Reign Drops Fall…

Wow, these past few days have been quite hectic. I started my internship last Friday, but the real work didn’t start until Monday. For some odd reason, we’re using BeyondFTP and its scripting language is pretty horrid. Not VBScript horrid, but horrid nonetheless. I’ve spent the last 2 days learning this scripting language so I we can move from 2.5 to 3.0. Oh well, it’ll pay the bills.

Follow Up
An update on my virtual desktop dillema on Windows: I tried out a bunch of different software solutions out there (thanks for all the help from the people that replied with suggestions), but I finally settled on LiteStep. Not only do I have multiple desktops, but Windows no longer feels as much like Windows.
Also, visitors to my site will notice I now have a spiffy new icon for my blog. I’d like to thank Ed Mack for drawing that for me. It’s cute .

Coaster
I worked some more on erasing CD’s in Coaster this weekend. I gave up on Daniel’s idea, and decided to do what regexxer does while it runs its searches: do an iteration of Glib::MainContext in the while loop. I hacked that up and it worked! Coaster now blanks CD’s and has a dialog with a pulsing progress bar. I just uploaded those changes to Coaster’s arch repo, so you can check it out, try it, and tell me if it works for you (I know it works for me). Now, it’s time for the Cosby Show and then bed.

P.S. Riff, thanks for the entry title.

So, I’m at my desktop at my internship and I forgot how crappy it was to actually work on a windows machine. I found the setting to turn on anti-aliased fonts (although, it isn’t as good as GNOME’s AA support), but I still miss virtual desktops. My mind works better when my work is abstracted into neat little piles of cruft. If anyone has any suggestions for software that will do this for windows, I’d really appreciate it.

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?