and life goes on

why is it that essays are so much easier to write after midnight? no wonder I’m still jetlagged…

I kinda got a little sidetracked this morning – after a long night of waking up regularly and having weird dreams (either suse or archlinux had to go out of business, because… *something*… had happened to a bunch of key people, and I was pretending to be a guy because bad things would happen if this evil lady who looked like my grandmother found out who I was) … well, eventually I decided it was morning and I was taking a sick day, and gave in to the lure of teh intarwebs. And found myself looking at an evil little heisenbug that’s been bothering me for a long time.

I started trying to untangle the panel code once again (plasma’s actually old enough to have some messy cobwebbed code now. huh) and fought with it, and eventually decided that the darn thing just had to be a kwin bug. since I’d spent all that time figuring out what the code actually did, I figured I might as well finish what I started, and cleaned it up a bunch. Then, near the end of that, I noticed the bug didn’t seem to be showing up any more; indeed, with over a dozen plasma restarts I still haven’t been able to trigger it. I haven’t a clue what part of the code cleanup might’ve fixed it (perhaps a combination of things). Of course, it’s still quite possible that it’s merely in hiding; I already closed and reopened the bug once before when it conveniently went away for one day after I attempted to fix it. :P

Somehow that bug took up my whole day… well, that and IRC and email… I made a few halfhearted attempts to get away from it, and I think I did do a *little* homework, but I was always drawn back in. :) By dinnertime it was working well enough that I finally convinced myself to switch to homework… and fell asleep on it. :P whoops. I’m lucky I woke up before the deadline!

…but I’m not so lucky I’m still awake. Somehow I found myself working on other homework, and it was going well so I didn’t want to stop. although now I’m just writing a blog post, so I really have no excuse. :/ bedtime!

I really must write about the activities stuff that was planned at tokamak, and I have more screencasts to do too – but right now I must sleep. and then do more homework when I wake up. the other essay is finally coming together…

fosscamp day 1

whee! the first day of fosscamp is over. apologies if this isn’t the most coherent of posts; I haven’t figured out how to keep my sanity at these events ;)

I arrived yesterday evening, feeling jetlagged despite being in hte same timezone. met far too many people, forgot most of their names, and discovered delicious delicious brownies. there were also ridiculously humongous drinks at the hotel bar; chris cheney bought one, and there are pictures out there somewhere now. :)
I was up far too late chatting with people, but my memory is as bad as usual, and I haven’t had time to look at my written notes. oh well…
in the morning I found out my n810 is having serious charging issues :/ there’s something funny about the charging socket, and it seems to be getting steadily worse :( by this afternoon I was spending five minutes fiddling every time I tried to plug it in. wah. that’s gonna be a pain. I’m just glad it still charges at all.

anyways, we got onto the mystery bus and headed off to google, where quite a few people were milling around. there was yummy juice, and a schedule up on a whiteboard, and it quickly started filling up… people continued adding to it all morning, which made planning a bit hard :) several times I wanted to be in two rooms at once, and tried to bounce around and catch at least some of everything… but that usually backfires on me, so I tried to limit myself to two rooms per hour ;)
I should have written more notes; I’ve already forgotten much of the morning. at 10 there was openldap and audio stuff in the morning, but audio turned out to be kernel-level discussions – cool, but not interesting to me. openldap… I dunno. sounds like they’re relying on ubuntu to do a lot of work, which makes me wonder what other distros are gonna do (not to mention ubuntu’s standard attitude towards kde).
at 11 blauzahl was talking about bugs, and I was mostly in another room… umm… I have no idea what room, though. blank spot there. maybe it was one of the many times I ran into someone in a hallway and struck up a random conversation.
at 12 there was a talk on opensocial, which sounded really interesting, but I gave it up to go to the talk on ui innovation. that was… well… nothing new, really, except in that it’s new to *gnome*. they’re wishing it was easier for users to try out new apps and applets, give feedback, etc… and for developers to share their work without a huge amount of packaging hassle. that’s just crying out for DXS imho; the only interesting bit is that they think it’d be good to be able to do stuff for entire applications (possibly including c/c++ ones), not just little applets. which reminds me of klik.

