The process uncovered bugs in pygame and python, including one which is fixed in 2.6b3, although there's no Windows builds of that version yet. Also, you can't currently rebuild Python under mingw. Still some patches to go: pygame tries to build a safe version number for bdist_msi however it gets it wrong in release, I suspect the rules have shifted slightly in 2.6...; and whatever else I've modified in my build trees that needs to be sent upstream.
Mingw64 was able to build stuff now (thanks to @NightStrike on the #mingw-w64 IRC channel) but Python's pretty insistent that I build against msvcr90 and mingw64 doesn't have an import library for that yet (mingw32 does, but mingw64's runtime collection is only up to 3.11 or so). @NightStrike informed me that pexports has been ported to amd64 on the mailing list, but I haven't dug it up yet, but that should allow me to link to msvcr90 from mingw.
Either way, I now have a modified win32/Makefile.gcc for zlib which doesn't use dllwrap (deprecated since 2002) and works with mingw64 nicely.
After mingw64 worked but I hit the requirement of msvcr90, I grabbed the Windows SDK and the DirectX SDK. Once you know to run dx_setenv.cmd in the Windows SDK cmd window and to use vcbuild /useenv (otherwise it'll ignore the results of dx_setenv.cmd) things seem to just work. You need to set DISTUTILS_USE_SDK in your environment for Python to trust your compiler version choice, too.
Converting SDL's Visual C projects and solutions was easy. Change platform from win32 to x64, change any /MACHINE: entries from I386 to AMD64. I should submit that change to SDL, once I convert and test the examples as well. SDL also builds with mingw64, but I suspect it doesn't produce a DLL at the end right now.
The Windows SDK 6.1 includes msvcr90 and the Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 toolchain, so that works for Python extensions.
However, after building everything fine, initialising pygame fails:
Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]
(C) Copyright 1985-2003 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\root>python
Python 2.6b2 (r26b2:65106, Jul 18 2008, 18:24:10) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import pygame
>>> pygame.init()
(3, 1)
>>> pygame.get_error()
'DirectInputDevice::SetDataFormat: Invalid parameters'
>>>
The Internet knows nothing about that particular error in reference to pygame. Since I had to install the DirectX SDK to get this far anyway, I'll see what that produces in terms of debugging output, when I get back to it.
As for pyglet, which started me on this whole mess? Upstream says it's not supported under x64, don't bother submitting bugs. Before I found that, I tried to work through their hello_world.py but pyglet.window.Window() came back from OpenGL with "invalid operation" calling glGetString(GL_VENDOR). The whole exercise with pygame came about from me trying to find a way to test if PyOpenGL was having similar problems as both PyOpenGL and pyglet use opengl via ctypes.
OpenGL on windows is hard. There's a huge amount of setup needed to get a context to be able to call openGL commands, and PyOpenGL doesn't provide that code. PyOpenGL's sample code relies on pygame to do this... -_-
And to think this all started because I wanted to prototype a game idea I had rather than just telling my work colleagues about it and hoping for the best. Oh well, maybe next weekend.
It does warm my heart to know that despite being a professional video games programmer I can still come home and spend a weekend doodling around programming.
I started watching Cheap Love, only two episodes in but I'm pleased to see that already the main love pairing have already met and realised they've feelings for each other. Most J-dramas I watch make us wait until half way through the season to let the characters know what's been painfully obvious to the audience since the opening titles rolled.
And in further good news, I'm down below 136kg. ^_^
My task for this week is to turn my barcode scans of my book collection into something I can access while I'm in Melbourne next weekend so I don't have to call home from Melbourne book stores again to get Mick to look at my shelves for me. I've also given my mother the book-barcode-scanning bug, but I imagine she'll buy some software off the Internet to manage the collection. Recommendations appreciated. ^_^ (Obviously, if you want to recommend such software for me, go ahead as well. But my requirements are somewhat pathological)
Oh, and I'm in Melbourne next weekend for Medleys. Taking younger sister (they're both younger, I'm talking about younger younger. Elder younger will be on stage) and hopefully catching up with Phil.
Been eating "Instant Stew" this week. Finally refined recipe down to:
~1.2kg of mixed heart-smart meat, diced
1kg bag of Home Brand mixed frozen vegetables
1 tin (400g) diced tomatoes
Random spices as I find them in the cupboard
Combine all ingredients in crock pot. Put on before work, arrive home after work. Makes 6 lunch servings or 3 dinner servings, ~350 calories per lunch serving. I blame recent weight-loss success on this stuff.
Turns out that making stew, unlike Python games under Windows x64, doesn't involve first creating the universe.
