It’s been a while since I’ve written anything terribly much here, so I’m going to make a nice rambling post spanning various different subjects…

Firstly, Seed! We’re going to spend a lot of time finishing up Seed 0.2.0 during the next day-cycle (whatever that means, these days - last night, I went to sleep at 8PM and got up this morning at 4 to do homework…). We’ll most likely release this weekend. Robb’s changed the core a lot this time around - we get struct support, a much, much better memory footprint, GObject properties (and, probably, signals) from Javascript, Cairo support (it’s not pretty, but it works!), many improved examples and tests. Also, exceptions work in a lot more places now, making it much easier to debug apps.

I’ve also been rewriting Matt’s Lights Off example in Clutter - I’ll upload a video when I get back if I can figure it out - it’s incredibly awesome!

On another note: I got female headers and got the LCD interfaced properly to the PCB; I’ve taken lots of notes for revision B of the PCB, which should be the “final” revision. I’ve also started a Keynote (I’ll post it here when I’m done) that I’m going to present to E-Club closer to the end of the semester, detailing the project from beginning to “end”, as well as what I learned about executing a “project”.

As for school - everything’s wrapping up; last horrific diff.eq. homework next week, last data structures lab next week, etc. I’m currently in the middle of the last project for VisComm, which is where the muffin pictures on Flickr come from. You really need to take a look at this one full-size… it’s… scary!

I’m calling Carol’s landlord later tonight to schedule an apartment tour… yikes!

So! Robb announced the first release of Seed tonight! It’s been a crazy journey, so far, and we’re just starting!

In any case… I’m hacking together Debian packages for our PPA for version 0.2, which will probably land in a week or so… then it’ll be really easy to get going…

Here’s a bunch of applications Robb, Matt, and I have written in Seed… the source is all in Gnome SVN…

Lights Off was Matt’s first application - he went from having written no Javascript at all to a nice, working game in a matter of hours one night.

n-oscillator was more or less the first working GTK application; Robb wrote it (who else would be interested in making annoying noises at all hours!?) just to figure out how to get things working… it lets you start an arbitrary number of oscillators and adjust their volume and frequency, and uses GStreamer for output.

calc was my first GTK+seed application. I wrote it on the train on the way to the Gnome Summit, without any documentation… it’s a horrible front-end for eval, nothing else!

mini-browser is my rewrite of Robb’s original WebKit/seed web browser, Spacewhale. It provides a tabbed interface (though, because of a WebKit bug, no GTK/WebKit-based browser can ‘open in new tab/window’ at all…), but not much else… I’m planning on revisiting this at some point, and getting it to a state similar to epiphany-webkit.

repl is where a lot of our testing takes place, since it provides immediate feedback. It’s a rather vital part of an interpreted language, and can be written in very, very little Seed code:

#!/usr/local/bin/seed
 
while(1)
{
	try
	{ Seed.print(eval(Seed.readline("> "))) }
	catch(e)
	{ Seed.print(e.name + " " + e.message) }
}

shader is a cute demo Robb wrote that lets you edit GLSL shaders and apply them to an image, using Clutter to display the image and apply the texture.

ide is a small Seed editor that I’ve been writing, eventually providing syntax checking and (maybe) debugging of Seed apps.

I’ve finished my Seed tutorial, which takes you from square one to writing a quick WebKit-based web browser in Seed, while explaining bits of Javascript and GTK along the way.

I tested it out on Matt, and he’s got a working copy of the browser now, so I guess it works…

Firstly, I’ve started tagging photos that I’ve used as backgrounds before here.

First-and-a-halfly: posting to WordPress from WebKit nightlies is still broken. Firefox on OS X. Yuk.

Secondly! Last weekend was the GNOME Developer’s Summit; Matt and Robb and I went. We stayed at Matt’s house again, which was excellent and convenient as always! The first day involved a talk from two of the awesome guys working on gobject-introspection (which is also a cornerstone of our project), which cleared up some of my fuzziness about introspection and their implementation (to some extent).

We (Robb) talked to Mark a little bit that day, and explained our plans (which I have yet to detail here, and won’t today!). More about all that later…

Seed release later this week, after the planned gobject-introspection release. Yay for Seed! I’ll write more about it after the release, post the tutorial I’m writing, etc. Pay no attention to the tutorial in SVN; I haven’t gotten a GNOME SVN account yet, so none of my updates are there… we just switched to SVN from a Bazaar repo @ Launchpad, so all of our commit history is missing too… oh well. In any case… all will be fun!

P.S. Intervalometer is waiting on PCBs from BatchPCB, so it might be a while!

