Bloggy

The Pittsburgh Steelers finally beat the Jacksonville Jaguars for the first time in like 3 years. And here I was worried about this season but our team is managing to find ways to win (well, for the most part).

Posted by mpyne under Personal | No Comments »

kdesvn-build 1.7 is out. The list of features/bugfixes is fairly long and I don’t feel like re-massaging it. I think it warrants you grabbing it if you’re already using it though.

Also, Just Say No™ to broken icons! I just fixed the help:/ kioslave today to have a correct icon assigned to it. If you notice the “question mark” icon (which is the “unknown” icon in Oxygen), find out where it’s defined and either fix it or let someone know who can fix it. I’ve noticed that the kwrite icon shows up as a question mark for me in KRunner but I can’t figure that one out as its .desktop file looks correct…

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

I’m not sure when this changed in KDE 4 but if you move your mouse to the upper-left corner and keep trying to “push” you’ll get the “exposé” effect without having to use the keyboard shortcut, and then click on the window you want. Handy alternative to Alt-Tab.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Useful Tricks | 12 Comments »

Why are you taking notes on the debate? I thought you already mailed in your vote.

This was a quote from my wife a few hours ago as the Presidential debate was getting started. She was right of course in that it wouldn’t affect my vote. I did jot notes down for the first hour or so just so I’d be able to remember the debate later should discussion ever come up. :-)

Anyways I expected better from Obama and worse from McCain. I still think Obama won but he at least at first seemed to have trouble collection his thoughts at times. I’m quite pissed at McCain trying to say that the only way for the deaths of American servicemembers in Iraq to have meaning is to “win” the war as it discounts the very real effort of many of those servicemembers. The Navy Times had an article the other day describing a Marine put up for a Medal of Honor because he died jumping on a grenade to save nearby Marines. He may not have won the war but you’d better believe what he did meant something to those Marines that he saved.

If there’s any single thing about this campaign that scares me though, it is Gov. Palin potentially becoming President if McCain wins the election. I’m impressed enough that he is doing as well as he is doing at 72 (?) years old but he has melanoma, suffered for years as a POW in Vietnam and, judging by the change in appearance of Presidents Clinton and Bush over their time in office, I’m really not convinced that Palin wouldn’t end up as President sooner rather than later. I feel that would be disastrous for the nation given her current practices for picking executive staff (i.e. nepotism instead of meritocracy). Being completely silent on the investigations going on in Alaska isn’t making me feel any better what with having just gone through Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez…

However, that’s neither here nor there and all I can do now is hope that the best candidates win the upcoming election. In more exciting news, a friend of mine coerced me into joining a fantasy football team (for points, not money, don’t worry). I didn’t really put a lot of effort into the picks and I missed the draft due to other committments so my team (”Graphitar”) is basically the best team the Yahoo! Random Number Generator could provide. Against all odds though, the team put up an incredible performance in Week 1 thanks to career days by Donovan McNabb and Michael Turner. It’s looking like the 171 points or so put up in that game may stay a season record at this rate. 6/8 teams get to the playoffs so I should at least be good for that.

On a completely unrelated topic I see the topic of Phonon and gstreamer has come up again. I documented many of the reasons why KDE needs Phonon in a letter to the LWN Editors more than 2 years ago. Suffice to say I don’t feel like going over the arguments again, but let’s just say that Phonon keep the doors open for gstreamer 0.12 to be supported in KDE when the time comes.

Finally on a more depressing note a submarine sailor was killed almost a week ago. The linked article is about all the specifics I have except that it is unlikely that the sailor was cleaning the rudder since last time I checked it had to be in the water (where the crew is not located) to work. It is likely that any cleaning he was doing was in the area of the hydraulics controlling the rudder but I don’t see how he would have been caught up in the mechanism. At least on my boat it has a shield surrounding the mechanism although Murphy’s law being what it is…

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 2 Comments »

My wife bought me a PS3 as an early Christmas present (and so I could possibly bring it on the boat for the next underway).

