Advogato blog for Uruk

1 Sep 2000

Fri, 1 Sep 2000 18:57:37 GMT

Just for fun last night, I hacked together a small system to deal with questionnaires over the web. I'm partly doing it to help out the psychology dept. at my university, that does some research in a limited way over the web using questionnaires, and also because I'm considering setting up a portion of my site with a few questionnaires to poll whoever wants to be polled on different things.

It's kind of neat - I finally got around to using Perl's XML::Parser module which now allows me to use XML files as configurations for questionnaires rather than inventing yet another messy file format. So a questionnaire would be specified as something like:

<questionnaire> <question name="howareyou" text="How are you doing today?"> <option value="good">Great</option> <option value="bad">Not so great</option> </question> </questionnaire>

it's bit more complicated than that to allow for more flexibility, but that's the basic jist of it.

It is rather annoying to not have access to any validating parsers for XML in perl. I've heard that Apache is going to be releasing something called Xerces for perl, but so far, it's only available for Visual C++ kits under windows. (?)

Other than that, I'm up to about 24 credit hours this semester in an attempt to graduate in december so I can move overseas, maintaining gtkeyboard when I get the time, and hacking on side projects like a java program I'm working on that takes number sequences from number theory and maps them onto certain tones, writing the resulting "song" out in MIDI format. There's a snapshot of that software on my page but it is far from finished. So basically I've got my hands in about 8 different cookie jars right now. :) When is it ever not like that?

27 Jul 2000

Thu, 27 Jul 2000 17:36:22 GMT

Started a very interesting project a few days ago - it's a program in java (unfortunately using swing) and the jMusic library (for manipulating MIDI files).

The basic jist of the thing is that it takes number sequences found in mathematics, (i.e. sequences coming from the 3x+1 problem or catalan numbers, what have you) and translating them into some type of scaled tones which is then written out to a MIDI file.

It actually works, although I've only got it working with a very few number sequences. I'll post the code sooner or later on my site under the GPL, but I want a chance to improve it some more.

It's kind of given me at least a few shreds of respect that I didn't previously have for java. I used to think the language really, really sucked. Now I think it's merely clunky. I guess that's an improvement.

The only problem with this program is that similar to gtkeyboard, it's a program that you can't just sit down and use with no instruction whatsoever. It's not like notepad or something, you actually have to read the help dialogs if you're going to have a chance of understanding why it does the things that it does. Which means more documentation that I need to write. Oh well. :)

19 Jul 2000

Wed, 19 Jul 2000 01:42:46 GMT

Home sick today.

I've wasted the last 2 weeks of my life on Nethack which is quite possibly the greatest game ever written, bar none. I'm really starting to dislike it though, because I'm having so much of my time taken up by playing the game. (I mostly play male elven wizards)

I just read the article about ESR, RMS, Perens, the OSI, and all of that. The poster pretty much echoed my thoughts on the matter. People worry about others posting things that are too inflammatory, but it's only really inflammatory if someone else rises to the bait. And besides, I suppose this is for honest discussion, not watered down politically correct speech. But would I feel the same way if the article had been opposite to my views? Who the hell knows.

I'm currently reading "Le Ton Beau de Marot" by Douglas Hofstadter. Excellent book, highly recommended. It has nothing to do with computing whatsoever.

6 Jul 2000

Thu, 6 Jul 2000 16:09:25 GMT

More XML work along with a strange thing happening to me...I'm actually starting to get interested in java again. I downloaded gcj and tried it out on a few of my older projects from school, and I'm quite impressed with it. Also, classpath and muave seem to be coming along slowly but surely.

Oh, and of course debian. I've been using debian at work for the past 2 months or so after being an exclusive redhat user before that. Not that I was bigoted towards redhat, more that that was what I had used, and I thought it was reasonably decent, and working on so many projects I didn't feel like learning the small differences between distros. (You know the story, none of them are different enough from one another to be hard, just be annoying as hell)

Well as it turns out I tried debian and it totally rocks. I'm getting a new box soon at home and debian is going on that, I'm finished with redhat. It's mostly because of apt, but the number of packages debian makes readily avaialble also puts redhat to shame.

3 Jul 2000

Mon, 3 Jul 2000 18:13:35 GMT

I've been working quite a bit on Perl/Tk stuff recently on an in-house project for my company. Also I've been working with python and Tkinter. Python is quite a joy to program in as it's very clean and sleek, but sometimes I find myself wishing for the messy chaotic beauty of perl in the language too. Well, they are separate languages.

I've been developing a medium sized application recently through an outside consultancy to translate some really old crusty HTML to XML. Please don't ask for this code yet, since by XML's very nature, in order to actually convert this using a program, the code contains a lot of assumptions about the format of the source HTML. It has been an interesting project if a bit infuriating at times. For people looking at coding something similar, do not pass go, do not collect $200, read all the documentation for XML::Parser and HTML::TokParser before you even start.

gtkeyboard has not had much work on it recently other than a few small patches contributed by users recently, and a few bugfixes put in place for a really braindamaged segfault that was happening on Debian GNU/Linux machines (due to odd placement of the dictionary file on debian)

As for the perl/tk stuff and the python/tkinter stuff, things should be appearing on my page relating to them and downloadable code sometime between now and when I die. :) I'm working 1 full time job, 1 part time job, and I have 2 classes this summer, so I've got my plate a bit full.

16 May 2000

Tue, 16 May 2000 02:33:56 GMT

I've been hacking python for the last few days. About a week ago, I was in the bookstore browsing the programming section, and I found a book on python. I'd been meaning to pick it up, since it's getting more and more use, and because I really enjoy learning new languages.