at 1 we had lunch! yaay food! :) I had a really interesting conversation with arne about translations and input methods. sounds like some changes are needed in how input is handled, to make input methods (chinese etc) less of a hack… but change is always hard. I hope he’s successful. :)

at 2 there was some oss biz thing, but my attention span didn’t hold out past the “how much money do these oss companies actually get” phase, so I wandered off and found people talking xrandr n’stuff. someone was really happy to have his touchscreen working with both rotation and compiz – although the mouse behaviour while rotated was amusingly broken :) then I got into some sort of kde discussion with adrien (the nepomuk guy) and a kde user… it’s so nice to hear that people are impressed with 4.2 and like what we’re doing :)
at 3 I meant to spend my time in hte nepomuk talk (we need to get more apps taking advantage of it! app devs, are you aware of the potential?) but my mind wandered off and I found myself walking around aimlessly… I can’t quite remember where I ended up. I know that I was getting really tired and decided to have a nap, but then I needed to plug in my n810 again, and then I found myself at a table chatting about desktops with a gnome ui guy. while we get lame complaints about being “too vista” or “too mac”, they get “too kde4” for their mockups ;) you just can’t win.
after that I wandered into another random talk… on… messaging. except it turned out to really be about thunderbird, and whether or not it was going to integrate with this or that someday in the future. and I was kinda too exhausted to process half of what people were saying by then. meh. one thing I like about kde, we’ve got so much integration, at least between our apps… and as kde4 matures we’ll have even more, I suppose…

I’m sure there were other interesting things scattered throughout the day, but… I’m too tired to bother reading my scribbly notes.

dinner was nice. yummy food, interesting conversation (the not-entirely-unlike-dxs thing started to sound a lot more interesting, and we discussed dreams of security that wouldn’t be too complicated for regular users)… and then I got back and there was pizza! yum. I went back to my room and was too tired to leave again, until blauzahl and riddell came by and convinced me to go out for a swim. :) that was nice. hot tubs ftw.
now it’s late, of course, and I’m going to collapse into bed so that I can survive another day. :) hopefully I’ll be talking about something tomorrow, but I find myself trying to find excuses not to…

it’s really awesome to be back among foss geeks, btw. :) so many bright people around, so many great conversations… it’s gonna be hard to go home and cram for exams on sunday.

code == happiness

despite spending my whole damn weekend at school, i’m feeling much happier recently. maybe it’s the sunshine. maybe it’s knowing that the seester is nearly over. maybe it’s the fact that i’ve been carefully not thinking about all the things that could go wrong and all the things i’m not getting done. maybe it’s that for the last 2 weeks (not counting this weekend) i’ve been making sure i spend some time relaxing in some way, not always being on the computer. maybe it’s other nice things ;)

but i think at least part of it is that i’m writing code again, lots of it. not only that, today i had my whole group with me coding too. i could help them debugs things, i could get code written while they helped each other, i could hear cheers go up when something hard started working, i could bitch about the insanity of this course with them… :)

slowly but surely our system is taking shape. by most reports we’re well ahead of the curve. today i spent a bit of time helping someone in another group – he’d essentially been writing procedural code in java. heh. the complete lack of code design experience among the people in this course is pretty unfair, really.

and speaking of design, it’s pretty cool to see mine coming together and working :) yay! naturally there have been changes along the way… i’ve learnt that designing classes for other people to implement requires much more planning and detailed explanations of just what is responsible for what. i should’ve started the class diagram earlier (or not gotten sick :P ) – it’s amazingthe number of ways a design can be misunderstood. especially when the generated code doesn’t include the comments from the diagram it was generated from. :P
i also would’ve had more classes if i was doing this over again. some stuff seemed small, so i lumped it together, but i would’ve had a much cleaner system if i’d pulled all of that out into separate classes.