So far though the experience has been underwhelming. The on screen keyboard is annoying to use, even accounting for the fact that it uses a controller. It at least uses the normal QWERTY layout instead of just putting the letters in order but you have to select that mode manually, otherwise it gives you 10 digits as if I was trying to send a text message to someone. What’s next, limiting games to 320×240 resolution because people have PSPs and DS? I don’t see why they intentionally limit the number of input buttons just because that’s what people have to deal with on a cell phone.

Eventually I got the internet access to work, at which time it needed an update. After about seriously 20 minutes of downloading over a cable modem it finally was able to start the 5 minute process of actually applying the update.

Finally I was able to play a game. Perhaps my wife shouldn’t have chosen Medal of Honor: Airborne though. :-/

It spent 10 minutes on its own installing stuff to the hard drive. I then got to go through a training mission where I was supposed to parachute out of an airplane near a green flare below. The on-screen instructions were basically useless. For example, “Press X to flare the parachute”. That explains nothing to me, and pressing the button made my legs kick and nothing else was apparent. It would probably have helped if my son wasn’t crying and therefore drowning out the spoken instructions but seriously, why put up on-screen instructions so undescriptive?

Also cool about the training mission was that I’m pretty sure my soldier broke his legs every landing. The game even made sure to put a message on-screen saying as much: “Botched Landing 10/50″ or something like that. For all 3 landings. This was even with me holding up on the stick trying to “Grease the Landing” or whatever that’s supposed to do. I never did figure out how to maneuver in mid-air. Trying the obvious thing (moving the control stick) merely makes you oscillate in the air before your untimely leg-breaking.

Luckily though no matter how much you suck the Army is willing to drop your ass over Sicily. I must have been on easy mode because I pretty much automatically landed near a green flare (botched landing, of course) and started the mission. It was basically me walking around and having to manually aim everywhere and getting shot 10 times and yet I still miraculously had half of my life bar. I figure that the health is so high because in-game testing revealed that the poor control they impose led to people getting out-gunned by the A.I. I wonder why they didn’t simply improve the control so that you aren’t useless but I guess innovations which were old hat when Goldeneye 007 was released in 1997 or so is old-fashioned now.

The buttons were at least easy enough to figure out for the most part, at least enough to point and open fire. Taking cover is easy, although the tendency of your computer-controlled teammates to immediately move in front of you when you try to shoot the enemy is not helpful.

I really wish that people would stop buying games which take such great pains to simulate events that real people don’t want to do. Hey look, I can spend $50 $60 on a game that allows me to take forever to line up a shot because that’s more “realistic” than the auto-aim present in Goldeneye 007, look how manly I am!! These developers have taken so many pains to make the game realistic that it’s no longer fun, it’s a chore. I turned off the PS3 1/3 of the way into the first level. If I really wanted to be a soldier I’d have enlisted in the Army. As it stands now I’d rather play Metroid Prime 3, which was designed for a system with probably one tenth of the power…

Also the graphics are not extraordinary although I assume that is because I don’t have the HDTV hookup. But it does make me feel better about what I get out of the Wii.

I’ll eventually try Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the other supposed good PS3 games but what an awful way to start out the experience…

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 5 Comments »

So the recent Hurricane Hanna that passed by forced our ship to get underway last week and I got to spend almost a week deployed. Yay. I’m back for now but we’ve been super-busy since then trying to make up for lost time.

I managed to find time to go ahead and move the asciiquarium screensaver into kdeartwork, which should be a part of KDE 4.2.

