An orange in an apple orchard
In the past hour I’ve almost completed 3 exams in my ‘home work’ stack. Tomorrow I need to finish them, I just need to dig into my text books to look up a reference.
Yesterday I had 2 finished and sent them out this morning.
I might not make it to a Diploma, but hell I am not going out without a fight 😉
The fire is lit,
like a bull seeing red,
it’s feet ready to charge,
the obstacles that lay ahead,
will give way to,
the horn of my desire,
crash the gates, let the
fires burn as I charge,
the fire is lit,
oh how hot it burns.
The fire is lit,
nothing to stand in the way,
like a bull seeing red,
it’s feet ready to charge,
the gates begin to fall,
my desire knows no relent,
as the obstacles disappear,
the fires burn,
oh so hot do they burn,
one by one, the objectives
shall be complete.
— Me, on the course to completing my education
OH how sweet it would be to have the freedom to get through even one day without any headaches……
Did some major clean up to the prototype for configuring build options tonight as well as experimented with a few solutions. I just wish I didn’t have to cram every thing into such a narrow time slot.
The main problem is I’m so zonked out by the time I get to start, I may as well try and code drunk (mm interesting idea… not!).
As hard as I try to get things done my family twarts me at every turn.. It’s like they have some kind of magic radar =/.
During the day, I’d have a better chance of surviving jumping in front of an on comming 18-wheeler then getting stuff done in day light…
At night, I can only work until my brain crashes from lack of sleep.
I can’t even remember the last time I had a good nights sleep any more…
At least for today I’ve managed to get Radio 1 working, although I can play real media in mplayer it konks out after awhile in konqueror.. So I opened it in realplayer rather then keeping the web interface in.
Guess I’ll read some doc’s before I start snoring with my eyes open….
luckily I am off for about a week, well as good as off work hehe. So hopefully I’ll have some more time to get things done.
I want to,
work towards getting ‘nco’s task completed…
send Wiz that memo
send GCHQ that other memo
experiment with a custom widget in both C++ and Python / QT3
continue expanding the configuration systems in NPM.
camp out TG#1 and TG#3
enjoy the [SAS] Virtual Christmas Party
For tonight, I’m not sure what I’m going to work on but I’m glad that I don’t need to get up in the morning… I’m also looking forward to the clans big bash, Wiz and Valroe will be DJ’ing so that should be a good pair hehe. It’s also a good thing since this close to Christmas, it’s unlikely to find me or any of my family on the road more then necessary lol.
I also need to start logging into AIM more often, I havn’t gotten to talk to any one lately other then teammates over XFire =/. And since I *hate* phones and the aDSL tends to disconnect when the phone rings, I mostly use Instant Messengering.
“Why the heck did you call me ?”
lol. Unlike phones, IM’s allow some measure of coping with life here and actually getting to talk to some one… Without being deafened or inaudible, or losing the cordless.. hahaha.
I don’t think I would mind phones so much if it wasn’t just a complication of my already insessent multi-tasking.. A clone would be nice, then I could be in two rooms at once rofl. But a clone would probably be as annoyed as I get at it..
As much as I love my family, they can drive me bonkers given a chance +S
Extreme Multi-tasking on the PC and off the PC at the same time can be tricky lol.
Sorted my play list for the night, I have a fair system of selection. Using Amaroks file tab, finding each track that matches my listing mood… As usual a mixture of Metal, Rock, Country, and a couple other odds and ends.
Now if my mood… never mind.
Just for the heck of it, I’ll feed my m3u file through a little ruby script I wrote some months back out of boredom; it generates a HTML listing from the file, even has the ability to offer a little more information then this when used with id3lib. It also conveniantly has a switch to suppress the HTML tags that make it a full doc, thus generating output that can be copy/pasted into another HTML file or blog 😉
I think I might actually tweak it a little bit, so it can be used as a filter. I liked working on it because it gave me an excuse to learn a bit of binary because of how I chose to implement it’s differing modes lol.
I recently switched to using Window Maker on PC-BSD, one of my favorite window managers actually. But it does have a few dis advantages over KDE when it comes to session management…
I went though my large wall papers collection and found several that I would like to use, the WMaker theme I have set is a dark one.
