everburning

Saw a couple of concerts this weekend. The first was a free David Usher concert at Nathan Phillips Square. Pretty small turnout, 100 maybe 150 people. Probably driven away by the rain. Concert itself was pretty good. He played a lot of new stuff that their currently recording in studio.

The second was the Tool concert down at Molson Amphitheater. Adam ended up with a spare ticket that he gave me. Tool was phenominal. They sounded amazing, the lights and stage looked fucking cool.

There must have been 16,000 people there. The place was packed. It started to rain about 2 minutes before Tool took the stage. Rained for about an hour, got fairly hard near then end. Then stopped for about 30 minutes. Started to rain when they came back on for the encore. By the end I was soaked, that and I managed to stumble into a gigantic puddle leaving the venue.

While trying to entice the band on the stage for the encore there must have been 5-10 thousand lighters going. Definately an impressive sight to see.

I think the most amusing part is, they made me gate check my pocket watch. I made sure I left my knife at home, but who whould’a thunk it, a fucking pocket watch. Apparently the chain is considered a risk or something.

Well, the process of adding another ring to the tree of life is over. I got a really cool gift from my older brother. A Lego Mindstorms NXT set. This thing is really fucking cool. It’s got sound, light, ultrasonic and touch sensors in it. The controller is bluetooth enabled and is suppost to be an interesting toy from the hacking standpoint.

I’ve been digging my hands in a bit, built the ‘30 minute’ robot they have as an example and ran around after the cat freaking it out by having this car charge at it all the time. I then sat down and built the robotic human that they have in their tutorial program. It was pretty simple to put together. I skipped their programming stuff and wrote the program myself, so instead of walking in a straight line he kinda went in circles, but hey, it was my first program, heh.

I’ve been taking a look at the CenterStage project a bit lately. I gave up on the iTheater project after I didn’t get an email back on any of my patches after two weeks (I still haven’t heard back.) I figure, if their that unresponsive to a couple of small patches, even to tell me I suck, then the project can’t be going anywhere too quickly. The CenterStage guys got back to me after about two days and have been really suportive and seem quite happy with any help they can get. If you’re a programmer, looking for a media center type app on a Mac, take a look at CenterStage. I’m sure they’d be happy with the help.

Lastly, Stacy and I picked up the first season of House while we were in PEI. I kinda ignored it for a while and kept telling Stacy I’d get caught up to her but never bothered. I sat down on Saturday to watch an episode, and managed to watch four in a row. Stacy and I sat down last night and I ended up watching four more episodes last night. (Stacy wussed out early, something about getting up for work.) The show is going amazing. The writing is top notch and it just keeps you coming back for more. I’m hoping it can hold its current momentum through the second and third seasons.

I’ve been doing some more fiddling with EWL the last few days. Came up with
an idea for an IO manager thats been commited to CVS.

Basically, it abstracts out the need for reading/writting data to get
specific EWL types back. The code currently has a hack in it to determine
mime types at the moment. This will eventually get changed to have correct
mime type lookups.

If you want to see an example of using the IO manager take a look at the
ewl/src/bin/tests/ewl_io_manager.c file. The test provides a file
dialog to select your data and uses the IO manager to read the data.

It currently supports plain text and images. We’ll hopefully get more
plugins in the future to read different file types.

The simple magic behind the IO manager test is the line:

t = ewl_io_manager_uri_read(path)

This will then return either an Ewl_Text widget setup with the contents of
the file, an Ewl_Image widget if it’s an image or NULL if the URI can’t be
read in for some reason. It’s that simple. You can do other things with the IO
manager, map extensions to their icon names, lookup mime types for files,
etc.

Along with the input portion of this, you can also save using the IO
manager. To write out a file you’ll pass in the widget that contains the
information, the URI to write too and the mime type to write the data out
as. You should be able to save both plain text and images through the IO
manager at the moment. (You should also be able to convert image types this
way, read in a JPG and write out a PNG should, in theory, work
correctly.)