Posted in General at 1:34 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Much as I dislike the song itself, there's a reasonable chance I'm an asshole.
Some links follow, relevant to the above. No commentary, and don't expect many posts about this sort of thing. You'll notice there's no relevant category. ^_^
People who read this and actually know me offline, you are requested to call me out if you observe me doing any of the shit that may appear in the links that follow. Or at least the bad stuff. There's good stuff mixed in there, I hope it's obvious which is which.
On a positive note, I'm down to around 140kg. Four and a half months to lose another 20kg. That looks unrealistic, but it's actually 20 weeks so it's only on the high side of healthy, as I understand it, not in the danger zone, especially given where I'm coming from.
Posted in General at 9:13 pm by TBBle (Visited times)
Via Krefey, I'm not part of one of those weird pass-it-on things that shows up in the blogoblong on occasion.
Rules of the game:
Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
I respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
You update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
When others comment asking to be asked, ask them five questions.
And the questions I was asked:
If you had the chocie to remove either Star Wars or Star Trek form existence, which would you choose to discard to the eether?
If you could have any single (ie just one, not single as in not taken) woman be with you for life, who would you choose and why?
Dumb but attractive, or intelligent but plain?
If you could be anyone that has ever existed who would you be?
If you could alter the principle laws of physiscs as we know them, what would you change?
OK, here goes:
Tough call. I'm gonna go with Star Wars, much as I personally prefer it, because I think Star Trek has done more for us in terms of introducing and exploring new concepts, while Star Wars was kind of a samurai VS Nazis funfest. Of course, if this subsequently removed Indiana Jones from existence, I'd have to change my mind. And whichever one lets Red Dwarf stay, stays. Erk. This is why I've abstained from time travel.
Suzie Marie Toller. Spoiler for Wild Things... She's wealthy, attractive, intelligent, doesn't let the rules and mores of society hamstring her ambitions, without being amoral.
I'm definately intelligent but plain. Then again, given free reign I can also be dumb, and attractive in a gravitational sense. If you doubt that, lie next to me on a waterbed. ^_^
I'm tempted to say Andrew Tridgell, but I'm not sure I'd do as good a job of being him as he does, and that's not something I'd wish on the world. This also applies to most of the other names of existent or formerly existent that come to mind. The more I think about it, the more I realise that not only am I prolly the best at being me, I'm also currently the me I'm happiest with, or all the mes that have existed. Sure, there are mes I'd rather be (ie. exactly now, but ~50kgs lighter) but they haven't existed, so they don't count. Yes, it's a cop-out. If you insist I pick someone, go with Tridge. He seems to have been doing (and still is doing) the sort of thing I love doing, for a long time now. Although, right now I'm at the start of that process (I hope) so I don't think I'd gain much.
Posted in General at 12:28 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Firstly, a vast majority of people who read this, won't actually know the context of "Why I don't read weblogs". This is deliberate. I still know people involved in that incident, so no details will be released. If you're one of the lucky ones to know the story, don't pass the link around. ^_^ (It's embarrassing to me, just to be clear, so don't let the paranoia get you down.)
Anyway, LiveJournal slipped me back into weblogs by stealth, so I guess it's time to face it. I started out just looking at my housemate's LJ. Then one bored Saturday afternoon, I had a look at his friends list and realised I knew some of the people on it (through him) and so, having already managed to get OpenID working between LiveJournal and my Wordpress site (Using OpenID Comments For Wordpress, which despite the name is also an OpenID Server) I added them to my 'friends' page.
And then from a comment on a blog there, I recognised a long-unseen friend's nick, and then from that person's friends list, I recognised a whole bunch of other friends.
I accidentally connected my little island of long-winded to the blogosphere. O_O (I wish they'd called it the blogoblong. It's so much more fun to say...)
Anyway, as much as anything else, this post is also to explain if anyone doesn't recognise the username at the end of the befriending, well, now you know how I found you.
This is also to prevent me starting another disk of Babylon 5, given when I started this it was too early to go to bed, but three hours more watching Babylon 5 would have left me going to bed too late instead. This way it's, in the words of Goldilocks, "Holy shit, talking bears!"
For those who don't read Japanese and can't puzzle it out (it's up the top, above “ＷｉｉTM”) it'll ship on 2nd December 2006 for ￥25 000. It also says that schedule and pricing for foreign countries will come in the next few days.
Along with 15 other launch titles, and another 11 titles by the end of the year.
Oh, dude, yay!
Oh, and the second thing...
