Bloggy

Wow, I didn’t think it had really been two weeks since I last posted. I used to be putting up some new post every day.

Anyways, Power School is still going well. Managed a 3.90 (out of 4.00) on my last test, which is 0.01 above the score that netted me first place twice already. Well, this time it was only good enough for 5^th place (although I may get back to a tie for 1^st or 3^rd dependings on regrades). Of course, the actual placement is relatively unimportant. The Navy doesn’t care how well you do as long as you pass, so neither do I. ;-)

You may remember me going on about some text-mode fish simulator last time I posted. Well, due to popular demand on #kde-devel, Maksim Orlovich and myself have conspired to create a KDE screensaver based off of the fish simulator, with canllaith providing much-appreciated testing. It is a real KDE program, using graphical mode instead of text mode. However, it appears more or less just like the program in question.

Maksim and I managed to optimize it relatively well, it uses less CPU time than the program we based it off of (although it’s because of the fact we get to use graphical mode, not due to any errors by the original programmer). You can find it at KDE Look at its program download page. One little problem is that the preview in the Screensavers control panel looks inaccurate, you’ll need to use the Test button to see what it’s really going to look like.

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canllaith discovered a very amusing program:

It is an aquarium simulator that is completely text-based. Quite fun to leave running on a spare Konsole (plus it has sharks, including the bloody splotches in the water, and pirate ships!)

You can find it http://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/. For those who are of the Gentoo persuasion, I have the required ebuilds here.

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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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Big news for KDE developers: KDE 4 is nowgoing to be in /trunk. Update: I should have read the email better. As of this writing, no modules have actually be moved to trunk. Although the branch has already been created. Or in other words, /trunk isn’t KDE 4 quiet yet. Sorry for the confusion. Anways, KDE 4 will be in mainline development soon, with the upcoming KDE 3.5 now in a branch directory. The schedule seems to be still a bit undecided for 3.5, but now is the time to get your applications ported to KDE 4. ;-)

coolo mentioned kdesvn-build. I’m hoping it helps to make the transition easier as well. I’ll be frank and admit that I haven’t done much with KDE 4 and kdesvn-build at this point. I think what I may do is release an update to kdesvn-build (in /branches/KDE/3.5) as 0.97.1, making it default to downloading from 3.5 for now, while the version in trunk would remain unchanged (defaulting to /trunk). The only problem with that plan is that I believe the directory structure for 3.5 is slightly different, I may need to investigate and test on that before making the release.

I suppose now I have to setup a new KDE 4 build user. ;-)

Update: kdesvn-build 0.97.1 was released, containing the consolidated goodies over the last month of development, and defaulting to downloading KDE 3.5. If you plan on using kdesvn-build for KDE 4 development, please continue to use the version in trunk. From my basic testing it looks like everything should work fine if you’re using this for the initial checkout. Please file a bug if there’s something awry.

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Been playing Alien Hominid for the Gamecube today. This has to be one of the funniest and just overall bestest games I’ve played in a while. Although I still stink at side scrolling shooters. :-(

In other news I’ve been working on making kdesvn-build even better. Now it supports quiet mode, and emailing reports on a build failure. If it needs to email a report it will try to extract the relevant information from the error log instead of just mailing you the whole thing as well.

While restructing kdesvn-build to support quiet mode, I went and cleaned up the code in places and made a few small changes. For example, now kdesvn-build won’t abort when you pass a module on the command line that isn’t in your configuration file, meaning that it’s (in theory) possible to download and compile a whole new module without having to add it to your .kdesvn-buildrc, which is useful for a one-time shot, like if you were going to install something from kdereview or extragear.

In other news, have a test coming up tomorrow for Power School, hoping to do well on that. I only got 3.09 out of 4 on the last one so I’ve studied harder this time. ;-)

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