Woah, so this is what sleep is like. *ahem*

Everything is all over the place in room. Most of my textbooks are about a fraction of a centimeter too tall to fit anywhere in my bookcases neatly. Random books I never use, various burned CD-Rs, and paper scrap litter various elevated surfaces; this is partially due to my philosophy that the easiest way to clean up a book case is to take everything off it, then put everything back on. The other part is due to the current complete lack of floor space. >_<

Summer of Code marches on! Except not. The new router I set up for family which seemed to work so nicely over Christmas break now seems barely capable of transmitting a signal which I can receive consistently. I get disconnected from our home network and reconnected to our neighbor’s stupid “linksys” signal every ten to thirty minutes. And just forget about it if someone is using the cordless phone or the microwave. A reconnect every ten to thirty minutes doesn’t seem too bad- and I keep telling myself this. And [sic, don't care] it woulden’t be, if I didn’t happen to be conversing with someone about how to fix it, or downloading an eclipse update, or something of that nature every time it happened.

Seriously! NetworkManager is driving me crazy. Why on earth can’t I easily blacklist this “linksys” network? It’s freaking weak, weaker than the signal I want to stay connected to. Wicd won’t connect to my network at all. It’s really rather messy. To compound the frustration, the wifi tool in XP seems to have a slightly longer timeout that NM, so I can stay connected in Windows but not Linux. The irony!

Also ironic: the IDE situation on Linux, which is usually my development platform of choice. I installed Arch Linux half way through this past semester because of issues with Ubuntu, and I’ve been absurdly busy since then. Thus, I’ve just been using Gedit and a terminal window with gcc, guile, or whatever compiler/interpreter the situation called for. No sense mucking around with a full fledged IDE for 200 line homework assignments. However, AbiWord has a lot of code. This is by far the most complex project I’ve worked on.

So, after getting thoroughly overwhelmed (and reminding myself that this was the planning/research phase and I didn’t have to start coding in earnest for another three weeks), I decided to take Eclipse for another spin. Problem: it won’t spin. After figuring out how Subclipse worked and getting things syncing off the AbiWord SVN, my wifi connection died, taking Eclipse with it mid-checkout. Now Eclipse freezes on the loading splash screen.

In between the lack of IDE and lack of stable internet connection, I’m getting pretty frustrated. So, I need a plan.

• Teh Internets
  • Construct a Pringles ™ antenna, slap it on the router and point it in the general direction of my laptop.
  • (Plan B) Install OpenWRT (or something similar) on the WRT54G router, then pump up the transmitting power. Pray that the router doesn’t overheat, the FCC doesn’t show up at my door, and that the router doesn’t brick. Any of these are bad as they mean potentially making the internet situation worse. Gah!
• Eclipse (Ideally, after fixing the wifi situation. It’s hard download packages and/or to flame people on IRC when one’s connection drops every other thing.)
  • Visit #archlinux. Complain. Get connection dropped. Be ignored by everyone. (Accomplished)
  • Run Eclipse and get some sort of terminal output. There must be a console debug argument or log or something somewhere.
  • If Eclipse won’t run at all, I’ll fall back upon the “pencil and paper” approach and try drawing out the relationship between things. You laugh, but it’s worked before.
• General Sanity
  • Unpack from school and get boxen out of room.
  • Find mouse. Battling my laptop’s touchpad is not aiding my mood.
  • Unruly mob! Unruly mob!
  • Get something done on AbiWord. Seriously.

That said, I’ve got quite enough to keep me busy right now. Over and out.

So, Facebook got a new feature, Facebook Chat. It looks a lot like Gtalk, but it can only be accessed online on the facebook website. It also comes with an annoying gray bar which covers the entire bottom of the screen and can’t be permanently removed. Joy.

So, I thought it would be a great idea to have Jabber support for this thing. I told them as much.

Will Facebook chat support Jabber in the future?

It would be a shame if it were browser-only or used some proprietary desktop client not compatible with Linux.

They replied.

Hi James,

Thank you for your interest in Facebook Chat.  Unfortunately, the features offered by Facebook Chat do not necessarily match those of other chat clients.  Additionally, Facebook Chat cannot currently be integrated with third party chat applications.  We will keep your suggestion in mind and welcome your feedback as we continue to improve this feature.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Features? Facebook Chat has features? Additionally, I distinctly remember the word “future” being in there someplace. Meh. Open standards! Interoperability! Pretty please?