17:01 <@usotsuki> Debian's definition of "stable" is different from what most people call "stable"
17:01 <@usotsuki> that's good and bad
17:02 < TBBle> Nope, it's pretty much what everyone except computer users mean by "stable". Think about it in the geological sense, for example. Or the chemical sense.
17:02 <@usotsuki> lol
17:02 < TBBle> ie "If you don't touch it, it won't randomly explode"
Edit: Found the Wii software lineup page, and so fixed my video listing above.
The blog and my other site've just moved to a new server. Let me know if you see anything weird. It's supposed to be the same software configuration as the old server but whackloads faster... The joys of Debian/stable. (bzr.tbble.net's hgwebdir.cgi isn't running... No python or bzr on the new server yet, as it's the CBIT Internet shared webhosting server. I'm still weighing up whether to install it or if I can keep it all in the webtree somehow.
My final LCA06 report from the land of Dunedin, where the shadows lie. Although I'm here until Monday, I doubt my Internet will be working for much longer.
Started the morning at the usual time, which gave me an extra hour of bumming around (reading my LPI book...) before the (10am) keynote of the day.
And what a keynote it was. Mark Shuttleworth (The Ubuntu guy for those who're playing along at home) gave a presentation about how collaboration works in successful projects, how it doesn't work in unsuccessful projects, how to get projects to cooperate with each other, and how to get localisation from people who aren't programmers. And he packed it in hard, leaving a fairly long period for questions. There were of course a few fairly long questions asked, so this was all for the best.
Amongst Mark's major points were that the barriers to entry for things like bug tracking systems and translations are too high. Anything that isn't debbugs needs you to register to post a bug, and you lose 50-70% of hits at that stage. Translation systems that aren't Gnome currently require you to email around .po files, requiring the translator to edit them in plain text, and some even muck about with more esoteric tools. Gnome provides a neat program, and apparently so does KDE, to handle all that for you.
Mark's other major point was that distributed revision control systems will turn the language of development from mailling lists to patches. A question from the audience pointed out that mailling-list review of patches (eg. linux-kernel mailling list, and we do this on FreeRADIUS-devel too) would probably suffer if people were just branching things, working on them, and then pushing them back upstream... It's an interesting puzzle, but between this and the translations stuff, I'm the closest I've ever been to looking at contributing to Ubuntu... Scary.
For the one scheduled session of the day I went to a talk from Matthew Garrett about projects dealing with the loss of maintainers or pvioltal people, and how they can deal with it. I can relate, since I am both a sucker (I was kind-of the FreeRADIUS 1.0.0 Release Manager), and soon after moved, changed jobs, and basically stopped posting to (but kept reading what I could of) the FreeRADIUS-devel mailing list. I've been lucky that FreeRADIUS is a good, stable package, and so I don't think my long periods of inattention have caused the Debian package to suffer.
After the barbecue lunch and ceremonial shaving of the luminaries (including Rusty's moustache!), I attended one of the best-of session, about The RepRap, an attempt to produce a low-cost von Neumann Universal Constructor. And not only is this cool as heck stuff, it was heartwarning to see a geek from a different field, and know that much as our interests diverge, we are united in geekness.
It was also good to see that there are good jobs for geeks, doing geeky things for the betterment of humanity. Especially when one of those things is building the world's largest nanobot.
At afternoon tea, I scored some Ubuntu 5.10 i386 CD sets, which I think I'll take back to work and put on a desk with "Free! Try Linux without risking your data." sign on it or something.
This reminded me that I haven't checked WhirlPool in a week and a half, and I haven't yet picked up Omiyage... Still, I will have tomorrow and Monday morning to do so...
Also sitting around the link, reminded again to try WorldForge and Thousand Parsec... Also to find the mesa 6.4 packages and see if the r300 driver's been updated.
And a note about Blender that slipped my mind for yesterday... It's awful without a mouse. In fact, a two-button mouse would be pretty awful, but shift-F11-touchpad is particularly not an easy thing to do with only two hands.
Went to the panel discussion, which was largely focussed on patents, trademarks, and how best to promote linux onto both desktops and SMEs.
Finally, was the conference close, where prizes were awarded for the programs for drawing the raffle, then the raffle was drawn, and during demonstrations of some of the other programs submitted, my ticket was drawn. >_<. Although I dunno if I really wanted one of the shirts, it looked like someone'd scribbled all over it, and it'd need some heavy-duty washing...
