Cody Russell

Baltimore Book Festival

Yesterday Rebecca and I were walking around checking out the book festival. It’s sort of cool, except the food is all terribly overpriced, as festival/fair things always are. There was a stand selling turkey sandwiches that looked and smelled really good. But then Rebecca reminded me of the Labor Day episode of the Man Show that showed the three Worst Jobs in America, one of which was a turkey masturbator.

There was a stand giving out free packages of Famous Amos cookies, and it turned out that Wally Amos was there. He was autographing packages of cookies, but I ended up just throwing my autographed package away.

PSO Concert

Peabody Symphony Orchestra is performing tonight. Brahms violin concerto, Tchaikowsky Symphony No. 4, and Weber “Oberon” Overture.

Viola studio

Vicki Chiang’s viola studio is so cool. I’m so happy to be here.

Test

That was actually just an excuse to link to Ms. Chiang’s studio page. I’m testing something in Google.

This has been a test of the emergency linking service. This was only a test.

Weird email

For some reason I got this email from some guy I’ve never heard of asking me all about cvs and branch merging and weird shit that I never do. I could barely understand what he was asking, so I just referred him over to gnome-hackers or gnome-devel. I hope he finds the answers he needs.

Hacking

I have started writing a new XML loader object, LudwigXmlParser, that I think is very good. I think the way it’s written will make it extremely trivial to make modifications to the XML file format later on. It’s designed around a single recursive function that parses using a lookup table of XML tags. So, rather than writing out tons of code, I just create a new description of my XML file with some callbacks for setting or getting the data. It’s similar to setting up GnomeUI stuff. It’s not finished, but so far it seems to be cool.

Other than that, I haven’t really been doing much hacking.

Other photo

I left off a photo from my list that I posted earlier. Here is a picture of way too many viola students in a single room.

My HTML vocabulary sucks

Cameron just pointed out to me, as I typed out the Other photo section above, that I was using the <ol> tag to do indentation for my Advogato entries. This happens to work just fine, but I wasn’t really using the tag for its intended use, which is ordered lists. Instead, now, I am using <p style=”margin-left:3em”>, which is a hell of a lot more typing.

20 Sep 2001

Victor

I saw Victor today wearing a white shirt. I thought this may be the end of the Vic-noir era, but later on I saw him with a black shirt over his white shirt, so I guess probably not.

yakk:

Does your translucent panel hack use Xrender, or does it do a hack similar to Zvt? How does it look when you slide a panel in?

Photos

Last Sunday I took a few photos. Earlier today I burned them onto a CD-RW and took them up to school, scaled a few of them down using the watered down version of Adobe Photoshop 5.0 that our school has on a few of the Windows machines, and posted them onto a webpage. They probably won’t stay there forever due to my incredibly small limit of 5 megs on my web space. However, you can view a few of them now:
• Ms. Chiang with her 6-month old son, Oliver
• A few of Ms. Chiang’s other students. From left to right are Louise, Cameron Raecke, Jenny Anschel, and Jessie.
  

• Oliver again, but turning his head really fast so the camera blurs. Sort of funny looking.
• Oliver again, but a better picture.
• Bill and Kasia getting into Cameron’s car.
  

I’ll post other photos later on, probably. And once I get my DSL line installed I’ll be posting tons of photos of Baltimore.

USB storage

While I’m on the subject of photos and cameras, I just have to say how cool it is that I can mount my camera like any other storage device and copy my images directly out of it, or even view them in Nautilus.

Possibly in trouble again

After just having had two complaints against me by the JHMI network admins and then the Peabody computer lab people (which turned out not to be about me at all), I suspect that the dean may be calling me into her office again, but this time because I didn’t slide my little card through the slot at the security gate, and I reached through the bars of the gate and pressed the little red button instead.

I’m of the opinion now that I should not get in trouble over this, but the security people who have such an insecure gate should get in trouble.

yakk’s panel

yakk:

Your panel hack looks über-cool, dude! Is there any way for the panel applets also to be translucent? That would look really cool.

Viola lesson

I had my first real viola lesson on Monday with Ms. Chiang, and it rocked! She said I did really well, so she loaded me down with tons of additional tedious work to do this week. I feel really good. I feel better than I have in a very long time.

