Software

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Somehow, I’m really not sure what is worse: the curse of experience or a gringo’s rush.

Concept: tried Quassel IRC, didn’t like it – good software but not my bag. Switched to ircII – love the interface, don’t want to screw with hacking it. IRC clients are simple creatures but tend to be crap. While I could live with (or suitably script) ircII to my hearts content, I also want a more Windows usable client too.

Problem: When it comes to programming languages and what I want (something very ircII like, yet rather lisp like in a way). I can see all the pluses and minuses of any given implementation. If I was a nub, I would just pick a language, rush into it, and try and dig myself out.

Knowing so much can sometimes be a real let down o/.

For those that don’t know it, ircII is a very old school IRC client, even by the best CLI-whorish standards.

The typical IRC client is arranged as a text display area, for the current channel; a line edit for your messages; modern ones include a panel to list names in channel and some “Tab” like interface for marking the channels you’re chatting in. Text mode IRC clients work this way too.

ircII on the other hand, routes everything into a central display area and places a line edit under a “Status line”. Rather than jocking between tabs to see what’s up in other channels—which is very wasteful, even when using keystrokes: in ircII you simply use a command to change your current channel. Exempli gratia:

Typical:

  1. Click #chan1 tab
  2. Read what’s going on
  3. Reply if desired
  4. Change back to #chan0
Becomes:
  1. See what’s going on both in #chan0 and #chan1
  2. Use /j #chan1 to make your subsequent messages go to #chan1 instead of #chan0 until the next /j[oin] command.
It’s just more convenient for me than the ‘modern’ user interface. I like efficiency.

In terms of implementing something like this portably (unix/win), the issue is simply line editing. That’s not a subject I enjoy. Having worked on a unix shell, I know it’s a bitch of a subject. Colour support is another, but minor one. Cmd.exe doesn’t understand what a DEC does.

I also want something dynamically reprogrammable on the fly, basically access to a REPL. O.K. so lisp spoils you. This makes dynamic languages more convenient; which is also it’s own can of worms.

That’s the fact of Programming, it’s all a Kobayashi Maru problem: you’ve just got to deal with it.

How not to advertise your product

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“When Defraggler reads or writes a file, it uses the exact same techniques that Windows uses. Using Defraggler is just as safe for your files as using Windows.” — source

I was just updating the CCleaner program I use, and thought I would take a look at the other programs they’ve posted on the new site. When I saw what I’ve just quoted above, on their defrag tools features page… I could not help but think “THAT IS THE WORST DAMN PITCH EVER!”, as safe for your files as using Windows!? Seriously folks!

die portmaster die

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Well, after 23 hours uptime, submitting several problem reports over gettext, and a heck of a lot of compiling, it seems that my laptops updating is finally complete… except for a few stubborn packages that I rarely use anyway lol.

The thing that *really* pissed me off, is portmaster. Three times (gettext, gtk20, gstreamer-plugins) I had to manually do make reinstalls in order to get the freaking packages to install correctly. However portmaster saw fit to work it’s magic, it forgot to install essential things, like msgfmt, libgstpbutils-.*, and and the actual gtk-x11 library o/. Which obviously caused other ports depending on them to pop corks during portmasters updating them.

I think I’m going to again ditch the third party updating tools, flip the bird, and go back to using my own custom updater script. All that’s really needed, is implementing the topological sort over dependencies anyway… then it would be automated in essence. And it’s never doubled my work load the way portmaster and portupgrade do!!!

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In looking closer at things, somehow I think that by cica GCC 5.0, either the GNU compiler will have imploded upon it’s own weight :-o, or it will become an impressively powerful compiler, in place of an impressively portable one.

The feature set being grown, may even give old MSVCs optimization setup a good run for it’s money someday, only the best tools with Visual C++ cost a few thousand dollars and GNUs is given away for free lol.

Me, I would just settle for a generally portable compiler that generates decent code, and complies with the bloody standards… So far I personally like pcc.

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Now this is what a *real* web surfers experience looks like: What Firefoxs memory leak feature taught me about life

It also reminds me of an old photo of mine:

Having used Firefox since the 1.0.x days, I’ve also come to find it one of the single most annoying web browsers ever written. Then again, I am also a weirdo who thinks both Internet Explorer and Mozilla should rot in hell… for crimes against the Internet.

Dropbox… interesting

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The other day, whilst parsing webpages in my usual manor, I stumbled across a nifty service called dropbox. So far, it seems to offer all the perks of rolling ones own solution but with better OS integration, and a network server. I’m planning on putting it to the test for replacing my existing rsync based system.

What dropbox is capable of, is not far off from what one can do using rdiff-backup and your own server. Main difference I reckon is tone meshes well with SSH and the other relies upon SSL. The way dropbox claims to integrate with the OS however, would more than make up in time lost to configuration.

My main gripe of course, is that dropbox does not yet offer their desktop application for FreeBSD :-(. Which effectively limits how much I can use it until suitable builds become available for testing.

rdiff-backup can solve the problem just as well for me, since my home server is about as reliable as the rock of Gibraltar; the only problem being the software involved. The lowest common denominator among versions of rdiff-backup available for my platforms, are not compatible enough, 8=). Which is why my computers rely on a custom set of scripts built around rsync: rs-mgr rs-pull, rs-push, rs-touch, and rs-vars.

If dropbox became suitably available under FreeBSD, my life would be a heck of a lot easier, and vectra’s roll could be reduced to backups rather than storage central.

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In my web travels, I’ve just come across an interesting web-focused application and service, called Teambox. So far it seems to offer, a rather interesting stack of tools. Assuming it could be suitably extended into the neccessary work flow, by adding things such as SCM integration, code reviews, and issue tracking, it would be darn freaking useful.

Little old me, is used to projects where the best things in life are e-mail, XMPP, and Git, hahahaa!

gfire+freebsd

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A week or so ago, after updating my machines to a newer GFire plugin, I had the problem with it breaking xfire support on my laptop. Making me have to roll back to 0.8.3 :-(. Today I’ve just sent a message to the `gfire team`, in the hopes they might have a clue to to solving the issues.

Really, since my laptop isn’t for gaming, I don’t care as long as I can sign in / chat. Being able to do file transfers (finally!) and have the right status message displayed however, are worth the upgrade. I just recently noticed that status messages weren’t being updated from my laptop lol.

I guess, on my laptop I’ll just have to change my nickname on xfire to match status, e.g. ‘Spidey01 = AFK’ or something like that. No wonder people keep messaging me when I’m marked AFK, or ignoring the big I’m not here signs. No matter how bad a mood I am, generally I won’t take it out on someone unless they’re at the root cause of it; but when I’m marked away or busy, it means don’t expect a reply within the next 5-15 minutes: unless I happen to notice the message and have time to answer it. Assuming I’m even seated in front of the computer!

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I’m really starting to get addicted to Google Chrome’s ability to auto-resize it’s windows when dragged and dropped into the right spots. It’s a feature of some unix window managers that I’ve rarely used, that’s starting to make me wish it was built into Windows XP, instead of being a trick of the Chromium trade 8=).