Fri 13 Jul 2001

  • movie (Alphaville): Watching alphaville. Odd, odd movie. A French version of 1984. Very odd. I need an Alpha 60 here. It would be fun to play go against it.

  • movie (Chinese Ghost Story I): Last night, we watched this. It felt like a cross between Princess Bride and Evil Dead 2 (in Chinese). It was quite a bit of fun, though.

  • fish: Brought quite a bit of fish back with me from the coast. On Monday we had grilled Swordfish with Papya and Pineapple salsa. Tuesday was Tuna steaks with a plum-wine and sake sauce, which we shared with Christian. We watched battlebots. It was cool. I want to build a battlebot.

  • GNOME: Spent today hacking on the control-center again. Felt very odd — a lot of things would have been much better nowadays. Unfortunately it was written before the days of gnorba, which meant that the control-center compares argv[0] of capplets against the filenames in the .desktop files to identify them. Blah. I had to add a bunch of symlinks to the sawfish capplet to make it work.

  • movie (Alphaville): Update. The Alpha 60 went nuts when posed a riddle. It could not handle the concept of happiness. These evil-computer movies are so predicatable. Why can’t they ever go nuts trying to comprehend the nature of something more mundane, like a pretzel.

  • dinner: Barbecued with Zana, Owen, Havoc, Amy, Alex and Anna. For something thrown together at the absolute last possible minute, it came out okay, though a big ‘ol hairy catepillar ruined Havoc’s Cheetos. The watermelon Owen got was extremely good. Amazingly enough, he also bought some Bubba Burgers (which were Bioengineered to be extra juicy or some such nonsense.) The came out pretty well, though.

  • movie (Alphaville): Loses something in the translation. Zana commented on the use of familiar/formal parts of speech. They didn’t make their way into the subtitle.

  • fruit: Mangos, Papayas, I always get them confused.

Wed 16 May 2001

  • movie: Fairwell My Concubine. A very good movie. Made me really greatful again I didn’t grow up in China during the cultural revolution. What a horrible, horrible thing that was. After the movie, I decided to go ahead and buy a book on Cantonese grammar so I can (try to) learn a little Cantonese with Zana.

  • hacking (gtk+-HEAD): Lot of work sanitizing column code. Still not sure what some interactions are, but I’m ready to move to DnD. The tree will be finished some day…

Tue 15 May 2001

  • movie: Saw “An Ideal Husband” with Alex and Zana. It was pretty good, though I felt like I’d seen it before. I felt really stupid at the end when I realized it was an Oscar Wilde play. I even think I’ve read it before.

  • hacking (Zope): Owen and I learned more about Zope then we wanted to this evening. Apparently, when setting the document root, we broke all management software. We had to save the page source to a file and edit the table target in order to fix it. Anyhow, it seems to basically work now.

  • hacking (gdeck): Rusty Conover seems interested in it. Must-redouble-current-efforts!!!

Tue 01 May 2001

  • hacking (music): Spent a few minutes cleaning up Mr. Rupert’s Ripping and Encoding tools so they do a better job of encoding data into the ogg’s created. I am considering adding FreeDB support to the encoding tool so I can get the DATE field added.

  • hacking (Nautilus): Spent the night trying to modify the music view in Nautilus to handle ogg files. Dealing with the nautilus view and gnome-vfs was a lot less painful then I expected. Everything I tried basically worked. libvorbis seems to have a somewhat crufty API, but seems alright other then that. I have it currently displaying the correct file information. Tonight I’ll get it to play.

  • hacking (gnome-vfs): I hope someone looks/comments on my patch.

  • movie: Saw the Producers last night, and the Mummy the night before. Neither one was particular good, but both were very enjoyable. I think I’d like to go see the Mummy 2 this weekend. It looks like it will be much better on the big screen.

    The reason we rented the Producers, was that I have a recollection of really enjoying it when I was a kid. I think I merged that film with “To Be or Not To Be”, though. Both movies have musicals with Hitler in them, and are made by Mel Brooks.

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…)

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!