The total money raised for the John Lyons Chair was just over AU$48k, which is a sterline effort. We also raised NZ$1800 or so from the raffle for the NZ version of Kid's Help line, which is an excellent cause. Hack fest winners were announced, much thanking of those who have sacrificed so much to get this going, including Mike Beattie's second standing ovation (The only presenter I saw get a standing ovation was Van Jacobsen), which was well deserved.
Mike mentioned afterwards that the photoblog prize had been completely forgotten, so hopefully they'll judge it anyway, and we'll have something pretty to look at on the CD. There's also supposed to be a written-blog prize, but I suspect my abuse of the "Excerpts" box may count against me. Unless the judges share my sense of humour. ^_^
I must say I have had an absolutly brilliant time. I've been rushed off my feet, exhausted, tired, I sat my second LPI exam tonight without having read the last three chapters of the Exam Cram book (It still only took twenty-two minutes by the wall clock... I hope I passed!) and on top of all that I've been coughy and snuffly when I wasn't writing in pain from my throat. And I'd do the whole thing again at the drop of a hat. Or preferably a spiral.
Of course, like anime.au (with which I've been involved on the other side a couple of times, but which is only one day, rather than six) these things take so much time and effort to prepare, that managing one every year is quite impressive, even though it's a new team each year. It's been suggested that 2008's LCA location be selected more than twelve months out to give them more time to prepare, but for me, my eyes are firmly fixed on LCA07, Sydney. (Their site's not up yet as of this writing, but yesterday it wasn't even in DNS. ^_^)
Unless I'm in Japan, of course. I was actually looking around yesterday afternoon in the link, at all these people, these luminaries of my industry and my passion, and wondering if Japan is the right choice... I mean, there's CBIT now, and I'd hate to leave that. But it's not what I want to do... And there's the other project I may have mentioned, which I will be having a meeting about next week, with luck... And yet, having come this far, how can I not go further? Maybe I should be searching harder for Open-Source jobs in Japan, and combine my interests. Sure, I love teaching, and I love teaching languages... But it's so scary!
I guess it comes down to Feel the fear and do it anyway. And I suspect if I do get to go on JET, as long as I have an Internet connection, I'll be able to spend more time on my hobbies than I do now. Or maybe not.
A final thought on LCA06... I hope everyone realised the sense of humour it must have take to aware LCA06 to a New Zealand team... ^_^
Saw "The Legend of Zorro" tonight with Bek and Sean. It was... interesting. A few fairly good fight scenes, with some nonsense in between to bulk out the movie. Bek and Sean commented that the movie could have done with some cutting, although really it was obvious that it had already had a fair bit of scissor-work taken to it. Particularly when one character says to another "As you said, 'You never see the one you love, you only see what you wish to see'" or words to that effect. Either I dozed off, or they cut the scene where the character in question actually says that. Maybe the actors decided the script was too long and coherent, and decided to adlib a bit. Who knows? It'll prolly be put back for the DVD, mind you. Then again, they _could_ decide to explore this particular editing path further on the DVD...
Spoiler Alert
The Legend Of Zorro: Zorro rides again in this blockbuster movie! Can Zorro defend the poor, downtrodden Spanish peasants of California from the evil French Count and his soap? Or will the Frenchman's wine prove too much for our hero?
Previews of Aeon Flux (it looks cool, it had better be cool, or there'll be much crying and gnashing of teeth), Just Friends (Depressing, given my history... >_<) and Casanova (Looks amusing, but I'd rather watch the BBC miniseries I think. I'm sorry I missed it on the ABC late last year... I don't suppose anyone taped it?)
In other news, I got to the interview stage for the JET program. I'm not sure why they sent the notice to my mother's house, but there it is. Interview sometime in February, they're gonna call.
I got a phonecall from Melbourne yesterday afternoon... If that was JET, I'm confused as to why they called from Melbourne. If that's someone reading this, call again. I got no voice mail and my phone's phonebook didn't recognise the number. ^_^
I have to get the international roaming activated for my phone, on that topic. I'd die without a mobile in New Zealand. I'll prolly die when I see the phone bill. History suggests I make long phonecalls back to Canberra whenever I travel. On the plus side, calling me costs me 26c flat rate, so I'm as contactable as alays.
I'm all excited about the New Zealand trip. I've got all the accomodation worked out now, staying in Kiwi's Nest about three blocks from the university on the Friday and Saturday night, and at the university for the rest of the trip. I am also worried what CBIT will do without me, as the promised webadmin interface is not ready. Maybe I'll have a nice productive programming day tomorrow? The fact that I'm working on my blog at 1am suggests not...
