Chris Lee

a barbeau-bot would weld that leak with her laser beam eyes

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:25 -1000

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.

qotd dec 15 2004

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:58 -1000

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

less lip and more launch!

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 05:51 -1000

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.

thank ares you're alive

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 05:45 -1000

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.

pop some more pills, pill-head

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 03:00 -1000

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.

Gonna show Quinn this thing that I got...

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 19:00 -1000

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.

would you like to take advantage of Wiretap Wednesdays?

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 20:08 -1000

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.)

you've laid your brood of eggs in my navel!

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 14:18 -1000

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::

gstreamer hacking

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 06:27 -1000

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.

I also have the orphans wet his bed while he's sleeping

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 06:20 -1000

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.

It's a good thing I exist!

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 05:44 -1000

(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.

Short post

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:44 -1000

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

That is all.

I even have a secret mountain stronghold

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 02:27 -1000

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

Man, life is weird sometimes.

oh! and chainsaw hands!

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:36 -1000

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.

you're not gonna do it, are you?

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 03:35 -1000

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.

another day, another server

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 05:56 -1000

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.

4AM once again

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 04:12 -1000

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.)

hackfest

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:49 -1000

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.

we have bigger problems than a butter shortage

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:44 -1000

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.

qotd 10.31.2004

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 23:32 -1000

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

it's 4am

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 04:14 -1000

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.)

showdown

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 00:59 -1000

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.

hooray for migration!

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 23:43 -1000

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...

status 2004/10/07

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 17:59 -1000

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.

you want the mustache on, or off?

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 02:22 -1000

I crave brownies.

That is all.

the past year

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 03:30 -1000

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.

I can hear again!

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 12:29 -1000

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.

almost wrecked my car tonight

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 02:20 -1000

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.

whoops

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:52 -1000

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.

bitchin' home-made tesla coil

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:18 -1000

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.

daddy needs his medicine

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:16 -1000

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?

bored bored bored bored bored

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 19:09 -1000

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.

what kind of madman are you?!?!

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 14:09 -1000

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.

whoops! dart in your neck

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 02:32 -1000

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.

enough talk. let's ... kill a human

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 02:28 -1000

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 usual kind

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:21 -1000

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.

and I've heard great things, Kevin

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 01:22 -1000

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.

wonder if it's legal to sell this stuff to kids

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 01:12 -1000

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.

the black death is coming

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 00:24 -1000

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...

disabled account

Sat, 04 Sep 2004 15:25 -1000

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 :)

new keyboard

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:30 -1000

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.

hardware for doom3

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:02 -1000

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::

hooray errata

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 17:00 -1000

ugh. Errata suck.

that is all.

so long and thanks for all the fish

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:56 -1000

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.

good discussion

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 14:02 -1000

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

planet upgrade

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 13:56 -1000

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!

potentially offensive pics

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 02:45 -1000

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.

one of those moments

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 22:06 -1000

... 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::

new hotness

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 12:49 -1000

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?

rollerblading

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 12:27 -1000

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.

Geek Central

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 13:25 -1000

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.

instant embarrassment

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 13:18 -1000

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...

qotd 07/24/04

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 04:12 -1000

From Josh: "You give us mall employees hope"

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

ols rocks

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 02:51 -1000

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.

hottest. redhead. ever.

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:19 -1000

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:

Redhead.
Cynical.
Killer sense of humor.
Gorgeous.
SEXIEST. VOICE. EVER.
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.

hackergotchi head

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:29 -1000

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, read this

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 01:16 -1000

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

Thanks.

surprise revelation

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 00:53 -1000

{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.

drunken monkeys

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 16:05 -1000

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.

wonder where all the socks came from

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:57 -1000

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.

ok, this sucks less

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:05 -1000

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.

this sucks

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 11:32 -1000

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.

going live

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 09:06 -1000

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?

blog feeds

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 22:23 -1000

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.

tack release

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 08:21 -1000

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.

planet KDE

Sun, 06 Jun 2004 06:08 -1000

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.

I kick ass

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 22:21 -1000

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.

domain transfers

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 16:23 -1000

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.

my new apartment

Sun, 30 May 2004 23:57 -1000

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.

excitement in the air

Mon, 24 May 2004 04:01 -1000

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. :)

asteroid release

Thu, 06 May 2004 12:30 -1000

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.)

new toy

Wed, 05 May 2004 03:18 -1000

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.

looking at laptops

Tue, 04 May 2004 03:06 -1000

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:

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.
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.
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.)
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.

my own personal reason to hate Microsoft

Mon, 03 May 2004 16:28 -1000

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.

asteroid surprise

Mon, 03 May 2004 16:02 -1000

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.

apartment hunting

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 07:50 -1000

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.

oil change

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 11:13 -1000

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.

new jeans

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 01:37 -1000

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.

evil plots

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 05:49 -1000

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.

invincible!

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 05:41 -1000

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!

speaking of challenges

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 03:13 -1000

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.

linux lives

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:44 -1000

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.

sync script

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 00:30 -1000

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.

buffalo

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 18:50 -1000

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.

why are women evil?

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 18:30 -1000

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.

qotd

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 20:23 -1000

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.

interviews

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 20:22 -1000

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.

updates

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 19:45 -1000

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.

in new york

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 20:39 -1000

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.

disappointment

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:15 -1000

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.

oh how I hate gssapi

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 15:47 -1000

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.

mmm. kerberos.

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 09:03 -1000

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.

orkut

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:44 -1000

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.

corner widgets 2

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 06:19 -1000

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.

corner widgets

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 01:35 -1000

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.

jessica and intervention

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 01:07 -1000

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.

resolutions

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 16:46 -1000

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.

st. anger

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 00:57 -1000

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.

give me money

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 22:43 -1000

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!

rock star

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 21:34 -1000

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.

this is a test from my tack app

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 07:52 -1000

hooray! I have a test app! :D

200 gig hard drive

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 01:04 -1000

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.)

temet nosce

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 00:53 -1000

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.

setting up this blog

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 05:58 -1000

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.

And now for something completely the same.

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 04:44 -1000

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.