Operation Redeemer… green light or die.

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For the past week or so, I have been plotting to free myself of this life: bit by bit, byte by byte, phase by phase…

To be honest, I’ve never really feared death, but then again, I have never counted on living very long either. I’ve always expected that I’ll pop off somewhere in my 30s or 40s — but would rather live to a ripe old age and a half. Anything after that… well, I guess you could say it would be like a gift from GOD. Genetically, one thing i have going for me is most people in my family are long lived; going at least as far back as (linearly) distant relative in Italy, who is said to have passed 100 lol.

I’ve always looked at the future, planning is a part of me; I often fly by the seat of my pants but I know when things require the effort of planning, and when they don’t.

Growing up, we survived on social security (a check for each kid), ma basically decided to milk it for all it was worth plus interest lol. Ironically, although no one actually had a job when I was a kid, I was raised that you get up, you go to work, no matter what. The standing thing was, the respective funds would run out when we reached the appointed age (16, plus way back when it continued into HS if you took long enough), so obviously it would be job time. Imagine, growing up with an impending doom hanging over your head: that someday your entire world would be tipped on its hinge, and all would fall to earth. Never being one to accept such bad omens; I largely disregarded thinking about it as a kid, and instead focused on growing up and decided that I would worry about that when it was time to cross the bridge. My agreement was to get a job when the time came, no problem, no challenge, just a simple fact of life… no problem, yeh? When I hit high school, her royal pain decided to start up this business as a way of making some extra money in preparation for the [i.e. my] last check running out. The cleaning would help pay off the high school course, and earn up some savings…. yeah, fat F’ing chance! Fast forward through the last 5-6 years of living: never saved a freakin’ dime, her choice of starting this business ensured not only that I did not have to go and get a job (as ground into me since an early age lol), but that doing so became impossible… thanks a lot ma.

One positive if not perfect thing of it, that change of plans also allowed me to go further into my personal studies (technology, science, etc), I should be thankful in some sick way: because other wise, I might never have discovered coding with such vigor.

On the other hand, that same change in plans also cost me most of my studies! Math/physics died out for the longest time, aeronautics required way to much effort in computation, history couldn’t fit into the day anymore, even my regular exercises and CQC practice all went out the window… and then proceeded to suck out every decent part of my life, that does not involve a fscking computer! So all in all… I ain’t that thankful. I’m largely trapped here these days, ffs I don’t even have the freedom to choose to walk to the damn blasted mail box; can it get much worse, I dunno, and I dun’t want to know.

After some careful thought, I’ve decided to call the plot, “Operation Redeemer”, which is in my honest opinion quite appropriate considering the meaning of the words redeem and redemption. Pretty soon, I’ll be turning 21 years… a point where *no one*, not even my mother can contest that I have some measure of legal right to freedom.

I have, in my own opinion: both a meticulous and sincere nature. As the latter controls the former from doing harm, it is not always benitfious in a family like this. Lately I have been applying that meticulous attention to solving problems, the problems of how to get from where I am shackled — to where I want to be headed in life.

I wish I knew better and at an early age, what I wanted out of life: the last decade has passed fairly quickly, and the last 3-4 years almost like a blur of toils. I always figured growing up, getting a job at ~18 as expected would open the doors to moving on with life… despite the issues involved, I suppose it was worth looking forward to. I also figured by the early/mid 20s things would hopefully be at a good place in life, and to let nature take its course; with the hopes of eventually settling down around late 20s: and being free of the years of family-in-fighting.

So much for that 8=)

I divide Operation Redeemer into outlooks, objectives, and phases. Outlooks are the short term, mid term, and long term scope: objectives fit into the outlooks. The phases are the principals of the objectives. It is also somewhat a depressing series of mental-processing tasks….

short term — the next few years

drivers license.

Currently the only way I can cover the costs of maintaining one, is for H.R.P. to foot the bill, which she would do fine… the only problem being, of course why I currently don’t have a license as is: http://sas-spidey01.livejournal.com/318927.html

petrol supply.

best way to get around the aforementioned issue set, is to GET IT IN F’ING RIGHTING!!! Or should we say…. a signed document stating that HRP covers the gas usage as composition, irrevocably or I ‘revoke’ my presence in this business… which would bring the hole life tumbling down period: however through applied positioning it would become Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). The goal would be to utilize her promises in order to move towards reclaiming my freedom: and when she forgets and threatens to pull the plug (on what would hopefully be a much freer form of living then I have now), have it in writing to remind her: along with the MAD clause ;). Of course, said document would likely have no legal value what so ever, it would just provide leverage over the “forgetful, opinionated, and automatically right” nature that so many people have.