I bought the book, went home, and hacked till about 4AM or so. What a cool language. It's almost as weird as perl, just weird in its own way. (enforcing whitespace, a bit of strange syntax here and there, and making you refer to your class data as if it were static class data)

But python is very easy to write, and very readable. Quite a nice language. I started in on Tkinter last night, and I'm working on writing a really good file selection widget. I'm sure a dozen have been written, but it's fun to just try to pull it off myself, since in order to write it, you have to know how to read directories, update 5-10 different widgets, signals, the whole deal. It mostly works. Mostly

I may be going overseas for about a week next month to look into business opportunities in Germany. I would LOVE to live in Germany. Since I last lived there, I've wanted to go back.

So I haven't gotten much done in terms of my core coding (other than the gtkeyboard-1.1 release last week some time) - I've been too busy playing with new things like perl/XML parsing, python, LISP, and working on an article for TPJ which I'm revising heavily.

8 May 2000

Mon, 8 May 2000 22:52:47 GMT

Sheesh. I haven't written here very often in a while. Oh well. A lot of stuff has been going on, etc.

We're bugfixing for gtkeyboard-1.1, and it's looking pretty good so far. Fixed some evil installation problems, polishing word completion, and a few other nice things.

I taught myself python over the weekend. It's criminally easy. I do need to get around to actually programming more with it since I don't want to say I know the language till I've written a few thousand lines of code in it.

I guess I find the indentation and whitespace issues annoying, but tha'ts probably normal for python beginners or so I'm told. Maybe I'm just used to perl where you can be as pathologically weird as you want to be. At any rate, the language looks interesting, and I'd like to get busy with a real OO language that isn't as klunky as java is. I am really starting to dislike java the more I work with it.

Anyway...

1 May 2000

Mon, 1 May 2000 15:14:30 GMT

I've been busy recently - just got a chance to hack some new things into GTKeyboard last night.

Final exams are this week, and stress abounds. Grades are fine, I just hate having to know 4 months worth of material for one 3 hour sitting. Seems pointless considering that since there are so many exams, the moment you finish one, all those precious useless facts are gone instantaneously. Anyway.

GTKeyboard:

I'm working on finishing the word completion feature. After that's done, I'm going to write a few custom caches for different programming and writing tasks and distribute them as part of the package. Things like maybe a perl programming cache, where when you type 'p', you are listed with the following choices:

print pack pop push printf

etc. Instead of being given options of non-programming related words. If you're programming in perl, and you press 'p', you'll probably more often be referring to 'pop' or 'push' than, say, 'parakeet' or 'piqued'.

Caches for other tasks other than programming are really hard - but of course that's probably why readline stuck to command completion rather than trying to take on english.

I haven't built in the right features to allow the user to save whatever it was they were typing in a new cache, but I'm working on that....it shouldn't be more than about 2 hours of hacking, it's just finding those 2 hours that is the problem.

Sigh...exam at 1:00PM today, and then again at 7:00PM - it's 11:14AM.....(EST)

27 Apr 2000

Thu, 27 Apr 2000 03:07:11 GMT

Haven't posted here in a very long time although I have been reading the articles. Frankly, the articles have been a bit dull for the past few weeks, because Advogato seems determined to talk about nothing but itself. But that's neither here nor there...

I finally finished version 1.0 of GTKeyboard which was distributed about a week ago. I've already started on revisions for 1.1. I haven't heard of any bugs in the program from the users, but there may be a couple. There are a few people who feel that it was a bad choice to make implicit redirecting the default on gtkeyboard, but after having gotten lots of emails saying that most people used it to type into other things, it seems more reasonable to make that the default. Not only that, but it is configurable via ~/.gtkeyboardrc so it's kinda hard to feel bad for those people. :)

The revisions in the upcoming 1.1 are going to be *very* cool. I got a piece of code from a guy calling himself Dr. Tom a while back that does word completion ala GNU readline. The neat part is that it's for whole words, not for commands like at the shell, and it can work off of a cache if we choose, meaning that words that the user has typed frequently in the past will be listed as options ahead of other words that are not as frequently used. I've been having a lot of fun playing around with that source code recently...

This week is going to be final exams week at school, so everything is nuts and I'm trying to find spare time to code. One of my computing theory classes has just spent some time on turing machines. As it turns out, it's *extremely* easy to program a turing machine, (I used perl, but only because I didn't want to spend much time doing the file parsing) and will let you get a better grasp of what's going on in them. I guess I should eventually post that source to my site, which I will do if I remember.

Damn headhunters! Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I'm sick of losers emailing me asking me if I want to apply for a lucrative position manning a radar tower in Nome, Alaska. Well, maybe they're not asking me to do that, but people actually drop me emails thinking that I'm going to be interested in taking a job as a TRAINEE doing VISUAL BASIC for about HALF of what I'm currently making. It's like they're trying to present me with my *nightmare* job, just to see if I'll accept it if it's put in front of me enough times.

Rant, rant, rant, rant, rant.

Life is a haze of beer, code, exams, work, and MP3s.

10 Apr 2000

Mon, 10 Apr 2000 15:06:44 GMT

School and work, school, school, school, and work. The semester is going to be over in about 3 weeks. It can't happen soon enough.

Sometimes it really *feels* like I'm burning out, but even when it feels that way I can usually get over it with some sleep or cold pizza.

I'm going to go fix some bugs in some crufty piece of perl I wrote months ago - you know, if somebody wants to use something repetitively, they should let you know when they ask you to write it so you don't do it as quick and dirty as you usually to throwaway data munging perl scripts. Oh well.