Older blog entries for cTaylor (starting at number 131)

The most addicting hazelnut spread in existance.

So the past couple of days I've been doing a lot of hacking...well, atleast I'd call it hacking.

The PDFBox port continues to amaze the heck out of me, while it was deceptively easy porting this lib to C# - initally, it's now become a bit of a pain in the arse. There are just somethings about Java and C# that are annoying.

Bellin, convinced me to help him write an 'extension' for Epiphany so's that we can hackout some python modules for ephy. Thus far, I've started wrapping up epiphany GObjects into python a la example code from pygtk.

Speaking of which, the delicious/python extension is still in the works but since versioning is so strange in gentoo for epiphany, i've halted focusing on this until i can get that resolved. Grrr, versioning!

I've also been fiddling with the grammar checker. It's still going slowlybut my grammar definition gets better by the week.

One of the things that's cool about the place I'm stationed at, is this. When I first drove around the area, I noticed that I am only < a 5 minute walk from that place.

My daily swimming is paying off, my endurance is improving and now my breathing is starting to become more relaxed.

So, it's been a couple weeks since i've posted here. Feels like forever. My stay in Augusta is alright. I don't really connected with most of my peers here. Many of them have some growning up todo.

in other news, i've finished building my desktop. except i've found some weird linux errors. gentoo's live cd page faults into a system halt when i try building a reiser and ext3 partition.

when i install suse 9.1 personal edition, installation works perfectly. yet, when i try downloading debian's iso, after 10% of accomplished work, my computer hard locks.

i'm intrigued by this situation and i'm a little concerned.

in other news, the pdf filter for beagle is coming along well. just a couple more compile time bugs to squash and i should get to testing.

the delicious extension for epiphany has turned into a 'lets embed python' project. i'm a little annoyed right now b/c the ephy dudes are telling me that my testing modules aren't loading b/c of a linking error but, i've patched said error and they still aren't loading :( if anyone has written an epiphany 1.3 or greater extension/plugin, please contact me, i'd like to get the delicious one working before i start embedding a programming lanugage into the browser :P.

and with that, i go to sleep now. ubuntu looks promising.

Update

Hey everyone, the army thing has been coming along well. Augusta isn't as bad as I originally figured it would be - reminds me a lot of a 'developing' Columbia, SC. There's a very suburban 'Irmo-ish' part of town that houses a large movie theater and the usual places (Best Buy, Borders, CompUSA, O'Charlies, etc).

It's pretty 'staple' here. I've taken up swimming of late and it definately has been a good investment of time.

On the hacking side of things. I got a plugin written for epiphany and unfortunately it seems like the darn thing isn't initalizing or anything. What's even more strange is that some of the code, I jacked from the beagle plugin and when I build the plugin, gcc complains about some pointer stuff not being 'correct'. It's obnoxious but I think that's the root of my problem.

Some beagle filters I've been hacking are coming along steadily. I'm just porting some java code to c# - it's uneventful and uh.. i'm just crossing my fingers ;)
That's the only life for me...

Well I moved to Augusta for my army school. It went pretty well. I managed to get a pass for the swimming pool here and the majority of what's going on has been redundant meetings. I'm managing well though. Waking up at 4 am and working until 9/10 pm is getting old though. Tomorrow we have height/weight check.

Other news

Working on that word filter still. It's become obnoxious at this point. uchars in C# seem to equate to byte types. Again, annoying but necessary.

Had another interview with a very cool company today - it's a shame I'm on orders. I probably would have gotten a job offer. I was told that checking back in 2 months would be prudent and I'm acting on some of the questions I had asked (most were based around how to improve a software tool - maybe I can secure a cool job if I put forth a little effort).

Time to hit the gym.
Moving

Moving north to augusta for an army school. It's nice knowing my civilian job is going to be on hold while I'm out. So Sunday I head on out to augusta and I'll be up there until Feburary - then two days from getting back, I have to go overseas for work. Sooo much fun, my life is at times...

Had an okay AT. We did usual stuff, lots of shooting, battle drills, etc.

Extending Epiphany

Been hacking some more on an 'extension' for epiphany. I managed to wrap some Python code bellin wrote in C so now all that's left is to is hack the extension out. Wow, that just sounded wrong right there...In any case, the work is coming along nicely and I'll post more about it once I get some more progress completed.

As most people know. I'm easily distracted when it comes to code. I started getting kinda bored with the grammar checker , lymric seemed like something I was going to save for augusta, and I decided this extension would be a good break from about 9 months of study and work on the grammar checker.

The extention has been a good experience so far. I'm starting to get scared b/c all the gnome code that's templated for the ext makes lots of sense - and bellin has successfully conned me into hacking this out for him.

Back to packing, the movers should be here sometime soon...
7 Sep 2004 (updated 7 Sep 2004 at 02:51 UTC) »
Garden State, the theraputic portion of today's blog

One of those movies that makes me realize that the majority of my life has been spent focused on so many other things than just living. Ever since graduation I have been somewhat disappointed with 'the real world'.

Partly b/c I feel as if I should be doing more with myself. My travel schedule complicates this desire and supercedes my ability to 'do more' simply b/c it's impossible for me to commit myself to anything long term right now.

On another note. I've spent so much of my life in fear of grade reduction, doing 'activities' and sports that I feel really disabled in the 'living' department. I just don't know myself in a way that is susinct. I have a working knowledge of things I don't like...so I just need to focus on finding things I do like. Seems simple but, paragraph two explains why it's not that simple.

Packing

Still going through the process of packing. I've so much in the clothes department to load up. I'm getting somewhat tired of it at this point. but the remainder of my things shouldn't take too much time/effort. I have the rest of this week and a day to finalize things for storage.

