Cody Russell

GSview

I sent another GSview patch to Russell today. I think GSview is a little prettier now, at least. Check out a screenshot of the new look.

Shitty gigs suck ass

I agreed to play some shitty gig for Kasia. It’s four services. The first one, tonight, is about an hour and a half. I assume the others may be near that, I don’t know. It pays… $60. Whee. Of course, even if I had known what it paid ahead of time, I would still have agreed to do it because I need the money. =)

Tech Fellowship

Speaking of needing money, I’ve been waiting to hear from the Johns Hopkins Technology Fellowship people, and I finally did.. and boom, I did not get it! I’m so pissed. I saw the list of projects that got it last year and it was pretty sad. Some people made some websites. One person made a Powerpoint presentation. Yeah, a single Powerpoint presentation. That was worth $5000. And this year some media-streaming software for live classes or concerts is not worth $5000 to them. How shitty. They said they had like three times as many people apply, but I’m still surprised and disappointed, because I was expecting to get that $5000. Oh well.

Valgrind

This is a nice utility that Seth pointed me towards yesterday. It’s good for detecting memleaks and other such nasties. Check it out here. I sent in a patch that lets it work with GTK and GNOME 2 programs. This patch should be in today’s release, so if you’re hacking on GNOME 2, check it out.

Recent hacking..

Removing all the Bonobo control code from Ludwig van today. I finally decided it’s just stupid, and it’s not worth the time wasted. Started hacking on gfonted a little. It compiles with Gtk+-2.0 and libgnomevfs 2.0. It doesn’t quite work yet, though. Hopefully it will pretty soon. I have a couple other things I’m going to get started on or return to soon. More updates later on.

Recitals

Cameron had his recital today. It was good. He did Bach C major suite, Kreisler Praeludium and Allegro, and Hindemith Sonata Op.11/4. There was some crazy old man a few rows ahead of us who was bobbing his head like mad the whole time, making little gestures with his hands like he was playing piano, and after the Kreisler the guy turns back to the audience and says, “Yeah, that guy plays good.”

Jeremy played his recital yesterday, and it was also good. He did Bach c minor suite and Schubert “Arpeggione” sonata. Coincidentally, the same old man was there, also making gestures and being generally very physically active in the performance for a person who isn’t in the performance. He didn’t say anything though.

Carolyn Kuan had a recital last weekend that I played in. She conducted Beethoven Symphony No.3 and Shostakovich Sinfonietta, an arrangement of Quartet No.8 for string orchestra. It was very cool. The Beethoven is really long and really hard. I’ve played Shostakovich Quartet No.8 with three quartets before, so that was actually a breeze for me.

Dungeon Siege

This is a really cool game. I just got it a few days ago, and I’ve played it a little. I’m not usually into RPG sort of games anymore, but this one is pretty cool. You have an inventory that you get stuff in, just like every other RPG game, but in this one you can also buy a pack mule for carrying more shit with you.

I’ve got five people in my party, plus a pack mule. I started out trying to train my hero, Hiro, pretty equally between combat magic, melee, and ranged weaponry. Now I decided to focus him on combat magic. He also usually has a little stone gargoyle that he summons. If I could name it, its name would be Hans. Hans throws little green blobs of pain at monsters if they get too close to Hiro. Hans is very protective of Hiro. We have some chick in the group who is becoming a pretty badass archer, we have Zed the Sorcerer who really sucked at first and isn’t really getting that much better but he sits back and heals everyone else while they beat the shit out of Krugs. Then I have two other fighter-type guys. One of them is getting pretty good, while the other is sort of new and is a little behind the others. He has a really awesome Scottish accent, though, so I figured I had to have him. His name should be Willy.

My pack mule is the best. I wanted to name it Boris, but I couldn’t. That was a little disappointing. I think it has a name, but I can’t remember what it is and I don’t really care. I call him Boris anyway. Boris is a little bit slow, and he can’t attack. He’s good at taking damage, though, and he can carry lots of shit like a good pack mule named Boris should. Boris is so cool. I wish they had incorporated the learning features from Black & White into this game so I could train Boris to bite some Krug’s wiener off.

Halvorsen

Lesley and I started working on the Halvorsen Passacaglia finally. I think it’s going to be really cool when we play it on her recital. If she lets me, I’ll post an mp3 and a Vorbis file online. This piece is so much fun!

In-proc Bonobo components rule!

I converted Ludwig van’s Bonobo code so that the control is in-proc and it rules! It’s so much faster to start the control.

I really wish Evolution would do this now. That would rock so hard.

Amy’s recital

One of Ms.Chiang’s viola students, Amy Davis, performed her recital last night in Leakin Hall. It was so good. She did Bach c minor suite, and Mozart Sinfonia Concertante with Simon LaPointe. The Mozart happens to be one of my favorite pieces right now, so I really got into that a lot. They both were really awesome on it. Amy’s Bach suite was beautiful.

Bad Sopwith!

Elliott Lee got my hopes up the other day when he told me that the latest release of Rosegarden was completely converted over to GTK. I thought, “Holy shit, this is awesome”, until I downloaded and saw that it requires QT and KDE to run. Still, it looks like Guillaume is doing really well with it. It looks good.

Conducting Class

We’re doing Mahler Symphony No.1 right now, and it ROCKS!! I love that piece so much, and I’m finally playing it. So far we’ve only done the first two movements. Next week we do the rest, I think.