Older blog entries for i0lanthe (starting at number 41)

I've been pretending to have a life and not hacking much in the past few weeks. I got a total upgrade to the home development computer ("here's a nickel...") and compiling stuff is Blindingly Fast now. POSE is no longer almost-painfully slow. Rah. While reading papers for a class I found out about StarTool which looks like it would be nifty. I am trying to get cstar (StarTool for C programs) to accept a slightly-disemboweled copy of the crufty kMoria source. This requires 1. get rid of the c++-style comments (for a first pass I stripped them out with some random dude's perl script, which was ok except for a couple of printf's that contained the string "http://www..." that suddenly became unterminated); 2. get rid of the include's of PalmOS API header files because it just can't cope with heinous header file madness (does not help that they like c++-style comments too... heh!), and replace them with Folger's Crystals: a header file that just has a bunch of fake typedefs (all pointer types are void *, all struct types contain only the members I ever referred to, all named constants are 1, hey, it doesn't have to run); 3. some other thing that I forgot - oh, yeah, get rid of the sections.h include that tells the compiler toolchain how to deal with the multisegmentness. Did all these things and cstar consented to grok my code and allow me to create star diagrams. Now I just have to figure out "what it's good for".

I have nothing to say today. The semester is underway. I am actually taking a course (needed one more elective). Between this, thesis research, reading papers, and what passes for social life, don't have much free time just now.

I got a couple of new fish for my aquarium. (J. Random cichlids; they're cute in a way, and don't bother the bottom-feeders, which are all the other fish I have. They have not yet quite forgiven me for the trip from the pet store.)

Because I'm such a rebel I'm not going to say "it's been a while since my last diary entry". It hasn't. The 5th of August was, I assert, yesterday, and I really don't know where the intervening mumble days went (maybe they're in the pocket of my other pants? or out protesting a calendar reform?)

I have almost finished re-re-writing the slides for the talk I am giving next week (on Monday I am leaving "on a jet plane / don't know when I'll log in again"). Also I bought a guidebook for Amsterdam which is where the workshop is. I have given a talk before, and I have been across the Atlantic before, so I can't decide which one I should be more nervous about at the moment, so I think I'll just fret about whether I will forget to pack something useful and/or important. Do they have internet cafes there? Forget drugs, I'm addicted to email.

second try. Observation #1: that emacs has trained me to type alt-q in untidy paragraphs.. does not work well when said paragraphs are in netscape.

Biked on part of the Eliza Furnace trail today and it was very furnacy and dehydratory. Maybe autumn is a better time (it's a nice flat paved trail but.. could be more shaded..)

I should be making iLarn able to beam itself, or answering email, or perhaps I should make iLarn able to answer my mail for me (that would be pretty funny), but instead, I have been pestering people to discover the licensing situation of various old old code that I might want to port. (and, so far, I have learned that if you ask whether the license of something can be changed, the answer will always be that it isn't possible, but, so far, I ask anyway because I am curious about how many different ways there are to reach this state, and also because I am shameless.)

So if I did port any too-restricted-to-be-"Open" freeware, where would I put the actual, "download my tarball here" page? Geocities maybe... I was there for a little while peddling GPL foo before someone pointed me at SourceForge. Or is there some more-hip site? (anyone up-to-date on these things?)

What have I been up to this week? I stuffed more gratuitous features into kMoria.. you can beam your high score to another player, or you can beam an object from your inventory. Also added support for multiple users (PalmOS device as time-shared machine: discuss) so you can lend the game to a friend without fearing for your own character. Someone started a thread on r.g.r.moria so I posted in it (kibozagoogle!). I should release again soon but it would be nice to actually fix some bugs first too.

ldunbar's perl script output made me laugh.

Sadly, my big ol' angelfish croaked sometime last night. He was a good fish (she? it? I'll never know)

man, I am behind on email again. Don't really feel like answering it either.

toys - When the VisorPhone price [with subscription] dropped I of course had to contemplate getting one. I concluded that, at the moment, cell phones and I don't really need each other no matter how funky they are. That was last week's toy contemplation. This week's toy contemplation is "minidisc recorder" (for recording live music). It seems like the older models are not that expensive unless of course I consider how many used paperbacks I could get for that. And do I need one? no, I have enough random electronic toys already, but today it amuses me to virtually window-shop. instead of... answering email

The magic 8 ball says Phoon is INTP ("Architect"). Your mileage may vary.

Feature-creeping - yesterday I frobbed kMoria, which can now beam itself (subject to recipient's approval). Also posted a pointless ramble to rec.games.roguelike.development (if it ever shows up) about character interactions in non-multiplayer games, or, "hm, I wonder what else I could beam to someone".

dyork and panix are having fun-with-personality-types. I always come up INTJ, to the surprise of no one who knows me. (Not sure how I feel about the one-word titles though. Mastermind! I'll just sit here in a chair petting this white cat...)
Last time some friends were talking about it, we made up a four-question sorter:
1. Does having other people around tire you out?
2. Have you ever walked into an obvious stationary object? (e.g. a wall)
3. Have you ever wanted to be a Vulcan?
4. Are you able to decide where to eat dinner?

Someone sent a patch for kMoria (wow!) so I am tinkering with kMoria this week.

Recovering from yesterday (got up early and went to the wedding of two friends.. very nice wedding.. meanwhile missed most of the local annual science fiction convention which was also this weekend (skipped the Friday evening stuff so as to be in decent shape to play guitar the next morning; but instead stayed up as late just being a worrywart, though I suppose that was somewhat less tiring than convention-going) but did go to the filking last night which was a fine thing.. then spent most of today (Sunday) asleep thus neatly missing the rest of the convention, and also missing helping friends move furniture (oops)).

Yet another thing going on this weekend (one that I was glad to mostly miss yesterday) was the annual "vintage grand prix" in which people with wacky old cars take and drive them around in circles in the park a couple blocks down the street from me (sadly, it is audible from here), all weekend.

Have not been doing much geek stuff lately, due to trying to get calluses back in time for wedding after having neglected guitar all summer; and "mundane" things like that. Also reflected (last night) that I have not produced much filk (if it can be dignified with the name) in the past year or so, maybe partly due to spending brain cells on other things, such as "working on thesis research" or newer ways to procrastinate same, and partly due to being lately gripped with a preference to write something with an original tune that is unrelated to graduate school or computers, the feasibility of which remains unproven (and thus nothing gets written at all).