jcm's blog

[ from the how-it-is dept. ]

Note that GNOME 2 is new and under development, bear this in mind when reading my comments below.

First impressions seem to matter more and more these days, GNOME 2 is no exception. My first impression was that it’s an unworkable piece of shit. This is a shame as I have been a die hard fan for a number of years. Read more…

Screenshot

After having to fix a broken ppc package so that it actually installed on my box (ok so only one package is actually broken, but it fscks everything else), I noticed things go downhill. Enlightenment is my window manager of choice, but it apparently isn’t “compliant” and so has a few minor issues. So I’ve switched to sawfish as a temporary measure (I don’t like it, I’ve lost my transparent effects, etc.). asclock is not in the new panel-applets and I can’t build the old one – is that a Debian thing (I hope not), or a GNOME one?

Aside from broken Debian packages (nothing new there), the environment does not feel polished, has issues and I’m not really sure what to say yet. It’s not quite enough to push people towards KDE though I do think they’re doing quite a good job at getting that effect unless something changes.

I’m annoyed with GNOME 2, stick with GNOME 1 until 2 is much better.

Jon.

[ from the hmmmm-ok dept. ]

So I took the UPS to campus today, gave me over 6 hours of runtime, which is enough for a full day of work…finally. If they won’t let me plug in to the mains then I’ll take it with me – but I am still after a smaller, lighter one. If you have one then please drop me a line about it.

Handed in the hardware request stuff and resisted putting anything I knew would be turned down – like useful things, Mot dev kits, etc. that would actually help out. Heh, I’ve decided MOL might be just what I need for development, if I can dump registers and so forth from a running instance. I have MacOS 9 running in a Window now with all the features I want except for OpenGL (which would be useful for quake3). Still, I’m interested in finding out how people get OS X to behave properly – it’s not running for me yet.

I enjoyed Birmingham, it was fun. Which beats the previous few times because I used to think it sucked donkey’s nads. Didn’t get mugged, and nothing particularly bad happened except for missing a train on Wednesday evening. Went to Star Bucks obviously – though didn’t look for wireless this time.

I need to get some stuff – principally some small PDA device running Debian or a small UNIX for my hacking pleasure. I hope to get a PIC with USB next week if my programmer can handle it, that would be cool, as the documentation seems to suggest their provided firmware does most of the nasty USB communications for you (very nice, saves hours and I can always write that bit another time).

I might go to London this weekend but I am in Birmingham on Sunday anyway so who knows

Jon.

[ from the giant-pandas-will-take-over-the-world dept. ]

Hmmm…I’m in one of my “Nottingham moods”. The one where I wonder why it is that I stay here. This is probably something to do with having slept for a while and doubtlessly I will be back to traditional jcm levels later on. Every so often I reflect on how annoying and boring this place is and why it can’t be just a little bit more exciting and generally interesting.

Well, we make our own fun I guess – if the academic side of things isn’t stimulating enough for me then I should try injecting more charisma in to it or something. I’m looking forward to graduation in so many ways – from one point of view I’ll get to do something else, and from another I may get a chance to push for some alterations which need to take place in my view.

I’m having to get a 4-gang->UPS adapter from a mate and take this ludicrously heavy battery with me to get a day of power. Why do I bother? Why bother with anything around here. Bah, bah, bah, humbug.

I’ll be ok in a few minutes.

Jon.

[ from the I-leave-my-door-open-at-night dept. ]

So I popped in to London for some food earlier (Wagamama, Covent Garden) and had a reasonable evening escaping temporarily from Nottingham – not that there’s anything wrong with Nottingham, well, there is, but that aside, I enjoy being in London. Read more…

In fact, I’m thinking of going to see a play in London next week or soon after. I have not decided what to see yet however I am sure there are plenty of good performances on at the moment

Paddington has an interestingly unencrypted, publically available wireless network called “Megabeam“, as some American man was telling me about earlier – in the typical “I know what wireless is so I know everything” style that people from certain parts of the world tend to do…annoying, but I put up with it because it was not worth getting involved with a discussion. The network is there and apparently free to use though I of course will not be trying that until I find out more about whether I am meant to be using it

So, back in Nottingham, there are basically no lectures today. I am going to make the SSCC meeting I hope (I have a few issues to raise of minor concern – such as lab bookings and so forth. I suppose I could mention the department closing times again for the 4th or so time in a row…they might not change the opening times but I feel obligated to bring it up).

I will be in Birmingham later on today to visit Hannah and Joe, and Dan I hope. Pizza, town, escapism, great stuff. Then back to the hard life of being a student bored out his mind.

I have finished reading through some more Motorola documentation and now understand a minimal boot sequence for setting up a PowerPC CPU. The plan is to use this information to experiment with using MOL as an environment for executing binaries and then to branch in to more interesting setup (such as getting the MMU going properly with page tables and so forth rather than fixed size BAT regions of limited size and use). It’s all good.

Jon.

[ from the this-one-makes-me-laugh dept. ]

Someone posted a link to this on a mailing list I subscribe to, figured others might enjoy it too. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=891kot%247uj%40weyl.math.psu.edu.

Jon.

[ from the giant-penguins-are-taking-over-the-world dept. ]

Well, it’s BBC Children In Need on Friday November 15th 2002. This time I am considering dressing as a giant penguin for the day – subject to interest from potential sponsors. Let me know if this appeals to you!

[ from the late-night-tv dept. ]

Staying up watching TV, I noticed a program I have probably encountered before – The Web Review. My first response was to slam it for being crap but having watched it I now believe it’s fundamentally ok, just completely misdirected. The “Web” is not all about excessive quantities of pointless graphics and flash (though some seem to think that it is) and these people actually judge sites based on criteria such as these. There was me thinking that the content might actually be more useful…sigh. The coverage of the Stop Esso campaign was possibly constructive. My rating of the program? 5/10.