everburning

I finally got around to updating my iPod again last night. I don’t think I’ve changed the music on there since I bought it. So it’s been a while. In the intervening time I’ve bought a bunch of new albums and only listened to then occasionally on my stereo. They just didn’t get enough play to make them memorable.

With this update, and about three hours of work renaming, fixing and organizing in iTunes, I’ve got pretty much all new albums on my iPod.

It’s strange. I’ve had these discs for months but haven’t really listened to them. Now that I do, their amazing. It’s a relative cornicopia of new music. Not all of it is new music, some is old stuff that I decided to pickup as I’d heard good things.

So, here’s to Alice in Chains, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Kraftwerk, Amon Tobin, The All American Rejects, Arcade Fire, Over the Rhine and all the other new discs that are on there. Here’s to hours of new music.

Well, Stacy and I were out being good consumers tonight. We went down to the Eatons center after work and picked out our wedding rings. Mines titanium which I think is kinda cool. Stacy got a really nice one that matches the engagement ring really well.

Along with the rings I also finally broke down and bought a pair of Birkenstocks. I haven’t actually owned sandals in about 10 years or so. Will be a bit of a change for me. I’m used to combat boots or docs.

I’ve been trying to buy a nice jacket for a few weeks not. Not a suit jacket but something that looks like that. Something kind of dressy but also casual. I realized today while looking for one why I hate shopping. It seems like 9 times out of 10 I’ll see a jacket or something that one of the maniqueins is wearing in the window and think, that’s really nice, I’d like that. So, I go into the store and lo and behold, they don’t actually have that jacket. Not on the shelf anywhere. I don’t get it, why display it if you don’t carry it? What’s the deal?

Anyway, I’m just killing time until World of Warcraft comes back online. Back to surfing the inter-tron.

Over the last few months I’ve been using a few different operating systems. Either for work or at home. I’m currently running Solaris 10 6/06 on my work laptop, some version of Gentoo linux on my work desktop and home desktop and OS X on my laptop at home.

I’ve been using Linux as my primary desktop since sometime around ‘97 or so. Enlightenment being the window manager of choice for a lot of that (except when we were in the labs at school and it was a version of twm.)

Even with all the work that the Linux developers (myself included) and the Sun people (and other GNOMEies) have been doing, it just dosen’t hold a candle to the Apple experience.

I don’t know what it is per say. Everything just feels, smooth. Don’t get me wrong there are bumps, like some apps closing when I hit the X in the top corner when most others just hide the window. But, those are minor compared to the hoops and loops that are involved in the Linux/Solaris desktop.

When you combine the Apple desktop with things like Quicksilver everything just becomes sweet. There is also the most excellent Textmate which has been weening me off my VIM addiction (at least on OS X).

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the other Operating Systems. DTrace, ZFS and SMF make Solaris smokin’ hot at the moment. You can do so much cool development type stuff on Solaris, from performance tuning to memory checking that it’s very happy making.

Linux has great tools under it’s belt as well, Valgrind being a big one. The dual-head support with TwinView on Linux just seems to work better then on Solaris, at least for me with two heads that I want to act independently but be able to move windows between them.

So, whats my point? Well, I don’t have one. I’m just say’n is all.

Well, I’ve been getting back into EWL bit by bit lately. Sticking to smaller things like documentation fixes and bug fixes. This is good as it currently isn’t driving me up the wall and I can get my feet wet again.

We have been getting lots of great stuff from Peter lately. He re-did the Ewl_Grid to act more like the rest of EWL, to which we then gave him a whole bunch of suggestions on things that could be cleaned up or fixed. Hopefully he keeps it up as the work is greatly appreciated.

Other then that I’ve been doing some bug logging and some design work with Nathan. We’re currently working out how to best implement the drag and drop system in EWL. The current one has some limitations and some assumptions that aren’t valid and need to be worked out.

The main piece that we worked out last night is how to keep the DND events but not waste so much memory due to them. I want these to be seperate events in EWL but we also don’t want the four or five events adding space to each widget since their fairly specialized. (We briefly toyed with the idea of having one DND event that would tell you what type it of event it is.)

For the uninitated, the event callbacks are stored in an array of arrays in the widget structure for EWL. (There is a bit more magic then that but thats the basics). So, for each event in the system we add another entry to the array per widget. If you have a few thousand widgets this size can addup. (The structure is currently 8 bytes per entry, so having five extra entries for DND times 8 bytes per entry times a few thousand widgets adds up quickly.)

So, what’s the solution, well, it’s actually Nathans solution not mine but here goes. When we create the array to hold the events we allocate it to EWL_CALLBACK_MAX + 1 (so there is one extra field in there). Then, we have a call to allocate a new event number in EWL. So, for DND position it could be EWL_CALLBACK_MAX + 2, DND Status EWL_CALLBACK_MAX + 3 and so on. Then, whenever we get an event ID that is greater then EWL_CALLBACK_MAX we stick it into the array at EWL_CALLBACK_MAX + 1, preferrably sorted by its event ID to give fast lookup.

This way, we only store one extra entry per widget. This solution gives the ability to have as may different types of callbacks as we want in the system. The drawback being, if the list gets big it could be slower to find the events. (This is helped by the sorting and binary search of course).

You can comment on the current decussion happening at xcomputerman.com/bugs under the title EWL DND Improvements.

I picked up the first disk of Samurai 7 the other day. Well, I convinced Stacy to buy it for me. Anyway, I’ve seen a bunch of Akira Kurosawa’s works before and have loved’em. Having seen the original Seven Samurai and The Magnificant Seven I was curious to see the anime remake.

I must say, I’m loving it. I love the whole idea of the show. I’ve only seen the first four episodes but I sat down to watched the first one, was intrigued and ended up watching the last three on the disk.

The whole idea of futuristic samurai battling cyberneticly enhanced robots just appeals to me. It has some wicked awsome scenes of samurai battling space ships and other fight scenes.

This is definately one that I’ll be buying more. Highly recomended.