P.P.S. Registration soon (the third)! Looking at… Programming Languages, Graph Theory, Models of Computation, Multivar, Engineering Processes, Electronic Circuits (that’ll get me through the end of Junior year CS and a little further… also not taking Typography this semester because apparently the teacher is… not… optimal… and everyone)

P.P.P.S. Robb’s going to be working for litl starting next week. Yay for an NDA with your roommate

I’m on my way to the GNOME Developer’s Summit, but some news just came down the RSS tubes:

MacBook Pro video flaw

Apparently they’re going to pay us back for having repaired our machines because of the flaw, and they’re fixing the flaw for free from now on out (I presume this means out-of-warranty, which is good for everyone!). They’re also acknowledging that it was still a problem with machines shipping last month (probably even this month), and that NVIDIA supposedly misled them in suggesting that no MacBook Pros were affected…

Today started rather lazily; Amy got up and read for a few hours; I got up at 11 (not being used to getting up at 6:00 like she is…). After getting dressed (we dressed up, to some extent, certainly a bit more than usual) for the day, we went to Commons for breakfast/lunch, dragging Matt along with us. A pretty normal, quiet Saturday morning, except for the Amy-being-here part.

We thought that one of the shows we were going to was at 2:00, so we headed over to EMPAC to pick up tickets and go to the show; I took my camera so we could take some pictures in the 30 minutes between ticket pickup time and the actual show (so that they didn’t give away our tickets!).

Those pictures are on my Flickr now; it turned out we misread the website vs. the ticket receipt, and the show wasn’t until 10, which was really optimal because that was the same showing Mike and Nate had three tickets to. We wandered a bit more, ran into Eli (my physics grad TA from last year who graduated, but came back to see EMPAC and have coffee with a bunch of our old class), and some others…

Carol had planned on doing dinner tonight, but for numerous reasons ended up making lunch instead; Amy and I headed over there in lieu of our 2:00 show. One of Carol’s friends from home, Anna, is up for the weekend, so the four of us sat down to some excellent eggplant parmesan (I’d never eaten eggplant in that quantity nor cooked that way, as far as I can recall, but it was really very good!) and a long game of Apples to Apples… eventually we were joined by Victoria, which further broke the already broken-for-RPI ratio. All in all we had a great time, good food (as always!); even Amy came away smiling and admitting she had a good time, which is something to say considering the number of people she knew going in! We were there for a few hours, and when we finally returned to Davison (at a bit past 5), it was time to wake Robb up…

… and head back to EMPAC, this time with Nate and Mike and Matt and Robb! We met up with Carol and Anna again, and eventually Gino and Jillian, and the whole bunch of us went to the inaugural concert (with the Albany Symphony Orchestra). We were sitting just in front of the construction manager; it was rather humorous to hear some of his conversations with other people about some of the features of the building. The concert hall is absolutely beautiful, and really rather perfect, and every single one of you should convince me to take you to something in it some time! The concert was quite good, though they started out with rather old music even in the scheme of classical music, and it had a somewhat dark, dissonant feel. Things cheered up by the end, though, and they - of course - finished with a standing ovation!

Through a walk to Davison and back to EMPAC, we lost Carol, Anna, and Matt (on purpose) and went to a show in the theatre which turned out to be incredibly strange, and also rather loud (they handed out earplugs while we were walking in!)… it’s not clear to me (or, I think, anyone else… numerous people walked out on the show) what the show was about, though there was a point where a girl laid on a bit of grass in the middle of the stage chanting “I wish … (xyz)”, over and over… and another point where a person dressed only in underwear and a space helmet was dancing around on the stage with a toy space shuttle and disk on a stick… and (at a different time) another astronaut-like-person sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow… it was really rather… strange. But cool! They made good use of the theatre, in any case, and it looks incredibly cool… ah, the possibilities

We dragged Amy to Pizza Bella after that, had our midnight snack, and now we’re back here, arguing over Orange and how best to destroy Robb’s laptop… so, check out Flickr, comment on stuff, and have fun!

Later!

Tim

Just pictures for now, stories (maybe I can convince Amy to write something) later…

So ugly Cogswell in the background doesn’t help… but the sign is pretty cool…

Into the concert hall!

They have a little café, too!

Yay! It’s finally the opening weekend of the “Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center”, or as we’ve all been calling it for a whole year now, EMPAC. It’s a pretty big deal for the school, and is almost certainly the sink of most of our tuition money (along with the new athletic village, which makes even less sense…), so hopefully it turns out to be all we’re hoping it does!

Amy came down for the weekend to say with Robb and I and to go to the opening weekend events we’d gotten tickets for; to pass the time tonight we went and saw Get Smart (again) at UPAC; we dragged Matt and Robb (who hadn’t seen it before) along with us…

Tomorrow we’re going to go to a concert, and various other EMPAC events… should be interesting!! Tonight they’ve got lots of searchlights (which, of course, made light-pollution-aware Matt somewhat unhappy), as you can see in the picture below!

A: Not to be nosy, but why haven’t you been coming to analysis recently?

B: To be honest, it’s because I’ve been working up the courage to ask you out!

So yeah… expect the occasional heard-at-RPI bit… except this one is a bit closer to home… and not… real

So! It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written here; that’s mostly because of school and stuff, also because I wasn’t quite sure when I was going to get around to introducing my latest project, which is one of the only other things I have to write about right now!

I guess I’m finally getting around to introducing said project to everyone!

One of my “complaints” about my D80 is the lack of built in intervalometer (providing, of course, the ability to take time-lapse photographs). I won’t be happy until I’ve duplicated every bit of functionality that my old Coolpix had, and this is really the only thing remaining… but the market for such devices leaves much to be desired. Prices are insane (as is usual in the photography world), with less justification than usual.