freedom of motion

with that assured: it should actually be possible to GTFO out of here periodically. Having to put up with the limitations of a learners permit slows it down but hey… I’ve only had to watch most of the last sequence of years be squandered for the benefit of my family, I can afford to be patient. Once the times up… it will be time to make use of every avenue possible. One of my first intentions, is the library. It’s an old saying of those who know me:
“He would live in the library if he could”, and I would lol. It is also a nice, quite, comfortable place to BUG OUT of here, and be able to relax, read, maybe even bring my laptop and hack at some code while the battery lives. In point of insurance policy: by 22, I am sure no one on the face of the earth (who is still alive!) can deny I have a right to exercise free will, and go where I like, in a free country, subject to the law. As for car access…. that HRP has legal authority over; in the planned case however without it, I would simply adapt “or else”. Because quite simply if I can’t drive, I’ll walk — and take my chances getting run over. Actually, especially in the libraries case (2-3 miles) I would prefer to walk (exercise!!!). With the way GA drivers are, that threat might even work to my advantage if it became neccessary… lol.

mid term — intermediary

The means to actually make use of newfound freedom… that means pocket money. Actually one odd thought that popped into my head last night; a job with light enough work that I won’t be freaking dead 24/7, yet with hours that could be squeezed in around existing business (since there is no escape from it). Ideal, would be working nights: just in time to come home around 5am and pass out before work, lol. With some measure of reliability to scheduling, even most weekdays could be open; since I’m generally off work from 15:00Q until 09:30~10:00Q the following morning. Heck, even if it was only 12 hours a week (which is ludicrous imho: barely worth the gasoline lol) and at minimum wage…. Let’s say, its as much as $4 an hour after the compulsory government and business related skims. Even that level would be good… *if* it was all turned into profit, as opposed to say, family bleeding my dry for every penny they can dig. Then it would be possible to save up and still have a bit of pocket money for once. In considering whats around here, the only thing that seems like it would have a chance of working out for, would be working at a gas station; probably not likely to find that these days. Maybe it’s some form of irony, that such a thing would come to mind: since my pa worked at a gas station when he was younger, and learned from the mechanics. Then again, full-service stations were probably the normal back then and I bet modern self-service stations were designed to cut man power costs!

Another thing I’ve thought about, is trying to scrounge up some decent web work, just shorties preferably. Something that could generate a bit of capitol to put towards continuing the effort. Funds permitting, it wouldn’t be to hard to score a years web hosting, setting a site offering design / training, and try to make use of available media for advertising; you would be surprised how much you can do in this place, if you have the money to make money: and a fair measure of luck. All in all though (especially with the luck I’ve got in life), I doubt it would ever make enough income to be self sustaining, let along profitable for me, but alas, a spider can dream (and plot).

Find a solution to the gaping hole in my life… well that is easier said then done, but having the means to move in that direction would certainly help!!! Either way, a large part of this objective is in GODs hands…

long term — coming to the close of the next 10-15 years

Be saving and close to the point of being able to get my own wheels.

I’ve always planned to move out by 30, married or not. Personally, I would prefer to first option but could be happy enough with the means to do get out of here.

and that’s as much, as I can stomach writing down for now…

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Maybe it’s the lack of sleep in the last ~72 hours
Maybe it’s the war between fine and depressing
Maybe it’s life sucking the energy out of me
Maybe it’s the lack of peace in my life
Maybe it’s always being pressed for time

but I feel like s***!!!

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I dunno what is worse… that it is only 06:30Z, that I’ve been awake so long, or that there is nothing I can get done before work 2morrow that I actually feel like doing…. despite the fact that I can’t sleep, lol

oy

Waking up to bullcrap

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Not even taking the time to boot into X, writing this from a vtty for later posting; gotta start getting dressed for work in about 5 minute.

This morning, I was informed that H.R.P. and Prince Asshole (haha) are no longer talking, when told that if my brother wanted to talk to her, that I would have to be the relay…. I told ma *NO*, “I’ve had enough years of doing that, to last me a life time”. I can still remember the years, I spent relaying their messages over the phone; that’s part of while I’ve shunned phones for most communication purposes (the others being lack of privacy here, and that IMs lend itself better to abusing multi-tasking then phone conversations).

It seems they are moving nearly a decade back, as opposed to taking a foreword direction of travel… and doing it gladly on both sides! This time around: my neutrality will be suitably respected during their waring &mdash or to borrow H.R.P.s speech pattern, I’ll ‘excommunicate’ them from the family!

I’ve had enough of this horse shit to last several dozen life times.