Code

Taking a break from some of my most recent efforts what with this move and all I'm focusing on writing some TODO type stuff for another project out there. Seems like something I could knock out in a couple days. I'll post more when more happens ;p
4 Sep 2004 (updated 4 Sep 2004 at 00:19 UTC) »
Coolest site ever

This is quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen.

Got Army stuff next week - uhg. And once I get back from that I've got to move to Augusta for more Army stuff. So I've a million little things to line up in a row and then run over with tractor-trailer-like efficiency.

If I get time, today I'm going to pick up a book on tai chi. I've been really interested in that martial art of late and I can't really explain why. I've been looking for a sport to practice on my own that doesn't necessarally require a partner, but maybe an instructor. Partly b/c of my travel schedule.

And as the Captain of SeaLab 2021 would say, "I need to get my yin and yang in harmony because I LOVE FRIGGIN' HARMONY!!!".

I noticed my uncle in CA was taking tai chi and it seemed more like a dance than anything else. So I've figured I could practice it anywhere. Reminded me of shadow wrestling/boxing. I did a fair bit of shadow drilling in high school so I know I have the discipline to follow through.

In other news, fixed a couple bugs in pygg (my grammer checkers current name). Pretty good progress on that front. I've noticed a lot of people are talking about grammar checking these days as something abiword/soffice are lacking. It kinda excites and worries me at the same time.

Had a strange idea for a business model that I could run in my free time, writing software people could like and use, which would be a nice pursuit. It's like donation-ware. It's a little more in-line with what I'd like to be doing with myself professionally and how I think things "should work".

In any case, I've dilly-dallied on this site for too long. Time to stop blogging and start doing!!!!

30 Aug 2004 (updated 30 Aug 2004 at 14:59 UTC) »
My weekend

Spent this weekend with Surphaze, Joe&Est, and John&Erica (wow, J&E^2!) going around town. It was refreshing to be around people for a change on a weekend.

I got to see Hero which wasn't really my cup of tea BUT, for a movie in which people are dancing on water and fighting each other with water droplets... it was okay. The story was really good - some of the fantasy kung-fu stuff was on the verge of being obnoxious, then again, I kind of chalked that up to a cultural story-telling mechanism. The only problem I really had delt with the audience. Everyone was expecting something probably in the Kill Bill/Pulp Fiction department since, you know who, is producing the US Release. The marketing gurus, I feel, have unjustly advertised this flick as a matrix-style shoot 'em up flick. Unfortunately, this is not that kind of movie. It's an eastern-fantasy tale akin to Crouching Tiger. So some of the snickering from the people around me was a bit... lame.

I also managed to see Donnie Darko: the Director's Cut last night. It was wonderful! The added footage isn't on the DVD and it really fleshes out some of the details that were lacking (ie: what made it so strange for most movie goers). Don't get me wrong, I loved the bizzare portions of the original cut - it actually gave my friends and myself something interesting to discuss as opposed to the usual bitching that happens after seeing a movie about time-travel. The Director's Cut is done in a book/chapter format. With each chapter's beginning coming from "The Philosophy of Time Travel". Each of these excerpts overviews what is currently happening to Donnie and the people he's trying to save. So, if you didn't like the mystery/unanswered questions of the first movie or would like to see how far off your thoughts about what was going on are, see it. Or if you just love the darn movie... see it. Or, if you haven't ever seen it... see it.

Moving + Computers

Since I'm moving to Augusta soon (thank you army!), I'll be packing this week after work each day and I'm getting all the other ins-outs tied together.

What's fun about this move is that I'll be leaving Atlanta for Augusta until Feb. Then 2 days after my return to Atlanta, I'll have to go overseas again for a month! Man, my stuffs going to be in storage forever.

Got the AC adapter for my laptop so, that machine is hard at work parsing a gutenburg webster dictionary. I'll soon have 2 databases of word & parts-of-speech maps to compare and merge. woohoo! Working on this grammar checker has really given me a "good old days" feeling from the summer I spent working in PARL. I kinda miss the days I spent working on the cluster. ;)

Newegg just shipped out my new desktop power supply today. I'm getting anxious b/c the entire world has wrapped up doom 3 and i've yet to get it going! grr!

Scout

Scout has a really strange bug right now and I'm not sure why it's happening. There's a runtime error when it tries to perform a simple floating point operation, which leads me to believe that an object that I'm drawing out of my datastructure isn't the right type.

Tomorrow

I'm soooooooo psyched about seeing the Burning Brides tomorrow night! This show is going to friggin' rock!
27 Aug 2004 (updated 27 Aug 2004 at 17:54 UTC) »
Coding

Well, I finally got fed up with Windows.Forms and started using wx .NET for Scout's UI. I've got to admit, wx .NET project kicks so much booty that I'm sure Pirates in the Caribbean can feel it.

Installation was totally painless. I unzipped the package, copied the dll's to my dev directory and then downloaded the M*VC*.dll plopping that also into my development directory and started writing my interface.

What took me all of 4 hours to (offically) half-ass in Windows.Forms (due to hunting and pecking for example code and making sense of strange, undocumented behavior in ListView) took me about 2 hours to pull off with wx.

What made it even nice, dare I say...fun, was the fact that the .NET bindings followed the C++ bindings so closely that I could acutally "wing it" (it being undocumented classes) by using the C++ docs.

wxWidgets, in general, rocks the house.

Now I have a nasty runtime bug in my graph traverser. Once I squash the punk, Scout should be available for beta testing.

"Thank you wxWidgets!"

Now if that wasn't as commercial as I could make it....

Music

Been listening a lot to Bad Religion and Burning Brides. I figured (bad religion) it's probably due to political atmosphere of work, and television, and everything. Man, I've been blogging a lot this week.

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