Diary for aes
Older diary entries for aes (starting at number 15):
4 Jan 2003 (updated 4 Jan 2003) »
Gosh, it's been nearly 2 months between diary entries!Catch up time, in rough chronological order .....
RAID
It works, it's cool. I couldn't be bothered to work out how to transfer data onto a new root partition, so I did it in the Redhat 8.0 setup program.
The thing about using RAID is you have to set it up so that you know when a disk fails. Lots of complicated scripts to do this on the internet, but "diff /misc/mdstat-saved /proc/mdstat" in crontab works a treat :-) It emails you if there's output. Simplicity, simplicity.
Little Shop of Horrors
or, "my play."
Went like a treat :-) Several weeks of setting up, 1 week of blind panic, 1 week of tense showtime and it was all over. We probably did the most technically complicated show that my college has done for a while, considering.
The person who was meant to be running lights with me was ill for 2 days of 4, meaning I did most of it ; including part I didn't have a clue about in 2 hours notice :-/
"How to make a dry ice machine." (The type for use on stage, not for making the dry ice itself.) They cost £40 a week to hire, so if you want to have them for cheap:
Buy a black plastic dustbin. The sort that hold gallons and gallons of water. Cut a rectangular hole about 1/3 of the way up in one side. Fill to a couple of inches below the hole with boiling water. Add try ice and put on lid quickly. It will pour out lots of fog for quite a few minutes without the water appreciably cooling down, because those bins hold a _lot_ of water.
Universities
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK, has given me an offer to read Natural Sciences (or: biochemistry, for those unfamiliar with the weirdness of Cambridge courses) starting October 2003. Now I just have to get 3 A's in A-levels. More exams start January. Ho hum.
mascot has also been offered a place for Computer Sciences.
... ROCKS! It needs a modern patched mozilla, compiled with Gtk2, followed by HEAD galeon from cvs.gnome.org, but it's worth it. If you like cool looking, nifty, unstable browsers that is ;-)
It crashes from time to time (Mozilla's fault). And I haven't been able to work out how to catch a stack trace. It's some types of webpage that do it; Gtk 2 Mozilla needs serious dogfooding before it's releasable. But it will be, eventually...
Windows sucks!
again.
mrcsparker: you're right that libglade rocks, and that using glade-generated source code is The Wrong Way To Do It. People use it since it can save time in the short term (read: first half-hour), although it wastes a _lot_ of time in the long term.Passing multiple widgets to callbacks, if you want to, would have to be done by passing everything in a struct to the data argument of the callback IIRC. If the widgets have a logical on-screen connection, you _could_ make a new container widget and pass that about but it's probably overkill. What about putting widgets in a container (eg. vbox) and passing that as the data argument, and pulling out the widgets in the callback? I don't know if this is possible, I'm just throwing out ideas.
Tonight I have been eating cheese. Long live Marks and Spencer!7 Nov 2002 (updated 8 Nov 2002) »
Hackery
Been writing various patches for ickle bugs in GNOME. I got CVS access, which is nice. This is in addition to constant QA work for gedit and gnome-control-center.
Blood donation
I donated blood again today, so I'm feeling a bit achey and tired :-)
Real Life
Got an offer from York University to read biochemistry. I've got to decide which of my other university choices I am going to go to interviews for, and which I am going to reject at this point. It takes too much time to go to all the interviews.
I had mock interviews on Tuesday, which went very well. I'm not so good at talking about general stuff, though OK, but quite (very?) good at thinking about chemistry problems.
Started work for the lighting of my college's production of Little Shop Of Horrors. We've catalogued all the lights we've got, worked out what accessories we're missing, and buying everything the drama students have lost in the past few years. So it's going to be lit with a full inventory, and by talking to the director+TD it seems that the lighting is going to be very interesting. Over the top, in fact.
The sound is also going to rock - not strictly what I'm best at doing/understanding, but we're mixing a band fallback and main speakers separately, so we can turn down the vocals for the band fallback without killing it for the audience if we need to. We've also got a crossover for splitting high and low frequencies to different amps and speakers, so we can have a rocking bass without it taking the power from the high frequencies. And feedback destroyers (of course).
So. Good times :-)
TORVALDS. T - O - R - V - A - L - D - S. No, "Just for Fun."
You have no idea how hard it is to get a librarian to see if they have a book in another library.
19 Oct 2002 (updated 19 Oct 2002) »
The first day of half term! I've got a week of holiday and not _too_ much that I have to do in it :-)
Today...
Gene
I comitted a bit more into Gene CVS. You can now maintain a family tree using it; I just need to add better display capabilities, file read+write (which should be quite easy) and then make a 0.1.0 release. (I'm using a kernel versioning model, so 0.1.x is unstable.)
I branched(!) I made a gconf-dev-branch, which isn't really important in any great sense (other than I've never managed branches before). There's some things that I want to work on prior to finishing 0.1.0, but they would block 0.1.0 (destabilising a pre-alpha product, heh) and so they're being dumped onto a branch till post-0.1.0. Then work can continue on HEAD.
I went to Huddersfield Town Hall to see Robert Llewellyn presenting WomenWizard, a complicated software program to allow men to understand women. Also a much simpler companian, ManWizard, to allow women to understand men. He was very funny, as was the intro act before him. Interestingly, all the screenshots were from a Mac (looked like Aqua on OS9 to me, but maybe I'm confused...).
