Bloggy

So, I’ve just completed the Prototype school. Now I get to go to Connecticut and go through Sub School, so I’m prepping to move.

Unfortunately, I won’t have Internet access there, so there won’t be much activity from me on the KDE front for the next couple of months (I’ll try to stay in touch though, someone must have wireless Internet somewhere. :)

Afterwards it’s on to my next duty station, and a very hectic schedule trying to qualify on equipment which isn’t 40 years old.

I have to say that this was one of the nicer graduation ceremonies I’ve had to endure. Just about 20 minutes of speeches and recognizing honor graduates, and then we got to go.

It looks like I will have to obtain some kind of dedicated web hosting for the grammarian.homelinux.net domain where I host abakus and my weblog before I leave as well, as the computer I’m hosting it on will be powered down and very likely in a box for awhile as my poor wife gets to deal with the movers showing up where we are living now before the place we are moving to is ready to receive us.

In fact I may just take the computer with me to Connecticut but then it would be offline even sooner. So, I’ve started compiling important data that I want to backup so I can get a full backup on CD. (No, I’m not very good with backing up my data. :-( )

My Internet connection is currently horrifically spotty. I keep wanting to blame Comcast but I’m really not sure that it isn’t my router, a Linksys WRT54G, v5. This is why I was happy to hear that some intrepid hackers out there have managed to get Linux to install on my router model. I had originally bought the Linksys because I had heard it was possible to install Linux on it, without realizing that the shave costs, Linksys released a new router with the same model number, but reduced memory and… no Linux. :(

It runs on something called vxWorks instead of Linux, and from what I’ve seen on the Internet and in my own experience, the Internet connection is kind of spotty with the vxWorks operating system. One of these days I will try installing Linux on my router (my Internet connection crashed just now, great) to see if I can get the superior Internet uptime I was able to get when I lived in Jacksonville.

To make this worth the while for the KDE users out there, I have fixed a bug (bug 118550) in the CGI kioslave (which allows you to test your CGI scripts on your local ssytem). Due to some differences between QByteArray and one of its subclasses, QCString, the CGI ioslave would try to output a ” (NUL character) every 2 kilobytes or so, which the web browser would map to a space. This isn’t an issue if it shows up where a space normally would in HTML, but if it pops up in the wrong spot it will break things. Somehow I got suckered from there into agreeing to fix charset handling for the CGI ioslave in KDE 4, so stay tuned for that.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Navy & Personal | No Comments »

Haven’t posted in awhile, figured I’d go ahead and update you all on what’s going on.

I think I’ve already complained about this, but I had a like, horrifically bad case of food poisoning a couple of weeks ago. I vomited more in one night than I had in probably all of 10 years up to that point. I also found out why doctors recommend that you drink tons and tons of water if you have diarrhea (as I have apparently never really had diarrhea). Suffice to say that it wasn’t a fun weekend when that happened.

I know what my next two duty stations are, and I’m not entirely thrilled with the first. The next one is Submarine Officer Basic Course (SOBC) in Groton, CT. The weather will be nice, but from what I understand we are going to be forced to stay in some absolutely abysmal housing arrangements, the Susse Chalet. It is a 1-star hotel (ranked 16^th out of 17 hotels in the area). There is only Internet access in the lobby as well, so I will probably not be online much as of next month. At least the school itself is easy.

After that I get to go to my boat. I’m just hoping I don’t end up arriving like right before the boat deploys or something. When that happens I get to try and qualify again and basically repeat the prototype experience (just with hopefully less hours. =D)

On that note, my wife and I are going to investigate finding a house to live in at my next permanent duty station tomorrow. Hopefully we can find someplace that’s not too expensive (and not too far away from the base). We’d also like to avoid living in an area where cars are prone to disappearing (referring to my wife’s car). And we don’t get a lot of time to do the search either. :-(

I also then need to get all the paperwork setup to get moved, get this place cleaned up, and try to decide if I want to move the computer hosting this weblog before I leave in July or leave it operational and have my wife move it.

