Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 55)

XPLC

Got a new release prepared, with monikers and other things coming together. I'm actually getting paid to work on this now, which I find really cool (thanks apenwarr!).

XPLC

This is really weird. In my last diary entry, I was wondering where all of the people that wanted a lightweight component system went when I gave them XPLC. Maybe they went to Korelib, which is so close to XPLC (and also seemed to appear 8 month after XPLC came out) that I wonder if they didn't read my article and went their way? I just fired off an e-mail to the project lead.

It's pretty nice, from what I can see, doing things slightly differently: very Qt/KDE oriented (but still independent), more complicated to use (but is more featureful than the current XPLC release) and uses strings instead of UUIDs for identifying components (potential for collisions, but easier to use), etc...

11 Feb 2002 (updated 11 Feb 2002 at 17:51 UTC) »
Life

Undergoing massive psychological review of myself. Fear not, I'm still very much a hacker at heart, but I feel some parts of myself are very much broken, and I wish to heal them.

XPLC

I have set a goal for XPLC. I should have a usable release and deliver a paper or a talk about it sometime in the coming year and a half. I would have aimed at this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium, but this is pretty short and I'd like to see it in some actual use before going and making a fool of myself. The "and a half" part is to keep in mind next year's OLS.

But I might still try for this year. ;-)

My big question nowadays is this: where did all those people that kept asking for an "XPCOM Lite" go when I came and gave them XPLC? Oh well.

I might write another Advogato article on XPLC soon, if I get the time.

Makefiles Wizardry

Anyone knows the Right Thing to do so you can get automatic dependencies that work with an IDL compiler generating headers?

E-mail me if you got the faintest idea.

Work

I work for Net Integration Technologies now, which is apenwarr's company. I'm hacking WvPrint at the moment.

Looking into an SLR film camera? Check out my Canon EOS-300 (Rebel 2000) review on photo.net!

One dead childhood friend, stumbled upon my old highschool crush, geeks are psychologically broken, I do gross overgeneralization, film at 11.

13 Dec 2001 (updated 8 Dec 2004 at 18:26 UTC) »
AlanShutko, welisc: I work with a number of physicists and meteorologists that do Fortran programs on shared memory vector supercomputers for weather forecasting.

They are somehow convinced that having multiple MPI processes on each supercomputer node is faster than having a single MPI process per node (which would use threads to use the multiple CPUs available instead). How they manage to think that transferring gigabyte-sized buffers between MPI processes (incurring two copies) is better than passing an 8 byte pointer around totally escapes me.

18 Nov 2001 (updated 10 Feb 2005 at 05:35 UTC) »
jdub: about your groove thing...

I can remember, in my second year of college, when I was going out with this girl that was really bad for me and I was just lacking the strength to leave her (which came in time, thank God!), I went alone to my favorite club in the small town I was in (quite cool, a good alternative club in a 40,000 people town!).

There, I met a few of my college friends (in the computer shit program I was doing), one of them accompanied by her ex- girlfriend of a while (like 6 months) but still good friend (and really pretty). We get into various states of drunkeness. I play a nearly perfect game of pools (when you're drunk, you're better at pools?) and that girl kept hitting on me all evening.

Then I go home, get unclothed, drop in bed, then look at the then-still-girlfriend-but-the-love-is-dead sleeping beside.

F**K! I'M IN THE WRONG DAMN BED!!!

I had been blind all night, just enjoying the time and not thinking a single second. It was fun, but somehow, I think it could have been better... ;-)

That was of course the one and only time I've been "hitted on" by a girl. I've had a few guys hit on me, but... :-)

olandgren: when a nice girl asks you if you want to kiss her, always answer truthfully, you never know!

Life

Weird situations. Is there anything else than that actually?

My girlfriend and me broke up, but it was much cooler than I expected. Things had been going downhill (we've been together nearly 5 years now), but while our couple has been so-so the last year or two, we find that we are great friends and that by staying together we'd probably get to hate each other.

Now, we're still sleeping in the same bed, and it was a bit weird, but not in the sense that we didn't look at each other.

We still appreciate each other very well, and getting back together is not excluded, but we agree that we need some time for ourselves. Both of us have never been single more than a week since we were 16 (I'm 24, she's 23), we both feel we might be lacking something there that's needed.

Work

There was a Cray beer and pizza with some of the managers from the main offices visiting. I finally learned that the senior analyst title I had been proposed had been given to another guy I work with. I could have done good with the extra money, and there was an attractive suggestion that we would sometimes do development work for special projects, but overall I think that guy might be more up to the task of the day-to-day work this job means (meaning that I'd probably get "bored doing work" rather than "doing stuff like open source development to avoid getting bored, because I don't have a shitload of work").

Photography

Got a new lens (my second), the Canon 100mm/f2 USM. This thing is awesome.

  • the amazing USM motor (near total silence and very fast and precise autofocus)
  • the "one-way" focusing ring (the autofocus doesn't make the ring turn, so you can hold it firmly and autofocus)
  • the full-time manual focus (thanks to the USM, you can do manual focus even if autofocus is enabled, unusual)
  • the large aperture (the glass goes right to the inside edge of the lens casing)

I finished off a roll of Sensia with some nice portraits of Mélanie's dog in the autumn leaves, a neighbor cat and some of the visiting Cray bigwigs.

I also got a nice Lowepro S&F Reporter 300 AW bag to carry that new gear. I previously used a regular backpack, but now that I have two lenses means that there would be a free-flying lens bouncing around in that unpadded backpack, and I wouldn't want that to be a $500 lens, so it's more "protecting my investment" than "getting new toys" (although there is a part of this!).

I have to take some time to myself and do some photography. I'd like to do a project doing portraits of a number of friends, that'd let me go out and be with friends.

Ok, now this is weird.

First off, there are Quadra fan sites.

Second, one of them interviewed me. Could this get any weirder?

Also, some of these guys are MAD Quadra players! I have seen whole game average of over 200 blocks per minute!!! This makes for a bit over 3 blocks per second!!!

To put this into context, Quadra is a roughly Tetris-like kind of game, that is multiplayer and has slightly different gameplay. Have you ever been able to keep up 3 blocks per second at Tetris? Not me! I'm a poor 50 blocks per minute player, a bit more if it's a good day...

MikeCamel: People who know me would have noticed that I neither said "spread over space" or even "spread over time and space", which I would have said if I had meant either of these, but I agree with you, this could get a bit confusing!

Let's say that I have a long-term buying plan going on those underwears...

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