Chair Plow

2002-05-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

Last post here

I've moved my blogwhoring over here.

2002-05-24T18:38:00.000-05:00

Its been so long since I knew ye

Courtney left this morning, and thus a pivotal part of my life comes to an end. Through good and bad, my time with Courtney was the most eye-opening experience in my life. Moving on is a good thing, but a big part of my will be empty with her departure. Our paths will cross in the future, and I anticipate the day.

Otherwise, life has been a mixed bag. I survived exams, though I still don't know what made in Operating Systems .

I've started back at TI. That was not as exciting of an experience as I would have hoped. I'm not too particularly pleased with the project I'm on, coupled with the fact that my former boss is not too pleased with the project we're on, and that makes me not too highly pleased. I'm starting to think maybe I want to do stuff more on the software side of the ball. I think blogging and just trying some of the great new Linux software has driven me to that idea. I think I would still enjoy systems level programming, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be a professional bit twiddler.

I hope I don't spin into boredom this weekend. With Courtney gone, my roommate Randell gone and Jeff at E3 until Sunday, I'm pretty much solo for amusing myself. This ends up being a good thing because I really need to clean this apartment. Courtney would drive me to do that more readily than I would do it myself though. :|

2002-05-11T18:04:00.000-05:00

In brief:

Amazon seems to think I like anything with Tom Hanks or where men dress up as women. This could not be further from the truth.

Basketball players are jerks. They are poor sportsmen. Hockey players flaunt nothing in the face of the other players. They just sock each other at will. This is the way it should be.

Bacon pancakes are goodness .

It's Chloe, she needs us

Got a new cell phone. Its an Ericsson T68 . I would link to Ericsson's site, but it sucks ass in a way that is seriously hardcore. Its a really neat GSM/GPRS phone with an IR port, Bluetooth connectivity and a 256 color screen. Hellz yeah. It is the shiznit scrizin. I'm still trying to devise a way to sync it with Evolution. If I can accomplish that, then I can leave my Visor at home except for more hardcore tasks. This would be nice.

Turncoating

I have been trying lots of new software. I am using Evolution instead of KMail now. I am using Galeon instead of Mozilla instead of Konqueror now. I think I'm even going to jump ship from Emacs to VIM.

All in all I'm using a lot of Gnome/GTK+ software these days. Even though I would maintain that KDE is superior to Gnome as far as the programming interface goes, the Gnome/GTK guys are writing some really nice applications. I think this disproves the people that say having Gnome and KDE is a waste. I'm leveraging the both of best right now, and since they were not designed to play mean with each other, it has been a pleasant experience.

2002-05-10T03:06:00.000-05:00

I don't want your movies!

Watched Not Another Teen Movie tonight. Genius. I love crappy movies. Sorority Boys and Van Wilder are too other choice movies that are both awful and amongst my recent viewing pleasures.

But we all know, the apex of the awful movie/TV universe is "Bosom Buddies." I mean come on, how can it get much better than Tom Hanks dressed in drag trying to hit on Donna Dixon! Priceless.

2002-05-09T15:36:00.000-05:00

And now...other news!

I failed to play hockey yesterday because of bad weather predictions because of my roommate. Becoming somewhat stir-crazy to get out and play hockey again. Didn't read much. I did manage to install AWStats and Moveable Type on the new server. Didn't do anything programming related. All in all, didn't do too bad on my pseudo-todo-list.

Also saw Spiderman. The movie was enjoyable and did in fact make me want spider powers. Kirsten Dunst is hot. Very hot. I think she could win the "summer nerd movie chick" contest. Natalie Portman just don't have as much to hold on to! The ending was disappointing initially, but it grows on you. At least it leaves the possibility of a sequel, "Spiderman II: Wild About Harry!" :)

2002-05-09T15:24:00.000-05:00

Right about now, the funk soul BOOYAH!

Yesterday Courtney and I were going to exchange our books for cash so that the evil forces running the school bookstore can further exploit the student population. That's the sidestory. The real story is that we had just crossed a major intersection when I saw a very tiny baby duck walking around by itself. There is a big pond about a a quarter mile away, so this duck was very lost. We decided to turn around and I jumped out to catch it. After a few minutes of manuvering, we finally apprehended the estranged quacker. He was so fuzzy and small and had the tiniest little wings.

So anyway, we drove over to the pond and tried to find some ducks who might recognize him. There were some sitting on the raised embankment, and I put him down as close to them as I could get. He immediately went straight to female duck. She ran away from him while he chirped "are you my mommy?"