Conductors’ Orchestra

CO is really cool. It was cooler this week than it was before because this week we were doing Tchaikowsky Symphony No. 6, and before we were doing Beethoven Symphony No. 6. The Beethoven is great, but the Tchaik is so much fun! CO is really cool because it seems like the people in it are more interested in what they’re doing than the people in PSO are.

Viola party

Viola party

The title of this entry alone should strike fear into the hearts of any musicians out there!! Yes, Ms. Chiang had a party for all her viola students today over at her house. Miriam brought her dog, Simon, and Cameron brought chocolate rumballs. They’re little chocolate balls with rum in them, although I could taste the chocolate only slightly, and I could taste the rum very strongly. Cameron’s modified recipe called for the normal 1 cup of rum, plus his “an extra splash”. I’m sure that made all the difference.

I saw Ms. Chiang’s new son, Oliver. He’s six months old, and very cute now. I’ll post photos in a couple weeks.

Mulad:

I like the letter you wrote to the president. Especially the last paragraph.

mjs:

I found your recent post very interesting and informative.

gman:

Nice hair, blondee!

The JHMI Situation

The JHMI Situation

I got an email from Dean Frank saying that she wants to talk to me about an email she got from the network administrators at jhmi.edu. I didn’t have time to respond, so I came back later and suddenly found that my account had been disabled.

wtf??

I then got a telephone call from Dean Frank last night, but I wasn’t home when she called so I called her back this morning. It seems the sysadmins at the medical institute are complaining about me because I’ve been questioning the security on their machines.

Last night Cameron discovered yet another security problem at jhmi.edu, and it’s actually quite a major problem. Since they insist on removing all the UNIX commands and shit, they decided to create a web-based frontend for doing things like changing your password or removing files in your home directory. Stupid, huh? Well, it just gets better. The page creates a popup window that asks for your username and password, and later on there is a “logout” link you click. A person would expect that when they click “logout” then their entire personal information would be removed from the machine on which they are browsing from, but this is not the case. Next time you try to login, that popup window does not appear, which indicates that the cookie with your login information is still residing on the computer.

The funny thing is, if I tell them that they have another security problem, they’ll only get upset and try to get me in trouble with the dean again.

If you ever go to Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, or the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and if you give even the crap about security on your email account, do not use the account they provide you. Get a DSL or email account with another service provider!

Clearly, they don’t care at all what their users think. I suspect it’s even worse for students at Peabody Institute. They actually told me that they have very low opinions of Peabody students.

Blood

Rebecca, Cameron, and I were going to go give blood today, but Johns Hopkins Medical was pretty much shut down and not accepting blood donations because they’re in D.C. doing emergency medical stuff. They said they’ll be doing a very deliberate blood drive very soon and so I think that’s when I’ll go.

Advogato

I’m going to cease posting any opinion about anything that anyone else on Advogato may have an opinion about just on general principle from this point on. People seem way more uptight here than I ever expected, and certainly nothing good for the Advogato community is coming from people speaking their opinions. Some people are going so far as to nearly throw up upon reading what other people post, and I wonder how friendships will be affected as a result of everything the past few days. This place wasn’t created for this purpose anyway, and I feel bad that it’s been being used this way.

I was sort of dropping out of the hacking scene anyway, since I have no Internet connection to my own machine and since I am at this new school and need to study. I guess if some of my hacker friends despise me now, I’ve got an even better reason to drop out now.

12 Sep 2001

yakk: Is there anything more brave than dying to save your country / people / faith?”

I agree with campd‘s response, but I think there’s more to it than that.

Look at how many people, including me and many Americans, are worried that the US response may be blown out of proportion and harm more than just the people responsible for the attack. Certainly there is a huge chance that this will occur, and so you now have to wonder, were the people who planned this brave and did they accomplish anything towards the goal of saving their country / people / faith, or did they just succeed in incurring the wrath of a large world power onto their people?

Whatever you think of me or Americans, we don’t want to see people hurt who had nothing to do with this. I want to see the people responsible for this dead, but I have serious doubts that they will be the only people.

I get the feeling that when yakk says people here are advocating killing innocent civilians, he’s including me because I said I want to see these people die. I did say I want to see the people responsible dead. I never said anything about attacking a country or anything like that.

campd:

DUDE, your Spider Man picture rules!