http://www.hortont.com/blog code + craziness Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:03:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/11/seed-intervalometer-school-etc/ 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... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/11/seed-010-release/ http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/11/thank-you/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/11/seed-in-screenshots/ 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... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/11/seed-tutorial/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/10/gnome-summit-seed-and-more/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/10/welcome-to-the-party-apple-4-months-later/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/10/empac-saturday-part-2/ 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! http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/10/empac-saturday-part-1/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/10/empac-weekend/ 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 :-P http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/09/anticontext-1/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/09/intervalometer-introduction/ 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, ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/first-few-days/ 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 :-) http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/heading-back-to-rpi/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/and-thats-a-wrap/   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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/ecore-events-part-one/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/lisparticles/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/ecore-beginnings/ 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...). ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/apple-jack-chicken-pizza-with-caramelized-onions/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/cocoa-sans-nsrunloop-and-a-bundle/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/evas_quartz-leak-hunting/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/variable-desktop-directories/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/08/new-computer/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/a-downgrade-for-now/ 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 :-D Remote — The single most awesome iPhone app, Remote lets you ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/iphone-20-app-store/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/ibm-psl-temperature-monitor/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/shrimp-corncakes-and-chocolate-white-chip-cookies/ 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, ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/a-gentle-perian-warning/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/and-all-tests-are-go/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/fooding-stuffed-peppers-spinach-and-sandwiches/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/expedite-runs/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/fooding-chicken-riggies-and-ice-cream-pie/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/pretty-cool-evas-update-part-2/ 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, ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/pretty-cool-evas-update-part-1/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/07/more-macbook-pro-revelations/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/fooding-southwestern-chicken-salad-plus-sides/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/fooding-peanut-butter-and-fudge-pie/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/macbook-pro-santa-rosa-a-fatal-flaw/ 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... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/chord-diagrammer/ 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 ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/a-problem-with-kaylee/ Amy and I have decided we're going to make things more often (cooking/baking/whatever) especially since Mom always does all of the cooking, and that we should write about it somewhere, and keep a list of recipes that seem to have worked. So I'm going to add that as a new ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/fooding-fudge/ I've hacked up a small program that lets you play with CoreText attributes, mostly as a way to learn my way around the API. I'm going to clean it up and post it in a few days (check back here!), but for now, here's a screenshot: http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/textmanager/ The past few days have been very productive! I've implemented images and fixed up the text code a little bit (more importantly, I found documentation on things that'll let me make it work correctly, in a few days). There's screenshots and notes for all, after the jump! Note: This is Evas_Quartz, ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/friday-the-13th-evas_quartz-update/ I was just working on various things when I noticed a slight problem with my computer: Yep. See that nice bar at the bottom? That's all I've got left. And this is pretty cleaned up. Up there at the top is my Aperture (left) and iTunes (right) libraries, consuming approximately 55% ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/my-slight-issue-storage-edition/ So! I've had my camera for a few days now, and I'm incredibly happy! I've found it to be crazy sharp, and with really really low noise (crazily, if you use NR for long exposures), and it's just very impressive, overall! I'm still getting used to the controls, and I've made ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/d80-thoughts/ Guesses? Hopes? OS 10.6: short babble, no PPC, yes 32-bit, yes Carbon. iPhone OS 2.0 (OS 10.6??): today. Cheap iPhone: <<< 300$. Mostly probably things we aren't expecting. Hopefully everyone who's out there has fun :-) http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/pre-wwdc-08/ These are here for Amy... drag them into your bookmark bar. Download from YouTube Switch to High Resolution http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/youtube-bookmarklets/ Of note: the three title characters are not related in any way, except they were all a part of my day yesterday! Firstly, and most-excitingly, thanks to Google, and mom, and dad, I purchased a Nikon D80 today! I simply cannot wait until it gets here... I've managed to read literally hundreds ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/06/a-new-baby-rectangles-and-ma-bell/ I'm throwing this up here just for fun... it doesn't work entirely, but the general gist of things works. I feel much more comfortable with the Evas source code now than I did at the beginning of the week, but this is really just a start (considering this really isn't ... http://www.hortont.com/blog/2008/05/initial-evas-gl-quartz-patch/