everburning

Stacy and I went over to our new condo last night. We’ve got the keys, the paper works all done, so it’s officially ours. (Well, unless the bank takes it away, heh.) The we wandered around and made sure things work. It’s a good thing we did as we noticed a couple of wacky things. First, the hot/cold water in the washing machine are backwards. I’m guess this is related to the second where the hot/cold in the master bathtub are also backwards. Lastly, the two bathroom fans are connected. Turning one on turns the other on. Nothing too major (I hope). I’ve got to go over and give the management a letter today so I’ll see if I can get that figured out.

We’re making the final decisions on paint colours tonight. Not quite sure where that will go. We’ve got some ideas, but nothing set in stone as of yet. A couple of Stacys friends, Matt and Leah are helping us out. Their both designers so they’ll actually know what their talking about, heh.

After doing some packing, god damn it there are a lot of books in our apartment, I hopped on Xbox Live to play some hexic. Owen was also on, so we chatted and played some Cloned Clyde head to head. Fun game. Owens better then I am, but then, he’s played a shit-tonne more then me. Possibly a metric shit-tonne. Anyway, I’m loving the Xbox Arcade stuff, playing it more then the actual games I got with the 360. I wonder what the virtual console for the Wii is like.

As you’ve probably noticed I’ve been delinquent with the whole blog thing again. I’ve been doing stuff to the blog, just not on the blog.

As you can see there is a new layout. I’ve converted from my custom Rails thingy to a Wordpress blog. The main reason, I can’t be bothered to update my code. Wordpress has other people working on it who can add cool things that I can use. I wrote some scripts to import all of my old posts with comments and to move my quotes over as well. So, everything should be as it was before. Managed to maintain my link names which is nice.

I’ve also started to setup a photo gallery again. I’m using Photostack and it seems to be working pretty well so far. They make it really simple to add new albums and things. I’ve only got some Amsterdam pictures up there at the moment. I’ll end up doing some theming on that too to make it match the rest of the site which is why it doesn’t show up on the sidebar yet.

The condo stuff is coming along nicely. I should be getting a call at some point today to go pick up the key (or I’ll just go up at 5pm as it has to be there then.) Everything has gone through that I know of. Now we just need to paint and move in. Almost there.

I’ve written a few EWL tutorials over on wiki.edevelop.org. They’re introductions to EWL programming, although they do touch on some of the harder things like drag and drop support. You’ll basically end up with an image viewing application (showing a grid of images and then full images when clicked on) that allows you to drag images from another program onto it to display those images. The three tutorials are: EWL Introduction, EWL Introduction II and EWL Introduction III

The last big EWL thing is a nice Ewl_Text speed improvement. The Ewl_Text widget I wrote had never been optimized, we hadn’t had a lot of text in it before. This changed when pfritz wrote the syntax highlighting for C source files. Suddenly we had a lot of formatting nodes to deal with. My original tree approach fell apart under the load and I re-wrote it to use a simple linked list about a month ago. This managed to bring the time from about 6 minutes to 6 seconds, which is good. (The actual original time was 12 minutes which another small change dropped to 6 minutes). 6 seconds ain’t bad, but Nathan did some more profiling and noticed two hot spots in the code. One was when we validate the text we’re making an extra copy and another was how I was looking up some formatting nodes when converting indexes. Well, once I got the copying removed it dropped to about 5 seconds. Once I got the lookup fixed, we managed to hit 1 second, pfritz is seeming about 0.63 seconds. So, I’m quite happy with that. It now takes longer to draw then it does to create the formatting tree.

We’ll see if I manage to get back onto a regular blogging schedule again. Still a bit hectic with the moving and all going on at the moment.

Well I’ve been lax in my updating again. I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve been busy. Bloody busy.

Lets see, where to begin. Stacy and I bought a condo the other weekend. We’ll finalize everything on the 23rd of November. (That’s when we get possession.) This should give us about a week to do any painting before we move on the 30th. We’re still in the process of getting movers, neither one of us wants to have to move all our crap ourselves. It’s going to be a hectic few weeks getting everything packed and arranged.

Hm, I guess next up is work. I’d been offered a job at another company, which I subsequently turned down. Was a bit of a shit storm at work. Everything is good now. I’ve moved more to focus on migration tools which is what I want to do. A lot of my other projects, as much as possible, have been transitioned off to other people. It’s nice to drop the baggage every now and then. So that’s good. Work’s actually at the point where I sit down, start working and, what feels like 30 seconds later, it’s time to go home.

I’ve finally taken my Amsterdam pictures off my camera. (You’re seeing one of theme in the post icon.) They turned out pretty well. A bunch are blurry. I really, really, need a camera with auto-stabilization, or something. All in all, I like em. As usual, if I ever get a gallery setup…

Movies, movies, I think I’ve seen two since I last posted. Borat and Flags of our Fathers. Both were really good movies. I wasn’t expecting much from Borat, I haven’t seen the show it’s based on but, I laughed, then I quoted a bit. The guys I went with all grew Borat style mustaches. I think the best part of the evening is when the bar tender (we went for drinks afterwards) asked one of the guys ‘Are you in a mustache club?’.

Lets see, thats the condo, the job, movies. Ah, right. Been poking at EWL again, as usual. Did a bunch of work on the Ewl_Text widget to hopefully make it faster. Ended up simplifying the code in a few places which is nice. Should also make it easier for RbdPngn to integrate his skiplist work once it’s complete.

I picked up Ratchet: Deadlocked about a year ago. Didn’t really play it then (according to the save file, 1.5hrs). Popped it in the other day and have been pleasantly surprised. It’s quite fun to run around and blow shit up with ridiculously sized weapons. 11 days to the Wii.

That’s it for now, I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ll try to post more regular like in the future. I swear.