Older blog entries for chipx86 (starting at number 266)

Domain Renewal Headaches

Once again, re-registering chipx86.com proved to be a painful task. I registered this domain through a special one-day deal that Staples had in combination with Register.com a couple of years back. The domains were $1 each, so I got chipx86.com. Since then, renewal has been hell.

Last year, my domain suddenly vanished one day. I did a whois and found it had expired 1-2 months previously, but didn't actually die until that day. Not once did I get a renewal notification e-mail. I went to go renew it, and register.com showed absolutely nothing in my account information for that domain. I also was unable to register it, as it still claimed my domain. I had to call them up and spend a couple of hours on the phone. The problem turned out to be that part of my stuff was in their database, and part in Staples's database, and nobody seemed to have an access level needed to get to all of it to make a change. They had to call me back after a couple of engineers got on the task. Two days later, I had my domain back.

I had hoped that everything was cleared up after last year's incident. Today, however, people told me my domain was no longer resolving, and sure enough, it expired September 30th. Once again, I was unable to renew it or re-register it, so I called them up again. They said that the domain fell out of the grace period, so I asked if they could just re-register it now under register.com, without the tie-in to Staples. They said no, but that they could renew it for me, so I ended up just doing that.

Looks like I'll be looking forward to this mess again next year. I sent a request through a form the lady told me about to have it transferred, but I doubt little will come of it. Ugh. I'll just have to pay for a domain transfer to some other place.

Halloween

Ahh, I love this time of year! The costumes, the candy, the events!

*Shakes fist at the rain*

Yeah, it's raining. Lovely. That kind of ruins the whole costume contest and everything at school, which also kind of ruins the "not going to class so I can go to the costume contest" plans, but I'll blame it on the cookies.

My costume makes no sense. I'm some guy that got cut up and noosed and then went psycho. I'm in some dress clothes (complete with tie), with a noose imprint around my neck, scabs on my face, some bandaids, and a paper bag over it all with a little Gir-like tongue sticking out and two oddly shaped cartoonish eyes. Behind my back is a spatula cross sticking out of a golf bag. In one hand is a loaf of bread, and in the other is a cheese grater. I love it.

I'm meeting up tonight with my girlfriend and about 5 of my other friends to go trick-or-treating. I was invited to about 3 other parties and get-togethers, but I passed on those.

Ahh, going to be fun.

Toys

This week had a major downside. My $60 Zaurus case, with a 128MB CF card inside, went missing from college. Nobody has turned it in yet, apparently. Also, my combo portable CD player/radio stopped working. I knew it was going to soon, but it finally died on me. Never fun.. Tonight, I kind of made up for part of that.

I bought a CD player from Sony that plays MP3 CDs and shows ID3 info, and also picks up local TV and weather stations, along with playing CDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs. I haven't tested it yet, but it seems good enough for my needs.

I also picked up a Sony DVD player. I'm pretty strict in what I want as far as entertainment center equipment goes, but I only had so much I wanted to spend on a DVD player. Now first of all, I really dislike this concept of, "Let's put all the buttons on the remote control and leave none on the player!" I want to be able to navigate menus without a remote. I want to go into setup. I want to do all of that. This one doesn't let me, unfortunately, navigate menus and such from the DVD player, but it was the only one I liked that was in my price range. It plays DVDs, CDs, MP3 CDs, JPEG CDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-R+s, DVD-RWs, and DVD-RW+s. It works well enough, and was simple to setup (aren't they all?).

I had one condition, however. I wanted Circuit City to throw in a free velcro cord thing that they use to keep the remotes attached to the players. Best Buy said they'd throw one in, since I expressed an interest, and I wanted Circuit City to match that. They were a bit confused at first, but ended up giving me one, so that was good.. Should keep me from losing this remote :)

The funny thing about this player is that it came with 2 AA batteries for the remote. The remote, however, takes AAAs. Somebody screwed up :)

Life

I woke up this morning, which kind of upset me, so I decided to register a little domain. Now, the site is nowhere near complete, and the links are all broken, but I now have destroymornings.com. It should provide at least some entertainment I guess, for me at least.

The rest of the day was good though. Got to spend time with my girlfriend, played a Go match, and had crappy pizza. Now it's time for bed.

New Harddrive

I had a nice little story about my experience yesterday clearing 300 viruses of 18 types out of a company's network, and my painful experience getting this harddrive installed, but I bumped something and the computer locked up, so I lost it.

I bought a 160GB 7200RPM Western Digital harddrive yesterday. 8MB cache, and came with an UltraATA card. $100 after rebate. I thought it was a good deal, so I picked it up, but my installation was a pain because I accidentally bumped a few cables out on various things. Anyhow, it's installed now and seems to work, though it generates a lot of heat. The only thing that worries me is that it has a pulse to it that is very audible. It's more of a vibrating pulse, not a noise, but you can definitely hear it with the case on. I'm not sure if that's a defect, or normal. I'm tempted to just take it back, just in case, but I probably should play with it for awhile. I think another fan in that case would help at this point, though, since there are now 4 harddrives in there...

Stevey

I guess you're in luck. Gaim is almost completely core/UI split, and most of the UI can be changed via a plugin. One example of a UI is Gaim for Qtopia. You could in theory just write a plugin that replaces your buddy list UI and keep that loaded. You can already assign your own names to people. Howver, data like phone numbers, etc. are not yet doable. Might consider that for a future release..