I’ve been a long time out of electronics (long long time), so I figured this would be a good project with which to get my feet wet again (in the process, I remembered how much fun it is to be able to manipulate things you build, and how awesome — if frustrating — the added puzzle of DIY hardware is)…

I started out by deciding what I wanted in my intervalometer, and ended up with the following list:

• Interval mode: straightforward, take a picture every so many seconds.
• Interval Bulb mode: take a picture every so many seconds, keeping the shutter open for a given duration
• Bulb mode: provide a way to hold the shutter open for longer than the camera’s 30″ limit
• Trigger mode: coupled with external trigger devices, allow the capture of photographs based off of high-speed triggers; such devices could be a laser beam-break switch, or a microphone

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.

Today, we started at 4:00 with the rolls, because they had to rise. We mixed all of the ingredients (yeast, milk, flour, eggs, salt, shortening and sugar) in half quantities, so that we only had 12 rolls. The next step was to knead the dough until it was smooth. That turned out to be the most exciting thing ever! Well, not really. We floured the cutting board and plopped the dough down. Then Tim set to work kneading. I poured (and I mean poured) flour onto the dough and his hands so that it would stop sticking. I can’t say that it worked too well. The dough was horribly sticky and messy, but we got it into the greased bowl and let it rise for an hour.

While we were waiting, I did the dishes and Tim took some pictures. Before we knew it, it was time to start the main dish. First, I cut up all of the vegetables and gave them to Tim to sauté. I continued to combine ingredients—the tomatoes and spices. Then, when the vegetables were done, we added those to the tomatoes. Tim went off to cook the chicken which I cut up, and I set the pasta to cook. Those all finished in about ten minutes, and they too were added to the vegetables. Everything was mixed well and poured into a 13×9 pan. I shredded the monterey jack cheese and poured it into the whipping cream, while Tim measured the grated parmesan. All of that cooked over medium heat until it was a sauce. That was poured over the chicken/pasta/vegetable mixture. Then, we put into the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

With that done, we moved back to the rolls. They had to be split into 12 pieces and put on a pan. I floured my hands and dove into the dough. Eventually, with a lot of flour, the dough became 12 very round rolls. We put them in the oven with the chicken and pasta so that they would both be ready at the same time.

Next came the drink. We boiled some water and put tea bags in it, as well as a bunch of mint sprigs. We let that steep, and then I took out the leaves and we added sugar and orange juice. We squeezed the three lemons and had exactly enough lemon juice to add. Then came the five cups of cold water. We put it in the fridge to cool, took out the chicken pasta bake and moved on to the salad.

I mixed the spinach and red onion together and started on the dressing. We cooked the sesame seeds and added the other ingredients (soy sauce, oil, salt, sugar and cider vinegar). Once it was boiling, which was quite dangerous, I poured it onto the salad and tossed it together.

Tim was pouring melted butter and garlic salt over each roll (at which point I burned two fingers on the pans…) and letting them cook for another few minutes. Once that was done, they were taken out of the oven and put in a basket. Tim set the table perfectly and then we put everything on it.

So, all of our food was done and on the table, and Mom was working her way through our mountain of dishes, but we were still waiting on Dad to get home from the neighbor’s house. When he finally got home, we started dinner.

Every bit of dinner was excellent. The chicken pasta bake tasted really good, and had a lot of different flavors. The drink had a lot of flavors as well, but they all seemed to work together perfectly. The rolls worked much better than expected. It all worked together quite well… but then there was dessert…

So, for dessert we attempted to make profiteroles, which are, apparently, as hard to make as is it to say their name. It’s really simple to make the batter and shape it on the trays, but once it’s cooked, they 1) don’t come off of the pan well and 2) don’t fill well with ice cream because a) they don’t cut in half and b) they fall apart. Basically, this was our first big… issue. I wouldn’t say it was a disaster because how can you go wrong with ice cream? But it wasn’t what it was supposed to be, which was very sad.

Besides dessert, this was a very successful day of cooking!

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.

So I made a little discovery in a 7 year old mailing list post yesterday, and found out how to create a fully-functional Cocoa app, without letting the default run loop take over permanently, and without embedding the executable in an application bundle. Here you go:

EDIT: OK Wordpress is being silly; obviously, put < > around the #import file

EDIT 2: Also, obviously, you need MainMenu.nib to be in the same folder as your executable.

EDIT 3: If you want to go NIBless, use NSBackingStoreBuffered, not the default NSBackingStoreRetained when creating your window!