i’ve also learnt a bit about group dynamics. working with people isn’t one of my strengths… i needed to teach them gui programming concepts and had no idea how. still don’t really have any idea how actually, but in the end we all figured it out somehow. :) i also have this tendency to make people feel stupid when i try to explain what they’re doing wrong, and i haven’t quite figured out how to tone that down… but i seem to have not really pissed anyone off at least :)
in the end, i stiill feel fairly lost on how to work in groups well when people don’t have the same grade expectations as me… but at least i’m a little more confident that it can actually work :)

i’m also happy that some of my group members with the least experience have been catching on quite quickly and writing stuff that does in the end actually work. :) it’s kinda neat to watch people make the same standard beginner’s mistakes that i remember making in the past… and reminds me just how much of programming is learnt from making and fixing those mistakes. somehow it still amazes me how valuable experience is.

anyways, it’s very very late now – i had to catch a nightbus and then walk a dozen blocks home, and then decided it was such a nice night i should sit outsiide and blog…
i’m gonna go inside and defrost now ;)

one week. just one more week

just one more week of classes. then the evil group project will be over. ohh god.
it’s actually not going too badly. could be a lot worse. but i got home at 12:30 this evening and i’m oing back to school tomorrow to do more code. urgh.

so it seems to be 4.2 beta time. already. huh. aseigo cleaned up my config ui in time for the string freeze, but i still haven’t had time to make it actually do anything.

pretty soon i need to figure out this fosscamp thing, and start planning the campkde thing… more plane tickets to buy. wow. stuff will be happening again. :)

oh, and an odd thing: a couple of weeks ago i found the source of my kernel panics. buggy iwl4965 wifi driver. if it’s connected to a router running openwrt it’ll panic randomly, so bad that even the magic sysrq keys don’t work. some people report success with the previous version of the driver, but for me that just won’t connect. so, since the router at home runs openwrt, i’ve got an ethernet cable running down the hall to the bedroom :) wired connection… feels so old-fashioned ;)
i wonder if there’s a way i can help debug the driver… maybe i should bug whoever wrote it…

anyways, time to pass out now. :P looking forward to december… i’ll probably need to do a fair amount of studying to catch up on the neglected math courses before exams, but at least there won’t be any groupwork. and then exams will be over and i’ll be free for the rest of the month! :D hopefully i can join the plasma bughunting for some of that time. and, y’know, actually relax and have some fun too. ahhh, it will be nice to have a vacation. very, very nice :)

not dead yet

wow, it’s technically friday again already. thursday night really, but i can’t sleep so i might as well blog.

i had a deliciously irresponsible thanksgivign weekend (yes, canadian thanksgiving was on monday). after over a week of no code, i spent my friday evening coding and chatting with geeks, then spent all of saturday on code too. i’m working bugs and bad code out of plasma-overlay, slowly but surely.

sunday i tried to do some math homework, but it seemed to expect me to know a bunch of trig identities i’d forgotten years ago, and i wasn’t so keen on memorizing them… so i finally installed anki, and started entering identities and formulas into it so that it can make me memorize them. all i have to do is actually remember to keep using it. ;) it’s a pretty neat pyqt4 flashcard program, and pete’s been using it for a while for chinese with good results.

i also had thanksgiving dinner sunday, and then went off to a birthday party… by midnight i was actually starting to want to get homework done. :) guess i’d had enough relaxation for one weekend. surprisingly i found out it was still possible to get a bus close enough to home… set out at about 1am, and got home somewhere between 2 and 3. i like the journey home after a good party… everything’s so quiet and peaceful. the weather’s nice at this time of year, too- cool, but not too cold. just right for a relaxing walk, and i had a nice warm bed waiting for me at the end. :)

anyways, that late night did make monday kinda unproductive too. i do remember getting some more math stuff entered into anki, but then there was an incredibly delicious thanksgiving dinner… mmm… such wonderful food. :)

i think i got sucked back into the black hole of homework on tuesday. i don’t remember, so it probably wasn’t interesting.

