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Is there a way to get a RSS feed of the recent logs from Advogato?
Whoops
Hmm, I've been lacking in updating the diary a bit... Oh well. Today I am at home nursing a yucky cold, so I thought I'd write an entry.
Work is getting better recently - less assembler, low-level C and debugging, and more Java interface coding. I used to like Swing, but after using GTK+ 2, Swing has some really annoying features. A total lack of a single decent layout component, for starters. To help in the future I am planning on writing a clone of libglade for Swing, so I can design a UI using Glade, and then load it at runtime in Java. I'm not entirely sure how all this would work though, but I will at least need to write clones of the GTK+ layout components.
Book wise - I finished the The Return of the King, The Time Machine, started to read War of the Worlds (which bought back many memories of listening to the vinyl when I was 10). I'm currently re-reading Use of Weapons, and have Iain Bank's latest, Dead Air, sitting on my desk. I hope it's good, The Business didn't really do anything for me.
The best news I've seen for a long time is that Babylon 5 series 1 DVDs are being released in England, contatry to some people. I found play.com does them, with a very respectable discount.
Web Site
I finally uploaded the new layout (stolen from MovableType) to burtonini.com. All I need to do now is find a suitable smalll PHP based content server, which also does URL re-writing. I'd like to use AxKit but my hosting side doesn't run mod_perl. This looks interesting though, so I'll wait for mglazer to unveil the demo site.
URL re-writing is an essential part of the system, as the most annoying part of the dynamic web for me is seing URLs such as http://www.foo.com/page.pl?content=welcome. Totally uncachable by any proxy servers on web browsers, as the content could change every second. Of course, the appropriate cache control headers could be added as well, but then my objection is the vile URL.
Want Pie Now!
http://www.weebl.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ is just damn cool. The best stuff is in the Weebl and Bob section.
Music
I really like Ray of Light by Madonna, the semi-electric sound and heavy beats are really cool. The producer is William Orbit, and I've been listening to some more of his work, but nothing I've found has the same feel. Any one know some similar artists? (I've already got some Massive Attack and Portishead albums)
Blogchalking!
Discovered the blogChalking web site today, seems like a good idea — let Google handle the strain of searching the web for bloggers in certain areas. Anyway, my (slightly inconsistant) blogchalk is:
English, United Kingdom, Bishops Stortford, London, Ross, Male, 21-25
So there you go.
Tube Strikes
Yet another tube strike for London, apparently one of the best (or worse, depending on your point of view) with zero trains running during the rush hour. I'll all for the tube strikes — I don't want to be in a tube crash or fire and die — but I'd really have appreciated it if they had waited two weeks so the major deadline at work had past... :(
However, I survived the strikes and walked from Liverpool Street straight down to London Bridge (took 15 minutes) and jumped on a train to Croydon, so I wasn't too late to work. One person at work who lives in Highbury left his house at 0600 and was in the office at 0700, which is just plain silly!
Digital TV
As you may or may not know, the digital TV licenses were awarded to the BBC, who are going to broadcast 24 free digital channels. This is really good news (the government plans to turn off analolgue is 2010 IIRC) but for mass-adoption of digital to actually happen, the decoders need to be cheap. At the moment, they are selling for around £150, so I believe. I was talking to my girlfriend about this and we agreed that a small decoder which only handled the free channels, and only cost £50, is all that is required to 'make' digital TV.
So, you can imagine I was quite happy when I found out that they will be £50. :)
One problem however: my "local" transmiter is at Crystal Palace, where I moved from four months ago, and now is on the wrong side of London... They make no promises about the quality of reception... This is silly — I live on the Herts/Essex border, in a highly populated area, and there is no local digital transmitter?
Working and working and...
10 more days and I finally get to have some time off from work! It has been totally manic recently, with major deadlines flying past. That is bad, but when it's due to the suppliers of the hardware/software that we are trying to use... it's maddening. Compilers for which the documentation does not match the manual, which is also wrong. Useless support staff. Simulators which randomly crash unless you set a breakpoint on the first instruction. Incomplete documentation, which arrives over time with the phrase "don't you have this?". GAR!
So at the end of the month I get to have a week off, and sleep. Once I've slept for a few days, I think I'll sit in the garden [looks out of window and watches the sun disappear], go and see Cambridge, do some shopping, and release gnome-games 2.0.2.
#gnome
Is it me, or has #gnome really gone down-hill since 2.0.0 was released? Before the release it was a nice and generally friendly place to be, but now... I don't know. Maybe it is new users joining and just being vocal about things they don't like, and not quitting...
Freeze Dried Testicles!
I hate crappy C compilers, and I hate writing math libraries, and I hate it when I have to write math libraries with crappy compilers. For some obscure reason our perfect 64-bit math library totally fails on the 16-bit embedded processor we're targetting. Arse.
Debian
Today I discovered the joy of apt-get source -b package, as I rebuilt some of hadess's PPC packages from source for the i386 with minimum hassle. And I thought rpm-build -tb was easy...
Matching Windows
Sawfish (and Enlightenment so I am told) has a wonderful feature called matched windows. For people who have never used this before, they are a set of conditions and actions which are applied when a window is created.
I normally used matched windows to tell X-Chat to be sticky on all workspaces, and Gkrellm not to appear in the window list. Some people make Evolution appear mazimised on a certain desktop.
With the advent of GNOME 2 and the "crack-free" mindset, matched windows were not implemented in Metacity. Havoc's argument against them was that they were used to fix bugs in software, which is often the case &mdashl as in removing Gkrellm from the window list. Gkrellm should do that and is using the wrong hint (fixed in Gkrellm 2 by the way).
However, there are still some instances where matched windows are usefull. I always want X-Chat to appear on all desktops and I can't expect the application to be modified to do this. So I am writing a small window matching program, called Devil's Pie at the moment, using the wonderfully-named libwnck (the Window Navigator Constructor Toolkit I think).
At the moment a prototype works: X-Chat is made sticky as the window is created. I'm currently re-working the design to use GObjects via gob, as hand-coding GObjects with virtual methods is rather mind-numbing. The design is looking good, however, thought the interface will be fun to design. Copying the Sawfish configuration pane is not an option...
Counting Crows
Okay, I've listened to the album more and I think I like it. Some of the songs sound like singles, but the slower moody songs are much better. And anyone out there who was going to get the UK edition on import as it's "special" — don't. The two extra songs suck in a big way.
Ouch
Thanks to lots of stress at work, my back is in a right state. The ache starts just above my arse and doesn't stop until the top of my neck. This is not good. Just what is the best position to sleep in with an sore back? At the moment I am trying to lay on my back, stretched out, but thats not very comfortable, so I'm tired as well... :(
Just to make it worse, my "asthma" is getting bad again for the first time in three years. I hope it doesn't carry on getting worse...
Scribe
Scribe is the provisional name for my Dublin Core metadata editor. Python + GTK 2 + pluggable DC sources sounds like a good plan. There are specifications on embedding Dublin Core into HTML, and examples of into PNG, so I don't have to do too much thinking for the primary targets. All I have to do now is think up the architecture, and then start coding. If anyone is interested, please shout.
Counting Crows
Today I bought Hard Candy, their 4th album. Not a bad album, but still nowhere near as good as August and Everything After, which was just sublime. Shame.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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