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.

No thank you.
No no no. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Found out something mildly amusing today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have tla installed, you can do: tla register-archive http://c133.org/arch/tla get clee@kde.org--2004/gst-spc--filter--0 gst-spc

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

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

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

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

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

(Mixing some Zim quotes in now...)

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is all.

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

Man, life is weird sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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