but thursday i took the morning off. :) and,”morning” ened up running until nearly 4pm ;) i went back to homwork after that, but i had lots of fun debugging screensaver stuff… never quite finished the problem i was working on, but found and fixed some small stuff, and now i know what to do to finish- i just have to find time to do it.

so, the curren state of plasma-overlay… there’s only one thing left that breaks things enough that i need to drop to a tty and kill a process. i know why it happens, but i’m hoping i can find a better way to solve the issue instead of adding to the current hack. crashes are no problem any more; both krunner_lock and plasme-overlay behave sensibly if the other vanishes. if the screensaver starts to come up and you wave your mouse, it’ll vanish promptly again now.. but a few seconds later plasma-overlay flickers by as it finishes loading and dbus finally gets around to telling it that it should’ve quit. that’s what i’ll be fixing soon.

once those two bugs are worked out, i think i’ll be able to work on something worthy of a screenshot…. ;) actually, more than one. we’ll see.

huh. typing a whole blog post on my n810 hurts my thumbs :P

where does the time go?

yesterday I talked about community stuff, washed dishes, bought food, got a little distracted by blogs, recompiled all of kde on my desktop, fixed a few little bugs in my project, puzzled over a weird crash, caught up on email, made dinner with pete, and did some other stuff I’ve forgotten.

today I discussed plans for my august vacation, did the weeding, washed dishes, had breakfast, started laundry, went to the chiropractor, then bought cleaning supplies and a curtain rod for the house, spent a while on the phone with fido ’cause they were overcharging me again, tidied up a little, did more dishes, threw out some bad food, made myself a sandwich, recompiled all of kde on my laptop, and it’s 5:30 now so pretty soon I’ll have to start on dinner again.

I’m supposed to be getting code done… but I still need to clean the bathroom, clean the fridge, finish the laundry, try and fix the broken drawer in the kitchen, buy more plane tickets for my vacation, and maybe at some point exercise or practice guitar. :/ there just aren’t enough hours in a day, and my head feels like it’s going to pop off even though I have all this stuff written down. :P

interwebs!!1!

so I was kinda without interwebs for a while there. last week pete and his friends unexpectedly got a house that was available immediately – they were planning to move for may. since pete’s landlord was being bitchy, I helped him move last week. the good: we have a 4-bedroom house all to ourselves until his friends get around to moving in. the bad: there’s no unsecured wireless in the area.

I was thinking of asking the neighbours if they’d be willing to share, but never got around to it – and today was the day the cable guy came, so now I have interwebs again, yay. :) life’s been quite busy, so in a way it was kinda nice to not have the internet distracting me. it was incredibly inconvenient at times, though – couldn’t look up bus schedules, couldn’t research things, etc… there are so many little things we take for granted.

so, yeah, busyness. mostly of the small-but-necessary variety. buying things, moving things, fixing things, making a vague attempt at househunting without craigslist access. I’ll be staying here for april, then actually getting a place of my own in may – or at least that’s the plan. between lack of interwebs and being about to head off to italy, there hasn’t been much time to look for a place, so… we’ll see how it goes.

apparently I forgot to mention this on my blog: I’m going to italy for a few days for a plasma sprint. lots of hacking, very little tourism. it’ll be awesome. :) while we’re on the subject, I’ll also be at akademy in august.

now I need to go panic about all the stuff I need to get done online. soc research to do (I haven’t even blogged about my application!!), email to catch up on, plasma stuff I never did…

plasma was a little frustrating last week, actually. I had just started on a ui for multiple desktop containments when I had to put aside that work to write a soc application… then I’d almost cleared everything away, and just had a bit of other code to do before returning to it… then I just had a few RL chores to get out of the way… somehow every morning there was another day’s worth of things in my way, and then I was offline and just as busy. since I spent most of today busywaiting for the cable guy (I’ve read most of the last harry potter book), I doubt I’ll get to it tonight… in fact, it may have to wait until I arrive in italy. there’s just so much to do!

well, at least I’m busy doing stuff I actually want to do. :) being back in canada continues to be awesome. hopefully after I get back from italy I’ll have time to go track down the friends that haven’t dragged me out or run into me at parties. and make some new friends. and… argh, there’s so much to do!! :)

shanghai

[another long post; wrote it last night]

whew. what a day!
I’d forgotten about the lack of central heating in the south. ohhh the cold. I do not like how cold I am. I do not like it, sam-I-am.

