code

That sucks

Posted on by grahams

The friends page that I integrated into my personal web page won’t show me entries done by friends who only allow their journal to be seen by friends only (because I can’t be ‘logged in’ and yank the page from the LJ servers, AFAIK).

I finished laying out the playlist plugin for SoundPlay last night, I even have the playlist placed and colored in the proper place, but I still need to make all the buttons, bells, and whistles work. One really annoying thing about the way WinAmp does playlist skins is that the buttons are all one sprite, so I have to divide the one sprite into several in code as opposed to having different sprites for each button. What a dumb thing. I also have to code a replacement for BScrollBar and BScrollView, so I can integrate the skinned scrollbar into the playlist window (it looks mighty lame with the default Be scrollbar in this mega-skinned window. :P

Software

Posted on by grahams

Ok, I really haven’t worked on any code since the last time I worked on AliveJournal (which I need to work on again). Today, I got fed up with that and started hacking again. This time, it is something which I consider substantial. I don’t use Winamp skins with SoundPlay, mostly because I like the way the BeOS native interface looks. But every time I have toyed with the idea, it really bothered me that the playlist skins were not supported. So that is what I am doing, and it is fun and I am learning and relearning alot about BeOS programming again.

Meeting my mother and grandparents for lunch tomorrow, which should be interesting..

Wonderful

Posted on by grahams

Greeting from BeOS. Ever since I came home I have been without network access on my personal PC, instead using my father’s machine (and its cable modem) when I needed to “get out”. A few people know that I have had a free shell account with a certain ISP from back when I worked at Sears. One of the reps of the ISP came in asking me to push their service, and in return I would get free PPP access. I said yes (even though it was probably against story policy), and they hooked me up with a free account.

Now, that was 6 years ago. :) They never took the account away, and so I have been using that account when I don’t want my real email address to get into the hands of spam harvesters. I had kinda forgotten that I had PPP access, and had assumed that they disabled my PPP access long ago. When I got home, I started thinking about it, and remembered that the PPP accounts for this ISP were seperate from the shell accounts, with different usernames and passwords. But I couldn’t remember my PPP password, and I wasn’t about to call their support asking to have it reset, so I just wrote it off.

I got an email from my father today…. I had apparently given him my username/password at some point when he was having trouble with the ISP he was using, and I figured he might want an alternative. My dad still had a copy of my password, so now I am dialed in.. Not that big of a deal, but it is useful in some respects, most importantly of all, I can sync to the Perforce repository at CSH again, which means I can start working on some of the projects again.

I am gonna go jump in the shower now… :)

Back to your regularly scheduled programming

Posted on by grahams

I think I got most of the VoiceXML scripting out of my system for a while. I have a few other ideas buzzing around, some of which would be really cool. I was thinking of adapting the Quotable JLG and turning it into a “Joke a Day” system, or “Call a Joke” system or even a phone-based version of fortune(1).

Still looking for that job, I have had a few leads, but almost 9/10 of them are from recruiters who simply don’t understand my background. I have a primarily OOP background, so I don’t want to do any COBOL development… Grumble.

Anyway, I know something will come along, but I would kinda like something to keep me occupied during the day. :)

Hehehehe… Try this, MPAA

Posted on by grahams

DeCSS in 434 Bytes

#define m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])<<
unsigned char x[5],y,s[2048];main(n){for(read(0,x,5);read(0,s,n=2048);write(1,s
,n))if(s[y=s[13]%8+20]/16%4==1){int i=m(1)17^256+m(0)8,k=m(2)0,j=m(4)17^m(3)9^k
*2-k%8^8,a=0,c=26;for(s[y]-=16;--c;j*=2)a=a*2^i&1,i=i/2^j&1<<24;for(j=127;++j<n
;c=c>y)
c+=y=i^i/8^i>>4^i>>12,i=i>>8^y<<17,a^=a>>14,y=a^a*8^a<<6,a=a>>8^y<<9,k=s
[j],k="7Wo~'G_\216"[k&7]+2^"cr3sfw6v;*k+>/n."[k>>4]*2^k*257/8,s[j]=k^(k&k*2&34)
*6^c+~y;}}

Brr….

Posted on by grahams

After taking a few days off from it, I started to hack on Drink again. Today, I removed a stupidity from the protocol that was inherited from whatever stub daemon that Joe initially used.. It stuck a Null character (\0) at the end of each line of a STAT response. Joe has an excuse, he hacked his client/server out in 10 hours over a weekend. I was just lazy. :P

I cleaned up the source and UI for the Unix commandline client that Joe wrote as well. That is more of an ongoing battle with my dislike for straight ‘C’ more than anything. :)

It certainly does look cold and solid wet outside.

I’ve got a drink-ing problem

Posted on by grahams

Ok, so I continue to work on drink. :) As I believe I have mentioned before, we have broken the project up into phases. The first phase is laying down the infrastructure for the machine and enabling people to ask what drinks are in the machine and letting them drop a drink…

As of this morning, I believe that this phase is now complete. I wrapped up a few loose ends, changed the way I was authenticating users, made users timeout if they picked their nose for too long… This project is certainly keeping my attention. Plus, I talked with Bill about licensing the code, and we agreed on a BSD-style license.. :P Down with the GPL!

Gravity holds galaxies together…..

Posted on by grahams

…..but 8am class rips my head apart…. :) Jetlag and this new schedule are working in concert to really make my life complicated right now. :) I assume that once my body readjusts to the timezone, and my mind adjusts to waking up at 7am instead of noon, things should get better.

It’s early in the quarter, so I am still in that “not much to do” state of mind…. I am going to leverage this to my advantage and do some Calculus this weekend… Man, I really wish I had a professor who spoke english. :) My classes this quarter don’t seem too bad so-far, but I guess that it is still a bit early to pass judgement.

In theory, Jon and I are headed back to Imaging Science around 12:30pm for another round of Junkyard Wars on the big screen. Unfortunately, right now I am less than motivated to do anything… :)

I am also going to try and wrap up my work on phase 1 of Drink (which means getting it back to the classic Drink functionality, dropping drinks over the network when asked to). It turns out that the TINI board does not support either ObjectOutputStream or ObjectInputStream. Of course, I would have known this had I just paid attention to the TINI API Differences. While the TINI API supports almost all of Java 1.1, there are a few differences. Fortunately, I was only using serialization in a handful of places, so I just have to hack out a different solution. I used Serialization because it was easy, not because it was necessary. :P