Category: hacking

Tue 03 Apr 2001

  • caulk: Finally caulked the bathtub. Not sure how good a job I did, but we’ll find out over time. I learned three valuable lessons doing so. First, using masking tape to line your edges is good. Second, you really want to use more then you think. Third, remove the shower curtain before starting. )-:

  • hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Closed the last of my API bugs today (the “range_changed” signal and the “expand_row”, “collapse_row” signals). This means that the tree is completely frozen API wise for 2.0. That would be nice…

  • packing (guadec): Did a lot of laundry tonight. Need to actually throw it in a bag tomorrow.

  • GNOME: 1.4 was released tonight. In many ways, it’s a somewhat uninteresting release of GNOME. I had very little to do with the release, for the first time in a long time. It is an important release though, and will have to bridge us over to 2.0. That release _will_ kick ass…

Mon 02 Apr 2001

  • hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Not a lot of work done today. Still, wrote a simple little test program to see if speed is a problem. I’m not sure yet.

  • movie (Being John Malkovich): Watched with Zana tonight while I did laundry.

  • books: Went used book shopping with Zana. We got $65 worth, which stretched pretty far. I got “Children of Dune”, 3 of the (very stupid, but influential in my life) Conrad Stargard books, a couple playing card books, and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” This should keep me busy for a while.

  • grout: Discovered an ant graveyard when removing grout. Very disturbing.

  • April Fools: There were no funny April Fools jokes this year. crackmonkey’s rant was pretty funny, but unintentional.

Sun 01 Apr 2001

  • paintball: Paintball this morning with the Red Hat Dev team. It was somewhat frustrating — my gun kept jamming and my goggles kept fogging up. Left a little early with Zana.

  • shopping: After paintball, we went to Walmart and Barnes and Noble. Walmart is still one of my least favorite shops of all time, but they did have tall (72″) bookshelves on sale for $29.99. We bought a pair, and I attached them end to end, as we have run out of wall space. Zana and I then moved books around using my cool Monk shaped bookends. At Barnes and Noble, I bought a travel book on Copenhagen, as well as “The Travel Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide”. Bought Zana a copy of “The Genesis of Justice” by Alan Dershowitz, as it looked interesting. I may borrow it someday. Loaded up on a unleaded mocha latte on the way out.

  • car: Windshield wiper is dying. My attempts to fix it broke off a protective cap. Whoops… )-:

  • grout: Removed more grout. Dremmel, good. Knife, bad.

  • hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Committed some work to GtkTreeStore to make it sort. Chased it down with some fixes to make it compile. Bad Nathan!

  • meta: Chris Gabriel pointed out that I have a diary in a similar format to his. It was completely accidental! Hopefully he doesn’t have any patents on his look and feel. Anyway, mine has more legible HTML, so that’s something in my favor… (-:

  • movie: Zana’s watching sneakers. I’ve seen this movie five times or so. Still, its pretty fun (despite the incredible disappearing guards at the end…)

Sat 31 Mar 2001

  • dinnerandamovie: Went out with Owen and Zana to the Persian restaurant (http://cafep.com/) and rented The Red Violin afterwards. I liked the movie even though it was a little silly. A very good mood piece.

  • hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Finished getting GtkListStore to fully implement GtkTreeSortable, as well as getting GtkTreeView to fully take advantage of them (minus parity.) It’s pretty darn neat. I then started getting GtkTreeStore to use it, but I didn’t finish, unfortunately (despite the fact it’s mostly a cut’n’paste job.) I also spent some time talking to Crutcher about the next step of the alchemist. Good chat.

  • hacking (lungs): Spent some time after Owen left trying to remove the grout from the bathtub/tile interface. The previous owner had done a pretty poor job, and the grout had started cracking. We would like to put some caulk there to try and resist the water longer. I dragged out the Dremmel tool to try and get faster results then the knife we have, and indeed I got them. Unfortunately, I breathed in too much dust, and I’ve been coughing and sniffling ever since. Need to invest in a face mask…

  • lunch: Went with Zana to the Northgate mall to get her engagement ring inspected/cleaned. While there, we ate at Tokyo Express. It was the worse mall food I’ve ever had. It was amazingly bad. Zana’s meal was worse — her “Beef Stew with Noodles” was basicly Spaghetti with meat sauce. Only problem was the meat sauce was made from the cheapest part of the beef.

  • jester: Seems to have learned the word “perambulate”. Need to come up with another euphamism for “walk”.

  • meta: Somewhere along the way, I started to uppercase my subjects. Should probably rectify that.

Tue 27 Mar 2001

  • Hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Massive amounts of GtkListStore hacking today. I felt like I’d been extremely productive at the end of the day, despite the fact I didn’t get to work until mid afternoon. I put up a cool (animated) screenshot on the labs website. I also learned how to change the timeout of a single frame in the gimp. What an amazingly broken system!!!

  • Havoc: Broke his left wrist. It sucks a lot. Further proof that vehicles with two wheels cannot be trusted. I visited him this morning and lent him my twiddler in the hopes he gets more use out of it then I did. He seemed a little doped up, but otherwise, about as good as you’d expect someone with a busted wrist to be. He also described the device used to set his wrist. I swear, in some aspects we haven’t left the Twelth Century.