// Build like so: gcc short.m -framework Cocoa
 
#import Cocoa/Cocoa.h
 
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
   [NSApplication sharedApplication];
 
   [[[NSNib alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"MainMenu.nib"]] instantiateNibWithOwner:NSApp topLevelObjects:nil];
 
   ProcessSerialNumber psn = { 0, kCurrentProcess };
   TransformProcessType(&psn, kProcessTransformToForegroundApplication);
 
   [NSApp finishLaunching];
 
   while (1)
   {
      NSEvent *event = [NSApp nextEventMatchingMask:NSAnyEventMask untilDate:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.001] inMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode dequeue:YES];
      if (event) [NSApp sendEvent:event];
   }
}

So, I’m not sure exactly where I was last time I wrote about my progress on Evas_Quartz… so I’ll just mention the things I know I’ve done recently…

1) Gradients work now! Except, only some of them. It seems that linear, sinusoidal, and angular gradients work, but I haven’t seen a radial gradient out of it yet. Not sure that this is my fault, but it really only seems reasonable that it is. I just haven’t figured out why yet (anyone care to help?)…

2) The biggest problems with the text block layout code (actually, the problems were with my functions for querying Core Text font metrics, as I knew) are all fixed now. Text blocks (at least the ones in Expedite, and the ones I made for my little throwaway test programs) all look great! A part of the solution is very clearly hackish, but it works for now. I’ve come back to this code, revising it massively, a few times during the project… one more pass should probably do it.

3) I spent a lot of time cleaning up memory leaks in #1 and #2. I suppose this is technically part of #1 and #2, but it happened more recently than the initial implementations. Heh.

In truth, I was leaking a lot. A legitimately embarrassing amount, at first… so in an afternoon, it went from >100MB (just silly!) to 100KB, and now it’s at 14KB (through the entirety of the test program). The remaining leak is somewhere in the image data access functions (image_data_put, I think)…

4) I’ve got bits and pieces of the Ecore bits started, if you count… nearly empty files compiling and installing properly as started. I haven’t added them to Git yet, and I have to find a home for them in Google Code SVN (since the root of that is currently the evas directory… oops). I think it’s pretty clear that between sorting out threads/runloops/etc. and … just … making Cocoa work like a more conventional system, I’m going to be at this part for well into the school year, which is fine with me (maybe I can convince Robb to point me in the right direction, once I can show him what’s up). But maybe there’s others that work like this, I don’t know. Carbon would certainly be literally a million times easier. Gah!

I had a thought yesterday about a feature I’d like to see in Nautilus or Finder…

If you’re anything like me, you probably keep a lot of crap on your desktop, mostly related to things you’re currently working on (and you file them away later). This certainly isn’t the most efficient system, and I can assure you that it’s not the prettiest.

So I thought… wouldn’t it be cool if you had a little menulet that allowed you to rapidly create directories (in a definable place, say ~/Documents/Projects, or something), and switch your Desktop between representing the contents of each of these project directories easily? If you could get this implemented, it would also allow you to assign a particular project’s directory to a Space/Virtual Desktop, I suppose, but I don’t use them, so I’m more interested in the thought of a cleaner desktop, and the inherent organizational improvements.

I shared this idea with Robb (who noted that he thought something similar might possibly be in KDE4, though none of us have paid much attention there), and he started to implement it in Nautilus, but discovered that, while Nautilus respects XDG_DESKTOP_DIR, there’s no way to convince it to reload the directory (SIGHUP, the most obvious choice, also causes the creation of a new browser window). He also noted that simply replacing the ~/Desktop folder won’t work, because, if you’ve registered for filesystem notifications on the old ~/Desktop, you’ll loose your notifications when you replace the directory.

Finder is a different story entirely. Apple uses some sort of magic to determine what directory is the Desktop, and I haven’t figured it out yet. It was very promising at first… I created two directories with files in them, deleted ~/Desktop (with root privileges, because a user can’t delete their own Desktop…), linked one of the new directories to ~/Desktop, and *BOOM* the files are there on my desktop. But that’s the only time it works… if you try to change the link, the desktop continues to represent the new folder, no matter what you do. I have a thought regarding chained links, but I’m not actually sure it’s going to work; I’ll try it tomorrow.

So! If anyone has any suggestions… now would be the time

Ahhhh! It’s been a long time since I last posted, but I’m back up and running for good, now (there’ll be another 24 hour outage when I move to RPI, but other than that, we should be good!).

I’ve replaced Trinity with a nice new machine, built from a bunch of parts I bought (all from Newegg, of course).

I initially tried OpenSolaris (which Mike is succeeding with), but between the package manager needing a serious amount of help and my general inexperience with a rather different OS, I had to go back to Debian. So, no ZFS for now, maybe next summer.

Here’s what’s what in the new computer:

2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (E7200)
2GB DDR2 RAM
2×750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16

all in a cute little Shuttle case (the K48). I had to later acquire an extra SATA cable and a ATA-to-SATA power cable (to get data and power for the second drive), but that wasn’t a problem…

The stock Intel fan sucks, as everyone has already noted, but Arctic Cooling’s fan simply doesn’t fit in the small case! (so don’t spend extra money on it… just… make the Intel one work!)

The most awesome bit: I get 106MB/s writing to the disk (and 60MB/s over AFP over Gigabit Ethernet, or about 80MB/s over SAMBA). Mike and I discovered that Apple’s SAMBA client is broken: I get about 2MB/s with SAMBA on OS X, but 60MB/s with AFP on the same system, and 80MB/s with SAMBA on Linux on the same machine. So, simply put, don’t use SAMBA from Leopard.

