Typical

so this morning (and even the beginning of this afternoon) was just great.

things were going my way, i was making progress, and everything seemed to be going according to plan. sure, we had that meeting where it was made clear that we have far too much work to do and not enough time to do it, but hey, let's ignore that for the time being.

then, this afternoon happened, and now i'm frustrated and annoyed and not really sure what to do about it. i mean i'm sure we'll come up with a solution to the problems, but honestly i have no idea what that solution will be, and i suspect that finding one is going to suck the life right out of me.

The Hazards Of Visiting Costco

so i just finished watching season one of futurama, which i had not intended to buy today, and damn, i had forgotten what a cool show it is. the whole show is like the simpsons, but compiled with -fenable-geeky-humor turned on. it's unfortunate that it never became more of a mainstream success, but honestly it would have been surprising if it had, considering the subject matter. still, going back and rewatching the old episodes is amusing, as just like in the simpsons there are a million and one little amusing details hidden in each episode.

If You Can't Laugh At Your Own Problems...

so apparently the unix haters handbook is now available online for free. this classic has been out of print practically forever, and i've never been able to find a copy, but the x-windows chapter that's been online for a while is just a riot.

oh, and yes, i am completely willing to stipulate that me thinking this is a riot is conclusive proof that i'm a total geek (like anyone reading this needed more proof or anything).

Published!

my first article on embedding the subversion client libraries was just published on oreillynet. this is just the coolest thing ever. it totally made my entire week cooler.

it's kind of irritating that they put it in the linux devcenter category (hell, i wrote the damn thing on os x for crying out loud), but hey, whatever gets the info out there.

the second half of the article should follow up in a few weeks.

Fixed It!

one of the things i like about working on subversion is that after a long frustrating day at work, i can come home, sit down and spend an hour or two working on something, and actually end up feeling like i've accomplished something.

On The Todo List

need to implement something like this for blosxom, or find someone who already has, since wasting bandwidth is uncool.

now vs. later

so i've got to admit, the present (meaning the opening years of the 21st century) is a pretty cool time to be living in. there's a whole hell of a lot of cool things going on, and it seems almost criminal to not enjoy it.

but then i read this, and it really makes me think about how much cooler later is likely to be, compared to now.

i suppose the only thing to do is to work on making later happen sooner, or something like that. if i was really on the ball, i'd be spending this week at o'reilly's emerging technologies conference, trying to figure out how i can do that, but instead i'm sitting here, watching tv, wishing i had that next great idea.

Ouch

so i have no problem with good c++.

if the author knows what they're doing, the complexity of the language can be put to good use, and you can do a lot of neat stuff.

the code i was working with today is not good c++.

now i have a headache. but at least it was compiling when i left work.

Yeah, It's Pretty Neat

so i got to ride on a segway today. a friend of my sister works for them in their public relations department, and she had hers in her car when she stopped by my parent's house.

for the record, it's just as cool as people say, and i wish i was in a situation where i could justify paying that much for one.

riding on it really feels like you're in some kind of sci-fi story, and i am in awe of how much neat technology must go into them. it's for things like this that we have a patent system, because there are ideas that are just cool enough that awarding a temporary monopoly on it is absolutely worth it if we can get the details out in public in return.

For Future Reference

i'm sure i'll want to find this at some point, and someone just mentioned it on lily, so while i've got it in front of me, here is the url for the online version of the single unix specification v3.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/

it's nice that this kind of thing is now reasonably easy to find online, as opposed to the bad old days when you had to spend some ridiculous amount of money to get a copy of the standard.

*laugh*

ok, while i understand the logic behind this change, i must say that the old error message is just the funniest thing ever.

this really does say something about my sense of humor, doesn't it...

Crap

ok, now for the record, i hate 'will and grace'. i think it's a shitty show, and it baffles me that it's on ALL THE FUCKING TIME. i also intensely dislike 'dance dance revolution', and it baffles me why it is so popular among geeky people everywhere.

but here i am, sitting on the couch, watching 'will and grace' (it's on between two shows i do like ('scrubs' and 'good morning miami' if you must know), and i'm insanely lazy), and there it is, they're in an arcade playing 'dance dance revolution'.

i just can't seem to escape either of them, can i.