/* their ‘alternative’ forms of address are chosen in order to avoid proper names, and still be as “polite” as possible */

Delightfully enjoyed this article

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http://freshmeat.net/articles/stop-the-autoconf-insanity-why-we-need-a-new-build-system

I can also sympathize with the fictitious Joe and Jane in the examples — I have no love for the GNU build system / autotools. I’ve also had to waddle though ugly auto* files and deported documentation on occasion ;). The only part of autotools I do like, is GNU Make: because it is the most portable make implementation available, short of limiting things to a subset of the standard syntax.

I don’t quite understand the authors comments about m4, because it is a pretty simple tool. Heh, I still remember watching The One on TV one night, and interspersing it with learning the m4 macro processor. IMHO m4 is an incredibly useful tool: being a fairly generic (yet expressive) macro processor lends itself to virtually any tasks that can benefit from pre or post processing. Although to be fair, for what most (smart) people would use m4 for doing, I typically (ab)use the C Pre-Processor (cpp) into doing for me (^_^)/. The main reason I avoid using m4, is because I can never seem to count on a *consistent* set of behaviours whereever m4 can be found/ported, the last time I required m4 for a project, I ended up in a “F it, I’ll make a C||C++ compiler a dependency” like situation: because the platforms m4 would not behave IAW the norm. It is a shame really, GNU M4 adds some nifty features (and even more shamefully, it was a ported/tweaked version of GNU M4 that was the problem child in the aforementioned situation lol)

When it comes to building things of my own, I usually create a Makefile; exception being Qt based stuff, in which case I generate makefiles with qmake ;). I’ve also considered implementing a Perl script that automagically does the right thing (or should I say, the infering the right thing) through a quick bit of build rules written in XML — but why do that, when there is a tool like ant? I personally like makefiles and GNU Make; then again I’ll put up with virtually any make with $() and documented inference rules… hehe

SCons has been something tha thas been increasingly interesting to me, but unfortunately time constrants mean writing custom makefiles is a more economical use of time then learning a new tool like SCons :-/. Like wise, the main reason I have never adapted the Boost libraries is no time to fiddle with their build tool, which also interests me.

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I **really** need a fsckin’ vacation!!!

I think, given the choice: I would just sail away, away from the things of man, and let everyone rot… since that’s what they love to do the most.

*sigh*

Random thoughts on working with XML

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It’s no real secret that I love XML but truly hate working with XML parsers in general (^_^).

Xerces-C++ and libxml++ are not to bad but I have never met a parser that I love. The main reason I choice Xerces was the painless’ness of compiling and linking against the library; I really do not want to go through the bother of setting up libxml++ in MSVC. Especially when taking a look at the pkg-config output on my workstation:

FreeBSD$  pkg-config libxml++-2.6 --cflags --libs                      18:07
-I/usr/local/include/libxml++-2.6 -I/usr/local/include/libxml++-2.6/include 
-I/usr/local/include/libxml2 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/glibmm-2.4 
-I/usr/local/lib/glibmm-2.4/include -I/usr/local/include/sigc++-2.0 
-I/usr/local/lib/sigc++-2.0/include -I/usr/local/include/glib-2.0 
-I/usr/local/lib/glib-2.0/include  -L/usr/local/lib -lxml++-2.6 -lxml2 -lglibmm-2.4
-lgobject-2.0 -lsigc-2.0 -lglib-2.0

SAX, DOM, or whatever else, the parser style doesn’t really matter to me that much: as long as it gets the job *done*. Although obviously, I am more familiar with DOMs (thank you JavaScript). I tend use XML for storing structured data without having to resort to a binary file/database, or a curmudgeon of files within a zip archive. So operations tend to be very straight forward using a couple of glue functions.

Personally, my idea of fun XML parsing is to take data this as input:

<rootnode>
  <child1 attr="val">string of text</child1>
  <child1>
    <child2>another string of text</child2>
  </child1>
</rootnode>

and to in turn receive a nested data structure like this as output:

# example in Perl
$structure = { 
    node       => 'rootnode',
    attributes => undef,
    data       => [
                      {
                          node => 'child1',
                          attributes => { attr => 'val' },
                          data => 'string of text'
                      },
                      {
                          node => 'child1',
                          attributes => undef,
                          data => [
                              {
                                  node        => 'child2',
                                  attributes  => undef,
                                  data        => 'another string of text'
                              }
                          ]
                      }
                  ]
};

Probably because that is how my brain sees the preceding XML xD.

