2006/Mar/25

Man, it’s a lot easier to pick blog titles when you simply use the date of the entry. :-)

I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve been very busy. But the best is coming up soon. For the next two and a half weeks my life is going to be very crappy as I have a nice 4-hour exam (that I’ve barely studied for yet), and about a gazillion watches to stand.

Best of all, they are the hardest watches, the Engineering Officer of the Watch ones. Even the easy ones (where it is just steady state, engines already steaming, etc.) can get hectic due to having to make announcements, handle incoming/outgoing communications, and the like. But, after a few of those and a couple of engine room/reactor startup and shutdown watch, it’s looking like I’ll get thrown into the ever-popular casualty watches.

That’s where they get to either simulate a casualty condition, or actually make it happen. The deal with those is that you have to identify the casualty and then perform a sequence of immediate responses to save the plant (or prevent further damage). Not only that, but this being the Nuclear Navy, it’s not in general good enough to know what to do, you also have to know exactly how to say what you want to do. Most orders have a standard form, which is the exact form you’re supposed to give the order in. That’s even more things I have to study.

I’d study in my spare time between watches, but that is diminishing more and more as we speak. The flipside is that I would have to stand all of these watches anyways. So, the fact that I’m standing them all now means the rest of my time in Prototype should go by comparatively smoother. Or at least, I hope so. :)


In KDE-related news, it looks like CMake will be the build system of choice for KDE 4. This is exciting news for myself because I’ve been hoping for years that we would get rid of autoconf, automake, and libtool, and now that day is getting closer. The CMake developers have been extremely responsive to KDE’s needs, and some of the KDE developers, spearheaded by Alexander Neundorf, have been integrating CMake into KDE /trunk. kdelibs /trunk compiles for me (though that’s the only one I’ve tested. There is a page up with a introduction to CMake for KDE developers.

These changes will require corresponding changes to kdesvn-build. They shouldn’t be too hard, but I have to figure out how to implement things like configure-flags in terms of the CMake equivalent.

Speaking of kdesvn-build, I finally made the process of creating snapshots at the Subversion snapshot page completely automated. With one command at my computer I can update a module, package it up, and then upload it to kdesvn-build.kde.org and update the appropriate files there. It’s pretty cool, really. Most of the snapshots are still 3.5 (which is probably for the best) so I don’t think I’ll be updating them much in the coming weeks as KDE 3.5 won’t be changing much either.

I’ve been playing a *lot* of Starcraft lately. I wish Blizzard would release a Linux-native version. (After all, they have a Mac OS X version, which if it uses OpenGL would be hardly any trouble to port to Linux). Wine actually works very well at emulating Windows, except that Battle.net looks awful since Wine doesn’t update the screen right for some reason.