Bloggy

Reading about the disaster in New Orleans has been incredibly depressing. As bad as four different hurricanes were last year, this one seems to easily take the cake. It’s as if New Orleans was simply turned all at once into a lake.

If you want to be depressed even further, take a look at Google Maps’s Satellite View of New Orleans. Of course you’ll see New Orleans in its pre-flood condition, but knowing that pretty much everything you look at from Lake Pontchartrain in the north to the Mississippi River down is pretty much filled with water. This is horrible.

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I’ve previously mentioned the donut tradition at my school. Well, I’ve done it again. Same test subject, same score.

I took a look at the recent KDE Commit Digest and noticed that I’m actually showing up in it more often. Not sure how long I’ll be able to maintain my current level of coding since school is fixing to get harder (apparently the second half is harder still than the first half). But hopefully I’ll still be able to keep trucking along.

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The other day I found my old N64 and hooked it up and started playing Super Mario 64 again for the first time in awhile. I love this game if only because it proves that a game can be fun without necessarily having to be violent or mature-themed. I suppose the recent Game Cube releases from Nintendo haven’t helped that impression any though, especially the quite bad Star Fox Assault. I couldn’t even make it past the first level of that game before getting sick of the characters with the pre-pubescent voices.

In other news, kdesvn-build has seen a few bugfixes already since the 0.97.4 release. Expect 0.97.5 and 0.98.1 (which builds KDE 4 by default) in a couple of days. This will be good news for the KDE Quality: Step by Step Building Guide, whose layout was up until recently quite horrid due to kdesvn-build not supporting line continuation characters, causing horizontal scroll bars to appear because of the sample configuration listing. 0.97.5 and 0.98.1 will both support the line continuation character and the sample configuration files have been accordingly updated.

Dirk has suggested that I work on the release script used by the KDE server infrastructure, which currently produces the nightly code snapshots, in order to also produce nightly Subversion checkouts in a convienient tarball form. There are a few from last week still up at the kdesvn-build website which I had manually generated. The nice thing about the tarballs is that it enables one to perform a KDE checkout without all the extra server load, which makes things quicker for both sides.

Once some form of snapshot updating is merged I want to work on having kdesvn-build try to download a tarball first before doing a checkout, since if that is possible I just saved anonsvn.kde.org a ton of CPU and IO load, and made it quicker for the user as well.

Finally, over the weekend I made a few bugfixes to the JuK Cover Manager code. You should hopefully notice snappier track changes for tracks that have large covers, and setting the cover of more than one track is also much quicker now.

Well, that’s it for now. Time to eat dinner.

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As indicated by the title, I actually have two things to mention this time. Shocking, no?

First off, I (finally) released the new version of Abakus that I’ve been going on about. There’s some good stuff, including more raiding of the SpeedCrunch goody-chest. For example, Abakus now supports function and variable completion (with descriptions), syntax highlighting, and showing you the result of your calculation in a tooltip before hitting Enter.

In addition, it supports the GNU Multiple Precision library now (in conjuction with the MPFR add-on). It’s actually not significantly different in my tests, except for issues with raising negative numbers to powers. It is, however, significantly faster, especially with complex expressions. If you don’t have it, don’t worry, Abakus will fallback to the code it used in 0.85.

In other news (and probably more interesting news for my family, Hi Grandma!), the other day I mentioned scouting out for donuts. What I didn’t mention then (and what my wife’s having me mention now ;-), is a funny encounter we had on the way there.

I was pulling up to a red stoplight, and there were railroad tracks in front of us. Luckily for me, I figured, we’d have juuuuuust enough space to squeeze behind the car in front of us and still be off the track. And besides, it’s not like a train ever comes down the tracks…

Of course, Mary says something about it, and of course, I point out that there’s no train coming anyways. Of course, as soon as I pointed down the track, a headlight appeared. As it started coming closer, you could make out the orange blinking lights on the engine as well.

I was hoping that perhaps I was just seeing a car, but I look around, and sure enough, the red blinking signposts are beginning to come down. So I started inching as far forward as I could without hitting the car in front. Luckily the light finally turned green at that time and off we went. The train passed behind us not 5 seconds after we passed through the intersection though. o_O

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So, there is apparently a long tradition at our school that whoever scores highest on a test has to bring in donuts or something the next morning for the class to snack on.

It took me 8 tests, but I finally scored first in my class on one (3.89 / 4.00). I wasn’t really expecting to do so however, as many of the prior enlisted students in our class have been doing this kind of thing for years. In fact, I was at home when I found out, I didn’t stick around to see the scores since I figured there was no way I’d make #1. I guess my relatively strong background in mathematics finally paid off. :-)

So anyways, donuts. I just returned from a mission to acquire donuts for the class. When I got to the store I found out why everyone else had to get up early in the morning and buy them on the way. Let’s just say that apparently donuts don’t keep very well, as all the donuts I saw at the store were already dry and just unappealing.

So, I converted my expedition into a reconaissance mission to find a convienient donut store. Luckily I found one not too far away. Unfortunately I’ll still have to get up early, but I guess that’s the price one pays for doing the best on a test. ;-)

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Those who have kept track of the evolution of abakus will have noticed that a lot of the improvements to abakus recently had first appeared in Ariya Hidayat’s SpeedCrunch. The last release of abakus integrated the high-precision math routines. And, now that I got a spare day today to work on it, the next release of abakus will also have the nifty syntax-highlighting input feature found in SpeedCrunch 0.6-beta1.

Thanks to some hard work by J. Hall, it will also feature a KDE Helpcenter Handbook so that it integrates even better into KDE. ;-) You can see it online at http://grammarian.homelinux.net/abakus/doc/.

I want to add a bit more to it before releasing it, not to mention the various bugs I’ll have to track down that invariably come from the kind of code melding I’m doing. But it’s shaping up to be pretty nice. Once I have it more or less stabilized I’ll get it ported to Qt/KDE 4 and see if I can’t beat kcalc to the punch. ;-)

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