Not to mention it makes writing something like a pretty printer easy as pi:

# for some reason, writing this subroutine was very relaxing...
sub pp_xml {

    my $xhr     = shift;
    my $depth   = shift;
    my $indent  = sub { "t" x shift };
    my $node    = $xhr->{node}  or warn "XML node has no data!n";

    if ($xhr->{attributes}) {
        while (my ($attr, $val) = each %{$xhr->{attributes}}) {
            $node .= " " . $attr . "='" . $val . "'";
        }
    }
    print $indent->($depth), '<', $node, '>', "n";

    $xhr = $xhr->{data};
    if (ref $xhr eq 'ARRAY') {
        pp_xml($_, $depth+1) foreach @$xhr;
    } else {
        print $indent->($depth+1), $xhr, "n";
    }
    print $indent->($depth), '</', $node, '>', "n";
}

pp_xml($structure, 0);

Making it accept a callback ident function as a 3rd argument, is left as an exercise for others who are equally in need of R&R 8=).

Terry@dixie$ perl -Mstrict /tmp/xml.pl -Mwarnings                         21:57
<rootnode>
        <child1 attr='val'>
                string of text
        </child1 attr='val'>
        <child1>
                <child2>
                        another string of text
                </child2>
        </child1>
</rootnode>
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I think I’ve had about 2~3 hours sleep… it was after 06:00Q when I logged off, guess fiddling with Xerces and G++ took longer then I expected; had planned to finish up, grab a bowl of cereal, and hit the hay before 04:30 lol.

No luck what so ever trying to sleep, 7 o’clock passed by like lighting as birds chirped outside, by 10:30Q I was woken up in order to be dragged out on a shopping expedition 8=). Managed to cram my flubbed up toe into an old shoe, and limp most of the way though… oi.

Due to a disagreement over my brothers (2nd) wedding, my mother has effectively decided to blackball the event and excommunicate him from the family — again. As usual, I avoid becoming involved in the conflict: it is none of my business, its his life, and she is not the planner. Unfortunately I still have to listen to the endless whining, I really need to learn how to “tune” people out someday! *sigh*. Courtesy of said arguing, Reese refused to pick up the stuff Ma asked him to get from the grocer, hence this mornings wake up call. A few weeks ago, they ‘made up’ over issues of ancient history (my family never forgets anything!), and have been on increasingly nice terms until this week: now they are back to pissing each other off. My private thoughts on the matter of them settling old wars, were along the lines, “He must want something”, guess I was right. As normal, my family interacts with one another on a mercenary-like basis o/.

The toe has managed to survive another outing, but now it is band aided with tape keeping the band aid in place: epoxy adhesives are not always useful! At least on the up side…. my life has given me higher then average pain-thresholds both emotionally and physically, for better or worse.

quick note to self

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once tpshs implementation of shell script is more mature: transition the windows machine to running a shell script on init, rather then the Startup system used by Windows NT, and compare performance.

I’ve fallen asleep 3 times, and I’ve had 3 crazy dreams.

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The first, we were baby sitting in a very large house and the “worst storms in 20 years” are in bound. For some utterly stupid reason, we were retreating to the upstairs… when one I feel a tap on my shoulder, I look behind and see another baby levitating behind me! At that point, I was starting to wonder “Oy, not one of these crazy dreams” lol. Some time later when the storms were very bad, I found myself on my knees praying and suddenly the storms stopped. Looking outside, I heard someone below being sentenced by a judge (and losing), and thought of Homer J. Simpson (Having watched The Devil and Daniel Webster a few days ago is perhaps why lol). Later I was doing somethings outside, probably in preparation for leaving; when I heard a voice come to me in the wind, can’t remember the exact words but it made me worry for some reason, it also mentioned that I would be meeting something with this silly name, sounded kind of like a twix bar. I remember thinking, voice of GOD or someone else…? Or am I just cracking up! Sure enough, I ran into a stray dog with the exact 3 words of the name on his collar. The last bit, I guess can be owed to having read Job a few days ago, before bed. The rest of the dream was fairly placid.

The second dream was more of a private nature, and somewhat different because I knew it was a dream and could control aspects of it. You could say, I made use of the situation in ways I would never do, having know it was a dream and nothing more.

The third, I had talked about the dream, and my family was shopping at a shopping mall, and me and my brother were arguing vehemently about the dream. I eventually one the argument, having thought of something about his past that would “close” the argument at the cost of hurting him, but passed up the avuneue of counter attack for one that settled for a non-painful stalemate. On the way out, it was discovered the I had left Ma’s bag in the store, so I went back and got it. Not surprisingly security had to check me out, they bagged it. Then an officer stopped me, “Yeah, I figured you would have to check it out before they let me take it”, he checked it and tossed it for someone to carry off, then went to leave. And I called back for him to wait a minute – S.O.B. even tried to pull the gum out of my mouth lol, when I asked for a receipt or something to go claim it later.

It was about this point when I was woken up.

Really, that is the most dreaming that I’ve had in a while now :-/