Reign Drops Fall…

I’m back from my week-long sabatical (i.e. wedding and honeymoon) and hacking away again. As soon as I get some pictures (the photographer is supposed to be sending us a CD with our wedding pictures on it), I’ll post them.

Coaster
As you can see, I didn’t get a pre-release of Coaster out. I wanted to hit myself. I still haven’t gotten it to burn without crashing, but I’m working on it. Hopefully we’ll get a release out this century (but don’t hold your breath!).

Honeymoon
September and I went to the Wisconsin Dells for our honeymoon. We stayed at Sunset Bay Resort which was very nice and close to a lot of attractions. A word of caution about the Dells: if something has a sweet advertisement but has no real description about what it is, don’t go to it. We got (ok, I got) sucked into going to 2 tourist traps that really sucked and cost a total of $50. September wasn’t pleased because I dragged her along.
Other than that, the trip was fun. We went to a drive-in movie (which I had never been to) and saw two movies for a total of $13.00. We saw The Bourne Supremacy and I, Robot which were both fairly good. It was cool because the sound was broadcast over an FM station the theater had set up.

Other Stuff
It’s really strange being back in town because I’m not living at my parent’s house anymore. September and I went over there to pick up my stereo and some other miscellaneous things and I realized I was visiting my parents for the first time. Very surreal.
I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to get high speed internet at the apartment. I’d like to do cable (because it’s simple), but I’m not sure how many other people around me have it. The other option (I think… I’m not sure how close the nearest POP is) is DSL, but I don’t think I can afford $30/month + an ISP subscription (however much that will be). Hopefully I don’t have a bunch of neighbors that have cable internet that suck up bandwidth so I can go with the cable solution.

Wow, this weekend was busy! On Friday, I took off work to go get my marriage license with my fiancée. Now we can officially get married . Then, on Saturday, we came back to Cedar Rapids from Omaha to pick up the keys to OUR apartment. Yesterday was spent going to the groundbreaking service for our church and moving things into the new apartment. It’s really funny how much stuff we really don’t have. This left me little time for code.

Coaster
The little time I had was spent working on threading in Coaster. This is my first endeavor into threading, so I have no clue what I’m doing. This would be much much easier if Daniel Elstner was around in #c++, but he seems to be AWOL right now. I hope I’ll figure this out before the release at the end of the week.

Wedding
If you didn’t know, I’m getting married, which means one of the end results is presents. If you would like to contribute to the “Bryan and September have nothing and need stuff” fund, please visit the next few links.
Target Gift Registry
Younkers Gift Registry
JC Pennys Gift Registry
end shameless plug

Music
Thanks for all the help finding music for my wedding! I have all the tracks I need thanks to all the helpful people in the GNOME community.

Thanks a ton to all the people who emailed me with mp3’s and locations where I could get the mp3. Jason Scott Gessner sent me the one that my fiancée has on her computer. Thanks again!!

My fiancée and I are looking for the piano only version of Aerith’s (or Aeris’, not sure which is right) Theme from Final Fantasy VII. I found the orchestrated version, but she has a version of it on her laptop hard drive (which is fried and is 4 hours away from me) that is piano only. If you know of a place I can get it, please email me.

UPDATE: my email address is bryan at reigndropsfall dot net

Wow, my last blog entry was on June 22. I guess Andrew is right in saying that I need to blog. So much happens in 3 weeks (I think it’s been 3 weeks).

Coaster
Really, not much has happened with Coaster on my end. Harshy has some debs in his repo for libburn and libbakery2.4 if you want to check those out. Also, he merged his gtk code into libcoaster, so now coaster-gui is using libcoaster for its preferences dialog (on my local copy). I’ll check that in sometime this weekend. I hope to get burning data discs working before my wedding so we can push a release out.

Wedding
Dude, it’s only two weeks and six days until I get married. I’m really excited. The plans are going well (we almost have everything lined up) and we’re trying to stay as stress-less as possible.
September and I just bought her a car last week and she loves it. It’s a 1997 Ford Taurus with only 74000 miles on it and in great condition. We also got her a cell phone on my account so she doesn’t get stranded somewhere when she’s out exploring Cedar Rapids. And she expects me to get her a wedding present on top of this…

iBook
Well, I got tired of building everything from source so I broke down and installed Debian on my iBook G4 12”. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier. I am quite pleased with it. I know, I know, the Gentoo-ites will tell me that I don’t have a streamlined, fully customized box, but I’m OK with that. I don’t have to worry about building Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice.org (I never built it, but I got packages from people that said it took 12-14 hours), or anything else. The surprise to me was that my Debian install actually boots faster and generally is faster than my Gentoo install (waits for USE flag comments).
On that note, I built debs for libbakery2.4 and libburn for Harshy and emailed them to him today. Those should be up within a day for all you Debian PPC users (the repo is http://debian.dersoldat.org.

