Easily Distracted

Yes, that was a long time between posts. I’ve been… busy (killing time). I haven’t felt so motivated to bother doing the alt-tab mouse input thing in Metacity (the official window manager for GNOME), as other things which seem to eclipse it are being developed:

• Gimmie (which looks awesome!)

• AIGLX (Redhat)

• XGL (Novel) (very nice demo | src )

3D is on it’s way to the Linux desktop. 3D cards – This has always bothered me. Put aside the fact that the drivers are not open. ATI cards always looked nice, to me, and they’re a Canadian company, so I would choose to support them given a choice of NVidia or ATI. However, ATI clearly does not offer competent drivers for Linux to support their nice cards. If I want any kind of performance, there’s no choice, really: NVidia. Since I’m not playing intensive games all the time, however (I did enjoy the Doom3 demo, though), I would be willing to go with a card that is backed by an OSS supporting company. Not sure what my options would be then.

The USB flash card reader I got is working awesome. Yes, it’s pretty small w/a short cable for using on your PC, but it’s got GREAT portability. Doesn’t need any extra drivers for Linux or Windows (the reader is cross platform!) heh. I’m ecstatic with it for $9. I almost bought a second when I saw them on sale again at NCIX.

Google Page Creator got slashdotted, so I didn’t get a chance to try it. Oh well.

And after watching a wicked sweet 30 minute gameplay video (140MB) of Spore, I’m not sure if I can resist setting up a windows box that can run it. I mean… Oh My God. Best game evah!~

I should upload some pix. So behind on pix it’s ridiculous. I thought about flickr… but i’m convinced there is a better personal solution, if I don’t care about the communities (that much). Maybe take a look at WordPress Gallery2 when I have time.

Oh yeah… I was working on a new blog design (like I said I would) and things were going ok. Then I stopped for a while (a week?) and wanted to work on it again after. But.. I couldn’t find it!! I thought I had accidentally deleted it in my clensing! I was pretty irritated with myself. Luckily, I only moved it… and I found it just today.

Oh man, stupid-me number two (far outdoes the first): I was keeping my laptop on the floor of my bedroom, near my bed. You know, for easy access to porn… on my bed. Anyways, when I stepped closer to my mirror to examine a couple odd hairs on my head (what else?), I felt something bend under my foot, and looked down. FUCK! My wireless card that was poking out of the pcmcia slot in my laptop! :’( I now present it dead. RIP 1000yen wireless card. Anyone know where I can get a cheap wireless card? Laptop’s pretty useless without it. And a cheap CF wireless card, for that matter… would be nice for my zaurus.

UPDATE:

On second inspection, the PCMCIA slots are totally shot. One doesn’t work at all, and the other never successfully registers a card… (BEEP beep). I’ve tried both my wireless card and a regular CF adapter. So possibly in addition to my 1000yen wireless card, I have to do something about my $2000 laptop. *sigh* Guess I’ll be heading to Futureshop again… I hope they don’t remember me. Damnit, this sucks.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually blogged anything. Like Jon observed, you get used to a routine, and if blogging isn’t part of it, it’s just not gonna happen. I’m less likely to spend time on the computer when I get home from working with a computer all day. Been spending more time with the idiot box, actually – I guess I find it more relaxing. I still use the computer, of course, (I still have a pulse, after all), but blogging hasn’t been high on ye ‘ol todo list.

Let me see… what’s happened, recently?

Soccer
Somehow, I got conned into joining an indoor soccer tournament at work. Practises are about once a week at a place called SportsTown, in Richmond. I didn’t know what I was getting into; these guys are good… really good. I used to play soccer, but that was ages ago, and I was never that good! I feel totally out of my league, but my team is in pretty desperate need of players, so there I remain. We played with some other soccer team at Slocan park over the weekend, and it was really fun. My main concern is disappointing my team mates. We got a tournament game, this weekend. We (they) are defending champions, so there’s a lot of pressure. But I’m just gonna play my best and have fun – can’t do much more than that. I’ve suffered a ridiculous number of injuries due to my jumping into this, but I am glad I joined.

Southpark Me
Inspired by Shirley’s photo-realistic South Park personality, I created my own. Unfortunately, he looks nothing like me… but It’s as close as I could get without making him naked… and trust me, you don’t want that.

New Computer
After my first (or maybe it was second) paycheck, I bought a cheap desktop computer. Pretty much a bare minimum at $600 after tax, sans monitor. I’ve since bought a nice 19″ LCD flat panel monitor (cost almost as much as the desktop), a friend’s old graphics card (so I got 3D acceleration now! – thanks, Haseeb!) and a wireless PCI card. Oh, and a 10′ DVI cable. Did you know 10′ DVI cables are cheaper than 6′ DVI cables? Crazy, I know.

Getting all the hardware was the first step. I actually built this computer, which is a first, for me: I figured, if I’m supposed to get a degree in Computer Science, then I owe it to myself and that piece of paper in my distant future. There were a few kinks, and I had to complete a quest for thermal paste, at one point, but everything seems to be working now. I must go out of my way, however, to say that mother board manuals are completely useless pieces of shit. I respect a good piece of documentation, but motherboard manuals get no love from me. None.