On a side note, I think I've discovered Smilex... I can eat any one of sardines, tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion, curry powder, chillis, and noodles, but combine then together into a dish, the name of which escapes me (It looks like red sludge with noodles mixed in) and I have an upset stomach the next day. A friend pointed out that he's allergic to tomatoes, so I wonder if I am too... They're c
Posted in General at 5:01 pm by TBBle (Visited 545 times)
Bored at ActewAGL, I dropped in to slashdot to see that apaprently Google has released a video service and DVD Jon (the DeCSS guy) has cracked the player. Since the player is based on the GPL'd VLC, and is distributed to the browser as an ActiveX control and therefore comes with source, the crack itself is trivial (No offence, Jon. I can't believe you knocked up a binary patch in .NET!)
The idea that using the google version of VLC means you are now licensed to use the MPEG-4 Visual and AVC patent suites depends entirely on the license that google has received from MPEG LA.
MPEG-4 Visual. Looking at: http://www.mpegla.com/m4v/m4vweb.ppt I suspect Google is not considered an encoder/decoder manufacturer but do fall under the category of "Free Internet Broadcast", which covers the category of making money from the patent by means other than selling the video (eg. advertising). This happily has no patent fees until 2008 and after that will be no greater than "Free Television" which is currently US$2.5k per transmission encoder. (Not server. Encoder. I presume they mean that a machine encoding two channels at once is actually two encoders, although if not, there's a nice use for a four-way super-machine. One $2.5k payment and you've got four channels encoding at a time, while if you buy an off-the-shelf MPEG-4 encoding box you pay $2.5k for the patent license _each_). Upshot: Google pays nothing for this license until 2008..
MPEG-4 AVC. Looking at http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf the bottom of page 3 and top of page 4 shows that the same rules apply, but the free period is until end of 2010. Again, after that it's capped at the television rates, which are this time defined per broadcast market ("geographic area within which an End User could use an AVC Decoder to view Free Television AVC Video sent by a single transmitter or transmitters simultaneously with repeaters by a single Legal Entity."), annually at US$2.5k for 100k to <500k households, US$5k for 500k to <1000k, and US$10k for one million upwards. Easily Google is a single legal entity able to reach anyone over the world-wide web from the one server or set of repeaters, so after 2010 they're looking at 10k per year for the AVC license. Upshot: Google pays nothing for this license until 2010.
In short, I don't actually think Google's _paying_ for anything, If they do have to pretend to be a manufacturer, then they're paying less than US$0.50 per unit for both patents, but I doubt they are doing that. No company would willingly put a up a link that costs them US$0.50 per hit. If they could, the Internet Ad Banner bubble wouldn't have burst. ^_^
Edit: Yes, I'm an idiot. I forgot to address the original point of the linked blog post. Anyway, the licenses I think Google are signed up to only affect Google's ability to stream out the video, and turn out to be completely distinct from the player used to stream it. I didn't see anything in the MPEG LA pages about free software encoders/decoders, since they all seem to talk about 'sale' and 'manufacture', neither of which is actually done for a software encoder/decoder. Mind you, I didn't actually read the license text itself, since you have to ask for it. And this article about Nero Digital implies that there's no fee for the codec itself now, but there might be soon. At which point, assuming Google pays the codec fee, then a google-branded player will come with a license for use which you wouldn't get directly from VLC. And things get sticky.
I originally started working on this around February 2002, by getting my key signed by a local
Debian Developer. However, my next step (adopt an orphaned package) failed miserably since the
only orphaned package I felt up to was awesfx, and I wasn't really using it -- I had an AWE64
in Keitarou at the time, but wasn't using the wavetable. ^_^
Flash forward to early 2003, when we launched BU, and I
started using a Debian package of FreeRADIUS (then radiusd-freeradius) as the RADIUS server.
However, the maintainer at the time (Chad Miller) felt FreeRADIUS was too buggy to go into
Debian/stable (the just-released Woody) but the bug
used to keep it out of Woody also caused it to be removed from the archive entirely in
a post-Woody archive purge.
Ever intrepid, I turned to the upstream, where I discovered a debian/ directory also existed,
had been maintained by Chad Miller, and produced (roughly) the same pacakges as the Debian
archive's version. "Aha!" said I, now that I had a way of keeping up to date. However, at
this point I was not completely happy with the upstream Debian packages. For a start, they
had the wrong version number in them...
So I started sending in some patches
to the Debian build (as well as miscellaneous things I'd hit elsewhere in the system) and was
eventually granted CVS access to do my
own commits. During this process, I renamed the package to
"freeradius".
Eventually, I was happy enough with it that I decided to try and get it into the Debian archive.
