[This log used to be on my UCSB website but moved when I graduated.]
Sun Nov 18 20:52:01 PST 2001
From: "Jeff Hagen"
To: <warmen@cs.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Your log
Hi Eric. I enjoyed your log (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~warmen/log.php3), but there haven't been any updates in a while.
PS Congrats on having the most popular project on SourceForge! Very impressive!
Most Active This Week
( 100% ) Gaim
--Jeff
I moved. Sort of. I don't write anything there, either.
Wow. I didn't think anyone even knew about this website. That's scary.
Tue Aug 21 15:16:47 PDT 2001
I could bore you with a month of updates but I'll spare you.
I'm annoyed that I came to work today. I wish I had stayed home and kept working to figure out which kernel broke my camera. That's not phrased correctly, but oh well. I also want to play with my CD writer to see if it works. I was hoping to have finished it last night so that if it did work I could by 200 CD-Rs from Costco for something like $35 and be set for life. Not that I would ever in my life use 200 CD-Rs but it'd be cool to have them. Then I wouldn't be annoyed when I give my Linux CDs to my friends and then 4 months later wish I still had them. Not that the CDs cost me anything, they're just occasionally useful.
I was contemplating writing stuff. Fun stuff. Boring stuff. I haven't decided whether or not I will. We'll see.
Tue Jul 17 13:03:01 PDT 2001
(09:46:29) mid: what was your miserable experience?
(09:48:57) Eric: working on gaim. i just didn't enjoy it
(09:51:26) mid: oh.
(09:51:29) mid: why'd you do it?
(09:51:45) Eric: i thought it would be fun.
(09:51:54) mid: oh.
(09:52:04) mid: rob said you werent working on gaim because of your job. i didnt blieve that.
(09:52:16) Eric: that's partly true.
(09:52:42) Eric: if i weren't working on work, i'd be working on something else. but pretty much the only other thing i have to work on is gaim.
(09:53:03) Eric: but if i wanted to work on gaim, i'd find time.
(09:53:20) mid: ah
Fri Jul 13 15:54:52 PDT 2001
It's so nice that no one knows my screenname anymore.
Thu Jul 12 12:24:33 PDT 2001
I think I'll probably still work on Gaim. But I don't think I'm going to work on it again until I figure out what I want to work on.
Tue Jul 10 11:49:18 PDT 2001
We replied to AOL and they haven't sent a reply back yet. It's probably too soon to tell but I hope that means that they won't reply.
One of these days I should go through the patches that people have put in for Gaim and see which ones are worth taking. I don't particularly want to though. I keep debating what I want to do with Gaim; there are actually two debates that go on, whether I want to keep hacking it, and if I do, whether I want the core-UI model to be the new Gaim or a fork. If I want it to be the new Gaim then most of their patches are probably pointless right now. But if I decide not to continue then they're probably much more relevant, since no one will probably work on the core-UI stuff if I don't. Maybe mid will. But I think if he really wanted it that much he'd have done it by now. I think for him it's just one of those things that he'd like to have but doesn't find it interesting enough or something to do it himself. Though he does seem very interested in helping and has already given quite a few good ideas so maybe not. Maybe he's just worried about creating something that someone might actually use.
I'm hungry.
Fri Jul 6 13:57:43 PDT 2001
Today is Friday.
I got DSL today, which means people are probably going to expect me to hack gaim today. I've been playing with the idea of quitting gaim recently. I still haven't made a decision about it. I think I may just become a virtual recluse, never respond to email and not tell anyone my screennames. It seems to work well for Adam.
Thu Jun 28 12:01:46 PDT 2001
Today is Thursday.
I suddenly realized that I haven't logged anything since before my DSL was abruptly shut off. So allow me to run through the major events.
Wednesday. My mom arrives to help me move. I continue packing. I think this was the day I sent a letter to gnu@gnu.org asking if it was okay to rename Gaim "GNU Messenger".
Thursday. I move. I first pack all of my belongings into a rather large truck with the help of my mom, then drive to my new apartment, and unpack all of my belongings, with the help of my new neighbors. My new neighbors are very nice people but somehow I don't think we'll see much of each other. In the midst of the move Lisa drove home to be with her mother who was in the hospital. To save you any grief she's out of the hospital now and feeling much better. She had a hysterectomy followed by some internal bleeding.