  • Books (Fools War): Just finished this book. I enjoyed it a lot despite the fact it petered out at the end.

Mon 26 Mar 2001

  • DSL: Connection was down for most of the weekend. Suck.

  • Oscars: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wires didn’t win Best Picture. Further Proof that none of the voters actually watch the movies.

  • Hacking: Despite the fact we’ve reached crunch time, I was unable to do any serious GTK+ hacking from home due to above mentioned network outage. Worked on AR2, instead. I got the gdeck library hooked up with the Scheme code as a test, and managed to get the Klondike to appear (though moving cards is not currently working.) I started working on the drawing code for cards, and got bogged down by pixbuf issues (alpha/non-alpha messiness). I’m thinking my great idea of drawing the images dynamicaly might not be such a great idea after all. It will save 1.5 Megs of memory, though…

  • Taxes: Suck.

  • Movie (Out of Sight): I’ve seen a lot of Jennifer Lopez recently, for some reason. During the Acadamy Awards pregame show, I saw a _lot_ of her…

  • dog: Jester decided that it would be a lot of fun to rip up our bags of leaves and spread them over the lawn. Bad Dog!

  • nothing.webwynk.net: My computer is sounding like a Jet Engine again. Bad ‘puter!

Sat 24 Mar 2001

  • Hacking (AisleRiot2): I probably should clarify what I got working last night. I got the library back to where it was before I tore it apart last week, though moving/revealed cards are now shaped. I also made it autoconf based (instead of my ugly hack of a makefile) and checked it into CVS this evening too (module gdeck). If anyone wants to play with it (or give me patches, even) that would be great! Tomorrow I plan on simple string drawing to get the card value displayed, and to start trying to hook it up to a game or something.

  • Movie (A Fish Called Wanda): Watched this again. Zana pointed out that Jamie Lee Curtis, while a fine actress, was badly cast for this movie. I must concur. They shoulda definately gone for a more ‘blonde’ actress for her part.

  • Hacking (GTK+-HEAD): We’ve got less then 2 weeks to get an API freeze done (for guadec.) It looks more and more like the tree will be a soft freeze, and will be holding things up. Perhaps, if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have tried so hard to let people implement their own models. Ah, well. We at least have this feature now. Time will only tell how important it is.

  • jocave: Hi Justin!

Fri 23 Mar 2001

  • Movie: Saw Highlander 2 and Sliding Doors the last few days. Sliding Doors rocked! Highlander 2 was truly, amazingly bad. I had no idea how they managed to make such a crappy movie… It was redeemed by one point — I loved the little movie they showed on the plane. However, the rest was truly bad.

  • Hacking (AisleRiot): Ripped apart the code again, and this time (in theory) it’s correct. I’m still not 100% sure of it, though. I think I can start thinking about hooking up the game soon. Need to get it into CVS first.

  • Hacking (GTK+-HEAD): We’re getting to the end of the cycle. So much left to do! I realized today that I need to rewrite both GtkTreeStore and GtkListStore to take advantage of the sorting stuff. Pretty depressing, as the code there was pretty clean. Argh! Must put on a big effort next week to get the sorting API done for GUADEC.

  • Dinner: Peppers. Waitress had a cool leopard print tattoo on her neck. That’s not something you see every day.

  • Mir: The worlds biggest rock skipping contest and I miss it! It’s a pity that the coverage from CNN sucked so much.

  • Red Hat: We broke even. Pretty cool, huh…

Wed 21 Mar 2001

  • Movie (My Fair Lady): Where the devil are my slippers? Finally got our first movie from Netflix. It’s a pretty good service, though I’d like to see what the turnaround is before I renew it. I had forgotten how much I liked this musical, though I think it ends on a somewhat flat note (by modern standards, anyway.) Anyway, the DVD had a track with Audrey Hepburn’s voice on it. She obviously wasn’t as strong a singer, but it seemed to fit her character more (at least in the song they had — “Wouldn’t it be Loverly”.) Anyway, I think I’d like to see the whole thing with her singing someday. Maybe they’ll rerelease such a version…

  • Meetings: Eazel guys came to visit this morning. It was good to talk to them again, though I’ll prolly see at least Darin and Maciej again at GUADEC. We ate lunch at the blue Indian restaurant where much nerding took place. It started raining on the way back, and Bud impressed everyone with his foresight by pulling out an umbrella. It was very cold rain.

  • Hacking: Got very little done today with the meetings and all. I did fix some annoying sizing code during one of the slow parts of the meeting. That was pretty nifty.

  • Dinner: Went to Joe’s Crab Shack with Zana. I read a story in a book of short stories (“Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri) about an Indian woman who went to the beach and had Fried Clams with lots of Tobasco sauce. So Zana and I had plates of fried stuff. While there, all the waiters/waitresses/hosts did this odd dance routine and sang lots of songs. I’m glad we don’t do this at Red Hat. On the way home, we stopped at bn for books and coffee. Dangerous place; I bought the Diamond Age and a book by Jostein Gaarder, who also wrote Sophie’s World. Oh, and that book on Quidditch as a spur of the moment purchase.

  • Rain: The rain sucks. My roof leaks. I need to get this fixed tomorrow.