I meant to get up early and wander around, but of course that never happens; by the time I’d convinced myself to wake up and leave the relative almost-warmth of bed, then showered and checked email, it was already lunchtime. I wandered out and gawked at things for a while, and evenutally found myself in some underground shopping area – the standard chinese tourist shops with bags, watches, jewellery and other knicknacks.
I looked around for a while, and remembered that my mum wants another watch (I don’t know how she does it but no watch lasts even a year without breaking in some way or another). I was so surprised to find some watches that actually looked good, I bought two of them. at the price the girl was asking; 30 kuai each. I’m sure they can’t have been worth more than ten; in fact, on my way out I caught sight of some similar watches with marked prices – 28 kuai. yep, I’m a sucker. (at least I had my wits about me when I was buying clothing in beijing).

I wandered along the street a bit more, and some chinese guy started chatting with me… he had a standard phishing story about being only 15 years old, running away from home and looking for work – all bullshit I’m sure, but I bought him a cheap lunch anyways ’cause he was fun to talk to.

not long after getting rid of him, two girls came up – their story was that they were students doing an art exhibition. :) I let them pull me along to go see their ‘art’ – the standard scroll paintings that everyone swears they made themselves. they did have some silk paintings I hadn’t seen before, though, and those were pretty. I ended up buying one ofthem for 55 kuai – a ridiculous price I’m sure, but they were asking 50 for the cheapest paper scrolls that I know areworth under 10 kuai, and I made the mistake of saying I’d pay 50 for the nice silk painting not the little paper one… luckily 55 was all I had in my wallet at the time. :) they were fun to chat with, though. everyone’s been fascinated by my water thingummy today – I can never remember what to call those plastic water-sacks with the tube, but I dunno why everyone doesn’t buy them. they really are convenient.

After that I wandered until I reached the small strips of flowers and grass that were marked as a big green area on my map :P I was just turning around to wander back when some people saw me juggling and were quite interested… turns out they were tourists from some other part of china, around my age. it was a while before I convinced myself they really were just tourists and not part of some elaborate plot to part me from more of my money. ;) they were about to go buy tickets for some acrobatics show, and I decided to tag along. unfortunately the tickets cost a bit more than what I hadon me (minus the money tagged as ‘needed for survival’) and there was a charge for using plastic, so one of the guys paid for all four tickets and we headed to an ATM to pay him back. That was kinda.. very stupid. I’d already had to go to three ATMs in beijing to get my card to work. this time we went to… I think four ATMs, and then we went into a bank, where there was a minimum withdrawal of 1000 plus a 30 kuai service fee… which didn’t matter, because there was some kind of error again. I even tried my visa in an ATM, guessing at the pin # (I remember 3 of the 4 digits). we went back to the ticket-selling place and got them to try charging the ticket to either of my cards… while they were fiddling I realised the tickets were nonrefundable, and started to stress out. strange thing was, when they tried my debit card they never asked for my pin and said that the machine said there wasn’t enough money, so they must’ve been outright doing something wrong htere… anyways, they said there was an atm across the street that would surely work – I didn’t believe that, but we went anyways… and it actually worked. I have no fucking clue why, but I finally managed to get money, thank god.

and then one of the guys realised he’d left his bag back at the ticket office. doh. :) he ran back to get it and I headed off to the hostel.