Unlike many prospective maintainers who are not developers, I had no trouble finding a sponsor. (So much for that Debian myth...)
In fact, I had at least three offers, and one offer of co-maintainership. I ended up agreeing
to have Steve Langasek (also a Debian Release Manager) sponsor the package in, mainly because
I got his email first. ^_^
And so I had a package sponsored into the Debian archive on 11th November 2003 (after a query
from the ftp masters as to the number of binary packages produced. I stood my ground, and to
my surprise, won. That's another Debian myth squashed. ^_^)
At the time, I intended to apply for Debian Developership soon after having the package enter
the archive, but elected to wait for the Sarge release, since Steve would be busy until then
Release-Managering. At the time, Sarge was slated for a December 2003 release. ^_^
Flash forward a year and a half. -- In this time I discovered the #debian and #debian-devel
IRC channels, made a nuisance of myself on them and the Debian mailing lists and was accordingly
humbled, stayed the hell away from any DPL debates and the "documentation wants to be free" debate,
and generally enjoyed myself. ^_^
Anyway, Sarge came out, but I was playing
Guildwars and so not watching my email too closely until about the 9th. ^_^ And so once again
visions of tbble@debian.org are dancing in my mind. Steve Langasek's agreed to advocate
me, which is good since he's no longer the sponsor of FreeRADIUS, due to RM commitments, but I
was a tad worried after someone at linux.conf.au.05
told me I was the 'infamous' TBBle from debian-devel. ^_^
Posted in General at 12:14 am by TBBle (Visited 502 times)
I bought a second-hand HP LaserJet 1200 series for $80 from an Internet cafe which was going out of business. An evening spent with cups, and I can print from windows, have driver auto-download going (for Win2K+ at least) and also got a PDF-output print which writes to /home/tbble/cups-pdf for output. ^_^
The hardest bit was the driver-upload. I had root disabled in samba (sensibly) but the samba drivers directory /var/lib/samba/printers/ is only writable by root, as you'd expect. I ended up enabling root for samba for the moment.
Posted in General at 6:01 pm by TBBle (Visited 291 times)
I got the flat! Yay! ^_^
I started looking on Tuesday on allhomes.com after I talked to Salu on Monday afternoon and we decided that our aims were too different to be able to easily find a flat that would suit us both. I inspected the place on Wednesday afternoon, decided I liked it, and put in an offer. The landlord only settled on the place today, and this afternoon the real estate agent called me and said I've got it. ^_^
$120 per week, $480 bond, two weeks in advance and $15 fee. I'm laughing. ^_^
And it also gave me a good chance to SMS all my friends, and see who I hadn't heard from in a long time, but still had their number. ^_^
Posted in General at 1:37 pm by TBBle (Visited 573 times)
Wow. Linux.conf.au. Today and tomorrow are mini-confs, and I'm attending the DebianMiniconf4. So far the two speakers have been about the state of Debian according to Bdale Garbee, former DPL, and a presentation on rockets running Debian.
Currently it's lunchtime, and I've found a powerpoint so I can laptop again. Wireless signal is good in MCC foyer, unusable for me in Sullivan's Cafe, and untested in MCC T2. Of course, others aren't having this problem, so it's still either my card, or the prism54 driver in Linux. I've now established that booting my laptop with the card in does bad bad things to IRQ routing, meaning I have to boot into windows (or at least try, the local Win98 is unbootable just now) to get things going again. Even a cold boot doesn't fix it. >_<
Oh, and my laptop's battery life is about 12 minutes, with a charging time of about 100 minutes. Luckily, that 12 minutes appears to be the first 5% and last 5% of the battery, so I get some warning when it's about to go down. ^_^
Anyway, I was lucky the guy at the registration desk didn't look too hard at my student card, which expired at the end of March, and got some neat swag in the showbag, including a little pliars/knife/screwdriver thing, and a network cable-in-a-box type doodad. Actually, that plus the Ubuntu PPC CD (which I'll prolly use to empty and back up Obiwan, which is why I chose it over i386) is the neat swag. The rest was various brochues and pamphlets for other conferences I can't afford to attend.
This afternoon we get some very interesting-looking presentations, and I'll finally be able to put a face to Horms, who's been sponsoring FreeRADIUS into Debian for me. Which reminds me I have to get those threading fixes uploaded ASAP, and see if there's anything left for FreeRADIUS 1.1.0's release to take care of.
Gah. That capcha wasn't working very well (or at all) so I've instituted a different spamchecker, Spam Karma 2 which also involved a patch for a WordPress bug.