Friday. Finish packing and moving some final things, clean the old apartment. My mom starts unpacking things for me while I take a nap. I get woken up by Elie Azar asking me why I haven't signed my acceptance letter yet. I inform him that I've not heard of any such letter and will see him in an hour. My mom leaves, I sign the letter, come back to my new apartment and start unpacking a bit.
Saturday. Nothing really happened today. I got a thank-you gift for my neighbors. Lisa came home. Oh, I got a temporary ISP: K-Mart.
Sunday. More unpacking.
Monday. My first day at work. Since I had only signed the acceptance letter late in the afternoon on Friday, MIS only had about one business hour to get me a computer. So when I arrived they still hadn't gotten it. I found out today that Mark had set up a email address and paypal account to pay for the legal fees to fight to keep "Gaim". How nice. DSL will be installed July 6th, 10 business days from today.
Tuesday. Work. Go home briefly to have digital cable installed. Work. Go home to watch digital cable.
Wednesday. Work. Go home.
Today is Thursday.
Tue Jun 19 17:38:48 PDT 2001
AOL sent us Notice of Infringement yesterday. Wasn't that nice of them?
In unrelated news, my cat has fleas. Still. That's annoying. She's getting a bath today.
I got all of my services moved over, except for DSL, because Nazi DSL providers say they can't install it until they can test the line, and they can't test the line until the number is active, and the number won't be active until I move in. Bastards.
So tomorrow night is going to be the last night in my apartment. How sad.
Gaim is in little tiny pieces. It's slowly being brought back together. I've gotten the core mostly written, and some of the protocols are compiling again. Now the only major thing that's left is to get the UI-CORE protocol worked out, and get a UI written. Once that's done, it's smooth sailing.
Sat Jun 16 23:34:49 PDT 2001
So yesterday I went to a job interview for Occam Networks. I think I handled the interview portion fine but they had me take a test and I was really unprepared for it. I guess I should have expected it but I just really wasn't in a test-taking mood, especially since I just finished finals yesterday. I got a B in my 170 class (the OS class). An F on the midterm and a C on the final still couldn't bring me down. Isn't that nice.
Lisa's in Las Vegas this weekend, so I'm on my own. I'm so bored. I slept most of this afternoon.
Fri Jun 8 15:37:23 PDT 2001
Today was one of those days where you feel like by the end of the day the only thing that might have prevented you from taking over the world would have been getting hit by a car. So aside from a slight paranoia about being anywhere close to where a car might potentially be, it was a great day. I haven't tried to get my webcam working yet but it's one of those days where I know it would work if I tried. (Though in the back of my mind I know it'll take a lot more effort than it should and I don't want to ruin a perfectly good day so I'm not going to try.)
Today I had to pick up notes for Music 114 so I can have a shot at passing the final, go to a discussion for CS 170 so I can have a shot at passing the final, and go to demo a program I wrote for CS 170. I had to do them in that order because the notes office closed at 12 pm, the discussion was at 11 am and was an hour long, and the demo was at 12 and was thirty minutes long. The bus leaves at 10:40 and gets me there at 10:50 so everything is perfectly timed.
I woke up this morning later than I should have, as usual. I don't really remember what time I woke up but I think it was just past 10. I took a longer shower than I should have. I checked my email and read Slashdot, neither of which I should have had time for. And yet at the end of all of this needless time-wasting, I wasn't late. I walked to the bus stop as the bus was pulling up.
I got to AS Notes to pick up the notes for Music 114, and within thirty seconds realized two facts which cancelled each other out. One was that I forgot the little stub that let me pick up the notes. The other was that they're not open until 12, and are open until 5. So I didn't need to be there. Fine.
I went to the discussion section. I learned what was going to be on the final but not much else.
I went to CSIL for my demo. On the way there I saw the TA who was going to be grading my demo, and found out it was at 12:30, not 12. Good. Time to respond to email I didn't have time to respond to earlier. Report a bug in GTK 2. Look at the clock, it's 12:35. Search around for the TA, and find him just as the last people he was grading are leaving. Perfect timing.
He pulls up the code that I turned in and has me compile it. After it's done he removes the object files and copies in a few test programs. He asks me how much of it is working, and I look at him funny and say all of it. So he tells me to run a test program and I do, and it works. No big deal to me. He then proceeds to tell me that I'm one of three people so far (probably out of about 20 or 30) that has done this well. So he asks me a couple other questions which I answer correctly, and he gives me 100%. How nice.
