Older blog entries for wwwwolf (starting at number 7)

So, my self-confidence isn't getting up...

Been thinking... Here, I'm certified as an Apprentice. I guess that's just what everyone can expect from me. I'm not a Great Coder. I don't do big things.

I'm unable to do anything "big". I'm a tinkerer, I have been doing small things for years and years. I make small things that help me to make things better. Last night I wrote a hex dumping program, because I was constantly bothered by the fact I didn't had a decent hex dumper program.

Hey, come on. If I would be a Divine Entity, I would have built a replacement for od(1). I won't get respect with small hacks like this.

But I'm happy with the program - it does what I wanted it to do. I write things so that I would make myself more productive, and don't think of others... Does this make me worse?

OK, I haven't posted anything for the while. I was about to wait until everything is clear and then post. But looks like it'd be delayed, so I think I'll post about the recent developments.

There haven't been any "developments"!

Well, the only thing that has happened: Schedulist moved to SourceForge. I thought that was... bound to happen. (I don't have any other place for CVS...) The home page is now at http://schedulist.sourceforge.net/.

And what else? Well... Suffice to say there hasn't been many other things of note. I have had one specific problem recently, and that would be... that's right, the CVS. I'm a newbie. I screwed up the import so completely that I gasp in horror myself every time I think of that. It was a disaster. I hope the wise people at SF can fix that mess, because I get nauseous every time I think of that. I'm sooooooo stupid!

Further, I have been sitting here with feelings of extremely low self-esteem. For a reason! I suck. Plain and simple. No one wants to listen to me, and so it's pretty hard to make anything shiny if there are things I wish people would comment on...

Awww, what the heck, no one would want to hear such depressing news anyway. Have fun, folks. I hope I'll find my fun. (If not from Java, then from other forms of coffee! =)

In January, eve of the XMMS plugin competition, I made a hardly interesting but working SID plugin.

Now, I spent another Sunday writing something that will be a bit more... interesting. InfoPipe is a plugin that opens a named pipe (/tmp/xmms-info) from which XMMS status can be read in textual, easy-to-parse format.

I needed this for my web cam page... I wonder why I couldn't find anything related from the XMMS plugin page, after all, this is a fairly obvious application of XMMS plugin API! =)

I also hope the configuration script works this time...

Oh dear, oh dear...

Within last days, I've done every possible screwup I can easily imagine... I feel as if my IQ had dropped by 60 or so (leaving it nicely just below -10 or something).

I made a new GIMP tutorial, but that's infortunately both a) incompherensible and b) obvious. No way I can allow things like that. ::sigh:: I wish I had a working GIMP-Perl + some documentation for it, I would script that stuff.

(Speaking of which, why does all GTK-related stuff have holey, if nonexistent, documentation? Last time I checked, glib was not documented at all; GTK-Perl doesn't have a POD, just some example code I couldn't make sense of because I have had too much coffee recently... ::sigh:: Repeat after me, now: Documentation gooooood. Documentation our frieeeeend. Wooorshiiiip dooocumeeeentss. Sorry if I'm whining too much...)

I also made something a bit more interesting - emphasis on "a bit". A small Perl script that checks if DRI is in use, and if not, runs the specified program, else it'll display a warning dialog (hence GTK-Perl whine above; this UI was built with Glade). This is mostly for menu use. I had a Nasty X11 Crash a few days back when I tried to use xawtv when DRI was in use...

OO Programming course assignment (exam tomorrow) report: Some Java objects were refined, some nice EOFException dilemmas were encountered, random "this is not Perl, grrrr" whining, and such. Nothing amazing... This will work. (Fortunately they said it needs to be turned in "before May", so I have some time left... =)

Now, not a drop more coffee or I'll need to see a doctor... =)

Recent developments: some pathetic stuff that calls itself a prerelease of YiffCam is out...

Also, I found what was wrong with Schedulist =) Can you believe I spent a month crying, when in fact the only thing that made it to Brutally Blow Up was that one for() condition was = when it was supposed to be <=? Yeah, stuff like this happens...

It uses CPAN module Set::IntRange for figuring out date ranges - a bit cleaner than my routine... it still doesn't work at all, though. HTML tables can be such a pain!

Dammit, if I can't make some small, unessential detail to work (in this case, Texinfo->PDF conversion), I'd better just publish stuff as it is: Mortar (a program to generate NoCeM notices) is out, at version 1.0.1.1...

As implied above, this is an ItWorksForMe® release. This is a fairly limited audience tool, so it shouldn't matter anyway.

Yeah, this is the famed elisp version. The perl version (still somewhere out there) is about 10 times smaller and does just about the same thing. =)

Any way, the spammers should feel the cold bite of NoCeM shell splinters tonight. Don't spare their blood! They have done a very wrong thing, and verily, they should pay for their misbehavior! We, the Antispammers, shall not sleep until last one of their vile brethen has been swept off the face of the planet!

1, 2, 3... ... 9, 10. Phew. I'm feeling better. Or not.

::sighs:: I'll never become a good coder!

I'm declaring the status of Schedulist officially Hopeless™. Why? Well, excuse for unacceptable language: I have no ****ng idea what is wrong!

If you think you can bang some Clue to my thick head, PLEASE help. This program is driving me nuts.

But beware: The original script is actually a lot more complicated than this, it uses insane syntax to do really funky HTML tables. I'm actually proud of that, in a rather pervert way. =) The new version is mostly "cut and paste from original and put some variable names there that actually make sense - and interpolating variable names is verboten!" The code should work at least to some extent. It just doesn't!

On the "This may actually even work"® side, I'm... (not that) proud... to present some POP3-related scriptlets. Those are available at my utilities page.

And almost forgot: Today I again looked at hasterm.c - a really small but helpful utility that does terminal examination. Too bad I don't know what's the point of it now...

Hello, this is my first diary entry. Please don't hit me. =)

I've been, as you may have been able to see from my E2 diary, working on this thing called Schedulist.

The new version is underway. It's getting cooler. The HTML it generates is something I'm kind of proud of (in the sense "as a mental excercise, not as Good HTML Use").

Currently, though, there's still a few severe quirks with the HTML Table dumping code. I have a reference to an array of objects as $$tables. Now, ($tables->[$n])->getlength() fails, because it's undefined. If there's one thing in Perl I find confusing, it's the way the references are used.

I would need a better Perl debugger, the current one is driving me nuts... =(

Rather than making myself to hunt for the lost reference, I spent time documenting the API and the main program. Well, at least it's something that would actually help...