Older blog entries for lordsutch (starting at number 7)

RoutePlanner hit 0.3 today; in about a week of real hacking it has now surpassed what seemed to take years in C on AmigaOS. Rapid prototyping r00lz :p Those of you who don't want everything in the universe installed on your systems should check out this release; it'll work (albeit slower) without the kitchen sink; hell, it'll even run on JPython, if you uncompress the database first (no zlib in JPy). (I tested it and nearly keeled over when all I had to do was bypass import timing.) And nothing runs on JPython :-). Maybe it'll even run on Win32 and MacOS. All it needs for the tty version is barebones Python, and you need that for reportbug anyway.

In the real world, I TiVo'd Nuremberg and thought it was interesting; then I watched the History Channel documentary (which I think was probably a BBC documentary at some point) and felt cheated by the miniseries. IMHO the whole production glossed over the USSR's complicity in WWII, and Goering gets sympathy from one of the guards (some Southern lieutenant named "Tex") by Commie-baiting (I guess since Goering was vehemenantly anti-Communist, that means that all anti-Communists are bad or something). OTOH Jackson was the only justice of the time to have the balls to stand up for free speech (and was IIRC a dissenter in the Japanese internment cases), and that didn't get played up either. A lot of the time I felt like I was getting lectured to (us Americans and our lack of historical perspective, nach). Overall, maybe I'm reading too much into the show ;-). And at least Alec Baldwin's chest toupee didn't make an appearance.

Nothing much else of excitement to report. Being unemployed (until August 21, when I get to teach Introduction to American National Government to impressionable undergrads) has its perks...

A weird segfault in reportbug turns into a hunt for some weirdness in libpthread on Linux/m68k. So far, we can duplicate the problem on 040s (1 Amiga, 1 Mac), but not 060s (2 Amigas). Anyone with an 020 or 030 got time to test it?

RoutePlanner is progressing nicely; I'm about 6 hours of hacking away from having RouteEdit working (the main things left are designing the extend/break dialog and figuring out how to get the city selector from the RoutePlanner widget tree to import into RouteEdit's). I've come to the conclusion that glade (with libglade) is something of a double-edged sword, and that Gtk really needs builtin double-click handling. I hate to say it, but MUI got the whole GUI toolkit thing right 5 years ago (i.e. back when I wrote the original version of RoutePlanner), and we're still catching up.

What tausq said. I don't think I can add anything.

Well, I finally got off my butt: RoutePlanner is released to the world. Now, go forth and plan your next roadgeek expedition. ;-)

I guess I've been lax in my diary entries. Ok: I did [deleted] and [deleted] at Sair, graded a stack of tests for an intro to U.S. government class, had dinner with a colleague and his wife, and upgraded a few Debian packages on humberto (www.us.linux-m68k.org). P75s are not fun to apt-get dist-upgrade, even on T1s.

I'm leaning towards wxPython for my GUI solution for RoutePlanner. I guess I'll have a few hours to hopefully finish it up (for 0.1) this weekend, since the rains came and washed out my chances of mowing the lawn this weekend.

What, pray tell, is a dimwit? If they're that bad, shouldn't they be lower than observers? Or is that the yet-to-be-implemented dumbass?

In more diaretic terms: job1 is boring today; I skipped going to job2 (the joys of having no set schedule); I learned the word pulchritudinous; I ate halfway decent food at McDonald's for a change; I pretended to read for a class tomorrow. I still need to do something with the Python GUI stuff... any suggestions?

I achieved absolutely nothing today, which is a good thing. Well, I did catch up on about six weeks' worth of Entertainment Weekly and spent the afternoon hanging out with a friend at work, in no particular order.

I have to agree with Joey's comments about the certification scheme (even though I've barely even been here a day). It seems like "Journeyer" is the default category, if only because I can't imagine calling anyone whose reputation I know well enough to rate an apprentice. Maybe that will change as more people get involved in Advogato, or if more gradations can be introduced (I tend to think of myself as being on the low end of Journeyer, for example).

I need to get off my lazy butt and release the "new" and portable RoutePlanner to SourceForge and Debian woody. The basics are there, but it needs a day's hacking to add back the old GUIs from AmigaOS days. Now if I could only decide which Python GUI to use (and, by extension, learn)...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!