So I go home and come back and get my notes, and now here I am. And this has been a good day.
Wed Jun 6 10:28:43 PDT 2001
All my projects are over. I have to demo the homework I turned in last night, and I have to take three finals. But basically the quarter's over. Thank God.
I bought the Lego MindStorms Robotics Invention Something or other (all I know is that the abbreviation is RIS) and the Vision Command module (complete with webcam and vision recognition software). Unfortunately the webcam only works with Windows (it's USB and I can't find a driver for it). The RIS works with Linux though. Now I just need to build something.
Thu May 31 08:19:48 PDT 2001
So here I am, sitting, waiting for Sunita to show up so I can demo my last homework for CS170. I know I'm supposed to meet her today but I forgot to ask what time I was supposed to show up. Details. Anyway, I have to do my PSTAT130 homework. I can't wait for summer.
Wed May 30 12:29:44 PDT 2001
My cat has decided it likes plastic grass, like the stuff that comes in Easter baskets. She also likes the Easter basket itself, particularly for chewing on. So I think I should take those away from her before she eats plastic. That can't be healty.
Lisa and I bought one of those laser pointer pens and we've been annoying the cat by having her chase it around the room. She's really quick. But she's not very bright. She was sitting on the back of a chair trying to get the light on the wall, and jumped for it, and jumped off the chair. I don't think she was expecting not to land on the chair, or not be able to bring the light down with her.
Tue May 29 03:11:42 PDT 2001
I got buddy icons working in gaim, mostly. It's fairly stable now, I think. The problem is winaim doesn't always want to send them. Oh well, that's winaim's fault.
I don't think I have anything really interesting to say.
Fri May 25 01:19:51 PDT 2001
I got buddy icons to work. I currently have a patch for both libfaim and gaim to get them working. I need to fix the gaim patch so that it displays them in the convo window instead of in their own window though. Also I should probably make them optional so that people don't have to look at porn icons if they don't want to. But that's secondary.
Pixel got her first bath yesterday. She didn't like it much. Though she doesn't seem to be scratching as much anymore. I'm going home for my sister's graduation tomorrow. I'll be able to show everyone pictures of her.
Wed May 23 13:08:43 PDT 2001
I've been playing with how to format text in ViM automatically. Things like getting lines to wrap automatically. It's really quite easy. All I had to do was read the docs.
Pixel (as the small furry creature has now been named) likes to pounce shadows. She also likes to be where other people are. Down comforters have lots of shadows. If I'm in bed, generally I won't be asleep for long, because I'll have a kitten pouncing everywhere on the bed. Though I have occasionally woken up to find her asleep next to me. Lisa thinks it likes me. I think I'm just a warmer place for it to sleep on than the couch.
I wrote a plugin for gaim to display ads in the buddy list. Right now it only has ads for SourceForge and ViM. Oh, and GNOME, but that's a crappy icon. I don't count that one.
I never did start on that bot I was going to write. Maybe I'll go implement chat in Yahoo.
Mon May 21 14:41:09 PDT 2001
I am now the proud owner of a small furry creature.
Yesterday I went to the zoo where I saw a couple very large cats. Then later that day I went to a place that had very small cats. The zoo said I couldn't take any big cats home with me, but I was able to get a very small cat.
It's seven weeks old today. Lisa took pictures of it. It's name is...
Sun May 20 02:12:18 PDT 2001
Shrek is a hilarious movie.
Army of Darkness, however, has Ash.
Debian has begun to greatly piss me off lately. It started when they broke the Home/End keys in Eterm, and then telling me that it was Eterm's fault and not theirs. So what if it was Eterm's fault, they're the ones who fucking broke it. So then they update Eterm, and now when I type it blinks. This is really really annoying, when every letter I type makes the entire screen refresh. Then they fix Eterm by providing the TERM it uses, but it doesn't default to using that TERM, it defaults to using a broken one. I want it fixed, and I want it fixed now.
Hrmph.
Oh and another thing. I finally beat Jabber. Isn't that wonderful. It should be mostly segfault-free now. Except for registering an account. But you only need to do that once anyway.
