vordark

http://www.huggableurns.com/

You are welcome.

Alex is off with her Mommy now and I'll probably be heading out fairly soon for a while. Apart from chilling tonight I'll be reading more about Lisp and getting ready for a nice, fun-filled run at my computer this week.

Kind of tired, but in a relaxed sort of way.

In case you weren't aware, when the heat sink and CPU fan fall the fuck off your motherboard, it's a Bad Thing. I woke up briefly around two this morning to see that my machine had powered off. I turned it back on, got half way through loading the OS when it powered off immediately again. I peeked inside the case (half of which is clear plastic) and saw the whole heat sink/fan assembly was dangling in the case. I'm pretty sure the failsafe kicked in, saving my CPU (as it appears to be working now that I got things put back together), so that's at least something.

Oh, and why did it fall off? Because the mounting bracket that holds it all on the motherboard broke. So I used some superglue to put things back together. I also had to shave bits of plastic off various parts of the bracket in order to form a thick plastic/glue glob I could use to make sure the pieces fit together well. It took about an hour to get the bracket to hold together and get a computer that actually works.

Of course, this is only a temporary fix at best, so I need to start looking for a replacement for that bracket.

Hopefully this will be the end (for now) of the hardware fuckery cycle I seem to be caught in. Although I know it won't be, since I still need to get a new drive and install that. Fuck, shit, piss.

In other news, time to play with Alex.

Alex and I had a pretty good day. The morning started a bit...off. She was fairly into not wanting to do what she was told, but by dance class she was being an angel. We hung out, put together a jigsaw puzzle (Strawberry Shortcake), made corn muffins (the recipe sucked, I think I'll stick to mix from now on) and generally just had a ball.

In between the fun and games I've been continuing to throttle my brain with Lisp. As I said before, the gears are slowly starting to turn but I don't know enough of the language to feel even remotely confident in trying to do anything useful in it. I've tried to do a few things, and mostly succeeded, but I have to stop myself every time I realize I keep doing things in a "C" way and not in a Lisp way. Like when I need to do something with every element of a list and I start to write a while expression.

Of course, those rare, glittering moments when I suddenly realize that something which would take me ten or twenty lines of C would only take two, maybe three lines of Lisp (and that the Lisp code much more clearly and cleanly represents my exact thought) make it all worth it.

Next week I'll have a lot more time to play with all of this, but of course that's because Alex with be with her Mommy, so the fun time will be balanced out by the not-fun time of missing her.

In other news, I think I'm going to do a little more reading the veg out with some TV.

As I've been making fair progress in absorbing Emacs and Emacs Lisp, I decided to poke around with Common Lisp, partly as a point of comparison and also because most of the old school hackers I know still can't shut up about it. My conclusion, after only about two or three hours of fucking with it is, like the Led Zeppelin thing, I've been missing out.

I'd put a long, rambling tract here to describe my excitement and wonder at the language and environment, but anything I wrote wouldn't do justice to the level of "Holy shit!" I'm at right now.

My brain still only half-gets (at best) Lisp, but I see the doors starting to open and hear the gears beginning to turn.

Fun times ahead!

If you happen to be of the "history is cool" crowd, and happen to know something about Japanese history, you would have heard the story of the 47 Ronin. This is a pretty important and impressive bit of history when it comes to understanding just who the Samurai were. Personally, I'd rank it as one of the most profound events in all of human history, but hey, that's just me.

Well, it's being made into a movie.

By the guy that wrote the Fast and the Furious.

Starring Keanu Reeves.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Alex is in bed, asleep, meaning I can now unwind in the manner I see fit, which will probably involve watching some TV and reading. Among today's accomplishments was creating a random name generator in Lisp so I can call names out of thin air in Emacs. When you do a fair amount of running/writing paper and pencil RPG stuff, coming up with names on the fly is a necessary thing. This hack is based off the data I use for the name generator on my site (which is quite the popular little thing, it seems).

The only issue I have with it is that that lists for the names (three of them: male first names, female first names and last names) are large. In particular, the list for last names can from the US Census and has over 88,000 elements. They all load fairly quickly (barely any noticeable delay when loading the last names) but it's horribly inefficient to burn nearly a megabyte of RAM for this. I've looked at autoload, provide and require but I'm not entirely sure that any of those can do what I want or won't cause a delay when I don't need one. In no particular order:

1. I want the function (there's only one) and the data in one file.

2. Whenever the function gets run (even the first time), it should be snappy with no noticeable delay whatsoever.

3. It should be tit-easy for someone to add this functionality to their Emacs (i.e., one expression, at most, to load it and one expression to bind it to an appropriate key sequence).