KDE trunk is looking better and better with each passing day which is nice. I’m tempted to run out and buy an ATI card at this point if only for the better hardware support in Linux. It seems that everytime I build a computer I inadvertently pick the worst-supported graphics card somehow. :-/

Anyways, I’m too tired to remember what else I was going to post so I’m just going to go to bed. :P

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Navy & Personal | 1 Comment »

There’s enough changes in the upcoming kdesvn-build release to bump the version to 1.7 instead of another 1.6.x release. Here’s a sampling:

• Improved latest log directory support:

  Normally kdesvn-build stores the logs for a build run in a directory named in the form YYYY-MM-DD-ID which is kind of unwieldy to type in. So what kdesvn-build would do is to create a symlink called “latest” which would point to the last build run. So an error that just occurred in kdelibs could be easily found, in ~/kdesvn/log/latest/kdelibs (the path may vary, kdesvn-build will tell you the exact location). This is cool and all but if you had multiple modules you wanted to look at then the behavior of “latest” was not normally be ideal.

  For instance let’s say there’s an error in kdebase and kdemultimedia. You fix kdebase and confirm that by running kdesvn-build just on kdebase. Now when you want to see what was up with kdemultimedia you can’t, as the latest symlink is pointing at the wrong directory.

  With this change, kdesvn-build symlinks individual modules under latest to the last run for that module. So, you can always go to ${log-dir}/latest/kdebase to see what the last set of logs is for kdebase.

• Related to the last point, André Wöbbeking pointed out to me that kdesvn-build doesn’t create the latest symlink anymore if it didn’t already exist, which is also fixed. It’s probably been broken this way for awhile actually.
• Another major change is that kdesvn-build will try to apply more intelligent default branch settings for modules. For instance if you set branch 4.1 for global settings and ask for the phonon module, kdesvn-build will download from branch 4.2, which is appropriate for phonon when trying to build KDE 4.1. You can still override this by specifying a branch for a module, and sometimes you must, especially for modules which don’t get branched with KDE like playground and extragear.
• The phonon module I mentioned earlier is completely a figment of kdesvn-build’s imagination (it is developed normally in the kdesupport module). So kdesvn-build 1.6.2 only supported phonon with a branch option. Andreas Pakulat showed me that phonon trunk (from kdesupport) could be built without the rest of kdesupport so now kdesvn-build supports building the phonon module from trunk. Just remember it’s not a real module, kdesvn-build is making it up as it goes. ;)
• Finally the biggest change is that kdesvn-build will support persistent data finally. In other words it will save information about its execution and results for later use. It doesn’t do much with this yet (I’m thinking of having it automatically re-run configure or cmake if the appropriate options change) but it lays the foundation for bigger stuff. One visible change is that kdesvn-build will warn you if modules repeatedly fail consecutive times so you can take a closer look at it.

So that’s a lot of work I think. If you want to test it’s all available from /trunk (kdesdk/scripts) and I would appreciate it since I may not have the opportunity to catch brown-paper-bag-type bugs for too long after release.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Programming & kdesvn-build | 2 Comments »

So I was excited to see my people behind KDE interview get posted the other day, especially since the comments were much more positive than I was expecting. blauzahl did a good job on the interview, I’d like to thank her and Danny Allen for taking the time to work on it. It was hard for me just to handle the Q&A session so I don’t want to think of how much work they put in!

Akademy 2008 is over and it’s kind of bittersweet for me, as I hear it was the best Akademy in the last couple of years and I wasn’t able to attend. I am glad that everyone found it such an enjoyable time though, I will hopefully be able to show up for one some day.

I’ve spent quite some time watching the Olympic games this past couple of days. There’s a lot more excitement than I’m used to, between Michael Phelps winning 8 gold medals (including 2 squeaky finishes), the excellent performances of our gymnastics and volleyball teams and watching Bolt destroy all competition on track and field. It’s kind of a shame to see China apparently faking the age of some of their gymnasts and going overboard in keeping protests away, especially given how unnecessary it is. China’s athletes have done very well so far, there’s no need for trickery, and trying to hide protesters is kind of like a Streisand effect. We already knew that China had dissidents, and now it’s also all over the news. Either way the Games themselves have been good although I’m starting to think it would be nice to have a organization not so completely corrupt like the International Olympic Committee to handle the Games. But I suppose the kind of money we’re talking about it practically going to guarantee rampant corruption :-/

Anyways I’m working right now on polishing off the kio_perldoc KIOSlave which I’ve added to kdesdk and I will probably make another kdesvn-build release in the not-too-distant future. Also, does anyone know who I should ask about adding a screensaver to kdeartwork?