Thu May 17 11:02:44 PDT 2001
Never make the mistake of assigning a person a task. Once you assign someone a task, you expect them to do it, and they never do. It's human nature to avoid doing tasks they've been assigned. On top of that, some of them try to make you think that they're doing the task they've been assigned by continually asking you questions about it. This has the tendency to distract you from avoiding the tasks you've been assigned. In the end, no task that is ever assigned gets completed.
There's a similar law that says that people never do what they're paid to do until they're in danger of not being paid to do it anymore. Some people are just more paranoid about not being paid than others, and so work harder than others at that which they're paid to do. So if you're an employer, hire very paranoid people. They'll be the hardest workers.
Wed May 16 01:35:00 PDT 2001
I still can't belive they killed him.
I finished my homework that was due on three different days. It wasn't that difficult. But I didn't do enough synchronization. Oh well. So files will get overwritten. Big deal. You shouldn't be working on the same file twenty times anyway.
mid sent me his patch to get buddy icons working. If I can figure out when they're supposed to be sent, he'll put them in libfaim's CVS, and it'll go into Gaim, and then Gaim will have buddy icons. Oh yeah, and I'll need to do the UI for selecting them, and showing them. But eh, at least it'll be possible to have them.
I think I'm going to go write a bot.
Sun May 13 12:54:58 PDT 2001
So last night I was talking to mid (which generally is amusing but not very productive). I suggested the idea of writing a Jabber server as a bash shell script. It would probably be easier, or at least not more difficult, to write a decent XML parser in bsh/sed than in C. I wonder why more XML stuff isn't written in sed.
I had a dream last night that while I was home (which I currently am), I stopped by the Transmeta office (I still have a cardkey, though I'm not sure that it still works) (my writing style involves lots of parenthetical comments, in case you hadn't noticed). It didn't look like it did while I was working there, because most of the time in my dreams people and places won't look anything like they do in real life. Anyway, I was hanging out with Dan and Pat (my boss (supervisor? the guy I reported to and told me what to do) and my officemate/coworker), and I signed a contract saying that I'd work there this summer, even though I don't want to live in San Jose this summer. Anyway, Lisa was hurt and pissed and just overall not happy with the whole thing, and that was the entire dream. Some people dream about past events, some people dream about what happened to them that day. I dream about what might happen to me months from now.
I still need a job.
Linus Torvlads has a new book called Just For Fun. In it he says that ants don't enjoy sex. The reason that caught my attention wasn't the particularly odd topic, but that during my goodbye lunch at Transmeta, the topic came up about animal sex (because that's what you talk about when you have sushi with Linus), and I said that the only animal besides humans that enjoy sex are dolphins. I don't think I convinced anyone that I was right. In fact I'm pretty sure I didn't, especially after Linus made the point that there are a lot of horny dogs. But I know I read it from a reputable source, and I still think that I'm right. Anyway, the point of the story is that I think it would be neat if Linus Torvalds got an idea for his book from a conversation with me. I don't think he did though, he probably came up with it on his own. But I can dream.
Sat May 12 05:56:52 PDT 2001
It dawned on me today that no one would probably ever read this, and if I don't get anything useful out of writing it, then it's pointless. It isn't clear yet whether anyone reads these logs though, so I'll keep writing them until I have confirmation one way or the other. Of course no one's going to say that they're not reading it if they haven't read it, which means that I'll keep writing these logs whether or not anyone reads them, until someone reads them, at which point I'll keep writing them because someone read them.
You know, it wouldn't be incredibly difficult to turn Gaim into a Jabber server. Gaim can already do all sorts of protocols, which would be translated into transports easily. Then the rest of it is just the actual guts of the server, with session management and presence notification and stuff. Okay, so it wouldn't be easy. But it'd be a lot easier than starting from scratch.
Tomorrow is Mothers' Day. The day afterwards, I have homework due. I haven't started that homework yet. It's probably going to be somewhat difficult. Isn't that nice.
Mozilla is working again. Thank God.
Wed May 9 23:30:19 PDT 2001
AOL managed to block gaim today, but thanks to the hash server that got set up before pre11 was released, it was fixed within about three hours or so, and no one needed to upgrade. Isn't that lovely. It's so much fun when things AOL does to break gaim/Jabber only take a matter of hours to fix. And actually, if I hadn't had to take a midterm today, it could have been fixed much sooner than that.
