chrishowie.com

My web-based task manager now supports OpenID as a login mechanism. Have at it.

The cake is a lie.

The latest release of gnome-terminal has removed the ability to disable the blinking cursor, which I had previously turned off. The only way to disable it is to disable blinking cursors in all text entry widgets. For some reason I prefer the cursor in text boxes to blink, but cannot stand a blinking terminal cursor. Every blink jars my mind and I lose focus, like someone’s looking at me waving his hands and yelling “hey!” every second.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Arrrgh.

Anyway, since the developers saw fit to remove this feature presumably under the GNOMEism of “keep things simple, users be damned,” I have coded a quick patch to permanently disable cursor blinking in gnome-terminal.

As frustrated as I am at what I think is a stupid decision, at least this is free software.

I’ve started a web-based task manager to get some experience with Prototype. It’s very fast so far and is relatively easy to build upon.

• Taking liberal arts classes because in someone’s opinion that’s somehow supposed to make me more of a person.
• Hearing from every one of my professors that their class is not only directly relevant to my life, but extremely important and that I’ll never forget it.
• Caring about school.
• Not caring about school.
• People thinking I should care about school.
• Homework.
• Beating myself up because I don’t care about homework.
• Feeling like I don’t need school.
• Feeling like a whiny, egotistical jerk because I feel like I don’t need school.
• The inescapable feeling that if I didn’t get out of bed for a week, less than five people would notice and fewer would care.

This morning I got up and was going to take a hot shower. I started to take off my shirt and in so doing I must’ve bent my neck funny because I felt a sudden shooting pain near my left shoulder. After I recoiled, the initial sharp pain died down and it was replaced by a very, very intense throbbing pain. I sat down as fast as I could and tried not to yell (it was that bad).

For the first ten minutes I could concentrate on nothing else; I was paralyzed from the pain. An hour later I took an ibuprofen when it wasn’t getting better. Finally I made an appointment with my university health services. After explaining the issue to the nurse, she recommended that I take two ibuprofen every four hours and…

Take a hot shower.

During the prayer at the end of chapel today the pastor’s voice broke from emotion and she stopped abruptly mid-word. My immediate reaction was “argh, packet loss again!?”

Yeah. It’s that bad.

To test my new HDTV tuner + MythTV setup, I recorded the State of the Union address. While watching, I noticed this interesting clip and posted it on YouTube:

What’s wrong with this picture?

While thinking about how I was going to implement something in Kaffeeklatsch recently, I took a step back and looked at the class structure. What a mess. Over the next few days I drafted a new class structure that would better reflect the goals of the project and make implementation of new features simpler.

The last week or two have been spent implementing that new design and it’s very promising so far. Specifically, media player connectivity and presets have been overhauled. The OptionAttribute class has been removed in favor of a series of attributes from System.ComponentModel. The GUI designer is looking more slick than ever.

With the rewrite comes a new name: Open Visualization Platform, or OpenVP for short. Development is taking place in my public Subversion repository, so if you want to track it just svn co https://layla.chrishowie.com/svn/OpenVP. You will need a recent MonoDevelop to build the project.

As expected, the hacking on Tursiops continued most of last week. I’m a little late getting a release out there, but here it is. The archive contains two folders, one for i386 machines and one for amd64. The copy of Tursiops in each is identical, but the glue library is platform-specific.

If you want the corresponding source code, svn co https://layla.chrishowie.com/svn/Tursiops. This release corresponds to revision 126 if you want the exact code of this release at a later date.

The only known issue at this point is that the “refine search” function does not update the progress meter, and a refine operation cannot be canceled. This should be fixed in the next release.

Feedback is welcome — just comment here. Enjoy!