Older blog entries for tigert (starting at number 8)

Waiting at the airport..

I am sitting at London Heathrow airport waiting for a connecting flight to Boston.. The first flight was delayed for over 2 hours because of a technical failure in the air conditioning/pressure system.. Finally after trying to repair it for a while the tech staff decided they need to change the plane. Duh. On the other hand it is good that they take security and mainteinance seriously :)

I shot some photos while wandering bored around the airport.. I wish Advogato supported linking of images somehow.. Maybe raph doesnt want to have us fill the harddisk with random holiday photos, but I wish I could even link an image from a remote server.. On the other hand that would allow the use of Web Bugs(tm) to track you, dear readers (are there any? Hello? :) and I wouldnt even think of committing such a horrible crime! But nevertheless, I think it would be nice to have a possibility to add an image to the diary every now and then. Hm.. Of course linking to images via a hyperlink would work.. I need to think about this.

Ok, they are starting to board the plane finally, gotta get in the big aluminium bird!

. . .

..and finally at Helix Code. After a nice cab-ride from the airport I arrived to the office and met the hard workers who were still hacking. We decided we were hungry and went off to Kendall Square to get some protein units. The first chinese restaurant was closed, but the second one was open. I remember eating shrimps and chicken, but I was really tired.. (the time was around 5 am in Finland at that time) So off to bed. The "barracks" turned out to be an excellent place to stay, very nice apartment with a nice, comfortable bed.. YummyzZzZZZ....

. . .

Ok, now I feel good! Got some nice sleep and it's a beautiful morning, the sun is shining through the windows and I am sitting in the living room writing my diary and waiting for the other guys to wake up.. One tends to wake up in strange times when changing timezones :)

Back to stuff!

I had a nice holiday and it's time to get back to work. My friend ettore greeted me with a icon request list yesterday, and I have been hacking on them. Lots of thinking on how to do good and intuitive (the word starts to sound like a cliché to me..) icons.. I like making icons but some of them are comparable to real mini-artwork, when I think about the creative process. Lots of sweat and hard thinking. Maybe I should start printing them and framing into tiny little wooden frames and hanging them in my wall.. :)

I played with gphoto and my digicam, creating a nice hack-kludge webcam, go see if you want here. The good part is I run it from my laptop, so having it with me, I can "broadcast" from anywhere - I just need a net connection. There is a drawback though, I dont know what the camera likes to be scripted and taking photos every N seconds for extended periods of time. Thus I only update once per minute or so and it is running only occasionally. I dont even consider linking the webcam page from my frontpage.. It is a fun hack anyway, and if you are lucky, you can spot me hacking with Gimp :)

I also got around and installed the latest Gimp-print plugin. The results are cool. I dont need to print anything from windows anymore, the quality is awesome already. I cant wait to get raph's cool hacks into it, then it will be clearly superior to the windows drivers. It is excellent even already. Way to go!

Uhm. Another day of work fame

New screenshots in the Evolution page

US keyboard is not exactly ideal for HTML since the < >'s are in completely braindead places for me ;P

Good nightzZzZZzzZ..

Another friday, a week is over

I tried the USB stuff with 2.3.99pre-something kernel, and it worked fine. However the kernel crashed when I copied the linux source tree to keep a fresh copy before applying the ac-patch.

I then decided to go back to stable kernel, but I needed the USB for my mouse and Wacom. (no. it doesnt work in Gimp yet. You can use the tablet as a generic mouse without pressure etc. A serial version works fine. Xinput support for the usb version is on the works though..) Well the non-fun part is the backport USB driver for 2.2.x doesnt like my tablet at all. The backport driver is 0.2 I think and 2.3.99 kernel has version 0.5. The USB trackball works fine but the wacom just goes into a weird state, unplugging the tablet fixes it. It spews this to kern.log:

Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status
3, frame# 1114
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h:
uhci_show_td d49a1de0 (149A1DE0) 
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h: MaxLen=07
DT0 EndPt=1 Dev=3, PID=69( IN  ) (buf=0a0ae400)
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h: Len=07 e3
SPD IOC Stalled Babble 

I wonder what it is. On the other hand, it is pointless to wonder, the current driver works fine. I just wish the backport was updated at some point. Or I just need to play with the devel kernel again.. Gotta take backups :)

Anyway, sleep time. Good night and happy hacking people!

