Advogato blog for Spooky

26 May 2004 - May 26, 2004

Work Bah, I'm in late at work trying to get the data I need. It's not even real data, just calibration data. Nor does it help that I started looking in the wrong place, but that's why you do calibration runs: to make sure you're using the right parameters. If one in two runs works, then I will be out of here in time for volleyball. Unfortunately only about 1 in 3 is currently working out. Bugger.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=75

21 May 2004 - May 21, 2004

Romantic Stuff Cushla and myself are now engaged. Actually we've been engaged for some time but hadn't actually gotten around to actually telling anybody. Since we bought rings a week ago we felt we'd better own up to it now. So there you are, we're engaged. No idea when we're going to hold the weeding or anything like that (well, Cushla knows what she wants to wear, and we're thinking about an evening ceremony on the beach with a bonfire, but nothing actually firm). For those who want more.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=74

20 May 2004 - May 20, 2004

GNOME with 64-bits I've found the gconf problem (and filed the patch in bugzilla). It was one of those classic 64-bit vs. 32-bit problems, combined with endianess issues. An int had been passed to a function which expected a gsize. gsize is 64-bits long and so the function was filling out the int and then some. This wasn't the actual cause of the bug though, on a big-endian system the first four bytes, that the caller sees when it dereferences its int, are the top 32 bits of the size, i.e....
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=73

19 May 2004 - May 19, 2004

After the release of 2.7.1 I've been taking some time off gnome-games maintainance to focus on other free-software toys. The main project has been getting a full 64-bit distro running on my G5. This is basically Fedora for the IBM pseries stuff with a few tweaks. It now runs X and GNOME. The good news is that most GNOME programs do vaguely sane things when gconf isn't returning anything. The bad news is that I discovered this because the new XML back-end (i.e. markup, not libxml) doesn't like.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=72

13 May 2004 - May 13, 2004

Reading about worms infecting Microsoft systems is sort of like reading about a civil war in some distant country. I know that it is bad and that it is wrong and that the people caught in the middle of it are hurting but in the end it is just so far from anything that affects me that I can't make myself care.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=71

11 May 2004 - May 11, 2004

gnome-games The 2.7.1 release is ready to go, hopefully tonight there will be a place to actually upload it to. There is a hideous number of new features in this release, the most recent being a new score dialog for gnomine. If it goes down well I'll use it for all the games. Another big change is that gnometris now supports drag-and-drop for setting the background image. In fact this is now the only way to set the background. At the moment it doesn't work that well, it only seems to work..
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=70

4 May 2004 - May 4, 2004

Time for the silly book game ! The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. The effects of the coupling to the light field and spontaneous emission can be added independently. Obviously I am at work. If I was at home it would have been from the Camel Book, but Luis probably needs a break from Perl. I considered moving the laptop closer to a more interesting book....
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=69

1 May 2004 - May 1, 2004

gnome-games Thanks to work from Theo van Klaveren gnibbles now scales and uses SVG graphics. Colour-blind gnibbles players will be pleased to know that the bonuses are now different shapes, although the snakes are still all the same. Theme selection has returned to aisleriot so it should now be basically what it was in terms of functionality. Thanks to Aaron Schlaegel we also have one and two-suit versions of spider for those who actually want to win a spider game slightly more often than a.
http://www.advogato.org/person/Spooky/diary.html?start=68