I’ve installed the latest Ubuntu on my new desktop. It’s zippy and I like it. I had gotten so used to my laptop having to page-swap all the time, I thought it was normal. I’ve been really impressed with Ubuntu, despite having a few problems, but I will write about those later (and possibly somewhere else). With my new found space, I’ve also started migrating all my personal data to one location (to rule them all -sorry). This is an extremely long and boring task, but it simply must get done.

Some quick software I recommend checking out:

• Newton – I like it better than TomBoy, at the moment,
• Neverball – very nice monkey-ball-ish game,
• Automatix – an install script for some more inconvenient tasks.

Learning New Things
Recently, I’ve been spending time with a few interesting things, including:

1. Javascript – I thought I knew it at least a little. I didn’t.
2. DOM (w/Javascript) <– really cool stuff!
3. Perl (yup)

I also reviewed Java, but didn’t use it that much. I’ve been working a lot with web-related stuff at work, I encountered the need to write scripts, hence, the Perl. As someone who likes clean, and well structured things, it is my duty to loath all that is Perl. I have always hated that vile language. There is a well known (among the Perl community, at least) acronym that sums up the language quite accurately: TIMTOWTDI (pronounced TimToady). It stands for: There is more than one way to do it. And with Perl, there really is; for absolutely anything, there’s a thousand ways it could be done. And I don’t mean algorithmically, I mean syntactically. To me, this is a huge problem.

A simple example:

1. print "hello";
2. print ("hello"); # parentheses are optional
3. print 'hello'; # single quotes are significant, but not in this instance
4. print qw(hello); # just like single quotes
5. print qq(hello); # just like double quotes
6. print qq.hello.; # here you need something, but who said anything about parentheses?


OOP example:

1. door->open("a little");
2. open door "a little";


That being said, it has been extremely useful. Especially regular expressions (a whole other language in itself!)

To say I’ve been lazy recently may not be entirely correct. I have, however, put off doing lots of things; blogging is one of them. So I’ve got a bit to catch up on. I’m gonna try and make it fairly brief, as I want to go to sleep soon.

reading
Been doing quite a bit of reading in the sunshine, recently. I got The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from Shirley, and read that. The story was about a boy who has autism, and was actually written from his point of view. It was interesting to see what things he valued in contrast to what normal people value. For instance, he decides how he will behave depending on how many yellow or red cars he sees on his way to school; yellow’s bad, red’s good. My mom has had quite a bit of experience with autistic children, and she’s read the book before, so I asked her if the behaviour of the character was accurate, and she said yes, quite convinced. If anyone wants to read it, I now have a copy….

Non-fiction-wise, I used my shiny new membership at the VPL to sign out two books. I’ve almost finished Programming Linux Games, and find it very refreshing compared to other game-programming books. It’s got a lot of information other books never even mention, and skips over the stuff they usually do. *ahh* It’s so nice! I’ve already renewed it. Hopefully I can finish it before I have to take it back. And hopefully, I actually do make a game… or something for my “portfolio.” I need something… hrmmm.

windows
I recently wanted to use the family computer (which runs Windows XP) for something, and was assaulted with a pop-up upon login. Frustration Level: rising. I then opened IE (the whole reason I wanted to use the computer in the first place was to try viewing a site in IE). Oh, that’s right. IE can pump out pop-up ads (such as the former) but it doesn’t think I’m connected to the Internet and is therefor useless! I forgot about that problem. Can’t do Windows Updates, either. Frustration Level: Time to Re-install Windows! yay!

(VERY) Long story short(er), “re-installing windows with updated setup files” turned into “invalid CD key” which turned into “formatting C” which turned into “installing ubuntu temporarily” which turned into “try installing windows again” which turned into “Error loading operating system.” which finally turned into “Welcome to Windows.” For some reason, after formatting the MBR with GRUB, the 2nd stage of the Windows XP install would not boot. It’s a really strange problem, as I tried installing Windows 95, and there were no problems. Anyways, the only way that worked was booting with a Windows 98 boot disk and using that fdisk to partition the drive, then formatting it during the install of XP. Go here for more discussion.

linux
I’ve recently tried out some programs that I simply must mention:

Leafpad Until the new Gedit is released, I recommend making this your default basic text file program in Gnome. It’s basically like Notepad – simple and fast; great for viewing.
Graveman I think I may finally uninstall K3B!
Anjuta2 It still needs a lot of work, but it’s looking good.
Inkscape Wow! This program is awesome! And playing with vectors is FUN!

I plan on eventually making a list of useful programs, and some general tips, I think. But not now.

On a less happier note, I think I may have finally broken Portage on my Gentoo box. A couple programs have just stopped working. :’(

ubc computer science logos
Everybody and their dog is designing logos, these days. This is what I was using Inkscape for. My school asked for logo submissions for a computer science logo. At some point, I would like to acquire a peice of clothing that says my school and faculty… but I’ve had a genuine dislike for most of the designs I’ve seen. Hopefully, this time will be different. I took this opportunity as an excuse to start learning to work with vectors and try out Inkscape. Well, I stayed up most of the night (until 7:30 am?) playing around with vectors and attempting some logo designs. Went to sleep, got up at 12pm, made some finishing touches and created a couple more logos throughout the day, and ended up submitting a whopping 14 designs! Some aren’t very good, and others are just minor alterations, but I figured I’d submit them anyways. The chosen designer get $150 at the UBC Bookstore… not near as good as Alex’s competition, but whatever. I just don’t want another hideous CS logo!

Hmm… So much for brevity.

almost forgot…
Have a great trip, Shirley!