So! The first week of my sophomore year at RPI is over; some disconnected notes below:
- Our housing is excellent; two large rooms connected by a bathroom, so we’ve got lots of space; also, Robb and I bunked our beds, so we have a lot of space, especially on the other side, which is currently mostly filled with guitars, amps, and various electronic components.
- The only class I tend to be excited to go to is Intro to Visual Communication; the rest are just… bleh. I managed to get a lot of really dry professors this semester…
- It’s really, really nice to be back with everyone again! Three months is too long!
- I’ve finished my GSoC evaluation, and probably won’t be blogging about E anymore (or very very very sparsely if so), so if whoever runs planet E wants to remove my blog, that would be cool…
- EMPAC looks awesome. I can’t wait until it opens.
- Bunking beds in Davison is hard - it requires disassembling 4 beds, in total, at least in our case!
- Carol (& DJ)’s apartment is really very cool! Good place to hang out/cook/whatever…
- More later… also I have Carmen and Intervalometer posts to write someday…
I’m going to be moving tomorrow, so this machine is going to go down sometime later tonight, and will be back probably tomorrow night.
I can’t wait to get back to school 
So! Today marks the official end of Summer of Code, at least as far as coding is concerned. Final evaluations are due to Google between noon today and noon on September 1st…
I’ve decided to call revision c2c3fccb856771bf56fe15ad7c7ff66cf67ed2d9 my reviewable commit; I’ve not yet tested the Ecore stuff (which has progressed much further in the last 24 hours) in a clean install of Mac OS X, but that (and a patch!) will come soon.
It’s been a lot of fun, for sure, and I learned a lot! Especially about Cocoa/CoreGraphics, and a bit about the EFL architecture and what it is the Enlightenment ‘team’ spends all of their time on I’m not leaving for good, but what with moving back to RPI on Wednesday, and the end of GSoC, etc., I’m probably going to be missing for a week at least.
So I’ll say… Nathan and Dan were both excellent mentors (I was sad to see Dan leave Enlightenment, what with his clearly rather rare knowledge of a significant portion of the EFL, but I quite much understand his decision, and hope he finds something excellent to devote his time to in the future), and I’m very glad I got to work with both of them (as well as the brief encounters I’ve had with other members of the team)!
And, to the project: there’s certainly a good bit of awesome stuff going on here; I just hope that everyone can hold it together long enough to bring all the pieces together into something as awesome as the overarching idea of E seems to be. Good luck with that, for sure, and if you ever want an ‘outside’ head, drop me a line!
I’ve started implementing Ecore events. Lots of keyboard events work, and mouse events appear to totally work. Pretty cool!
Keyboard stuff is a mess… I’m borrowing heavily from the ecore_sdl module in that regard, but… they’re missing a lot of characters. So, that’ll be tonight. Then to clean stuff up and send in an Ecore_Quartz patch. Ehh. I named it Ecore_Quartz. It’s more Ecore_Cocoa. Maybe I should change that??
Code is in Git. Including stuff to make test/orig/ecore work with Ecore_[Evas_]Quartz
Here’s a post I promised a long time ago. I was playing around with Lisp back in late June, and wrote a little brute-force n-body problem solver. I should note that when I say brute force, I mean most naïve solution possible – summing all of the forces, etc.
It seems this is one of the first things I write in a new language now… not sure why, it’s not exactly a very good test of any language; at least not this type of implementation.
After the Lisp bit, I wrote a little point viewer in Perl (with Perl::OpenGL). It’s not as pretty or fast as the one Radiohead used that was implemented in Processing, but this was before that was announced, and I’ve never (yet) written anything in Wiring/Processing, so I wouldn’t have thought to use it.
So; it’s all really very slow, and silly. Very. Very. Slow. But, it works. Also, it’s physically inaccurate, in order to get results in any reasonable number of frames. Like, G is seven orders of magnitude larger than normal. So much for gravity being the weakest fundamental force… (EDIT: actually no. it’s still not even close.)
So, for your particle-simulating-pleasure: the Lisp and the Perl.
I know Summer of Code is wrapping up (Monday is the absolute-pencils-down date), but I’ve got more news!
Following last weekend’s advances (getting a Cocoa app up without a bundle and a NIB), I’ve restarted work on Ecore. After fighting a little bit more with Autotools (aargh!) to get Objective-C building successfully (which worked much more easily with Expedite).
After that, I dropped in some code from my Expedite engine, to set up Cocoa. And, as you can see, I was met with success! A tiny Ecore_Evas_Quartz test program, successfully running. No events, yet, but they should come within a day or so…
In any case, my biggest issue right now is I’m not entirely sure what to put in Ecore_Evas_Quartz, and what should go in Ecore_Quartz. Nathan suggested something like that Ecore_Quartz should provide functionality to talk to Quartz that Ecore_Evas_Quartz itself uses; I guess I’m still not entirely clear on what exactly should go where. So a lot of stuff is going in Ecore_Evas_Quartz right now, but I can move it out once I find out what’s really what. (probably by reading other people’s code, though if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that that’s a bad idea *ahem*Evas_Cairo*ahem*).
Also — this code is up in Git. Not SVN, though, obviously.
We decided that, before Tim left to go back to school, we should make one more dinner. This time, on August 13th (almost a month after our last full meal), we decided to go all out—which means a table cloth, perfectly aligned settings and every course imaginable (except for soup…). We decided to make a chicken and pasta bake, which I have made before with some friends at the Ronald McDonald House. In addition to that, we found a recipe for a spinach salad with sesame dressing. To our meal, we added dinner rolls and a mint tea punch. For dessert, we decided on profiteroles, which are basically cream puffs with ice cream instead of cream.
We went shopping on the 12th, which is always an exciting adventure. We scouted out everything that we needed, except for lemon juice. We solved that issue by buying lemons and squeezing them ourselves. We even got to check ourselves out, which is always fun! I spent some time last night going through the recipes and organizing a timetable for when we should start each separate piece so that we could end up with a hot dinner at around 6:30.
Continue reading ‘Chicken Pasta Bake, Salad, Rolls, Mint Tea and Profiteroles’
On July 19th, Tim and I made food for ourselves, while Mom and Dad were at the neighbor’s house for dinner. We decided to make our own pizza which has apples, cheese, chicken and onions.
Our first adventure was to make a crust for the pizza. Now, we’re good at making pie crusts, but a pizza crust is a completely different thing. It turned out to be not as much trouble as people made it out to be, but trying to figure out how to cook it so that the crust didn’t burn, but the top bits got cooked enough was interesting.
Tim cooked the chicken (as always) and I cut up the apple and onions. We piled that on the semi-baked crust. Then we poured on the cheddar cheese and attempted to do the same with the pepper jack cheese. See, we couldn’t find any shredded pepper jack, or a bar of it. So we bought slices. And then we had to shred it. We tried to use the large grater, but that failed. So Tim used the spinning hand held cheese grater—which worked perfectly. With all of our ingredients on the top, we put the pizza in to cook for another 10 minutes. When it came out, it was just browning and smelled great.
The pizza was excellent. We cut it up in to 9 pieces, and had it for lunch the next day as well. It tasted great and was quite simple to make. The crust worked extremely well and the apple/cheese combination is really good.