I also tried to install Subscribe To Comments 2 but it doesn't play nice with PHP4.12 I guess.
As I write this, Dogtato has just been expelled into the backyard by Shane for peeing inside. (I call him Dogtato, Shane's named him Capone, and his pedegree name is Sonny Bill. Other people have much ruder names for him, at least I can say it's because his coat's brown like a potato. I'm still looking for an opportunity to call Shane Mantato but I don't think that'll go down too well.)
Anyway, part of this process involved me clearing out the spam comments, and discovering people have been leaving me real comments. I had comments on WinNY, Mew, and Casual Projects. (Whom I enjoyed more than I seem to have said, but they've gone back down in my pile by being called Cas P, and apparently being hiphop.) Apparently I'm not supposed to prefer the lyrics of (early) Jewel to their lyrics. Or something. ^_^
On reflection, I might have marked them down a bit for having inaudible lyrics, but given my slight hardness of hearing for speech, my bar for lyrics is higher than usual.
Why am I harping so prosaic about Casual Projects? It's nice to see a (non-anime) rabid fanboy (or girl), proving it's not a phenomenon restricted to Japanese bishoujo/bishounen anime... And googling for '"casual projects" song lyrics' returns me as the top hit, and I want to encourage anything that makes me the top google for something. ^_^
Posted in General at 3:41 am by TBBle (Visited 1185 times)
Well, just saw Machine Gun Fellatio again. They still rock.
Sadly, the ticket was $5 cheaper. This is only bad because I blame the price difference on the second-rate (that's unfair) support acts, Casual Projects and Recipie. They were both rap-type artists (cf. Butterfingers in my last visit to the world of MGF). Casual Projects at least rapped about Australian things (barbecues for example, and trying to meet women while drink), while Recipie seemed to think they were African-Americans rapping about... I dunno some rubbish. At least by end of Recipie, I'd tuned out the... speakers... and could enjoy the trombone and saxaphone for what they were worth. Anyway, I felt the support acts were kinda like people who'd enjoyed Jewel's music but said "If only her poetry was less meaningful, repeated the same line more often, and was shouted instead of sung" and take this as the basis to form a band. It's Rabekah's fault I'm thinking of Jewel, as on Wednesday night (when I was at her and Julia's place, and alcohol was again involved) she started trying to play "Sensitive" and I had a brain fart and started singing "Hands". Today in the car on the way to the ANU I spontaneoously remembered the words to "Sensitive". And so I had Jewel in my mind. Blah.
I was thinking,
That I might fly today.
Just to disprove
All the things that you say.
It doesn't take a talent to be mean,
Your words can crush things that are unseen.
So please be careful with me,
I'm sensitive and I want to stay that way.
Three good singers tonight. Sadly, they were all in MGF (Pinky Beecroft, KK Juggy and "Beyonce"). Happily, MGF produced a hell of a show. Unlike last time, I was down in the front area ("Mosh pit?") and people kept pushing me from behind. Being a man of reasonable stature and excessive girth, this meant I started MGF's set about five or six people from the front, and finished two from the front. I also finish covered in feathers. Yes, that was part of the act.
Surprisingly, we didn't get KK Juggy doing nude cartwheels. She _was_ wearing some kind of skin-coloured bodysuit, and there were boobies visible during some parts of the show. I vaugely remember that the ANU (for it was their bar in which the show was held) banned KK Juggy from doing nude cartwheels on stage. Instead, Love Shark (guitarist) was in his briefs by the second song, and had removed them by the second-last song. (Turns out he's well sized, but circumcised, incase any of my readers wanted to know)
If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be "We're all OK".
Not to worry, 'cause worry is wasteful and useless in times like these.
Anyway, we got good songs ("What the fuck do I care", "My ex-girlfriend's boyfriend's got a band" etc.) and had a good time. I was also very drunk, and then proceeded to eat too much from Dolly's food van in the car on the way home. And then I decided to scare my friends (Julia, Sean and Rabekah) by being rather more honest with them than they probably wanted. Hence this blog entry, which happily leaves out the stuff I can't repeat in public. Or at least more than I have.
You took your coat off and stood in the rain,
You were always crazy like that
I watched from my window,
always felt I was outside looking in on you
You were always the mysterious one
with dark eyes and careless hair,
You were fashionably sensitive, but too cool to care
(Thanks to Foolish Games for verifying my recollection of "Hands" and "Sensitive" and supplying everything but the first line of "Foolish Games". ^_^ And Lyrics and Quotes from "moulin rouge" for the actual text of the start to "El Tango De Roxanne". That site also has the poetry reading in the Elephant Room. "You don't have to stand. I mean... It's sometimes... it's quite long. I.. I'd like you to be comfortable."^_^)
(For reference, the below is only representative of my general state of mind. I'm not actually upset over a prostitute. -_-;;;)
Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself.
