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!
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 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 
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.
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