My PowerMac G4 seems to have stopped working. Luckily, Dad brought a G3 B&W home from our neighbor’s a few months ago, so check it out!:

What with crooked disks and a 300MHz CPU, the chances of this being a lasting solution are somewhat slim; I’m going to replace Trin with a small homebuilt machine (based off a Shuttle box)…

Also… this is running inside a chroot off of the Debian 4.0 install CD, so if it goes down… don’t look at me

So, one week later, it’s time to write the obligatory what’s-cool-in-the-app-store post! I’m sure my answers won’t be any different than everyone else’s, but it’s this sort of post that’s always funny to look back at in the future

Remote — The single most awesome iPhone app, Remote lets you control iTunes on your computer from anywhere on your network, with your phone! It looks almost exactly like the ‘iPod’ application that’s been on the iPhone since day one, but changes are instantly reflected in the music playing from iTunes!

CubicMan — The only non-free app on this list, CubicMan is a game that I remember from the jailbreak days; though it was much less polished then, it’s still just as enjoyable. I’d recommend it to anyone, unless you’re easily frustrated.

NetNewsWire — Brent Simmons’s classic news client, for the iPhone! Syncs with the desktop client through NewsGator. The only issue I have is that it’s a little pokey, but apparently he’s fixed a lot of performance problems in point releases that have yet to be vetted for the App Store.

BoxOffice — Awesome local theatre search and Rotten tomatoes access app. Not much else to say!

Twitterific — The iPhone version of the Iconfactory’s now-famous Twitter client; looks just as nice as its big brother, the ads on the free version aren’t that annoying, and (besides Twitter downtime) the application works great!

Facebook — The 1.1 update to the official Facebook application added the one feature I was planning on complaining about: lack of wall access; indeed, it also added photo tagging, access to extended profile information, and more! This app more or less is already at the point where it completely replaces everything one could possibly want from the also-awesome web app.

midomi — A nice listen-to-music-and-find-it application. Works well for me, others aren’t so happy!

Last last summer, I inherited a set of old IBM PSLs from my physics teacher. In case you don’t keep up with your early-eighties home science labs, it’s a rather large beige box with all sorts of modules that you can plug in, which in turn plug in to sensors (light, temperature, sonar, etc.). It’s got a 25-pin serial interface, so it took a bit of … maneuvering … to get it attached even to my old PowerMac G4, or Robb’s desktop (the machine formerly known as cary3). Crazy, I know!

Way back before last Christmas, I wanted to get the PSL temperature probe, at the very least, working. A little bit of Python later, and it was working! (the manual had sample code for all sorts of things, and also detailed protocol and implementation documentation - try to get that from nVidia!)

I then wrote a little canvas-y viewer script, and left it running, polling the temperature in our room in Cary Hall every minute for approximately two and a half months. The final output is here:

You can pretty clearly tell when Robb and I weren’t at school (especially spring break, the really smooth wavy part near the beginning). It was cool at the time, just a cute little thing… I dunno!

Anyway. I put it back up, here at home.

We had some frozen shrimp in the freezer that needed to be eaten, so Tim and I took that on as our next cooking challenge. We found a recipe for Ancho Shrimp with Smoked Gouda Corncakes that would use up the shrimp, and be something other than chicken, which seems to be all we make. We also baked some chocolate white chip cookies and made a Orange Cream Punch as our drink.

After searching for ancho peppers, ancho chile pepper or some spice that could be a substitute, we struck gold at Shaw’s. We walked into the store, picked up lettuce for salad and basically walked into the pepper section, which just happened to have dried ancho peppers. With that most important ingredient, we set to work.

We started with our cookies, so that they could chill in the fridge because, apparently, that makes them better. We combined all of the ingredients, and even let Tim use the mixer—yikes! It was quite simple, besides the poofing chocolate and flour.

The first, and most important step in dinner was to make the corncakes that would accompany the shrimp. After mixing together all of the ingredients (and shredding our own Gouda cheese), I attempted to “spoon batter into oil by 1/4 cupfuls,” but that really didn’t work well. It was incredibly hard to know when the cakes were cooked, and how to flip them and just everything about them was painful. In addition, the corn was always exploding and releasing little spurts of hot oil, which always seemed to hit someone. So I gave that job to Tim, which may sound mean, but he did a really great job [ed.: lolno] making sure they were round and cooked. I was quite impressed. While he was doing that, I was de-tailing the shrimp and getting everything ready for making the shrimp sauce.

Once Tim was done, and I had done a set of dishes, we cooked the ancho peppers in butter. We let the oils, or whatever, seep out and we added the garlic. It smelled absolutely great—the ancho peppers had an “earthy” smell, and mixed with the garlic, it’s difficult to explain. The shrimp was added—and it looked like we could have stopped there. But we added the tomatoes and it looked even better. The peppers were removed, and we poured some of the shrimp and tomatoes over two corncakes on each plate.

Our drink for the night was orange sherbet, vanilla ice cream, Sprite and milk. I combined it all in a big bowl, and it turned out to be smoothie-like. It was actually quite great, but it didn’t really fit in with our dinner.