It always ends BAD!
We have a dance in the brothels of Buenos Aires.
It tells the story of a prostitute and a man who falls in love with her.
First there is desire then, passion!
Then, suspicion!
Jealousy, anger, betrayal!
When love is for the highest bidder, there can be no trust.
Without trust, there is no love!
Jealousy... Yes, jealousy...
will drive you, ...will drive you... mad!
Posted in Food Diary, General at 2:36 am by TBBle (Visited 337 times)
Woke up, futzed around with the blog software a bit, had a piano lesson (I've started on When The Saints Go Marching In ^_^) and went home to eat lunch. Nor a particularly good lunch, either. Jam iced buns.
Futzed around on the computer more, preparing FreeRADIUS packages for upload, since I forgot to test them with lintian when I created them, but that's not a huge issue since my sponsors both got back to me and said they're busy until next week.
Went out to find food, taped two episodes of Rosemary and Thyme, and returned to find Shane had returned from his coast trip, and I wasn't expecting him back until Sunday. Given I only found out about the trip on Thursday, and found out he was going on Friday, this lack of information shouldn't have surprised me. ^_^ No one asked if I wanted to go though. >_<
Idled around on IRC for a while, got into a discussion of copyright and source, which ranged from Finland's Lay Judge system, through to some direct personal abuse against me, something along the lines of (caps as per writer) "STOP THINKING LIKE A CALCULATOR AND FUCKING THINK FOR YOURSELF". This lead to my first /ignore in many many years of Internet, and I guess I mainly did it to see what it was like. Since that person seemed to have ignored the rest of the conversation in terms of direction, intent, and atmosphere, I think it petered off a bit after that.
Still, I'm looking forward to next weekend's IRC debate between the various Debian Project Leader candidates, lots of fun issues that've come up, and plenty of different approaches to them.
Since I had the big gap in this blog from mid-January, I still haven't written anything about my Queensland trip, or... well, nothing else I did comes to mind. I bought World Of Warcraft a few weeks ago, but only had time to play it for a week so far. Apart from that, boring boring boring. If I could make time for something interesting, I'd blog about it. ^_^
Oh yeah, and I signed myself up as an AmazonJP affiliate, so I can put links to products there and if you click them, I get a percentage towards a gift voucher. ^_^ So if and when I talk about things from AmazonJP, I'll put links. I've added a link to PGSM Vol.12 yesterday where I mentioned collecting it from DHL as a test.
I'm the Debian packager of FreeRADIUS, but I'm not a Debian Developer, so I can't upload my own packages but must have a Debian Developer sponsor my package into the archive.
Steve Langasek was my initial sponsor, but as he is also a Debian release manager, he's kinda busy so I found another person willing to sponsor my packages. This other person (lack of name will be explained shortly) did his first upload at the very end of December 2004, and I prepared my next upload yesterday.
However, a search of my email archives failed to reveal exactly who the new sponsor was. I've either lost the email, or sent it from a different email account (the power supply of that machine is currently in Terry's computer until he gets a new one) so another method was needed.
I went onto IRC and asked on #debian-devel how I find out who sponsored a certain package into Debian. I was pointed in the right place, and happened to mention that the reason I was asking was that I'd lost my sponsor's email.
I didn't save the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of that being the most sadly pathetic thing the writer'd ever heard. I was very much "Aww... Hehe, but aww."
Posted in Food Diary, General at 10:51 pm by TBBle (Visited 480 times)
An apple
A nectarine
Yaki chicken bento w/Mung Bean from Mirimar's Delight
Two prawn ball skewers, two octopus ball skewers and six gyoza
600ml Diet Coke. (Yeah, I know. I haven't had any since Thursday though)
A plum
A kiwifruit
Miniwheats + puffed amaranth w/ soy milk. (This seems to have given me hiccups)
A banana
Raspberry swirl soy icecream
Four pieces of toast w/honey
Glass of cordial (weak. This stuff's pretty strong. Diet Apple/Raspberry flavour. I don't think I'll buy any more after I finish this one)
Posted in Food Diary, General at 8:59 pm by TBBle (Visited 449 times)
(Today doesn't actually count, I start as of tomorrow. ^_^)
Six rosemary and garlic sausages
A Plum
An apple
The sweet potato and baby leaf thing. (Not very nice. >_<)
