2009.02.16 in uncategorized
Random Thoughts and Exciting things.
The other day I rescued a squirrel that was trapped in the trash. It was that kind of trash can with the dome thing on the top with the door that you push in to open, but doesn't swing out. The squirrel was flailing around and trying to push itself up against the door, and falling down sometimes into the trash. That's probably the most exciting thing. I let it out and then it ran away. So sad.
This weekend I spent my time accomplishing very little of what I planned. One thing I was working on for a while was for my next OpSys homework. The professor said we can use "any" language for our next project, so obviously it should be done in JavaScript with Seed. But the RPI CS machines running FreeBSD 6.3 obviously don't have Seed installed, so I would need to submit Seed along with the actual assignment, probably as a huge, statically linked binary. So I spent some time trying to get Seed built in a FreeBSD install in a virtual machine. Ports is really weird. I spent a long time trying to get all the dependencies for WebKit installed. Eventually I got an old WebKit from ports installed, but for some reason couldn't get one from git built, because somehow the dependencies that clearly had been installed for the ports WebKit were there. I don't understand ports. It seems to make no sense at all. I tried building gobject-introspection anyway, but the build scripts were looking for Glib headers in the wrong place, so then I forgot about that project for the rest of the weekend because autotools hates me.
I have a list of random projects I'm trying to start working on. One of them is GHamlet. A Clutter+Seed thing that plays Hamlet. The actors are Clutter actors naturally, so GHamlet will consist of colored rectangles moving around with text appearing around them for the dialogue. So far, I've found a text file copy of the Hamlet script. A major difficulty in creating GHamlet is the stage directions. I tried inventing a system of describing actions in a way that is hopefully easily parsed, but I think I failed. There are a small number of repeatable actions, such as move on and off stage, and death. Other than that, most of the actions are unique. After spending several hours going through Hamlet and translating the stage directions, not much has changed. I probably could have simplified the directions much more for the few that are easily repeated. Oh well. It will be slightly easier to regexp a new system now at least.
Anyway it took a long time to go through editing the file. Then today on Reddit there was a video about effective vim usage that was over an hour long. I watched it, and now my life has been revolutionized. I now know so much more about vim. My life has been revolutionized. Now I can do all kinds of magic that would have made processing Hamlet much easier. Oh well.
While my blog may have a cornify feature, and that's fine but there's a problem: the rest of the internet is lacking unicorns. Well I plan to fix this. With the new Seed Epiphany extensions, it's on my todo list to write a cornify extension for Epiphany which will bring unicorns to everywhere you look!