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal | No Comments »

I just wanted to say hi to everyone going to Akademy. I once again cannot go this year but I figured to compensate I’d regale you with a story from my Officer Candidate School days.

This is a War Spoon

This is a plate of spaghetti

When I first got to OCS, my eating habits were, uh, modified (to say the least) by the Officer Candidate Regulations manual. Instead of being able to eat food with a knife and a fork, I, as a newly minted worse-than-dirt OC got a spoon to eat with. The spoon was used to eat everything.

It was not sufficient that the spoon was the only utensil you had either. As an Officer-in-training you were not allowed to do anything as barbaric as pick up your food with your fingers. In fact you had a regimented, easy-to-follow 8-step procedure for eating. They called it eating-by-numbers.

So how does spaghetti tie in? Well, at every trip to the chow hall, spaghetti was an option on the menu (except for breakfast). Didn’t like mystery meat with noodles jefferson? Just get spaghetti. Get it every meal if you want. I wasn’t sure why the mess cooks liked spaghetti so much, but I wasn’t complaining. I love spaghetti. I even loved spaghetti by the end of OCS, wasn’t tired of it one bit.

But… how do you eat spaghetti with a war spoon? Well, the secret is that you cannot twirl your spaghetti into a bundle on your spoon and eat it as if you were using a fork. If you were to try to you’d make a mess everywhere (and thereby risk drawing attention to yourself). Even worse, it would be hard to actually eat all of the spaghetti without having to slurp any into your mouth. This definitely draws attention from the roving Class Drill Instructors. Officer Candidates do not like attention from Class Drill Instructors.

Instead learn to use what you have. With a war spoon, you simply have to use the edge of the spoon to cut the spaghetti into bite-sized pieces. Basically you use it like you’d cut a piece of pie out of a pan. It takes less time than you think once you get good at it. After a couple of days of practice you’ll be able to actually eat more spaghetti than you were able to before in a given amount of time.

At about week 4 or so we had our forks given back to us. How did I eat my spaghetti? With a war spoon, of course. Time is still precious, and you can fit more spaghetti onto a war spoon than onto a fork even if you use the pie-cutter technique.

To this day I still eat my spaghetti by the pie-cutter method instead of twirling. I use a fork now though, no reason not to be civilized. ;)

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | 2 Comments »

So in the course of developing the next code feature I plan to add to kdesvn-build (nothing major, just adding a persistent data store) I came across what I consider an oddity:

Imagine that we had a hash table, mapping module names to the count of consecutive build failures. Now let’s say we want to pare down this hash table to a list of modules with more than a given number of consecutive build failures (3 as an example). This could be done using Perl’s grep function to strip out list entries that don’t match a given criteria (in this case, hash keys whose associated failure count is not >3).

Now I didn’t feel like making this test inline (although it would not have changed the end result) so let’s assume that I put my comparison function separately in an anonymous subroutine:

Now if we use this code to search for hash table entries with an appropriate number of failures, you’ll find that it instead returns all entries in the list that are present in the %moduleFailures hash table at all!

So what happened? The key is in the and operator. Most Perl programmers know that Perl has two sets of logical operators. C-style (&& || !) and English (and or not). These are described in the perlop Perldoc page. Basically the reason for the two different sets is syntactical convenience (for example being able to do print FILE “text” or die without having to put parentheses around your expression.

The way this bites you here is that Perl evaluates return (foo) and (bar); as (return (foo)) and (bar);. I’m not sure how the parser allows for using the return value of the return statement without so much as a warning but there we have it.

The solution, of course, is either to fully parenthesize your expression, or to use && instead of and in this case.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & KDE & Programming | 2 Comments »