Work
Work has been going very well. It felt really good to get my first check last week. About a week and a half ago, my friend and I tried to propose we use python for our paging scripts instead of using VBScript. That proposal got shot down, but my proposal to move the paging system (to page the person on-call when an error occurs in one of the Beyond FTP scripts) to a database went through. That is a complete relief. Now I just have to wait for VS.NET to come in so I can start working on some command line programs that will page the correct person (instead of everyone) with a template filled in with the correct information (instead of 154 different messages for each possible error that can occur).
I also found something out last week: I can plug an ethernet cord into the back of my VoIP phone and connect my laptop to the network here. That was nice when I went to do my Debian install. All of GNOME downloaded in about 10 minutes, and OpenOffice.org downloaded in about 8 minutes. It’s nice to have a fairly fast connection .

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry, but it’s been less time than it has been for Daniel Elstner. By the way, he’s back and helping with gtkmm again. It’s really nice to have a resident C++ guru helping with the design issues I’ve been having. Plus, he’s a really cool guy.

Coaster
Coaster has been going through changes since my last blog entry. One huge thing that I really wanted to get done was an ellipsizing cell renderer. I used the routines from Rhythmbox’s ellipsizing label and inherited from Gtk::CellRendererText. I’ve also taken out the icon caching code because it was causing me headaches (it was slow and I didn’t want to put in idle calls or have to worry about context iterations). I’ve also redone some of the icons to match the default GNOME icon theme.

School
School sucks. I’m taking summer classes from my College and it’s not too fun. The only redeeming value to these classes is that they are only 6 weeks long, so I don’t have to sit through these classes for a whole semester.

RAGBRAI
John Fleck: have you ever heard of RAGBRAI? I know you’re into bike racing and all things bike, so I figured you might have heard of RAGBRAI. It’s the big bike thing here in Iowa.

Wedding
The wedding is fast approaching. We’re now deciding on DJ’s, menus for the reception, and other little details like where we’re going to live after the Big Day. I’ve also been looking for an internship so my fiancée and I can buy food and pay for an apartment when we fianally get hitched.

So, today I started summer classes. As you can tell, I’m not too thrilled about it. The one good thing about this is that it’s a 6 week accellerated course, so I’m not in class as long. Another good thing about this class is that it’s only 2 hours, so that’s just long enough that I can compile stuff on my iBook and not have to worry about the battery running out (today, it only got down to 26%).

Coaster
Since class was basically reading over the syllabus today, I worked on Coaster’s build system. I put all my miscellaneous widgets and dialogs into separate respective directories which cleans up the directory layout quite a bit. I’ve also figured out how to register an mime type with freedesktop.org’s mime database stuff. Coaster’s file format is just an XML file with a different extension (blf). It kept coming up as text/xml to gnome-vfs, but by registering it with the mime database and setting a priority of 50, it comes up as the correct format. It’s pretty neat. If you want to know how (that means you, gDesklet guys), go here.

Windows
Ok, I’m really glad that I use Linux because I don’t think I could stand the insanity of Windows. Yesterday, I spent 2 hours (I think) working on getting my fiancée’s desktop (Win2k) to dialup to her ISP. For some reason, her laptop (Win98) decided to revert all of her settings and some other applications to 6 months ago and I just figure it’s time to trash it. Anyway, she doesn’t want her family to use the ISP that her dad got her for a graduation present, so she asked me to make it so no one can use it except her. This is the problem: with *nix, you just create a new group, let the group own the modem, change the permissions, assign the users to that group, and there you have it! Could it be this simple in the world of Windows? Heck no! First off, I don’t think you can set permissions on devices. Secondly, you can’t even set permissions on Dialup Connections. I finally gave up. Now she can’t get to internet sites. She can use Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger, but no internet sites. She can’t even ping IP addresses. Any clues?

Weekend
Other than that fiasco yesterday, my weekend was great. My parents and I traveled out to Council Bluffs and met my fiancée’s mom and step-dad. It went pretty well. They seemed to like each other and my parents enjoyed themselves. Hopefully they behave this well at the wedding .

Wedding
3 W topics in a row… is that a sign? Anyway, wedding plans are coming along well. I can’t believe it’s only 10 weeks until the wedding (maybe even less!). I’m starting to panic about finding a job and stuff. Anyone wanna hire me?

That’s right, last night was laundry night, but really, for Coaster, it was all weekend. I cleaned up the icon changing stuff. I now have a program-wide Gtk::IconTheme and Gnome::UI::ThumbnailFactory which store Gdk::Pixbuf refptrs into a std::map for quick lookup. It actually works pretty slick. I’ll get it uploaded as soon as harshy gets our arch repo (which I screwed up) fixed. Hopefully that’ll be within the next few days.

Speaking of harshy, he uploaded new screenshots which were made of the latest Coaster using gtkmm 2.4.

The remainder of this week should be spent working on more fixups for Coaster’s GUI as well as finding a reception spot for my wedding in August and a hotel for that night. Finding a honeymoon suite in Omaha, NE online is harder than you think (or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong spots).