Older blog entries for chipx86 (starting at number 268)

deekayen

That'd be because we supply the Gaim win32 version upon release. We also supply the RPM, which you should be using instead of Fedora's. Yes, it's not in an apt feed, but downloading it once every couple weeks is easy :)

Report

Nearing completion.. Only a couple more pages, and one more day to work on it. I'll sleep a lot easier when this is finished. I should probably sleep tonight so I won't feel so sick tomorrow.

Can't wait to see Rachael. One day, and I already miss her. At least I got to talk to her on IM for a bit. Sometimes I can't believe how lucky I am.

I haven't posted much lately. I really should work on that.

Gaim

Things have become quite interesting lately. We have some news coming that I'm not sure if public yet or not, but I myself am working on a few Gaim-related projects.

First, Gaim for Qtopia v0.4 is about to be released, featuring message notification and beautiful support for 640x480. It makes me want to write a similar UI for my Linux box.

Second, I'm beginning work on a text-based UI toolkit called patui, which will be the base for a console gaim. Unfortunately, writing a UI toolkit takes a while, so I'm not sure when work on nc-gaim (ncurses-gaim) will start.

We're hopefully releasing gaim 0.73 soon. It was delayed due to some logging bugs we discovered, but the sooner we can get it out, the better.

Adium is using an experimental version of our libgaim in their Adium IM client for MacOS X. I'm really looking forward to trying that out :)

Life

Things with my girlfriend have been great. We've now been together over two months, and I don't think either of us have any complaints :) We'll be having a kind of Christmas together sometime before or after Christmas. I'm looking forward to it. I think she'll like what I got her.

School

School, on the other hand, is nice and stressful, as always. I have a report due Friday, and a small one due tomorrow. I've been fighting the flu, but now it's kind of winning the fight for the moment. I didn't even attend school today, which is too bad because I really needed to. I'll probably continue with the bigger report in a few minutes.

7 Nov 2003 (updated 7 Nov 2003 at 08:09 UTC) »

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.

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