After we ate, we cooked the cookies, which turned out to be very good. They didn’t even burn—like the last chocolate cookies I made.

In the end, a really awesome meal that was a little difficult in places, but well worth the effort. It was questionable along the way, in my opinion any way, but it turned out to be a good choice of recipes. I think I would make all of these again, but maybe we should learn about corncakes and cooking things like that before we attempt it again—as that was very chaotic.

Any Mac users here probably know of Perian - in fact, I’d venture a guess you’ve probably got it installed!

In any case, I’m just writing this to note that if you try to export (transcode) a video file in Quicktime Pro, there’s a chance that, if you have Perian installed, the audio won’t come through - in fact, you’ll find yourself completely unable to extract the audio from the file!

The only solution I’ve found is to use the proper codec for the video (and I’ve not found a solution for situations where said proper codec doesn’t exist, except try to wade through the mencoder {warning: 1.1 MB wall of text} mess…). Perian’s great, but this would be a good bug for them to fix.

I’ve only had this problem with DivX files, which, luckily, have an alternate, ‘official’ codec.

So! Tonight I got all of the Expedite tests running. I haven’t checked that they’re all perfect, and there’s some larger issues with the program (it draws the icon for the currently selected test really large in the upper right corner, sometimes the text disappears, or the menu forgets to disappear - not sure why); it’s nice at least to have all of the tests starting. So! Pictures and notes follow…

You can see the icon thing I was talking about in the top right hand corner. Other than that, this test works well (at least, it does now that I’ve turned CGContextFlush(…) coalescing off). Coalescing CGContextFlush is a per-application setting (you set CGDisableCoalescedUpdates to true in the application’s Info.plist). I’m convinced this is a good thing, because it seems like a good idea for general applications, to prevent tearing, but it’s nice to be able to turn it off, for benchmarking applications and the like.

This test hurts my eyes. I’m not sure if it’s because we’ve only got low quality smoothing, or Expedite just gives yukky data, or what, but I’m just happy that the test runs! I ended up looting bits and pieces of different engines to get these image data access functions working (thanks GL and SDL, mostly!). I’m not sure they’re perfect, yet (the last of the tests from the old program pertaining to this still doesn’t work), but they’re a lot better than they were recently!

I didn’t initially understand that I needed to support YCbCr colorspaces in my engine (nor did I, once I knew that, know how easy it would be to implement) - I initially assumed mentions of that dealt with the device’s colorspace, which I was already long done with… however, this test shows that it’s working now!

I think I caught this one in the middle of a redraw, or something. These run pretty slowly (the styled text tests), I’m not sure why - though starting up Quartz 2D Extreme just about doubles their framerate… the normal, unstyled text tests run ~60fps, which is good enough for me!

Here’s the first test that’s clearly still broken, though I think it’ll only take a little bit of TLC to get it into shape, I just haven’t paid any attention to some of the font metrics functions yet…

Runs nice; see how you can see the menu through it? That’s not … right … but my Expedite… hack… is horrible, and is probably at fault. I’ll write later today about the run loop issue that’s keeping me from writing a proper Expedite backend, and maybe someone can help me!

Rectangles - yay! So you’ve probably noticed a theme by now - everything seems to be limited to right around 60fps. Wonder why? SO DO I! I turned off coalescing - that got lots of things from 30 to 60fps. I’ve seen the rectangles go to around 150fps, but I can’t seem to duplicate that! Very very puzzling…

All done! More posts later!

Hello again!  We made food again tonight, July 11th.  I got this crazy idea to make chicken and rice stuffed peppers, which is what we decided to make tonight.  In addition, we made buttery lemon spinach, an orange juice/lemonade/iced tea drink known as Tiger Tea and a brownie ice cream sandwich cake dessert.

We started by making the dessert, because it took the longest and had to be frozen a few times.  The first step was to make the brownie layers, which were easy to mix and bake.  Those had to cool for a while, and then the ice cream center was added.  It took a bit of effort to get the brownie out of one of the pans, which made everything a little more difficult.  And the ice cream layer, which had to be level, was interesting because we had to slice the ice cream in layers, and had to keep melting it in the oven for a few seconds at a time.  In the end, it was alright, the brownie part wasn’t great, and it was really messy.

Next, we mixed up the drink.  It was made up of frozen lemonade and orange juice concentrate, water, sugar and tea.  The drink was supposed to have two quarts of water, but we only had room in the pitcher for one, so it was a bit stronger, but it was still really good.  Although it looked a little bit strange, it tasted better than we both expected.

Then we started the peppers.  We took the yellow peppers and cut holes in the top and removed all of the innards–that part was definitely not fun (I let Tim do that).  I cut an onion which was torture, and Tim ’sautéed’ them and we added that to some cheese, chicken, rice and spaghetti sauce.  We spooned it into the peppers and let them cook, which confused us because we had already cooked the chicken.  Oh, and a note on the recipe, if anyone decides to make it, a cup of cooked rice is not equivalent to a cup of raw rice, but it really works fine either way.  The stuffed peppers were excellent, in all of our opinions.  This was another thing that we would definitely make again.  We might even try some different fillings since the pepper piece worked so well.  The chicken and rice worked great as well, but there are plenty of different things we could try.