It's Got Tabs!

so if you care, you've almost certainly heard about this already, but there's a new safari beta out, and it's damn cool. tabbed browsing is in (which was the primary reason i was alternating between mozilla and camino lately), and overall it seems quite nice. i'm going to try it out as my main browser again and see how it goes.

A Question...

so my sister just randomly told me that she reads this weblog, which is odd,since i didn't even know she knew it existed... anyway, it got me thinking, and now i'm curious who is reading this thing.

so if you don't value your anonymity too much, please leave a comment in this entry telling me who you are and how you found this site.

Lack Of Progress

so i've been super busy for the past few days. thursday night i went out with the guys from work for jaime's bachelor party, then friday and saturday i was up in troy for psiu's founders day (apparently i was elected 'alumnus at large' again, although i'm not sure how that happened), and then today i was back here for jaime and susan's wedding.

i'm damn tired, and i don't feel like i've acomplished anything on the nine million things i'm supposed to be doing, but hey, it was a fun weekend.

now back to doing laundry...

Neat!

so it appears we have a new pledge, and it's maureen, of chalk art fame, who i remember from rpi.rumor and the acm.

anyway, i'm just amused that even though i left rpi two years ago, and i did my best to be as antisocial as possible (outside of psiu) while i was there, and despite that somebody i vaguely know is pledging the house.

Just Freaking Perfect

so i just looked at the letter i got on monday from the leasing office at my apartment complex, and it turns out they want a response 60 days prior to the day my lease is up.

this would be fine, except that i didn't get the letter until monday, which is already less than 60 days from when my lease is up. even better, the letter is dated april 2nd, which itself is less than 60 days from when my lease is up!

argh! where do they find these people!

i am seriously going to have to look at finding somewhere else to live. this is just too insane. hopefully the semi-formed plan of finding someplace with eric and dave will work out. either way, i'm definately thinking about finding someplace other than here in the near future.

I Hate The STL

i don't find it amusing that i just ran into a compile error with some fucking STL shit, wrote the quick work around to do it without the STL, since it's NOT THAT HARD (tm), then got curious and started looking through the STL code to see why the error occured and what was going on, and discovered that deep down, like 3 files in and nested within like 12 templated functions, all prefixed with multiple underscores, i found exactly the same code i had written. why the fuck do i even bother?

oh right, to quote jj: "yeah, but it's generic".

good for it. it can be as generic as it fucking wants to be, but i'm still going to write a god damned for loop to calculate what i should be getting from std::distance, because 9 times out of ten, i will spend more time figuring out why the STL approved "right way" of doing things won't fucking compile than it takes to just write the damn for loop.

The Joys Of Networking

so i've been reading about zeroconf a lot lately, since it's the underlying technology for apple's rendezvous, which is damn cool.

yesterday, i downloaded a copy of mdnsd, and was so horrified at it's code that i started hacking on my own. it doesn't actually do anything yet, and in all likelyhood it will never get further than my laptop's hard drive before i get bored and move on, but there has been at least one positive thing that has come out of this random hacking binge.

it turns out that apr doesn't currently have any multicast support, and since i wanted to use apr for my new toy, i had to take a go at implementing some. i've got the beginnings of it up and running (just enough to join and leave a multicast group), and i just sent it off to the dev list to see if people are in favor of me continuing work on it, since there are several more things that will need to be done if i want real multicast support in apr.

in the process of adding this support, i've learned a bit about how multicast works (it provided a good excuse to go back and dig out unpv1e2), and i've dug into the apple open source rendezvous
implementation, which is way cooler than mdnsd. even so, i may still continue work on my implementation, just for educational purposes, and because it would be nice to have one that integrated nicely with apr.

I Should Do This More Often

so i had dinner with tray tonight, since she was passing through on her way home to NJ. it was nice to get a chance to actually hang out and talk, since 90% of the time we see each other it's in the middle of a party of some sort, and one or both of us are too drunk to be able to hold a coherant conversation.

yet another reason for me to get the hell out of stamford and back to boston.

i wonder how many of those it's going to take...