We took our eyes off him for a moment and noticed he had jumped into the water. A female and male duck had flown in and he seemed to be taking to the female. She let him follow her around for a while, but then she jumped out of the water and he could not follow her. :( He started following another female around when we left. We are going to see how he's doing sometime soon.

Before that we had seen an eight week old dachsund puppy. So cute! I love tiny and fat animals.

2002-05-08T13:29:00.000-05:00

Stick a fork in me, I'm done!

Yes, Courtney , I will stop using that away message.

Done with exams. Feels good. I start at TI Monday the 13th. Looking forward to that, as much as one can look forward to more work to do.

This is my summer funlist of things I hope to do or mess with this summer:

Play hockey

Read me some fiction (Stephenson, Franken,...)

Set up my Sun and SGI machines and make them do something useful

See if .NET is another child of the beast or something decent

Haxor Dopewars so that I can play against friends and become a loan shark

I should revisit this list often and track my progress. Maybe then I'll actually get stuff done. It would be fulfilling to have accomplished > 60% of the things on the list.

2002-05-04T18:16:00.000-05:00

The End of Innocence

I finished my OS project yesterday. Or to be more precise, I didn't. I got to a point where all the changes I made were detrimental to the program and were not doing it any good. So, I made the decision to minimize my losses and turn it in as it was. I documented my failure as thoroughly as I could think of and sent it to my professor. I'm hoping that he'll take pity on my soul.

This really bums me out for two reasons. One, I've always thought of myself as a pretty good programmer, at least better than most. Now that I've failed so tangibly on this project, I feel very mortal. In the end, I think this is a good thing. A sense of mortality is a quality that many programmers lack. I'm hoping this instance of "falling down" will teach me a lot.

I'm also bummed because a few people I have chosen as competitors for myself finished the project and I didn't. I guess this is just hubris I'll have to get over.

On a related note, I am intensely looking forward to not having any more exam-induced stress. Only 75 hours until I'm done with this semester.

2002-05-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

Hey Stoopid

That's how exams are making me feel. OS project + Philosophy paper + Digital Logic Final = Max(Pain). After Friday by life should become much more pleasant...I hope.

I realized today that Mono is going to be very important if .NET takes off, as it probably will since most MS developers are being aimed that way. The reason is similar to why Samba is so important. SMB is the de facto method for moving files across networks with Windows machines on them. If successful, .NET will be come the de facto way to move programs and procedure calls across networks with Windows machines on them.

The effect Samba has on Windows is a commoditizing one. It makes the functional equivalent of a Windows file server a commonly obtainable item like pork or orange juice. Apache does the same for IIS on Windows. Both take a standarized protcol for exchanging data, and make it possible to do it without paying a premium price. Bill Gates probably dislikes this. It threatens his Windows.

Now, if .NET takes off, then there will be a lot of applications that use a standarized protocol for the executable format and for communicating over the network. This could have two effects. One, it could make the Wine people's job much easier. In order to support new applications, they would just have to support a fairly standard set of interfaces and formats. Second, and most importantly, it makes it possible for someone to create an implementation that is portable across systems. This would commoditize .NET, bringing it to the masses per se.

Joe Consumer would benefit from this. You'd really be paying a Microsoft tax to run Windows if all applications were .NET ones. You'd have a real choice in building a server if your application could be moved from Microsoft to Sun to Linux at the drop of a hat.

This would make the computing landscape resemble automotive maintenence. Some people have Fords, others have Toyotas, others still have BMWs. All can use the same roads, parking lots, bridges, high-ways and toll-booths. For support, they go to their vendor or someone who the vendor has approved (or just someone who claims to be smart enough to fix the problem).

Microsoft could still profit from this scheme. Presumably they would be the experts at creating .NET applications and implementations. If we were to suppose that they could behave themselves, they could maybe even keep all the "middleware" in their operating system, so long as people have choice about what goes on their new Dell, Sony, etc.

In conclusion, if .NET maintains its momentum and doesn't explode from the hype, Mono will be just as important as Samba and Apache are today. Helping out the project will be just as important for Open Source as helping out Samba and Apache was five years ago, and the prestige and respect will probably be equivalent also.

(Part of me is suspicious of these happy feelings about implementing a MS anything. There is always the potential for them to screw you. However, I remind myself of two things:you don't get anywhere without being burned at least once or twice, and the Samba people have been doing this for years and it hasn't killed them yet .)

