Since it’s impossible to work….I hit up newegg.com to experiment with a few ideas.

The PC I wish I could buy:

1 * Thermaltake Armor Extreme Edition ATX Full Tower case ($180)
; drooling over the VA8004BNS !!!
1 * 600W Thermaltake PSU ($130)
1 * Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 or E67x0 2.4/2.66Ghz ($190-$240)
1 * 1024MB DDR2 667Mhz (PC5300) ($22) ; Kingston preferred
2 * SATA 250GB HDD ($160 total)
1 * nVidia Geforce GPU (<=$130)
1 * Turtle Beach RIVIERA Sound Card ($30) ; ALSA support :-)
1 * 3.5" Floppy ($7 OEM / $20 retail)
1 * DVD Burner ($45 retail)
1 * CD || DVD Reader ($20 retail)
1 * 10/100MB Ethernet NIC ($12 at the local shop ;-))
1 * 104 Normal Keys KB ($20) ; Logitech Access would be nice & cheaper
1 * Wired Laser Mouse ($40)
1 * 17" LCD Monitor, 4-5ms, No Widescreen! ($180-$200)

Estimated Total: < $1350 depending on variables and RAM
+ Motherboard ($70-$120), any extra fans/cables

This is a much better PC then the one I am sitting, $1600 worth !!! And I supplied my own Mouse (replacement), Monitor, and had a Keyboard when I bought it. Although I do admit, a PC Desk and sound card was necessary to add to the pre-build… Hehe The system I had originally planned to build was about the same price range as this custom list but with less specs and a complete system minus the monitor and kb… bloody thing even had a UPS in the price factors! In the end, I ended up having my mother raising all freaking heck, to the point that I had to concede to *not* build my own, or she would really drive me crazy until I did F’up. To which I had my brother raising hell at the very idea (the family gamer), to which I ended up shopping for a pre-build to shut them both up (compromise of no DIY but higher specs) and got stiffed on the core factors… Rather then building my ideal ‘personal’ machine, I got stuffed into a Gateway Multi-Media PC that I didn’t want. Over a year later, that PC I bought has been a royal pain in the neck, often needing coercion to get it to do what I want. It has repeatedly failed to work with most tested Linux Distro’s without a lot of kicking, although it does love FreeBSD 6.x as long, the only good thing I can say 🙂 Instead of the GF6600 I had planned for the prebuilt came with a GF6200 (A real POS but still a major upgrade) and a TV Tuner; shitty PSU, funky BTX Mobo, and a signle 500GB drive Vs the good PSU, standard ATX Mobo, and Dual Seagate drives (1 for Windows, 1 for BSD). And a card reader which I can’t use (no media) vs the Floppy drive I wanted so badly. The sound card I had to buy to get the pre-built working properly for my needs was a $80 reck, it is a major POS under Windows… But works great under Linux and FreeBSD, which is why I bought it haha. If I ever could have that level of cash for a PC again, I’d hit Fry’s and build it from parts there….. Rather then letting my family have any say in the matter.. *sighs*, why did I have to be diplomatic instead of exercise my right to freedom?

GET ME THE **** OUT OF HERE !

I’m sitting here across the building…

Trying to build a working mockup of my main widget that’ll handle searching ports for the entered string through the GUI and volia !

Family is driving me out of my fsck’ing mind.

Just for once in my life, I would love it if I didn’t have to stay up to after 4 in the damn morning just to get stuff done because I can’t be left alone during the afternoon !!!!!

Every one else asleep == I can get stuff done

Any one else awake == 75% less chance of being able to hear my brains internal dialogue, let along get work done (much lower chances).

What Do You Have To Say? – Ah, Youth

Describe one moment from your youth that is impenetrably seared into your memory.
Brought to you by HP

Live Journal: Writer’s Block

Most of them are, good or bad, fun or horrible a like… My memory is just like that =/

A choice of one, would only be which one my brain recalls first.

Of dreams and actions

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!

Some where between merryment and torment, there lays the occasion =/

I’m definitally not looking forward to the holidays… but time stops for no man.

Not really in the mood for coding tonight, I’m tired.. Started work at like 0130 last night, finished and started reading about QT, then logged off for bed ’round 0400… And fell asleep after 0600 !!!

