huge commit with new fun stuff in it... :)

mmm. well, it's nice to have Konqueror drawing the tabwidget correctly now. it doesn't look so silly anymore.

got an email from ceebx tonight - this guy rules. not only is Plastik the single most visually attractive style I've used (well, aside from the ones I've written, of course ;) but he sends me suggestions for problems that he comes across.

now, the current suggestion he sent me doesn't seem to be working just yet, but I'm sure I'll get it to. I hate QTabWidgets.

the intervention didn't happen. Caitie got cold feet, chickened out, and didn't even show up until twenty minutes before Jessica left. I feel like shit.

Jessica really is too good for her boyfriend. that's really all there is too it. I wish I could have convinced Caitie to go through with it, but my persuasive skills aren't what they used to be, I guess. oh well... I tried, and I failed. it really does make me sad though.

it's been almost a week since my last blog! damn. I resolved to make sure to update this more often. not even four weeks and I'm already falling behind.

yesterday was fun. Caitie, Nuge, Brandi, Josh, and I all went to Red Sea. Kevin was over there (surprise surprise!) and Cliff showed up eventually, as did Steph, It was like a party or something, almost. everybody's decided that they're going to throw me a huge going-away party, although the little details (like "when" and "where") have yet to be decided. sounds like good fun though.

Steph took advantage of Brandi being there, and apologized to her. Or so she says. haven't heard Brandi's side of the story yet. still, it's nice to hear that Steph's trying to be less caustic. she got me a gift yesterday, too, completely unexpectedly. the Onion calendar. hooray! new Onion every day for the rest of the year.

that's about all. the last week hasn't been that interesting. tonight should be, though. Caitie and Nuge and I have finally agreed to do our intervention with Jessica. no idea how that's going to go, but ... it needs to be done. Jessica is a really great friend, and an amazing woman, and she deserves far better than what she's currently getting. anyway.

I've been really getting into Metallica's St. Anger lately. I don't know why. You can hate me now, I guess - I know that all of the TRUE METALLICA FANS hate anything more recent than the Black album (which was good, of course). I guess I'm not a TRUE METALLICA FAN then. that, and of course anybody who likes Metallica must have hated Napster. I have some news for you people - Napster was cool, but most of the stuff that people had on there was shitty. Too many idiots with broken CD rippers made too many shitty single MP3 copies. The real draw for me with Napster was the fact that I could find people with similar music interests, not the quality of the songs. besides, Ogg Vorbis kicks MP3 ass.

in other news, not much is going on. watched some old home videos with Steph tonight - vintage stuff from the summer before last. good times. we had dinner at NYPD. reminds me of how much I miss playing hockey. (Danny Schowe used to work there. I don't think he does anymore, sadly. He was on my hockey team back in high school though.)

also good: Radiohead's Hail it to the Thief. I don't know why but it feels like the whole album is different interpretations of the same emotion. I like it though. need to get my hands on some more of their stuff. I hear Kid A was pretty good.

Well, you don't have to of course. But if you like me, or you really really like me, or you like the work I do on KDE or you just have too much money, you can donate funds to clee@kde.org via PayPal. I'll be putting a button up as well. hooray capitalism!

I got an email from a Linux distributor today asking me if I would mind going into some detail on my widget style experience. Hopefully my reply will make a good impression, since I've done a pretty decent amount of work in this field; I think it'd rock if I were hired as a consultant or contracted out to for development work.

Life can be funny. I never expected that my after-school hobby might eventually open up so many doors for me. It's not quite the same as being a rock star, but life could definitely be much worse.

hooray! I have a test app! :D

So I got a 200G hard drive today. My dad decided to buy it for me as payment for all of the work I've been doing trying to get his printer working exactly the way he wants it.

Mmmmm. New hardware. I've completed the move of my /home over to the new drive, and now it's just a matter of wiping the 20G drive with my operating systems on it and using the 40G drive that previously held /home as my new OS drive. (I can fit more operating systems in 40G than I can in 20G! WOOOHOOO!)

Also, having the laser printer connected to the Mac works seamlessly with KDE over the network. I just pointed a KDE app at the Mac's IP, and it automatically grokked the print queue and even showed me both printers that have been connected to the Mac - nifty stuff. I love open source software.

(still have to make progress on some sort of a KDE-pyblosxom client. moving that to the top of the TODO, once I'm done screwing with the hard drives.)

I got into a funny conversation with Steph about marriage (of all things) earlier. I have a friend who lives in Minnesota and we were chatting the other day - the gist of the conversation was that since I'm going to Syracuse, and potentially staying for a while, and applying to work at S.U., I would be getting free tuition. I joked that it'd be convenient for her to just marry me and move in with me so she could take advantage of the free tuition (in the event that I do stay in Syracuse and that I'm working at S.U.).

