Older blog entries for mazeone (starting at number 65)

iain
I'm sorry if the people in #e were mean to you, as there is a chance that I was one of those people. The only excuse we have is that there is a constant barrage of really stupid people coming in the channel, bugging us with the same stupid questions over and over. So when someone who isn't stupid asks the same question, there is a chance that they will take the brunt of the frustration caused by the other people. Luckily, it appears that a good number of the people who used to bug us have moved on to using sawfish, so people in #e have a bit more patience than they used to.

efm
The plan all along was for efm to become part of the next version of enlightenment. Raster and Mandrake built what was EFM as a test of a lot of their ideas on what should go into a file manager. Now they are going back and building core libraries, including a lot of the ideas that were sucessful in what was EFM. They don't want to get a lot of support questions about EFM (which has never been actually released), so they moved it off the CVS server. #e also isn't interested in supporting it, much to the dismay of a lot of people who have seen the nice screenshots, which is why usually people in #e disavow all knowledge...

I have sometimes wondered if #e is "not nice", compared to other large irc channels...I know that the other large channels I've seen (#perl, #gnome) tend to be as brutal as #e, if not worse.

hmmm
I decided to rewrite my webpage, and this time to create scripts that will create all the html from a template file and some .content files. The basics work great. However, now I'm considering how to handle "special case" pages, like my screenshots page nad my random pictures page. On those pages I want to take a dir of images with one file that contains captions and automagically create an index page containing thumbnails that link to pages with the actual pictures (or the image files themselves, in the screenshot page). Right now, my main script looks for all the .content files in the main dir and creates .html files from those. I also have a couple of scripts that will create the "special" pages on their own. I'm trying to see if I can come up with a way of having one script do it all for me, and whether that will just be nasty (do i have a .pages file that tells my script which pages are "special"....
I know that there are 10,000 packages out there that will do exactly what I'm doing now for me much more elegantly and better than anything I can write, but writing this crap is helping me with the depression I've been struggling with for the last several days. sigh

update
I of course realized that i was being an idiot. All I have to do is create the custom .content files seperately, and then my script can create the html from those. So the main body of my script looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

&make_pixcontent;
&make_sscontent;
&make_html;

inside the make_pixcontent and make_sscontent subs I create a .content page that, when parsed, creates an index page of all the images thumbnailed, and then a bunch of .content files that parse to have the full sized image on the page. Whee!

neuro
if visibility is bad, maybe you shouldn't have been going that fast? I used to drive a school bus and I have no patience for people who try to make excuses for running red lights or doing other stupid things on the road.

lilo is funny looking. And he smells weird.

/me hides ;)

code
I've actually been doing some coding. I sent in a patch to freeamp last night, probably won't make it in until after 2.1 comes out. I also did some nasty hackery on vorbiscomment to make it take command line arguments, and then wrote a perl wrapper around it so it would clean up my broken metadata on a few of my ripped CDs. My changes were so bad there is no way I'd ever send them upstream, tho. It does make me love open source :)
Today I pulled all the ftp/scp stuff out of webcam (sorry, no URL) so it'll just take a single snapshot and archive it. I then wrote a perl wrapper to that to upload it to my website. Oh yeah, i also updated my website a little.

!code
I read that signal11 vs. cmdrtaco log. to me it seemed that cmdrtaco was very reasonable all the way through it. I dunno, I think that people take stuff way too seriously.

Went to go see sleater kinney last night. They rule.

campd:
There is a reason aaronl has been permbanned from #e on efnet for quite awhile. Doesn't #gnome have bots?

more interesting stuff
wrote myself a script to cddb-lookup, rip, and vorbis encode (using oggenc, of course) a cd. I borrowed heavily from ripit.pl, and still have some stuff to fix (it fails on CDs that aren't in the freedb, and it doesn't fork a new process so it can rip while it's encoding the track), but it works well enough for right now...

KDE2
KDE2 is in Debian now, so I thought I'd play with it a bit last night. Overall, it is very pretty and stable. I've had a few apps crash when I closed them down, but everything has done pretty much what it was supposed to. The good stuff:

• it's quite pretty. KDE 1.0 bugged me because it wasn't.
• It's acceptibly fast
• KOffice looks nice. I dunno about how usable it is, because I've never really used any office suite

The bad:

• I couldn't get the dialup stuff to work, dunno why. Especially since dialup using the 'pon' script works fine
• the terminal prog (Konsole?) annoys me, and Eterm didn't get along with the background settings (even using Esetroot). Could have been an Eterm bug, tho, since I wasn't particularly up to date from CVS
• there weren't may applets available for the panel, and the ones there were didn't live up to my expectations--I want a clock that will do 12 hour as well as 24 hour time (i know 24 hour is "better", but I'm used to 12), the mailcheck applet is just ugly, as is the system load applet.

I have a screenshot of it in action at my screenshots page, but the png seems to not get displayed correctly by netscape. Blah, use mozilla. Overall, I doubt I'll ever use it much but I would highly recommend it to anyone who was just starting out with a unix desktop and was looking for something of that sort.

spite
finally got some work done on spite. The best thing about it is that I figured out a framework so I should be able to churn out a bunch of code pretty quickly.

frustration
Actually started working more on SPITE last night and quickly got entirely too frustrated. It's hard for me to code when I have a throbbing headache and I'm depressed. Somehow I still have to tie together 3 combo boxes and a few text boxes so that when you change any of them the rest get updated. Ick. sigh Some days i just feel like a moron.

frustation and loathing
It occurred to me today that what annoys me most about windows is the magic involved. I have about as many windows skillz as I have unix skillz and I've found that under unix when something doesn't work there is a logical answer. Under windows there often isn't. For example, I've had two brand new machines today that couldn't see 'Network Neighborhood'. One of them was fixed by adding NetBEUI as a protocol, which is weird because nothing else on our network speaks netBEUI...the other one randomly fixed itself after about 10 reboots. Like I said, magic. And not the nice kind, either, totally wild magic.

python
so the weaselly PHB has been bugging me about some survey cgi that was written by some folks no longer employed here. Since it last worked we have replaced the machine it was on but copied all the data onto the new machine. Sooooooo...

The first thing was that no one knew exactly where the project lived. OK, no problem. I looked through the cgi-bin dir, hey look, survey.cgi. Looks like it calls a survey.py script that does all the work. Uhoh. I've never looked at python before in my life. Ok, let's run the cgi and start tracking errors. First error is a syntax error in the script. Hrm, better hit google. Tracked it down to a change in python since we seem to be running a newer version of python than the script was written for. Evidently, python made the way args to functions are defined a bit stricter--no problem.

The script wants to make a connection to a MySQL database. Oops, python can't find the MySQL module. OK, this is a debian box, no problem. apt-cache search mysql | grep python shows python-mysqldb - A Python interface for MySQL. Neat. apt-get install. Hrm, the script still can't seem to find the module. Oh, it's MySQLdb, not MySQL. Hmm, i wonder what is different...

OK, pretty much everything is different. Different syntax on how to make a db connection. Different syntax on executing SQL commands. I did some nasty ad hackery (think ad hoc) and voila! It seems to work. Yay me! Sometimes I don't feel like such a moron...