What are these plugins I’m talking about? Well, the IO manager works by
taking the mime type and loading in a chunk of code to handle that mime
type. So, for a text/plain mime type it will look for the
ewl_io_manager_text_plain_plugin.so, failing that it
will look for the
ewl_io_manager_text_plugin.so
(it falls back down the mime type). These
plugins are located in PACKAGE_LIB_DIR/plugins.

Because these plugins aren’t tied with EWL, developers can write their own
plugins and install them into the lib directory. They’ll then get picked up
automatically by any application that uses the IO manager.

Plugins are fairly simple to write, you can take a look in the
ewl/src/plugins directory for
two examples, one for text and one for images.

If you’d like to help out, there are a few ways. Send an email to
the enlightenment-devel mailing list, join #ewl on irc.freenode.net or add
your bugs/patches to the bug tracker at xcomputerman.com/bugs.

Well, its been another year. A lot has happened in the last year. Principle of which being that I got married. I’ve done a lot of traveling and many random other things. Its been a fun year, hopefully the next will be as good if not better.

There are a few plans floating around for next year. Their changing from what they were even two weeks ago but, some big stuff should be changing.

Let’s hope it goes as well as last year.

It’s been a hectic few weeks, but also nice and relaxing. Strangly enough.

As you probably know, I got married on the 26th of August. The ceremony was good, and the rain managed to hold off until about 10 minutes after our photos where finished. Everything turned out as planned and, as far as I know, everyone had a good time.

My brother did a fantastic job with the photos. He took something like 650 pictures, along with fixing things and picking up flowers. The pictures themselves look great, some need a little bit of touching up but I think we’ve got good pictures of all parts of the wedding. If I ever get the gallery part of eb done I’ll be putting some up.

We got some really cool wedding gifts, lots of kitchen stuff that we can use and Stacys father and brother got us a 32″ HD LCD tv. It’s sweet. I picked up a Mac Mini with some of the wedding money (you can’t just put it all into savings now can you?). The tv has a HDMI/DVI input on the back so I can plug the Mac straight into it, the picture is amazingly clear. I’ve been playing around with iTheater a bit, sent them a few patches that I haven’t heard back on yet. I’ve gone ahead and made a bunch of changes that I think make the video section work and look better. There’s still a lot to do on it, but it at least works and lets us watch things.

The week in PEI was quite good. The cottage was really cool, nice and secluded with its own beach. We put about 1000km on the car with all of our driving around but nothing was rushed or hectic. We basically just went where we felt like, and if we wanted, sat at home and read our books.

I picked up a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X which was my book of choice to read on the trip. I think it’s the first programming book I’ve ever read cover to cover. I typically just read the parts I’m interested in and skip the rest.

The book is really well written, if you’re interested in doing some Cocoa programming then take a look. It gave me enough information to jump in and start writting things and do some patches for iTheater.

We also managed to watch the complete season 3 of Arrested Development on Stacys MacBook while we were there. Definately a series to watch if you’ve never seen it.

On the EWL front I spent a few days of my vacation time hacking up the code. I got the Icon theme code hooked into the stock icon system. Pretty icons all over the place. I cleaned up the file dialog to use these icons, and use the MIME type icons if possible for it’s display. It’s looking nice and clean now I think.

The Ewl_Icon widet will now thumbnail the image attached to it automatically. This is a nice memory saver as the thumbnail will never display bigger then it’s size anyway, no reason to hold the full size image in memory.

The last place I spent my time was with Ewl_Text. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Ewl_Text. It’s been a lot of fun to write, by my god, it’s been a pain in my ass. I fixed up the alignment code so you can center, left or right align text. Fixed up the wrapping code so it should hopefully be word or character wrapping correctly.

And finally, the part that took about a day and a half. I got the UTF8 support in EWL all fixed up. You should be able to enter, edit, delete and scroll over UTF8 characters correctly. They should also work with selections correctly.

I’m sure I’m missing lots of stuff in this post, that’s kind of the problem with the big rollup posts, but hey, that’s life.