On that note I should probably migrate this weblog to a real hosting provider at some point. Only catch is that either I would have to maintain the software so that I always have backups of my data, or if I go the route of just using something like www.blogger.com, making sure that it’s possible to remotely backup my data. And then I’d have to somehow migrate over without destroying all the hyperlinks already in use on the site. :-)

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | No Comments »

Today I finally qualified as Engineering Officer of the Watch. This is awesome if only because I’ll be spending a lot less time at Prototype. Graduation won’t happen any quicker though, it’s still at the end of June timeframe.

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | No Comments »

I finally passed Final Watch Board. You may remember me talking about getting psyched up for it 5 weeks ago… and then a week ago, and then the boat broke. :-(

They got the boat working for long enough to start training again, and they squeezed my Final Watch Board in at very little notice to myself. Kind of a “Oh, by the way, come in tomorrow at 8:30 for your board. Sorry about you losing the day off.”

Apparently I did alright. 3.07/4.00 was the final grade (2.50 is passing). So far I believe that’s the highest grade among my crew. I got two casualties that I hadn’t prepared for. One I hadn’t prepared for because it was so easy, the other I hadn’t prepared for because of several reasons: It’s very hard, I had a similar casualty earlier (they normally give you casualties you haven’t had), and the staff had been pushing other hard casualties as things to study for. Luckily I wasn’t just completely unprepared, but it was going wonky at times. :)

Now I have about 40 more checkouts to get and I can go to Final Oral Board and qualify. :)

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | Comments Off

So today I released a new version of Abakus (the simple useful KDE calculator). Basically we show the more important part of long answers by default, and abakus supports using the correct decimal separator according to the KDE locale settings.

A couple of months ago I tried porting Abakus to Qt 4, which actually sort of worked, but I don’t think it looked too nice (something about the layouts being wrong). I’ll have to try again soon, which brings me to my next question: Should I push to get abakus included by default with KDE 4? I know that Jonathan Riddell mentioned it way back when. And even now it seems to be one of the more popular applications I’ve been responsible for. (In fact, the reason I made a release today is because someone emailed saying they love the application, could I add this feature? Whoops, the feature has been in SVN for months now, maybe I should release it…)

Of course then the issue becomes what to do with kcalc? I mean, I suppose I could add a button bar to abakus (like what Johan has done with SpeedCrunch), but it just seems… wrong. But then we don’t want to have two programs doing the same thing either. Hmm. Maybe I should ask the guys at OpenUsability. :)

The ongoing Prototype story…

Anyways, I haven’t blogged in awhile. Last time I mentioned how I was psyching myself up for my Final Watch Board. Well, it got delayed because of the poor performance of the officer who went the day before I did. The upper management freaked out and postponed the Final Watch Boards for myself and the other officer who was supposed to go that day. It was pushed back to 12-May in my case. But guess what, now the boat is broken, and unless they get it fixed fast enough (not likely), they’ll have to postpone my Final Watch Board *again*. :-(

And without the Final Watch Board, I can’t take the Final Oral Board and qualify. argh.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Navy & Personal | No Comments »

So. Prototype has been going fairly well. I’ve been doing good so far on my casualty watches, although the harder 3^rd drill set casualties are on the way for my next two watches.

There’s a roadbump tomorrow though. Thanks to an unfortunate confluence of events, I will be on duty for 16 hours tomorrow. :-(

Basically there is a training event that I must complete before my Final Watch Board, which won’t fit into the normal shift schedule. That’s no problem, we’ll just do it after shift, for a normal 12 hour day.

Then as I am auditing my Qualification Standard, I notice that one of the watches I must stand before Final Watch Board was never scheduled for me. So the choice is either to stand that watch back to back with one of my Engineering Officer of the Watch billets, or get the watch done on my own time. Unfortunately, we could only squeeze that into tomorrow morning.

So now that’s a 16 hour work day. And I have to be there at the beginning of the extra watch to observe the watch turnover. And since I will be on watch the other 8 hours of the day, I need to be in coveralls. And we can’t just stroll into Prototype wearing coveralls, so that means I need to be there even earlier so I can change at Prototype. Yuck.

Although it is nice that I went from struggling to be 2% ahead of the curve to being 13.5% ahead without even having all of my signatures scanned in. :-) I’ll be watch-complete very early compared to other classes, and they’re even trying to push the 8-hour Comprehensive Exam early for us as well to give us extra time off and more time to prepare for the Final Oral Board.

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | No Comments »

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 »