I think the only way to do this is what I'm doing now. That is, the three lists are defconsts at the end of the file with the function and the whole thing comes in via my .emacs with a load expression. I'm eager to be proven wrong though.

Anyway, once I'm satisfied I'm done I'll probably toss the code up on my site for those interested. Now, though, I think it's time to rot my brain with Fringe.

I'm pretty certain the existence of this video is worth that year of being Rick Rolled:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHJUrcVdJk

You are welcome.

Now that I've finally begun to think around Lisp and make Emacs do what I want, I'm looking at Gnome/GTK again. It's been a while, but the information is creeping back into my brain. I figure I'll be bouncing around between the two for a while, letting me continue to deepen my knowledge of Emacs and get the rust out of my C. Part of the promise I made to myself in moving back to Linux was that I'd dust off my programming skills and learn new ones so that I could make the most of the environment.

In more important news, I have my baby back! We've hung out, had dinner, played a board game and spent a fair amount of time singing and dancing to YouTube videos (the requisite Rob Zombie videos, among others). Things are winding down for the night now, which is good because I'm getting tuckered.

So I've spent a good part of the day writing and dicking with Lisp in an effort to throttle my brain into a mode where I can easily read and understand it all without having to stare at shit going cross-eyed. It's taking a while, but I'm making progress. Of course, I might just be going mad from writing crap like this all day:

;; This function computes the sum of the elements of a list if all
;; of the elements are numbers.
(defun sum-list (list)
  "Returns the sum of the elements in LIST if they are all numbers."
  (setq sum 0)
  (if (and list (listp list))
      (let ((count 0) (len (length list)))
	(while (< count len)
	  (if (numberp (nth count list))
	      (setq sum (+ sum (nth count list)))
	    (error "Element %d of the list not a number" count))
	  (setq count (1+ count))))
    (error "Invalid or wrong type argument given to sum-list"))
  sum)

Once I get something to do something interesting, I'm going back through trying to find ways to clean up the code and make it more efficient. I didn't do anything to the code above apart from get it working, so it is likely a little more hideous than it needs to be.

I really like what I can do with Lisp, but I'm really hating how it looks.

I've spent most of this week playing with Emacs and Lisp when I've been home, hanging out with various folks either here or not, but mostly enjoying a week of brain-centered activities. Right now I'm writing some Lisp code to handle various dice-oriented things to make my life easier when I'm dealing with RPGs.

In other news, I get my baby back tomorrow!

Had Shawn over last night and we watched some TV. I also made pasta and sauce which made for a fair amount of dishes. I got everything cleaned up this morning and have basically just been playing with Emacs for most of the morning so far. I need to head out to the store to get some smokes, but I'll probably hold off until after my appointment. Oh yeah, I have an appointment with my case manager this morning.

After that, not sure what's going on. I think today is going to be a fairly boring/non-busy day for me.

I'll be heading out in a few minutes to bring Alex to school, then she'll be off with Mommy for the week. I'm already missing the baby.

Not sure what else is going on today. I have some cleaning to do, as I already mentioned, but what I'm filling the rest of the day with is up in the air. Most likely I'll be continuing to play with Emacs. Back in the day I did a very small amount of dicking around with Lisp, but that information pretty much got lost a long time ago so I'm going through the whole language again. There's a few projects I want to tackle in Emacs now that everything is working great.

In further computer-related news, I have two questions for my *nix peanut gallery:

1. Which bittorrent client do you use? The one that comes factory installed with Fedora is Transmission, which works passably-well, but I can't seem to figure out how to set priorities for my downloads. If I'm getting a torrent which contains, say, ten very large files, I often want to let the whole thing download, but set the priority of the first or second file in the torrent to be very high so I get those files first. I see listings for "Priority" in Transmission, but setting priorities myself doesn't seem to be an option.

2. Which IRC client do you use? The two things I need from an IRC client are that it supports X (I'm not forced to use some kind of terminal-based crap thing with no windows or mouse support) and that it lets me do DCC downloads. For comparison purposes, under Windows I use mIRC which handles what I need very well. mIRC has a robust scripting system that I don't need or use, so that's not required of whatever I'd use under Linux. Having a decent GUI and letting me download files from other users are hard requirements though.