Terry@Dixie$ ls ~/Pictures/Wall_Papers|wc -l 6:38
657
Terry@Dixie$ ls ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Backgrounds|wc -l 6:40
57
Terry@Dixie$ 6:40
Many didn’t scale right and I don’t know of any batch image scaler, so I had my shell open each in kolour paint so I could do this. Using a graphical file manager I would have to double click each file at the least level of effort… With the shell, it was simple loop in my backgrounds directory:
for i in `ls`
do
kolourpaint $i
done
This opened kolourpaint to a file, allowing me to do a quick ctrl+e and set it to smooth scale it to 1280×800 to match my LCD’s native resolution. And then to ctrl+s save it, X out of it and volia, kolourpaint would start again with another file as it continued through the loop.
Having done this, I was thinking how to I get it to change after awhile? I thought about a symlink that would be changed to a different wall paper every now and then, tested it no go. Then I found wmsetbg and the -s (-scale) option, so yeah I wasted my time scaling them all lol.
So I removed them and made symlinks to the original files in my wall papers directory:
for i in `ls` 6:40
do
ln -hfs /home/Terry/Pictures/Wall_Papers/$i /home/Terry/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Backgrounds/$i
done
Like I am going to stand here and create 50++ shortcuts myself? NO WAY!
After that I set to look into hooking up a shell script that could run in the background and change the wall paper for me. I figured that I would want some thing acline to the sleep() function out of unistd.h but I didn’t really want to use a C program or any other programming language to do it. Because while looping over the directory in C might be faster then /bin/sh by the time the compiler tried to optimize it. Having to invoke a shell for every call to system() (for running wmsetbg) would probably be a bit wasteful. At least in a shell script, there should be no need to create a new /bin/sh process on each pass. Didn’t find a built in shell command for it but /bin/sleep works fine, so I wrote the following script to change my wall paper every 10 minutes:
#!/bin/sh
# A simple automatic wall paper changer for window maker.
while (true)
do
for p in `/bin/ls /home/Terry/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Backgrounds/`
do
wmsetbg -u -s $p
sleep 600
continue
done
done
And to run it on window makers start up, I added this line to my ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/autostart file:
/usr/home/Terry/sh/setbg &
and Hooah ^_^
And here is a python script that displays it in a random order,
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import commands
import os
import random
import time
li = os.listdir('/home/Terry/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Backgrounds/')
while (True):
x=random.choice(li)
commands.getoutput('/usr/local/bin/wmsetbg -u -s %s' % (x))
time.sleep(600)
Hmm, I wonder if I could do this on Windows XP to,under explorer of course hehe.
My dreams seem to have been plagued by the same things that often assail my mind….
Past today’s have been a lot of work for me and I’m actualy very lucky to have today off work I spent a little time working with Pre Processor like program but didn’t have time to get any thing done.
Today, I want to get back to work on NPM, I’m off (hopefully) till Tuesday so with luck I can get some work done!
I am so stupid !!!
I’m sitting here working on a the configuration file stuff in my options class and BAM the laptop shuts down on me.
Battery firmly attached and not in use, laptops been on at least an hour and a half or more but it’s still cool, no signs of blockages of ports and the fan was fine last I looked.
Rolled my chair around and made sure the power cable was in the socket check,
turned around to the other flank and saw that the light on the mobile surge protector was on, check, back to the poor laptop…
“Wait”, I rolled back around and picked up the A/C Adopter and the surge protector/cable segment had come unplugged — BINGO WE HAVE A WINNER !!!
I can’t believe I’ve been sitting here using the battery the whole time, like a moron… But I am very glad that I save files often when editing and that vim keeps a swap file so I didn’t lose any thing but the open tabs in knoqueror and the interipters history.
It would kind of suck to lose the entire projects files on day one =/
Saved by the editor… hehe
I’ve compiled all of my stored bookmarks (aside from the handfull on my laptop) into a single flat file…
One URL per line with a grand total of 662 lines.
Plenty are just enqueued to be read while others are perm storage.
Not bad for about 10 years of surfing =/
Now neatly redoing my bookmarks on ma.gnolia is the next big project of the day :'(.
And in the near future, properly using this for all my bookmarking needs.. lol.