Steph exploded when I told her about this, revealing much more than I think she intended. "You can't just marry someone for convenience! That's completely the wrong reason to get married! What are you, retarded?" Apparently Steph still believes that people should only get married if they're in love. I think that's pretty amusing, personally, just because it doesn't seem to be that common a view among the 20+ crowd that we're going to be joining this year.

Would I actually marry someone for convenience? I don't know. Would I do it just for sex? Nah. Would I do it for the convenience of a lower insurance premium? Probably not. But would I do it if I knew that it was someone who would put up with me and keep me company so I wouldn't have to be alone? That's the one I'm not really too sure about. I hate being alone. I mean, I don't mind being left alone for a while if I'm busy doing something important but I just don't enjoy being single.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I'm not nearly as confident as Steph is that I'm going to find that special someone. I mean, I don't think I'm quite troll-like (well, as long as I shower and shave, that is), but I'm not going to be featured on the cover of GQ anytime soon, and it's not like I go clubbing or anything. Not that I'd necessarily want to date anybody that I might meet clubbing - that whole idea scares me. But I'm not that attractive and I'm not that social, and most of the women I'm interested in aren't interested back. The few that I've dated that have been interested in me for me have ended up cheating on me (or wanting to and thus ending the relationship) so I don't really feel quite so self-confident anymore. Am I self-doubting? No, because I think the whole concept of self-doubt involves insecurity and questioning things, while I'm fairly sure of my lesser qualities. I also think that's one of the reasons I get a kick out of helping people - I feel better about myself when I know that I'm having a positive effect on others. Which, I think, also explains my whole knight-in-shining-armor complex.

Felt kind of weird to realize that I'm the friend Steph calls when she's got "alone time" while she's up in Idaho. Yeah, definitely weird.

so pyblosxom is neat software. I like the whole filesystem-to-blog mapping.

I really should have gone to sleep a long time ago. I'll need to talk to DanielS about nifty things like blogging via email (which it sounds like he has working with his, and that's just neat) and I'll probably get working on a KDE blogging client too.

anyway. I'm out for now. peace, everyone.

So I just went through a fairly messy breakup with Mickey, who I'd been with for well over a year and a half. It turns out that she slept with her (ex?)-best-friend Andrew back in October, and I found out about it just in time for Christmas. Great Christmas present.

Ugh. I feel like an ass. I guess it's a good thing that it happened at this point instead of later on, down the road, after more wasted time and such. Still, it sucks. I hate being alone. I had almost conquered my adequacy issues for a while there, too. Not to mention my problems with trusting people.

And then today I find out another great bit of news: Mickey's already got a new boyfriend. Way to go. I want her to be happy. I want to be happy too though, and this doesn't help me towards that goal at all. Two days ago she was swearing up and down that she didn't want to date anyone ever again and that she'd wait forever for me to forgive her and then this turns up. Good times. I have no idea how long it'll take me to get over her. Steff and I only dated for three or four months, but it took me a year and a half before I was ready for another relationship; I'm afraid of how long it might take before I'm actually ready for the next one, if there'll even be a next one.

(For those among you who don't know - Steff was my first serious girlfriend and Steph is her ex-best-friend. Steff and I don't talk. Steff and Steph don't talk. Steph and I talk all the time, and we're pretty good friends.)

Oh well. The road trip to Colorado was awesome. Hands-down the most fun I've had in years. Steph is awesome. And I forgot just how well Kyle and I get along. He's a rarity, I think - a truly great friend, not just someone fun to hang out with but someone that I know would take a bullet for me and someone I'd take do the same for without a second thought. You don't stumble across a friendship like that too often. Steph is completely head over heels for him, of course; and his girlfriend Krystal is also amazing. She's really cute, and she seems like a great match for him. I'm glad for him - they make a good couple. Steph isn't so glad, as she's so into him, but she'll have to figure out some way of dealing with it.

Speaking of Steph, it turns out that her grandmother died a day or two after we got back from CO. Not cool. It kind of puts a shitty pall over the memory of the trip because we were sitting there having a grand ol' time while her grandma was dying. Another reason for me to feel like an ass.

I love my keyboard. Logitech stuff hasn't impressed me this much in the past, but now I'm thinking that my next keyboard purchase will probably also be a Logitech as well. I still like the Microsoft optical mice though.

KDE stuff is always interesting. I got free access to the Lindows ISOs today by virtue of my being a KDE developer as well as eV member. I sent an email to Michael Robertson (CEO of Lindows and generally very cool guy) mentioning that I'd be more than happy to work with Lindows to develop a distinctive and professional GUI widget style for them but I haven't heard anything back yet.

Chris Lee
KDE developer

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