Bloggy

So I’ve been practicing for my Navy PRT. After taking a two day break, I go to the gym again today and start running again. I was finally able to manage to beat my required time of 13 minutes and 30 seconds by running 1.5 miles in 12:40. The catch is that my feat was performed indoors, on a treadmill, listening to some very driving music for motivation. But at least I know that it can be done.

On a completely unrelated note, my grandmother has been completing her move to near where I live, and recently had an old computer of hers brought up. Wanting to put it to good use, she was trying to see if it could be connected to her existing (broadband) Internet connection. Her son (my uncle) said it couldn’t be done, it was too old. I kind of suspected as much myself, as the computer looked to be so old that it had nothing but ISA ports, and I had no clue where I could buy an ISA network card besides Ebay.

Having nothing better to do while my wife was chatting with the other women, I took apart the computer to confirm what kind of ports it had so I could start looking for a network card. So my great surprise, it was a dual PCI/ISA type of motherboard, with quite a few extra PCI slots. Although it was very late at the time, I told my grandma that I could get the Internet going this very night. Walmart is open 24 hours, and I knew for a fact that they had good ol’ el cheapo NICs. I run down to Walmart and pick one up ($15), and go back to the house and install it.

It includes a driver disk (3.5 in. floppy… talk about retro) for Windows. Of course, even after following the instructions to install the driver, Windows can’t find some required file or other. So I had a nice Q/A session with my grandma.

Me: Grandma, you wouldn’t happen to have your Windows 95 CD from 10 years ago, would you?

Her: Uhhhh…

Me: Yeah, I didn’t think so either. Hold on a second…

I grabbed the Knoppix CD that I “accidentally” left there earlier, and proceeded to boot up Knoppix into text mode to save memory, just to see if it would detect the NIC. Of course, it had no problems, and I was rather surprised to notice that it actually detected all of the important hardware, including video and sound. I even played an .ogg file from the /usr/share/sounds directory to prove that Linux had sound support. :-)

My grandma’s being a good sport about this as well, and doesn’t mind the idea of using Linux, especially since I already have her using Firefox (she loves the conspicuous lack of popup ads). It’s her old computer after all, it’s not as if she’s be using it all the time. So I’ll be going back tomorrow and probably making the Knoppix installation permanent. Or I might pick up a copy of SuSE Linux and just install that. The computer is old enough that I doubt I’ll be running KDE on it, but I’ll double check just in case, as 3.2 is rather fast, and 3.3 is shaping up to be slightly more optimized as well.

My worry is that she isn’t going to love the whole root/user separation idea, but I figure that even if I simply put up a post-it note, that’s still much better security than a no-password account. So uh, yeah, score +1 for Linux.

Posted by mpyne under Navy | No Comments »

So, I’ve been exercising a lot recently. I have to get ready to go to Officer Candidate School in January, and I wouldn’t like to have my heart explode after 2 days or so. I was able to get my 1.5 mile run time down to 14:30 today (quit laughing, I’ve never exercised in my life until this month). I would like to get it around 12:30 (or better). I already feel that I can breathe deeper, but now I need to psych myself up into running for longer, faster.

Read an interesting technique today on concealing e-mail addresses. Normally I just go all out with the gymnastics, replacing . with (DOT) and @ with (AT), but that’s cumbersome, and doesn’t work well for making the link clickable. The technique I read today involves replacing each character with the corresponding HTML entity equivalent. For example, an uppercase A in the address would turn into &65;. I just hacked together a Perl script to convert e-mail addresses into equivalent HTML entities. Let’s see how much more spam the webmaster@microsoft.com gets. :-)

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Useful Tricks | No Comments »

Saw this story on Slashdot.

On the one hand, I feel bad for all those users out there who could have all sorts of bad things happen to them, such as identity theft and rampant fraud. But then I remind myself, these people continue to use IE, even after reports of security hole after security hole.

Obviously, it’s not like a new user is even going to know there’s something else out there, but I’m sure the company selling the product knows. Why don’t companies like HP and Dell do what I did for my Grandma? I went over and installed Firefox on the computer, and changed the Desktop icon name to “The Internet”. I then changed the IE desktop icon name to “CLICK FOR VIRUSES”.

So far, it seems to be working. Games on zone.msn.com don’t seem to work under Firefox, but that’s more than offset by the notable lack of popups.

If it works for my grandma, it can work for everybody. Someday these companies are going to have to help their users by making a PC that is safe for Internet browsing, and marketing it as such. Even if you must run Windows, that’s no excuse to not browse safely.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »

So I upgraded GCC the other day. Just a minor upgrade to boot, version 3.3.2 to version 3.3.3. But then all of a sudden, my KDE CVS directory refused to build, with libtool whining about missing libraries in /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.2.

I’m thinking, Well, duh, the directory’s NOT THERE you stupid script, I just replaced that version with the new hotness!. So of course, I had to find each and every .la file that was complaining, and munge it through a Perl script I cooked up that does nothing but replace gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.2 with gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.3.

I could’ve just rebuilt KDE from scratch, but that’s about 5 GB of compiled and otherwise generated files that I really don’t feel like waiting around for.

So if you’re recently upgraded GCC and libtool starts complaining to you, perhaps my tale will point you in the direction you need to go.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles | No Comments »

My little sister had a dance recital today, that I went to see. It makes
me wish I had been violently ill with the flu instead, at least I could’ve got
something done. The event was apparently around 6-7 hours long, including
intermission. My sister was on stage for a grand total of perhaps 20
minutes.