2002-04-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

Say it like it is brother man

The ASIC material is reserved for the most compute-intensive, mission critical functions only, because ASICs have two big problems: they take a lot of time and money to develop, and any algorithms they contains are effectively “frozen in silicon.” This latter point is a bit of a downer in the wireless world where standards can change faster than you can say “I love this standard... Oh #$%%^&!” -- EE Design

Substitute "standard" for "Microsoft APIs".

2002-04-27T18:52:00.000-05:00

We don't need no education

Studying for school sucks. I have something or other to do for all my classes, all due Tuesday. It feels good to vent about these things. Aaahhh. Now its time to increment my goodness by consuming some pizza. The food of gods. You know, the gods sit around watching hockey and eating pizza. Really. I hear they love AC/DC too.

2002-04-25T22:42:00.000-05:00

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I just wanted to mention that while driving to dinner tonight, Courtney and I got behind a really old, crappy car full of what looked like Caucasian teenagers. This particular car, full of crappy Caucasian teenagers, was spewing litter. Hardly an intersection did we pass that it did not spew trash and refuse. It was utterly appaling how little regard they had for anything. What do I miss in contemporary society? Respect.

2002-04-25T22:31:00.000-05:00

Axe Grinding, Part IIa

I feel the need to amend my earlier thoughts. I came away from that posting thinking "Man, Free Software does kinda suck, why am I using it?" Then I thought about it, and Free Software kinda doesn't suck. Because of Free Software I have a great Unix system to use, with all the Unixy tools, some of which are best-of-breed. On top of that I have a windowing system that, while it has its downfalls, is really great and ahead of many things out there. On top of that I have a desktop environment that is more adept at handling the way I want to work, which is something that at least Windows can't do.

In fact, I have these two contradicting urges in my computer usage. On the one hand, I want to use the most powerful solution available. For a long time, I tried to figure out Gnus because it seems to be an incredibly useful mail/news reader that is integrated into an incredibly useful computing environment, Emacs . On the other hand, I like to look at people's desktops, and so I see screenshots of people using very pleasant looking software like Evolution and iTunes . On the one side you've got real propeller-head, grow-hair-on-your-chest-because-its-hard-to-configure software and on the other you've got some really good but less flexible software.

Lets take the aforementioned deliberating over mail clients first. I pretty much have given up on learning Gnus. Unless it falls into my lap nicely configured, I'm just going to stick with something else. Right now that something else is KMail . It does most of what I want, it allows me to read my mail the way I want to read it, and it doesn't start four billion extra threads that I don't particularly need. The same cannot be said of Evolution. I was ready to go with this one, but then I realized I would either have to mouse around a lot, or get used to its keybindings. I really like my keybindings though, and that plus the fact that Evolution uses about ten threads really seemed to bother me. (I think that the perceived 'bloat' of a software is proportionate to how many times its listed in process listings. Take note ps and top implementers!) So, I'm sticking with KMail. Its filtering could be better, it could have news integration, and its threading could be slightly less prone to breaking. However, its obvious how to use it, it has not lost any mail, and it did not require mental gymnastics to get right. And its anti-aliased. Anti-aliasing is pure gravy, I don't care what you say.

I've really wandered off course here so I'm going to try and tie it up real quick here. Free Software does not suck. Some of it sucks, some of it doesn't. I think it has a proportionate ratio of absolute crap to great software that you find in the world of non-free software. Its just that, I don't have to deal with all that non-free software. Except LogicWorks. That program bites ass.

(I'll write on why some IM clients suck later)

2002-04-25T19:06:00.000-05:00

Axe Grinding, Part II

18:57:19 Remo177: does the aim transport support file-transfer
18:57:35 Remo177: i cant believe we dont have file-transfer yet (gaim might?)
18:58:12 Me: no gaim doesn't, the libfaim people are opposed to file transfer in IM programs
18:58:28 Me: i'm not sure which protocol the aim transport uses
18:58:40 Me: i hear jabber itself has file transfer but no word about transports
18:59:18 Remo177: i dont know how many times my friends have tried to send me something, usually porn, but cant
18:59:52 Me: yup
18:59:58 Me: and licq's file transfer is horked too
19:00:02 Me: at least for behind firewalls
19:00:05 Remo177: last i checked, the file x-fer in jabber was not standardized?
19:00:07 Me: alas our plight
19:00:15 Remo177: woe is us
19:01:15 Me: i should just strap an http server with put support onto an oscar client or something
19:01:38 Me: this is the frustrating stuff that makes me say "screw having the source i just want to receive this dude's file!"
19:01:47 Remo177: hahah
19:01:48 Remo177: true dat
19:02:07 Me: having an ftp server on your machine is no longer vogue! i need a solution not your bleeding heart DIE MICROSOFT DIE philosophy

Free Software is good. Being able to modify sources is good. Not having to deal with unethical business people is good. It is not an intrinsic means to an end, except for Richard Stallman and his cronies.