My homework is due last Wednesday. No, today. No, Monday. Okay, Monday.
That's all.
No wait, that's not all. I tried konqueror yesterday and today, because Mozilla from CVS was segfaulting on startup (because I have weird rules in my .mozconfig file - I'm sure the nightly didn't crash on startup). I have to say, I hate konqueror. I hate it more than I hate Netscape 4, which is difficult to do. I still prefer it to IE, however, because I can get source for it.
Now that's all.
Tue May 8 02:40:42 PDT 2001
One of these days I need to make a TODO list for myself, of all the projects I'd like to work on at one point. Like, I'd like to rewrite file transfer in libfaim. I'd like to add chat to aim-t for Jabber. I'd like to learn how 3dchess works so that I can start hacking it (and fix some of the bugs that I've found). I think I'll go start a TODO list.
Sat May 5 18:58:10 PDT 2001
Within the last 15 hours or so, I've accepted two patches for gaim, rejected one, and still have five or six pending (it depends on if you want to count an FTP plugin for gaim as a patch or as a joke). I feel bad when I don't get to patches right away, since it wastes the time of the person that submitted it, and I don't know if it makes them wonder why I haven't taken it yet. For some reason though, I don't really care how they feel when the patch is either accepted or rejected, even though it can't feel good to have a patch rejected.
I think I've been bugging Lis the last few weeks. I know I've been bugging myself the last few weeks. Maybe it's just me.
My father once told me, after reviewing a letter I had written to someone asking for a job, that I shouldn't constantly use the word "I". Ever since then I've been overly-conscious about it. It's been rather difficult to write this log without constantly using the word "I". I don't think I've done a good job.
Fri May 4 18:37:20 PDT 2001
So I'm continuing my job hunt. Currently I've got possibilities at Netscape and Transmeta; neither of them are definite but at least I've talked to people from both places and both of them have said they're at least interested. But I have a feeling that my demands are a little too unreasonable. Each of them individually is actually very possible, but for some reason they seem to be mutually exclusive. I don't know why.
Demand #1: I want to be able to stay in Santa Barbara. If I have to
drive to San Jose on occasion, that's fine, but I'd like to be able to
maintain permanent residence here.
Demand #2: I want to develop GPL software using Open Source tools.
Translated to English it means I want to write Linux software.
Demand #3: I don't want to do admin work. No database administration or
server maintenance or anything like that.
That's it. Those are all of my demands. Why can't I satisfy all of them?
Thu May 3 18:31:13 PDT 2001
Today I got Gaim to successfully compile and link against GTK 2.0. Isn't that exciting. Most things seem to be working, except for the slight matter of not being able to type into the GtkText entries. So that needs to be fixed. And it still needs to be ported for real; this was just a quick "see if it works" attempt using -DGTK_ENABLE_BROKEN. It's only somewhat broken.
Last night I got in bed around 1 am. I got back out of bed at 3:15, when I decided it was futile to try and sleep in a bed, since that's obviously not what they're meant for. You're supposed to sleep on the couch. So at 3:30 I was there, asleep. At 6:30 I woke up, assumed that I had overslept, got back in bed, and proceeded to oversleep. This is only slightly different from my normal behavior: on the average day, I'll get in bed at 1, decide around 2 that a bed is not meant to be slept in, play on the computer until 5 or 6, then oversleep. However, those 4 or 5 hours that I stay awake for are generally my most productive hours.
Wed May 2 18:35:45 PDT 2001
So last night around 3 am I was reading mid's logs and temas's logs and it occured to me that everyone has a log but me. So this is my log.
In creating this web page I came across several very interesting pieces of information. The first piece of information is that I now no longer have a cgi-bin directory on CSIL. I never used it when I had one, and now that it's gone, I had wanted to use it to make writing this log easier. Oh well. The second thing is that I can use php3 in my public_html directory. Aside from the fact that I don't know PHP, except for vague things I remember from using it years ago, this became very useful. Especially the backtick operator. Third: www.cs.ucsb.edu is actually a computer called aegis, and it runs Linux 2.2.14-5.0smp. I also effectively have a shell as user www on aegis, due to my keen knowledge of PHP. I also have complete control of the CS department web page, seeing as how all those files are owned by www. And this, my friend, is not a good thing. If I make use of my new-found power, I'll probably get expelled. So I think I'll just discontinue this line of thought.