Seeing as how I had other things to do today, that left me no time to work
on either JuK, or kdecvs-build, which is disappointing. I’m happy that my
sister was able to perform in an event she had been practicing hard for, but
it would’ve been nice if the other children had practiced as well.

If you’re reading this on Planet
KDE, I’ll just slip in this little KDE-related tidbit. Derek Kite has
just posted this week’s KDE CVS-Digest,
which is always a good read. Thanks Derek!

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal | No Comments »

I think I’ve finally implemented all of the features that mornfall and
berkus have suggested, with the exception of separate compilation and linking,
since that seems to be impossible.

So, I update the entry on
kde-apps.org, and when the content page comes back up, what do I see? This is a
screenshot of what I saw. If I were a superstitious man I’d be nervous
right now.

Hopefully nothing bad turns out with this release, Perl has given me enough
problems that I’ve been seriously pondering how to introduce a testing
framework into the script. That would be nice, since I already use a
packaging script for the program, I could just force the script to run all the
tests before doing any of the packaging.

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

Having read Roberto’s
reply, I think that of his two choices, Planet KDE should choose the
second one. I read planet.gnome.org
and planet.debian.net regularly, and
it’s not because I’m interested in knowing when I can use spatial browsing in
Debian installer, it’s because I’m interested in knowing what’s going on with
other free and open-source software developers.

Sort of as a corollary, I’m interested in what goes on with KDE developers.
Call me nosy, but I find it fascinating the things other devs do with their
life. Plus, it gives me a lot of exposure to foreign customs and culture,
which is something a lot of Americans could use nowadays.

So anyways, not that we’re voting or whatnot, but I say keep Planet KDE an
aggregator of blogs for KDE devs, and not just KDE-related blogs.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal | No Comments »

Hmm, been a few days since I’ve posted a blog. Been sorta busy myself,
between the coding I’ve been doing and real life.

For instance, I’ve been going to the bowling alley with my wife much more
often now than we used to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my score has improved in
the process. It used to be a very big deal if I broke 100 points in a single
game, but now I’ve been breaking that mark pretty routinely. Just 2 weeks ago
I scored a personal best of 159, and then matched that score this past
weekend. So it looks like practice can help even the most hopeless bowler.
:-)

Also, I’ve finally been able to get Unreal Tournament 2004 to play halfway
decent on my computer thanks to the latest ATI proprietary drivers. I really
wish there were good open-source drivers for the Radeon 9600, but at least I
can shutdown the X Server now and still be able to use the ATI drivers.

As far as coding goes, I haven’t worked on JuK for a few days. I added a
bunch of things to my code base all at once, and now I’m trying to decide if I
want to split it up into separate patches, or just submit the whole deal to
Scott for some more review.

What I have been working on lately, thanks to mornfall and berkus,
is my own program, kdecvs-build, which
has been the recipient of a lot of work from myself over the past few days
thanks to feature requests and bug reports from them, along with greater
testing from myself. I’m still adding a lot of features, but hopefully soon
I’ll have the code stabilized and then I can concentrate on improving the
documentation and working on bug fixes. As it stands now I’ve been using to
build KDE from CVS every night for the past few months.

Anyways, it’s bedtime for me.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & kdesvn-build | No Comments »

I usually read a little bit from bash.org
before going to bed at night. Or to be more specific, I’m at the site because
I’m bored, which convinces me to go to bed. But anyways, this quote was particularly funny.

So I was at work today, signing for a package from UPS.
When the FedEx guy walks in with a package of his own.
And at that EXACT moment, a customer changes the channel to TBS and
the Mortal Kombat movie is on, right when the fight theme music starts.
Did they break out into a delivery duel to the death?
I was prepared for parcel projectiles and fedex fatalities.
They eyed each other, and I knew something was about to
happen…
But then the guy changed the channel to “Trading Spaces” and
the fight was over.

As someone who used to sign for packages, I thought it was rather
funny.

Posted by mpyne under Funny & Personal | No Comments »

I never thought that I would have as much trouble understanding bugs as I
just now had for a bug in JuK. First, a description of the bug is needed.

• It only happens when using the Inline Tag Editor to edit a tag.
• It only affects on Search Playlists (with another qualifier I’ll add
  later).
• It only happens when setting a tag value to a value alread present in any
  of the other songs.

This bug keeps the Search Playlists that search on the tag being edited
from being refreshed. So if you were to edit a song and change the tag so
that it now belongs in one of those Search Playlists, it wouldn’t show up
there until you somehow managed to force it to refresh (such as by adding an
item).

Many, many kdDebug() statements later, I discovered that the
bug doesn’t affect newly created Search Playlists, only ones loaded from disk.
Turns out that what was happening is that Search Playlists are created with a
so-called Playlist Observer. Whenever a playlist changes, it can call
PlaylistInterface::update(), and any class which is observing it
will be notified. It’s a very elegant design.

The problem is that when loaded from disk, the Search Playlists have
“forgotten” what Playlists they were observing. Scott had gotten around this
problem by connecting to a signal that the main playlist class
(CollectionList) emits when it has changed. Since at this point in time this
is also the only playlist that is ever observed, the solution worked well
enough.

So it turns out that my bug was in a completely different class
(CollectionList), which didn’t always emit the changed signal when the
collection has changed (to be specific, it didn’t track the individual items
themselves changing, just the addition or removal of them, and the addition of
new tags, which was why adding an existing tag failed to refresh the
list).

Whew! :-) Now that I understand this code much better, it should be easier
for me to fix the bugs in automatically updating dynamic playlists, and get my
retag-on-drag-and-drop code in CVS.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Programming | No Comments »