Good software will always trump other software. No matter if it was written by baboons or godly programmers. If its good, then it stands on its own.

I used to tolerate not being able to do whizbang things. I could live without sending files over AIM or playing games. Then, I felt like I was idealistically justified in my ways. Since I've not received any Nobel prizes, commendations or other forms of positive reinforcement for my idealism, I've become tempered, more pragmatic. The goodness of software is sufficient for me to justify using it. Sometimes the goodness does not compensate for its non-availability of source, sometimes it does. If it gets the job done and I don't need to worry about how it could work better, how to fix it, or why it works, why would I want the source in the first place?

Now when I tell people "nope, can't receive files over AIM" its like I'm apologizing. "Sorry, I run Linux. We're still trying to decide how to get along. Try back in a few months." Its a real drag. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy Linux and would not be where I am today if not for all the things that make up Linux. But I'm tired of apologizing to people for using it.

If the world was full of software developers then I would not have this problem. "Yeah I used electric fence and found my segfault. Easy. What? You don't have electric fence? Muahahahaha! "

This is probably the reason you're going to see more and more people with nice little Apple machines sitting next to (or replacing) their Unix workstations. They can run their X apps, run their old-school editors, and then receive files through their friends without having to have nineteen different daemons running and properly secured on their machines.

In conclusion, I need a Powerbook G4.

2002-04-25T17:07:00.000-05:00

Where's your axe?

Seems everyone has an axe to grind these days. The GNU people versus Microsoft. The Microsoft people versus everyone else. The Republicans versus the Democrats. The History majors versus the English majors. The Wings fans against the Stars fans. This is not a new observation. Conflict is intrinsically human I suppose. Undoubtedly we'd go looney if it weren't for a little tense conflict here and there. But do we have to be so damn annoying about it?

"It says in this book here that God made us all to be just like him . So if we're dumb, then God is dumb. And maybe a little ugly on the side." -- Frank Zappa

Apparently ugly should be accompanied by irrating, irrational and primitive.

2002-04-23T08:01:00.000-05:00

Developer's Toolbox

TkCVS and TkDiff should be in every Unix programmer's toolbox. Perhaps every programmer's toolbox, at least where Tk runs.

There seems to be a lot of mature Tcl/Tk software out there that is well thought out and gets the job done really well. A search of Freshmeat can't substantiate my claim though. Maybe it is just these two apps. Anyway, my theory is that the reason for all these mature Tcl/Tk apps running around is Joel's idea that it takes ten years to grow software. However, it turns out I'm wrong. TkDiff appears to be just three years old (mailing list archives back to March, 1999). TkCVS looks much older; it is currently at version 7.03 while version 6.3 (the oldest listed on Freshmeat) was released in May of 2000. Maybe these apps are just diamonds in the rough. Maybe they are support for the argument that not all software can be great, regardless of age. Any which way, they are good and if you haven't checked them out, you should give them a chance.

I can see that I'm quickly becoming part of the "we can do software engineering better" brouhaha.

2002-04-23T00:11:00.000-05:00

Why fixing bugs is a fun activity

a) You actually solved a problem. Maybe it was haunting you for two weeks (my case). Perhaps it was holding up the project you were working on. b) It could get you the accolades of your co-workers or peers. c) It might just even get you laid! Disclaimer: might!

If you are using a bug tracking database (you're not?! Shame! ), then you get to close a bug. One tenth as good as the aforementioned sex.

If you are using version control (see above), you get to commit it. Another opportunity to tell the world you fixed a bug. You did get into programming for the glory, right?

It might mean you can go back to what you as a programmer love doing: writing new whiz-bang features. If not right away, at least you are (asymptotically?) approaching the point where new features can be added again. If you are in a code freeze, it means you are closer to having a neat release party or you can stop worrying about your bugs and help other people. Then you can make friends, see 1c.

2002-04-22T10:29:00.000-05:00

What makes you feel like a loser?

Me, I feel like a loser because I've been going to a particular restauraunt for several years now and now they know me. The manager comes by and says hi. For some reason, this makes me feel like a mondo dork. I've mostly recovered my dignity from this self-demoralizing experience, but wow. I am a huge loser. Mother Mesquite's