I have a feeling that either my bank is having network issues, or my cards themselves are messed up, because that was pretty fucked up. never again will I buy something with someone else’s money. :P

anyways, I had just enough time to walk back to the hostel, get some food and head to the acrobatics show. I took the subway.. oh god. shanghai subways are madness. utter madness. also, the street maps down there don’t always have north pointing up… anyways, I survived, and even arrived a bit early. no sign of my new friends, though. :/ I sent them an sms and they said they were on their way, but I’m not sure if they ever made it. how odd. in any case, the performance was awesome :) lots of flips and guys standing on shoulders and jumping from one pole to another and swinging around, and girls doing weird ballet-like things, and even motorcycles in a ball… definately worth the money. :)

I’m gonna go collapse now. I have to head back to hangzhou tomorrow – I still can’t quite get my head around the fact that I’m really leaving china. :)

xi’an and beijing

[warning: big long rambling post]

I don’t quite remember what my last blog post covered – I’m writing this offline. I think the last one was before nornagon arrived – the two of us did some touristy stuff in beijing, then went to xi’an for a couple of days, then had to hurry back to beijing so he could fly home. :( we didn’t have time to see the Great Wall, unfortunately – someday we’ll have to come back, ’cause there really wasn’t enough time.

xi’an was pretty nice – it’s a shame we had less than two days there. the hostel room was like a frigging hotel – actually, it looked like they really were sharing hte building with a hotel :) hehe. we ended up in a double room with ensuite (although I think we actually booked something a little cheaper) and it came with toothbrushes, shampoo, even towels! :) it’s a good thing it did, ’cause I used my own towel to mop up spilt tea.
the first day in xi’an we decided to just relax, enjoy the nice hostel room, hack a bit… then in the afternoon we went to buy train tickets for hte next day – there’s no such thing as return tickets in china, it seems. :/ the person at the regular ticket booth just kept repeating ‘没有’ – she didn’t have any. so we went back to the hostel and paid them 45 kuai commission to get tickets for us. after that I was stressed, worrying about whether they’d actually be able to get us tickets… I shouldn’t have worried, really, since that doesn’t change anything, and we did get our tickets after all. :)
in the evening we went out to the ‘muslim quarter’ – a couple of streets that were fairly touristy, selling lots of stuff, mostly food… we ate some pineapple rice cake thing that was yummy, then had dinner at an interesting restaurant – there was a big hot pot in the middle of the table, and all sorts of food on skewers along the wall. each skewer is the same price, so you gather up a trayful, start putting them in your pot to cook them, and at the end they count up the skewers for your bill… I really liked the peanutty sauce we got with it. yummy yummy food. :) I bought some snacks on the way back, too.
back at the hostel, we remembered they’d given us tickets for a free beer each – turns out it was a free chinese-size beer each :) so we drank and talked for the rest of the night.

in the morning we packed up and headed off for the standard teracotta warriors tour. one complication – there was no power or hot water in the morning. we’d missed the notice about construction somehow… good thing we’d showered before bed anyways.
the tour wasn’t too bad – they didn’t hurry us too much, and we stopped for lunch at an okay restaurant… of course it was only *after* we ate that they told us the food wasn’t included in the tour price and we had to pay an extra 40 kuai each. :P we weren’t happy about that, but since it wasn’t an unreasonable price for a tourist area we just grumbled a little.
the tour ended a bit earlier than expected, so we had a bit of free time. since no power at the hostel meant no internet, we went off in search of a starbucks – and found one, around the right side of the mall. :) once again we got a bit distracted hacking, then had to hurry to get food before it was time to leave. that evening we found a lovely little restaurant nearby – standard good-quality chinese food at chinese prices. just across the street from the starbucks, it was the second restaurant; the guy came out offering an english menu, so we went in (I can handle chinese menus now, but nornagon has only studied japanese).
on the train back to beijing, we wanted to watch a movie – but were sharing the cabin with two other people, and didn’t want to disturb them. so, we decided to splice two pairs of headphones together. :) we had one spare pair of cheap headphones, so we cut it open. unfortunately, the signal wire inside was insulated, and so fine that scraping off the insulation often broke it. :/ once we got some bare wire, trying to actually do anything with it broke it, so eventually we gave up and just shared one pair of headphones. ah well, at least it was fun to try :)