The spinach was spinach and some lemon juice, butter and oil.  It was really simple to mix together and microwave for 2 minutes.  It was easy, and alright in the end.

Together, an excellent dinner—everything worked really well and tasted great!  Most of these are things we would try again.  There was a lot to be done, and it took longer than expected, but it was worth it in the end!

So! I’ve started working on Expedite, since it really feels like a better test program overall, its what my evaluation is on, and it does more reasonable performance testing (as well as allows me to only run a particular test, if I want!).

I’ve got a run loop issue that I’m going to write up later and see if I can’t get someone else to help me puzzle out… there’s just too much code competing for attention, at the moment!

Anyway… it draws… no events, so it’s useless, and it’s absolutely incredibly hacked up, but I’ll work on getting it to work better and fixing things that don’t work (especially image data access functions, which need to be implemented, badly!)… image after the break!

Hi, Amy again, writing before we embark on our next fooding adventure tomorrow!  On June 28, Tim and I made an attempt at a classic Utica/Rome, NY recipe called chicken riggies.  It’s basically chicken and pasta (penne in our case, though rigatoni is suggested) in a creamy tomato sauce.  It’s kind of odd to think of and explain, but it was actually quite great.  The most hilarious bit during cooking this was the sauce.  When you let it settle, it turned white, but when you stirred it, it turned bright orange.  Absolutely awesome.  We skipped the cooking sherri, which was fine, but I think rigatoni would have been better.

In addition, we made some cheese bread—simply a cut up loaf of Italian bread, buttered and spread with mozzarella cheese.  Then the bread was baked it for about 3 minutes, and it was nice and warm and delicious.

Our chocolate chip ice cream pie was excellent.  The crust, which I had to make again, was crushed mini chocolate chip cookies.  There was a ring of cookies around the edge.  The crust was covered in melted vanilla ice cream.  We stopped there, and decided not to follow the next step which said to wait 2 hours, then add more ice cream.  We just put a ton of ice cream on the first time and froze that.  This was definitely a dessert we would make again!

Overall, a very good dinner that was semi quick and simple.

Two quick Evas_Quartz updates:

I’ve published my git repo here. I promise to try to keep it as up-to-date as I can!

The other bit of good news: I got the Evas image loading code working today, replacing the old Apple PNG loading code! This is good for lots of reasons: it opens the door to getting the image data-access stuff working, fixes the smoothing problem, and also gets us that much closer to having a working image cache.

The biggest issue I’ve noticed is that having smoothing working seems to slow things down a bit. Maybe too much - at least too much for the benchmark. It gets a little skippy… but I don’t think this would be a legitimate problem for any real application written using Evas… I’ll see what I can do.

Hey! I hacked up the Evas_Quartz test program to push out frames as files, so I have smooth video to show you! It’s incomplete, but it’s mostly here. It may not play back well for y’all, depending on your machine (it’s running at 50fps because that made the math easy, etc.), but check it out!

There’s still some tests broken near the end; there’s still lots of work to do…

I’ll post a patch tomorrow, with details. First I have to get it to patch CVS HEAD!

I know I don’t normally do news, but this is quite related to my last MacBook Pro bug post, so here goes…

Yahoo (among others) are reporting that NVidia has admitted that some of their mobile GPU lines have been failing at higher than usual rates; they’re cutting predicted revenue by ~150 million dollars in order to fix this; stock price is dropping, etc…

One wonders if one of the affected GPUs might not include, oh, say, the GeForce 8600M GT?

In any case - things are looking up for this problem getting solved, perhaps.

Some Evas news and a little Lispy bonus tomorrow!

Hi, it’s Amy again!  Our first attempt at making a full dinner together happened around June 17.  After going through about a thousand recipes, I compiled a menu for a complete dinner.  

The main dish was called Southwestern Chicken Salad—a combination of salad, baked flour tortillas, chicken, corn, black beans and tomatoes.  The dressing was a mix of barbeque sauce and ranch dressing.  It was very simple and good for the most part, though the beans and tomatoes were rather excessive.

The corn bread muffins we made from scratch came from this recipe.  They were quick and easy, but we learned that you should use Pam, not muffin papers.  Also, the recipe we used, which we found after we went shopping, used only things we already had.

As for dessert, which is apparently what we’re quite good at, we made banana cream pie.  Yet again, I had to create a pie crust out of crushed graham crackers—which is never too fun.  But, on the upside, I didn’t have to whip cream.  Instead of using two boxes of vanilla pudding, we had one vanilla and one banana.  Mixing the two worked quite well since we only had one banana to slice.

To complete dinner, we made Pink Honey Lemonade.  This almost didn’t happen because of the lack of strawberries and the excessive simmering that had to be done, but in the end, we got the strawberries and made it work.  The lemonade tasted excellent once it was done, but a lot of work had to go into boiling the strawberries.  And we sort of failed at the lemonade bit since we only had half the amount of lemon juice necessary.

All together, it was a highly successful dinner that we pulled off in a good amount of time for all of the components.  It would have been nearly impossible to get all of this done with only one person since a lot of things had to be done simultaneously.

