Recent blog entries for julian

I now have my own blog.

Bugtraq is a great way to encourage people who are writing software for money to fix security and privacy bugs.

It's also a great way to encourage people who are writing software for fun to not do it anymore. Especially when you tell them of the privacy bugs in private ahead of time and they fix them...

Carnegie Mellon

After not getting into Computer Science all I wanted to do was prove to myself and others that I'm capable of handling it. I don't really want to be a CS major anymore.

But it feels like at every turn CMU is denying me even the ability to prove myself as capable of CS. Every "CS" course I've taken so far has been separated into a CS-major section and a non-CS-major section. I've tried to get into the CS-major sections, but I'm not allowed. Fine. Whatever.

The harder CS classes are smaller anyway and not split between CS-major and non-CS-major. Like, say, the class I was attempting to take this semester. Of course, I was on the waitlist for this class. Today I find out that freshmen non-CS majors who are on the waitlist won't be getting in.

REJECTED. (again). Take that non-CS major.

Jabber now has an IETF Working Group! Sweet!

raph: I would very much appreciate a topic tag, I used to write a lot more here about what was going on in real life, but whenever I do so my diary tends to be rated down more, so I was getting the impression people don't like it. :)

I do keep a second diary now for more personal thoughts which probably wouldn't be a good idea for certain people to read at the time being... but I do wish to go back to talking about anything here.

I got gnomemm compiling under OS X this weekend. Unfortunately, libglade2/libglademm2 don't seem to be working properly... need to look into that.

Fuck. My desktop machine really does hate me. It's not starting anymore. I really hope the power supply died and not my new motherboard or processor...

To continue its cry for love and affection, however, OS X has treated me nicely. Thanks to F. J. Franklin, I was able to beat gtkmm2 into submission and actually compile it under OS X! Once I get gnomemm going, I'll be able to do gabber2 hacking right on this pretty TiBook.

fejj: Dude, I'm at CMU. I can't get away from computers :) -- seriously, there seems to be so little to do... when I try to hang out with friends we end up doing computer stuff. Everything closes so friggin early around here.

I wonder if this is somehow like writer's block... for some reason I just don't feel like hacking at all. I'm really feeling rather lazy. I know that in a situation like this I normally would love to start hacking on Gabber or something, but I really just don't feel like doing that. I don't know what I want to do. The lust for creating just isn't there. I'm even pretty sick of video games. I just can't stay interested long enough to keep playing... blah... I need to do something

Garrett LeSage is traveling the northeast US trying to get some good autumnal colors and just generally having a good time on a well-deserved vacation. He was in Pittsburgh last night and today and dropped by CMU campus to hang out. It was fun talking with him about what he's been up to at Red Hat and with life in general... I think last time I saw him was 2 or 3 LinuxWorlds ago. 'twas fun. Thinking about it, Linux really has come a long way from a few years ago. There are a lot of things which now Just Work. It's quite spoiling :)

It is kind of nice to not be particularly concerned with anything for a change... I really am not deathly afraid of getting low grades in my classes right now. Basically, I either am going to get into the HCI program, at which point I'll go for a masters and my undergrad intro classes won't matter much in the long run, or I'll switch to something completely different and... my undergrad intro classes won't matter much in the long run. So screw getting stressed over papers for English class or Freshman Seminar (I do of course still do them with a decent amount of effort -- I just don't stress like I did over this stuff in high school). In the end, it doesn't even matter. I'll spend time learning what I want to learn.

Apple gave presentations today... I think I need to work for them at least once. mmm... usability.

I got O'Reilly's "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" -- looks pretty good so far. I love my TiBook.

So after I've already ordered a new DVI cable from Cables-n-Mor, a friend of mine just got his LCD monitor (he's been waiting for over a month because of the shipping problems in California) and lent me his DVI cable. I tried connecting my computer to the LCD (by the way, it took *five* restarts after installing my new motherboard before Windows saw my USB mouse -- Red Hat 8 detected and installed USB 2, FireWire, etc all on the first boot, and it all works as far as I can tell) using his DVI cable, no luck. I tried connecting my laptop to the LCD using his DVI cable, no luck. I tried connecting my laptop to his LCD using his DVI cable, it worked fine. I tried connecting my LCD to my computer using VGA, it worked fine, same with my laptop. So I think I can state with modest certainty that the problem is in the DVI connector in my LCD monitor.

I guess I'm going to try to convince Planar to take a look.

I am not having good luck with computers.

But hey, my new motherboard is great!

jfleck and josef: I've been pondering the street sign discussion some, especially with reference to the KDE post josef linked. While I definitely agree with most of what is said, having recently started using Mac OS X for extended periods of time I find it hard to dismiss Apple's decisions so easily.

I think that while the street sign analogy works really well for things like toolbar icons (Apple still does follow it for some of the toolbars, like the one at the bottom of iChat), the difference with program and file icons in Mac OS X is that they are not street signs. I don't have milliseconds to react to my Navigator icon. Yes, street signs aid in finding what I want quickly. However, I am staring at my Navigator icon the entire time I'm using my computer. The Dock puts all those photorealistic icons in my face almost all the time. Icons on my desktop are always there. I do agree that simplistic street-sign-like icons would aid me in finding my programs faster, but I would get sick of them pretty quickly. The current icons are more aesthetically pleasing, and for the most part apple has made attempts to differentiate the icons shape and color-wise as much as possible. The majority of the icons sitting in my Dock have very different outlines and different main colors.

I think designing interfaces requires walking the line between what is the absolute easiest to use and what is pretty. Obviously it's very easy to fall too far into the latter, but let's not fall too far into the former either. I wouldn't want street signs in my Dock.