He also said that someone who helped him make the screenshots is a geeky type who is really making a spoof "WomanWizard" type program which is cross platform (!).
In answer to questions that we didn't ask :-) :
- There will definitely be a Red Dwarf movie. According to his website, rehearsals have already started. He said filming was due to start in March next year.
- The "Christmas special" scrapheap challenge is definitely worth seeing. Things went wrong in the most spectacular way yet, and although he can't say much about it "some people could have ended up very flat."
Raid 1
After reading about Telsa Gwynne's experiences with failing hard disks, I've got a bit worried. At the moment I back my /home partition to a smaller disk using an rsync technique mentioned on /. but it's not perfect. My tape drive is - let's say - antiquated (it plugs into a floppy disk type socket, can hold 400MB and isn't even in my computer since the last upgrade). I'm considering getting a new 40Gb hard disk (same size as my current one) since they're quite cheap and I really don't want to lose my data.
So I've got to choose what manufacturer make decent hard disks, and don't have problems with Linux, and whether I'm going to go for it or not. Ideally it would come from Dabs Online, so for reputable companies I'm probably going for Maxtor or Seagate. If anyone has any advice on best hard drives, or experiences with RAID under Linux, I'd love to hear it!
Well I haven't written anything in Advogato for a bit, but I've now got a rant.
Why some people are fed up of September 11th
(uh oh)
Well, on September 11th 2002, a lot of places had a minute's silence for the events of the last year. A silence which I didn't join in (of course, neither did I intrude on people who were respecting the silence).
A minute's silence is all well and good for it's stated purpose: of remembrance and respect for the dead. But there are problems.
- America
I am in England. We remember 11/9 because the media keep reminding us - and the media keep reminding us because it happened in America, a country which we are (in good and bad ways) "close to." Not geographically, but emotionally.
Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Americans. A lot of the people who work on GNOME are American and they are normal people (within reason :) ). But our Glorious Leader, The Righteous Glorious Tony Blair, supports America (== "The American Government) in everything they do.
This includes things that are not in this country's best interests. There is an overwhelming public opinion in the UK that we should not support the US in any war against Saddam Hussein. But Tony is going to, anyway, because he is friends with Mr Bush.
If this disaster had happened in China, we would not have had a minute's silence. We are not having a minute's silence for many bigger disasters that have happened in the past 20 years (so I hope that ... 11/9 ... is not "respected" for decades, because it would indicate a lack of balance). But our media is interested in America, so the public get pulled along.
- Political fallout
In the name of the people who died on September 11th, Basic Freedoms are being taken away from American people. Cryptography. Secrecy. It's all becoming very Enemy-of-the-State-ish. (If I had died, and there is an afterlife, and someone took people's Freedoms in my name, I would do whatever I would be allowed to to come back and haunt them :-) .)
Then, when Mr Bush could not find Ossama bin Laden, he decided that he needed to have some military success somewhere else. Like Iraq.
Never mind that Britain and America assisted Saddam Hussein to come to power and ignored the atrocities because he wasn't the enemy (then). Never mind that nothing's changed in the past 5 years. George Bush wants a war, and a war he will have.
Never mind the fact that this is America invading a country on the other side of the world in an attempt at "Regime Change" - or dabbling in someone else's internal politics. If a country does not conform to America's view of the world, it will be exterminated.
- Bitterness
And the final point is what do people remember in their minute of silence? Is it the wonderful lives that sadly passed away prematurely? Or is it bitterness at the terrorists? It is hate? Is it fear, for terrorists exist to promote terror in their targets and from America's scared reactions since the World Trade Center was hit, it looks as though they succeeded.
And that's not everybody's view. But it's an explanation for the views of some people like myself.
And can I emphasise again, that although some of the above looks like it is anti-the-American-people, I have nothing against the American people whatsoever. All of my gripes are at American politicians.
In other news...
I fixed someone's ADSL support under Linux, and he was happy since he could use Linux "more exclusively" than having to use Windows for networking.
Luis Villa is still mobilising the GNOME bug-squad into working as a team, since he won't be here after GNOME 2.2 and we need to track bugs without a super-triager. This could be tricky, because someone told me the Mozilla bugzilla is becoming a bit neglected. Patches are not being reviewed and so on. But GNOME doesn't use the patch-review system, so that may not be a problem.
UbWell, in the past few days I've got everything that should be ready for going back to school on Friday, ready.
Gene is looking good. To an end-user, it still looks really bad, but the code base is looking up. I've got a few things on my PC that need merging and comitting.
What universities to apply to? I can't decide. I've never been to half of them (they're too far away to visit each one), and they all have identical prospecti. Then I suppose they feel that way about applicants - everyone has the same personal statement, the same UCAS form...
All my gnome-games patches were suddenly committed by a waking-up maintainer in the last 2 days :)
Set my home page to the GNOME 2 schedule so that I do things before freeze dates. It's nice to have things in before the next GNOME release, not have to wait because you missed the freeze by 1 day.
Totally changed the codebase of Gene to use GObject. This took a while :) but it will save a _lot_ of time in the long run. There's things I want to implement that the dynamic-ness of the GObject run-time system will make much easier - automatic callbacks, run-time property definition... "Why do you need that for a genealogy program?" Oh, but you do...