Ack

I got a broken NIC. That is why my site was downlast night and this morning.. I first thought that the network was down but I found out my old tired SMC ultra was not feeling too well.

fix-a-fix

I took a Tulip card from the other box and got my connection working again, then decided to stick the SMC to the other box, and it worked. Go figure.

I got Redhat 6.2 in a shrink wrap box. They have a sticker of the most important Linux commands that you can stick to your monitor or keyboard. Handy. The box also contained a little book consisting of one page ads of all kinds of commercial software packages. Umm. I dont know what to think. We just need more free software. But dont write a napster client, please : )

I heard Redhat 6.2 does not start inetd at all unless you need it. Jonathan said that they turned a lot of services off by default. This is very good. I might consider having a look at it for a change - it's been a long time of debian lately. Not that I am not happy with it, it is also great.

Raph, I now have an Epson. Send me the Stuff. : )

Dum di dum..

I got Evolution running. I first added a new user account to my machine, named "crashtestdummy" - a good way to test out weird software. The Joys of a Real Multi-User Operating System : )

I got that beast to run, so I have an idea what it looks like. My job now is to make the Beast into a Beauty.. Lots of work but that's what I love doing.

I am also pondering of replacing some of the older Gnome Stock icons, it's been quite a while since I did them, and I think certain ones, like the "Save"-floppy icon could use some retouch. There might also be a need for some new ones.

I also added a load of new news headlines to tigert.gimp.org and put together a combined news page of most of the important news sources and slashdot. Google is a good tool for searching the RSS files for various sites.. : )

I finally dumped my old perl spaghetti that I used for the headlines grabbing, and I am now using XML::RSS Perl module (which contains a nifty example headline grabber script that I modified to suit my needs). I feel much more robust now :^)

I hope you like the new stuff.

Back to normal lifecycle..

So this is just a normal monday and I am having a short break between work stuff. At the moment I am doing some icons for evolution, trying to come up with something nice. Trying my best to make it kick some butt on the aesthetic side too..

Gimp just rocks.

Oh, I also did a new splash screen for CVS Gimp, you can check it out at my Gimp splash history page.

Hm.. back from GUADEC.

It was great fun meeting what was like 95% of the Gnome Hackers or something.. Raph showed up with some very interesting print stuff, and I even managed to draw some icons at the "hacking party". (yes, I had my Wacom Intuos pad with me)

I met a lot of people and brought some chocolate to Ettore to continue the GNOME Gastronomic (?!) Cultural Exchange. Ettore gave me some nice italian chocolate which is good (thanks dude : ) I also gave a box of cloudberry candy to Telsa, but I am afraid Alan took a lion's share of that according to his diary ; )

I also met Sven and Mitch and Raphael of the Gimp Hacker fame and we had a good time together talking about stuff and doing some hacking. They did a very nice user-install wizard dialog which is now in CVS, move away your gimp user dir and try a fresh gimp run and be amazed. It is nifty.

The Eazel guys had a very very nice demo of Nautilus, the new filemanager and looks like it is going to rock seriously. SVG icons is the right way to do make the icons scalable. Michael Meeks demoed a graph component in Gnumeric which should make any tie-wearing folks drool right away : ) All in all there are so many interesting things happening in the Gnome front.

drc had "The Imperial March" from Star Wars as the ringing sound in his cell phone. Is that geeky or what..

One weird thing though.. of what I understand of a "hacking party", it is not something that starts 8am and ends at 6pm, right? : )

Lots and lots of things to do..

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