I was kinda having trouble enjoying myself in xi’an ’cause I’d caught a cough & cold, so I decided to rest for a couple of days back in beijing. that quickly turned into four days of hacking and catching up on email. oops :) it was nice to relax, though. I went out one evening for dinner with BLUG, which was fun, although all the talking and smoke in the air really didn’t help the cough :/
now I’m in shanghai… despite dozing off on the train right after it started (or maybe because of that) I didn’t sleep very well. I was slow in getting off the train, and I think I almost didn’t get off :/ the doors were closed and then some employee jumped when she saw me and opened the nearest door to let me off. then Ihad to find my way out, sincethere was no horde of people to follow. at first I tried to go out the entrance by mistake, but eventually I was pointed in the right direction. :)·
once I was off the train platform, everything was straightforward. I managed to take the subway and walk to the hostel this time, instead of relying on a taxi. oh god was it ever crowded on shanghai subway – they had employees at one point standing by hte doors to make sure people were let off beore the crowds pushed on. they didn’t seem to have that at the station I got off at – I had to kinda push backwards and sideways until I made it to the door, ’cause there was no room to turn in.
somehow I survived, though, and got out into the.. relatively clean shanghai air. it’s kinda disturbing to think of shanghai air as clean. :/
not long after arriving at the hostel, I pulled out my computer and returned to this blog entry (I started it on the train). they still have no wireless here, but they do have power outlets by the beds. pretty soon I was fast asleep – slept away the afternoon. I hope that doesn’t make it impossible to sleep tonight. I think I’ll get up now and go do something so that I don’t fall back asleep. :)

sleep is for the weak

not much time to blog recently. I’ve regained my motivation somehow – it’s in a bit of a fragile state, though. haven’t actually got much code done, too much other stuff. half the week was spent doing stupid RL stuff, plus I ran into a guy moving in here and was helping him get internet n’stuff… oh, but that’s not what I was talking about. I mean on my computer there’s too much other stuff.

lots of small issues to get in my way – a few days ago I compiled a new alsa-lib and got amazing wonderful sound, better than I’ve ever had. mixing worked, just worked. I had amarok from kde3 running as my kde3 user in my kde4 user’s session, and phonon still played kde4 sound effects at the same time as the music. skype works again too – so amazingly well that I may as well have been using a real phone. lucky that I discovered this on my mum’s bday – got to chat with her for a while :) but then yesterday the sound just stopped, and I had to reboot to get it back, so things are not perfect.

there’s other issues to work out too, which I would have reported if bugzilla didn’t fall over (it came back today but now I’ve no time). there’s plasma emails to deal with, people on irc asking questions, ideas to write down, techbase stuff to work on… I’m trying not to spend too much time on irc and email, but it’s hard. I’m generally either distracted incredibly easily or totally lost in my code. I was up ’till 6am last night because I got the urge to write some stuff down at 3am and just kept wanting to do one more thing. :) I’m going to put down the computer after this blog post, really.

sleep deprivation is bad in that it makes me act kinda drunk, but good in that it makes it so much easier to do certain things that I just normally hate doing. like reporting bugs. anyways, none of that tonight.

I don’t really remember today – another downside of not sleeping normally. but it seems I finally committed that patch for dragging applets to the toolbar, and I *think* kwallet has a bug :( bugs that only show up on login are a real PITA to test when you’ve only got one computer and your graphics driver dislikes running more than one X.

I spent most of this evening watching that video of aaron’s presentation/tutorial at linux.conf.au :) it was quite inspiring – I had to keep pausing it to write notes, and I think I had an important bit of inspiration about the twitter data engine. it was pretty amusing too – plasma is all about the c(l)ocks, eh? ;) rofl.

now I just have to actually make time to implement some of the things I thought of. having paused the video so often, it took me a long time to finish watching it. past time to sleep now. hopefully tomorrow will be a coding day.