Thanks for your consideration.

I managed to get a fair amount done yesterday, though not as much as I would have liked to. I swept up the kitchen and bathroom, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow when Alex is in school to mop the floors and vacuum. My big accomplishment was cleaning pretty much everything else in the kitchen.

Oh, and I got a great surprise yesterday! My Samsung monitor decided to start flickering and wouldn't stop. Woo hoo! I disconnected it and put it in the den for now, so I'm down to one monitor. It's less inconvenient under Linux than it would be under Windows since I have virtual desktops to play with for extra screen real estate, but it's still annoying. And I don't have the money to replace it now. As it is, I have to wait until next month to get a new hard drive, and even that might not happen because I still have a bit of Christmas shopping to do for the wee one and that has to come first. Ah well, there's worse things than having only one monitor, so I'm probably just going to stick with this set up and save the cash.

Alex and I are going to hang out and have some fun today. It's supposed to get up into the sixties this afternoon, so we'll go outside and play. We're both feeling better and getting a bit stir crazy.

Apart from this, I'll be dicking around with Emacs and generally puttering away on a few things so I can feel like I've been productive when night time rolls around.

Right now I'm hanging out with Alex until it's time for her dance class. Once we're back from that I get to call the gas company and have them come out to fix the heater again. I spoke with my landlord this morning and she's really getting frustrated with them. She has no problem with getting things fixed that need fixing (apart from often sending over people she knows to do the Stare-And-Poke before calling a professional) but this thing keeps breaking down. I'll have them fix it today, but then she's going to call on Monday to see if we can't just replace the damned thing because it's nearly $200 every time they come over.

In other news, since I've felt like shit the last few days I've only really done the bare minimum housework necessary to keep this place looking decent. Now that I'm feeling good enough, I need to start catching up on a lot of stuff. The floors need doing, the bathroom needs cleaning, etc. Most of this stuff hasn't been done for nearly a week and that fact is really starting to skeeve me out.

I'm also dicking around with Emacs today. I have a project or two in mind that I'd like to tinker with now that I have a real, working Emacs. I might also wipe my second drive now that I have the data I want copied over to the first one so that I can set it up with a Linux file system and move /home over to that one. This is doubtful, though, since I think I might have burned up all of my current "fuck with the computer" desire on the install and I'll be getting a new, larger drive in the next month or two anyway.

Looks like it's going to be a fairly busy day, though apart from dealing with the gas company I doubt it'll be a very annoying one.

I just up a few minutes ago and am waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, which just isn't happening soon enough. While I was getting it ready, I decided to turn the heat up in the kitchen, only to discover that once again that heater is catatonic. This means I get to deal with the landlord today, and wait around for the gas company to come and maybe, possibly, actually fix the fucking thing this time.

Before I head off to bed, I'd like to say that my machine is now completely happy. I'd also like to point out that with Fedora 11, much like Ubuntu nowadays, none of the following are installed by default: compilers, headers, emacs, emacs lisp sources or the programmers' manuals.

I can't tell you how hilarious it is to run a ./configure script only to see the "No C compiler" message get shat back at me. Although I will say it wasn't as funny as actually having a C compiler, yet having nothing in /usr/include, which you might recall was my experience with Ubuntu.

On that note, good night.

Got my videos and music copied over and have Emacs along with my mail, so overall things are looking good. I still have more files to copy and a few other various and sundry bits to take care of, but at this point I'm pretty much back in a working system.

I'll be heading out with the baby in a little while. We're going over to my folks' place for the weekly family meal.

Gentoo was giving me a serious rash trying to get an X server running. Five hours of dealing with that proved to be enough for me to say fuck it and go with Fedora. Once I had a working installation of that, my next task was getting my XBox 360 to talk to it. That took a little while, but it's working like a dream now. which is good, because if I couldn't get that to work this would have all been for nothing and I'd be busy installing Windows right now.

As I type this, I'm in the process of copying shit from my second drive into my Linux installation and getting ready to make this machine my home again.

Against my every better instinct, I've decided to wipe my machine and put Gentoo on it. Despite everything I've tried over the last few weeks, I haven't been able to make Emacs do everything I want under Windows.

I doubt you'll see me post for a few days, since it'll probably take me that long to get Gentoo built and working. When I do, those of you familiar with my unique relationship with computers will likely find a great deal of comedy (I'm looking at you Fruity).

Wish me luck, I'll see you on the other side.