Hi!  I’m Amy and I’m going to be writing about the food adventures that Tim and I are taking over this summer.

After Tim made his fudge, we decided to take on a peanut butter and fudge pie on June 11th.  After we found the recipe, we secretly biked to Mazza’s and picked up the graham crackers, cream and evaporated milk that we needed.

The first thing to do was figure out how to make a crust out of the graham crackers.  That turned out to be my job, and it was quite an experience.  When I made the crust, I used the wrong pan, which was too small and made the pie rather tall.

Meanwhile, Tim made more fudge that we used to make a layer between the crust and the peanut butter.  Again, he complained about the candy thermometer, which I finally understand.  He had to use a cup of water and try to sink the little fudge drops.  He layered in the fudge, while I whipped the cream with a whisk—which wasn’t easy, but made a great topping.

Tim created the peanut butter filling, which stole half of my cream, and put it on top of the fudge once it had chilled.  We were both quite astonished that there was so much cream cheese in the pie, but in the end, you would never have known.  At that point, we put the pie in the fridge to cool.  I shaved a block of bittersweet chocolate with a carrot peeler to garnish the pie.

We let the pie cool, washed the dishes, mopped the horrendously dirty floor and waited to surprise our parents with our excellent dessert.  The pie was great, albeit a bit over peanut buttery in my opinion.  

While we were baking, we took some pictures of our creations.

Digg  Reddit

Recently, an unknown number of first-revision Santa Rosa MacBook Pros began exhibiting issues with their onboard video cards. After a reboot, or on wake from sleep, the machine refuses to acknowledge the presence of a display, either internal or external. From that point on, the computer never regains its displays - not after a reboot, etc. Subsequent debugging indicates that the machine is misidentifying its NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card as the MacBook’s Intel X3100 card. This issue is known to affect at least 50 people - a group of affected users has formed a Google Spreadsheet in order to document and organize cases.

AppleCare is recommending replacing the logic board, which some have gone through with, only to have the machine return to an unusable state shortly afterwards. Compounding the issue is the fact that this problem has arisen only shortly after the expiration of the default warrantee on these machines (this issue seems to only affect machines shipped around June, 2007), thus causing the logic board replacement to cost upwards of 400$ for those who did not purchase extended warranties. If you are experiencing the issues detailed below, please add yourself to the spreadsheet and visit our thread on the Apple Support forums, so we can get a reasonably accurate count of affected users.

Symptoms & Notes

• Blank screen, both on the internal and external displays
• The computer boots; it is accessible over the network or with Screen Sharing
• Target Disk Mode works (this can be used to backup user data!)
• ioreg and System Profiler both report an Intel X3100 video card, which is incorrect
• Affects people even with MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1 installed (which was released to fix a similar problem, introduced in Firmware 1.5)
• Seems to be independent of any software updates, hardware changes, etc.

There are a great number of potential fixes floating around on the Apple Support forum thread. These include PRAM/NVRAM/PMU resets, firmware restores, changes in memory configuration, deleting Safe Sleep files, etc. However, none of these appear to be permanent fixes; apparently, even replacing the logic board is not a permanent fix, at least for some!

Someone has mentioned the disabling/deleting Boot Camp might fix things. Replacing my machine’s logic board seems to have worked, at least so far!

Here’s a quick Perl script that I wrote to display Guitar chords. Really hacky, really quick, really messy, but I really just needed it for myself!

There’s a live version here.

I’ll write about NYC later! And pictures! And stuff…

Last night, I was having a slight issue (mouseDragged: only got called once for each entire drag). I talked to some people on IRC who suggested spaces might be the culprit (?!?), so I checked, but it was off. So, I rebooted… since then, I haven’t gotten video back… Mac OS comes up, I can log in, get to a terminal, and “say” things (this was how I was debugging before I got SSH on), but the display never comes up for real… not an external display either.

So, if people need to get ahold of me, either call me, or make your subject line really blatant so it stands out on my phone. I’m going to set up my old PowerBook tomorrow, get evas and Xcode and textmate running… but I really need to find out how to get Kaylee back! Any ideas?

One nice thing would be to be able to get a hardware listing from the command line. Anyone know how? There’s no lspci or anything… (EDIT: I had forgotten about ioreg!) But none of my 3 operating systems nor rEFIt get the video card up…

LATER

So… apparently some people think Firmware Update 1.5 is the culprit - there’s numerous other people on the Apple Support forums with the same problem, but they say 1.5.1 fixed it! I already have 1.5.1, and have no way of reflashing/trying to go back to 1.4/whatever, because Apple only seems to support going forward with firmwares.

I’m also beginning to wonder if it’s really reasonable for it to be the firmware, since I would have installed 1.5.1 when it came out, in late April! Which leads me to believe it might legitimately be a bad “logic board” (Apple’s terminology for motherboard, which just so happens to include a soldered-on Core 2 Duo)… I just really wish it were something else, because that’s mighty expensive to replace, my warrantee having expired less than a week ago. Literally. Amazing, right!?

Evas development can go on, I’m going to st