Looking over some of the first things I ever wrote programming wise. The creation dates are mostly november 2005 although the binary of dev-cpp is marked as feburary 2005 on my moms PC. To be honest, I have no real idea why I started learning programing =/ And it’s been at least 2 years since day one with C++.

I probably decided, I’d been around PC’s long enough and wanted to try taking it to the next level, maybe that is why… I don’t really know but I am glad I did. I know what pushed me into the level of computer studies I have, was a little trip through the WWW in that direction and the fish, ehh spider was hooked. I think it was The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO that hooked me, I wanted to learn more.

It’s December 2007 and I’ve come a long way. From a Windows XP user with no love of DOS. To practically living in a shell and thriving on *BSD systems. C++ I have not used in a long time, snored through Perl… nice tool but not my style. Java, from a book but never cared much for writing in it. C, because I wanted to see the differences between C++ and C, and what I found was a language I liked 10,000 * more lol. Always hated shell script… but came to value it as a great tool once I got used to it. Python and I didn’t hit it off and Ruby I had scoffed at early on before I decided on C++ as my first language.

One day, out of boredom I sat down and said, “Ok I’m learning Ruby” and a love affair was bourne. For my current task, I’ve been cramming the Python and QT like a mad hatter!

HTML, I also muddled with fromtime to time but rarely used. Eventually, writing in XHTML kind of replaced my need for a word processor haha! I’ve also had a longing to learn Ada but have never had the time :@, Scheme syntactically I find a bit strange but I guess I’m not used to lisp like languages.

I wonder, where the next couple of years will lead me, GOD only knows.

Thinking…

A few concept drawings of what I have in mind

Style #1: simple interface (emphasis on searching and ease of performing common actions)

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Style #2: orthodox interface (commander like with toolbar, I like this one xD)
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Style #3: balanced interface (I think it would be better with the left being a |installed software | build messages | tab-thingy).

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Personally I think the first style is easier to use if your not familiar with what your doing, can you get more simple then ‘search, click, click’ with a big set of buttons?

The second I really like because I think it makes best use of space and presents the most important information quickly.

The third, I think is probably a better choice since it combines #1 and #2’s ways of doing things into a fairly simple yet compact amount of space.

To be honest, I would kind of love docking / undocking elements and a very ‘cool’ look, like XFire or XMMS L&F with a Gimp or Designer style of operation but I think that would probably be a lot of work and a bit confusing to new people =/

searchlet prototypes

Oy’vey why does it have to be so easy to take a nap after chow with that dang couch =/

I suppose it is just as well that I’m finishing Dune tonight as I work because in this case the sleeper must awaken 😉

I’m trying to finish work on a routine to search the ports tree and generate the necessary stuff for a widget to display. The next phase is to experiment with how signals and slots workout through Python. Then build a more complete ‘searchlet’ module that can be integrated once the rest of work on the GUI is done. When I get a chance I’ll try to post a screen shot of the minimal searchlet in some portion of completion.

I’d also like to work on a few mock ups in designer or a few drawings in kolourpaint of possible configurations of the GUI.

edit:

I’ve basically finished the routine for searching the ports tree via psearch and getting it to display:

click to enlarge
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I think I’ve also figured out how to connect a C++ signal to a slot in the Python code but I’m still testing with that. The Signals & Slots mechanism is one thing that I do like a lot about QT. I’ve yet to use the Designer tool for any of this but for ease of use I probably will beyond test modules like the one pictured above.

I am using C++ documentation for most of this, so I am pretty dang glad that the best docs I’ve ever found in my time aroung computers has been the OpenBSD Manual, Vim’s :help stuff, and Trolltechs excellent offerings on qt documentation through the assistant program and the WWW. I also love that konqueror has qt, qt3, kde, and kde3 time saving web shortcuts like the wp (wikipedia) one I use so often.

Enter the Dragon

Well, so for work goes well for day one.

I’ve spent most of the day working on the configuration system, at this point it would be a lot easier to have a configuration file, so I set about to work with Pythons SafeConfigParser class and the format of the config file and options, e.t.c. There is still more to do but it is a great start, especially considering that I am not entirely comfortable with OOP under Python

I’d say greater then half the code for installing and updating the ports tree is done enough for further testing, the only issue right now is the reaction to errors sup’ing or portsnaping.

