Tue 13 Jul 2004

  • Weekend: Our library (http://www.gpl.org) has museum pass program. Rosanna and I spent a lovely day at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. I enjoyed the maritime exhibits. They also had a pretty impressive collection of export art. We then went to Gloucester for dinner.

Tue 22 Jun 2004

  • bad dog: Dogs should not be barking at 5:30 in the morning. Jester has been duly chastised. Gotta try to get back to sleep.

  • bugs: I found a cute bug in the control-center yesterday. The only way that gnome-window-properties has worked at all in the past (if it worked) is through relying on malloc reusing the same block that was freed. That is to say, after calling:

    g_free (struct->value); struct->value = g_strdup (str);

    it relied on struct->value pointing to the same block of memory, now with different contents. It’s been this way for over two years.

  • Running: I went to Cambridge this past weekend to help some friends compete in the Boston Urban Challenge. They took fourth, which was a very good finish and good enough to qualify them for the next round in Miami.

  • Travel: I misplaced my Green Card earlier this week. I was worried about making GUADEC but Zana went above the call of duty and sorted through the papers on my desk to find it.

Wed 16 Jun 2004

  • games: Finished Prince of Persia! It was an extremely well crafted game, and a great way to spend a couple evenings. My one complaint is that it was on the short side. The story was quite compelling, though. It was well crafted and kept pulling us to play just a little longer. It had a nice twist at the end, that tied the whole game together really well.

Mon 14 Jun 2004

  • games: Bought Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time this weekend. It’s a lot of fun, and lets me do much cooler moves than I should be able to do. Zana points out that the Prince would be in much better shape if only he’d carry a canteen.

Sat 12 Jun 2004

  • bingo: Zana and I have been playing Wind Waker again for the last couple of weeks. We have been trying to get every single item in the game, and are tantalizingly close. We have believe we have done everything except take a picture of Puppet Gannon. Unfortunately, we can’t think of any way to get his picture back to the figurine maker. So close, and yet so unsatisfying.

  • python: Due to my misunderstanding the docs for os.path.isdir(), I blew away Owen’s /bin directory this week. Fortunately rsync is in /usr/bin and we were able to recover it. Look out, I’m a dangerous man!

Tue 08 Jun 2004

  • python: In python, os.path.join has a somewhat unexpected behavior. For example:

    os.path.join (‘/tmp’, ‘foo’) => ‘/tmp/foo’

    os.path.join (‘/tmp’, ‘/foo’) => ‘/foo’

    Consider the following example code:

    os.system (‘rm -rf ‘ + os.path.join (chroot_path, ‘/dev’))

    Eek.

  • python (update): A better way to do this is to do:

    os.path.normpath (chroot_path + os.path.sep + subpath)

Sun 06 Jun 2004

  • AisleRiot: I fixed a bug in the hint code in odessa.scm that has been bugging me for seven years. While testing it, I found another bug (crasher) that must have been there for at least as long. My scheme skills are rusty.

  • weather: Zana and I went to the beach with Brian and Delphine, yesterday. We tried to fly the kite that they had gotten in California, but it wasn’t windy enough. So we flew my kite instead.

Fri 07 May 2004

  • sysadmin: Time to get back to the grind. It’s moving day tomorrow and we have a lot to do. We have a pretty good idea of what needs doing as, for better or worse, we had a practice run a couple weeks ago.

    The new machines and setup will give us a lot of really nice features. I’m excited about having shared home directories among all the machines now. The manual syncing mechanism we were using before was prone to mistakes. Having a centralized naming scheme is a huge improvement. Additionally, we’ll have extra horse-power for bugzilla. That should make Luis happy.

Fri 30 Apr 2004

  • life: …and now, Zana I have been married for four years. It has been a wonderful time, and I wouldn’t give them up for anything. To celebrate, we went out for sushi followed by a trip to the bookstore for coffee and cheesecake. We enjoyed just sitting there, chatting and flipping through some books.

  • music (later): My attempts to add a CD to Zana’s rhythmbox has crashed it horribly. Grr…