Gaim

I guess we're on Slashdot and Newsforge again. Yippy.. At least the Newsforge article was good.

Gaim

We released 0.70 yesterday. It wasn't the grand release I had hoped for. I wanted 0.70 to be the version that featured a fully split core/UI, providing a libgaim, but the Yahoo auth problems required that we get a new version out quickly. Now I'm not in such a hurry, so libgaim will probably happen by 0.72. There isn't much left to do in it.

mibus

Thanks for the compliments on the code :) I've been working really hard the past 10 months to document the code, split it, and put together a proper API. It's not the ugly thing it was a year ago. What niggles do you have with the code? I'm looking for ways to improve it, and a lot of it is getting fixed up in CVS right now. I'm curious as to the stuff you're working on.

Life and Jobs

Things are going great nowdays. My girlfriend is wonderful, and I enjoy every minute with her. School's pretty fun, even the classes I thought I'd hate, and hopefully I'll be getting a decent job soon.

I've been in contact with a local wireless ISP that's developing a lot of their own custom stuff for the network. They were rather impressed by my resume, recognizing some projects, and so I began to talk to them about a programmering job. Unfortunately, being a student, that may not be possible at this time, since they're looking for full-time programmers, but it looks as if there are other positions I could apply for. I guess time will tell here.

Gaim

It's nice when things work.

We're releasing gaim 0.69 soonish, and I figured that was good incentive to get all the signal callback problems in the perl plugin fixed. In 0.68's perl rewrite, some signal types were borked, parameters that are modifiable showed garbage, and they couldn't be modified. That has all been fixed, the last two being fixed in the past hour. Works like a charm... until we release and script writers find something else wrong.

Now I just need to figure out the SSL issues and solve those.

GNUpdate

Making progress again. Several fixes to the nested archive I/O operations have been made, though it still doesn't work correctly. I think I can figure out the rest rather soon. I have it narrowed down to a block of code.

funrecords: Why the lack of gaim? You know gaim isn't a GNOME app, right? :)

mikehearn: Excellent article on COM. I look forward to seeing the "Why COM doesn't suck" part.

Gaim

The core/UI split is near completion, but there's still a good amount of work left. I'm really hoping to have it all finished by 0.70, so we can release the first public libgaim. Off the top of my head, the only things remaining are the user info dialog, the prpl.c and server.c stuff, message queuing, status stuff (away messages and such), and logging. I can't think of anything else. There's a lot of API cleanage that needs to be done too.

Gaim for Qtopia

This has been delayed a bit due to a lot of work needed in Gaim. However, Gaim for Qtopia 0.3 will likely be out a week or two after Gaim 0.69, and is going to feature a lot of new, nice stuff, such as Contact support, a preferences dialog, several message notification options, and a cleaner UI. It's going to rock.

GNUpdate

Sadly, this too has been delayed, due to work on other projects, but I'm once again trying to get some work done on it. The main thing that needs work at the moment is the dreaded io_internal.c of libcomprex, which does all the messy work behind grabbing files out of archives nested deep within archives or on remote locations. It's broken, and hard to fix cleanly.

I'm facing a small dilema here. Currently, the API functions look like this:

cxGetArchivePath()

However, I've grown more accustomed to the namespaceObjectAccessorName or namespace_object_accessor_name style, so I'm thinking of switching the entire API, which means libpackman also needs an update (which it does anyway). If I decide to do it, now is a good time, because the whole API changed in this release anyway. I'm just not all that sure yet... The function above would end up looking like:

cx_archive_get_path()

I'll have to talk to the other developers and see what they think. It'll take a group effort, definitely, as there is so much code to modify. I'm probably just going to concentrate my efforts on io_internal.c for the time-being, though, so everything else will start to work again. Of course, while working on the above work, I still have another project.

FIRE Radio

I used to work for Freenode Radio, but we all left, so some of us started this new station. I can't talk about it much, but despite how quiet we all seem, there's a lot of development going on, and the new system for doing automated and live radio shows is going to feel so much more natural and easy after the applications, database, and servers I write are finished. Progress is nice, and it's fun to see this project improve. I can't give an ETA on its public release date, though, because...

Girlfriend

Now I have a girlfriend! She's beautiful, funny, really sweet, and a lot of fun. I asked her out last Monday, and we went on a date Friday. It went better than I could have thought. I'm hoping things continue to go that well. That'll of course mean I won't be working on the above projects as much, but since she has her own stuff too, there'll be time.

Gaim on TechTV

Pat McGovern from SourceForge made a pretty good presentation of Gaim on The Screen Savers on TechTV yesterday, and has a small writeup up on their site. He did a good job, and it was cool to see us on TechTV again. We got a lot of comments about that one :)

0.69 finally has a set of SSL wrappers included, which will be required for MSN Protocol 9 and Jabber in the future. It supports both Mozilla NSS and GNUTLS, and is working rather nicely. MSN support is coming along, though figuring out how I want to do some of the buddy list sync stuff is proving to be a bit of a challenge.. I think that's because I'm trying hard to fight sleep, though.

Also, we now have Contact support (like meta-contacts in other IM clients). Beautiful. My buddy list is roughly 8x smaller :)