I am some what tempted to try and have a wrapper of sorts that will abstact the issue of using QT or KDE specifics but I don’t think there would be any point. I need to dig deeper into the PyQT/PyKDE, QT, and KDE documentation soon so I can work more gui_error.py.

widets ? qt : kde;

It would be nice to use as many elements of the KDE bindings as possible, so it fits better with systems running KDE, yet it would also be nice to keep to the QT bindings more strongly so it is less tied to KDE.. In the end it will probably be which ever I’m more comfortable with.

My primary goals in the coming days is to finish the options and errors modules while I start work on the ‘searchlet’, which should handle searching through ports. Until a concreate mock-up can be made of the entire main window, I think I should keep the search stuff as far away from the rest of the program as I can.

Work on the searchlet as I call it, shouldn’t be to hard to keep self-contained since I prefer to work on smaller pieces and properly prototype things when I can, I’m not a real fan of monolithic masses =

Basically 7 tenths of that battle will be wrapping my head around working with the KListView and QListView widgets. Once I’ve figured that out, it’ll be simple enough (I hope) to figureout how to make it work with displaying a search through ports. It’s just I need to get a grip on the ListView widgets before I can do that lol.

Either way, I think I have done enough for one day… 0700 Zulu Time and it would probably be nice to have a little sleep before work tomorrow 0.o

A little horsing around before bed, not pretty but considering I don’t know QT from a hole int he ground… And I’m doing this with C++ documentation for Python, I think it’s a nice ‘Hmm, how do you make a QListView object?” test:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Neo Ports Manager (NPM) -- refer to the LICENSE file for terms and conditions

"""

"""
import sys, os
from qt import *


def main( argc, argv ):
a=QApplication( argv )
listViews=QListView()
listViews.resize(640,480)
listViews.setCaption("Qt Example - Listview") # Sets window title
# Add some columns to the list view
listViews.addColumn('Qualified name')
listViews.addColumn('Namespace')
# element is how to create a new list view item for display
element = QListViewItem(listViews, 'qName', 'namespaceURI')
# Now lets populate an array of items into view
els=[ [listViews, 'dir1', 'descr1'], [listViews, 'dir2', 'descr2'],
[listViews, 'dir3', 'descr3'] ]
for j in els:
QListViewItem(j[0], j[1], j[2])
# And sort it descending by col 1
listViews.setSorting( 1, False )


a.setMainWidget(listViews)

# draw & exec
listViews.show()
a.exec_loop()


if __name__ == "__main__":
main(len(sys.argv), sys.argv)

I don’t like that QListViewItem(j[0], j[1], j[2]) line but I was trying to translate from the C++,

for ( int i = 0 ; i < attributes.length(); i++ ) {
new QListViewItem( element, attributes.qName(i), attributes.uri(i) );
}

And I’ve yet to figure out how to better cook this up, still reading the docs here…

Idiot spider

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

backlog

This one made my day 🙂

[15:11] [SAS]_LCpl_DUKE: Did you know: The Navy takes now only not-swimmers.
[15:11] [SAS]_RSM_Spidey01: ?
[15:11] [SAS]_LCpl_DUKE: Yeah, they defend the war-ships longer…
[15:11] [SAS]_RSM_Spidey01: LOL
[15:12] [SAS]_LCpl_DUKE: the newest joke i got 5 minutes ago… 😉

I’ve been brushing up on Python for a little projectI’ve got in mind, so I’ve been cramming like a student at finals week. Python is a nice language but one I never put to use when I originally started learning it.

The thing I love the most about Python, is the doc strings, it’s such a great idea if you ask me.

--- def test(params):
... """ Simple test
...
... More detailed info about it"""
...
... print params
...
--- test.__doc__
' Simple testntnt More detailed info about it'

A poor example yes, but in actual usage the doc strings can be very useful. I also like it because it can be used to move inline-documentation (some times aka comments) into the body of the function, rather then being above it. And they are accessible at runtime with the __doc__ special method.

One thing I do wish Ruby had, is Doc Strings for methods, b/c then in IRB I could do a simple obj.methods.sort and follow up with checking a methods docstring rather then an intermixing of playful testing in IRB with looking it up in TFM.

With Python, it’s quite easy to go to interactive mode and use dir(obj) to get the methods an object responds to and any available __doc__ special methods to learn more about it, before we go RTFM hehe.