The ramifications of the rampant American consumer in and/or about places of popular commerce (specifically, WalMart) is deeply troubling. Look at Europe. They don’t have WalMart there. How do they get great prices at great values?

Actually, that title and intro was just to get Staples to click the link. Bwahaha! Fail.

I made my first impluse buy today. At least, the first one I can recall not deeply pondering or scratching down on a list.

We were in WalMart filing through the aisles while picking up various items which seemed useful for surviving dead week. My definition of useful appeared to differ somewhat from that of my companions, so our paths parted for a duration of five minutes. I was interested in not carving a path of terror and destruction through my classes. My roommate was interested in how much caffine one could legally consume in a week.

As I returned from the hygene department clutching a bar of deodorant, my gaze fell into the cart. It appeared that at the price of five dollars, once could obtain a large plastic jug filled to the brim with dill pickles in an acidic brime. Someone, not realizing my hidden weakness, had placed it there in jest. At once, I was filled with desire. I really wanted a picke. It had been months, nay, years of trudging through the wearly desert from which there grow no pickles.

Editors note: It has since occoured to me that I consume sliced pickles in sandwiches made in the cafeteria on a fairly regular basis. As it has already been established many times over the years that I am insane, I don’t see how that makes any difference. Pickles in sandwiches are not the same thing as whole, jucy, messy pickles from a jar. They just aren’t. Really.

Being the frugal shopper that I am, it was mere seconds before I realized that higher quality pickles could be obtained in bulk via the fine supplyer Mt. Olive. Not only that, but they also came cheaper and in a nifty glass jar. Ultimately however, it was clear that it would not be healthy to consume that many pickles in a week. It was also clear that my companions did not care for whole dill pickles and would not join me in my vegtable eating ritual every day for the rest of the semester.

My hand was between a rock, and a hard place. Specifically, a place with no pickles. At 4 more cents per oz, I opted for a smaller jar. The fruit, nay, vegtables of my non-labor now reside happily within my refrigerator.

Wee! The end of the school year is in sight. Honestly, I felt a lot more in control this point last semester. Since spring break, everything seems like it’s been a blur. An accelerating blur. I can hardly even remember the last week. Well, I can remember specific details about it and sort of piece things together, but I can’t really picture it as a whole. This is probably because I’ve had a bizarre cold/allergy thing coming on, followed by lots of sleeplessness. I have taken to measuring the days past by noting the number of tissues piling up in the trash bag under the sink. That’s probably not a good sign.

Notable events this week have included:

• Getting back an operating systems assignment and not failing. Doing considerably better than failing. Yay.
  • Good thing too, because I was up ’till three AM working on that. >_<
• RAM from NewEgg arriving. Subsequently, my Linux desktop runs a lot zippier and Guild Wars runs smoothly (There are several other games I’d like to test, but haven’t had time). I can have a lot more stuff open before swapping kicks in. In fact, I haven’t managed to hit that point yet. Yay. The laptop also seems to be dumping out a bit more heat. I’m guessing this has impacted the battery life in some way, but my battery is basically a 15 minute UPS at this point.
• Learning that even though you can implement procedural algorithms in a functional language, it doesn’t mean that you should. TEA looses a ton of elegance when written in Haskell. Not to mention it becomes a ton harder to read and understand. Quite disappointing.
  • Thank you Jurassic Park. You have given me a phrase I can apply to just about anything.
  • Taking two programming courses at once is interesting. There is always something due. Always.
• Racquetball tonight? I want to play racquetball. I’ve hardly moved at all this semester, unless you count walking to classes and SAGA. Need physical motion.
• Attending physics TI this evening and having a personal tutor of whom to ask stupid questions.
• Almost walking into a lightpost on Wednesday. This was my second clue that I needed more sleep. (The first was how tired I was.
• Not recalling having difficulty forming coherent sentances while sleep deprived. Amazing! My personal theory is that all speech is simply bypassing the mental facalties. Um, yay?
• Everything I write eventually turning into bulleted lists. Normally I’m able to supress this urge and make the English flow like butter on a rabid bald monkey, but I suspect the aforementioned lack of sleep is overwhelming my English facilities.

My desire to play racquetball seems to be being fulfuilled. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and loose miserably.

Today is third CSS Naked Day. Disable your style sheet and promote good webdesign!

Also, as long as I’m procrastinating, might as well post this too. It’s only like a week or two late.

• Diddy Kong is a lot of fun. I was surprised as how fun and balanced a character he was.
• But Sonic the Hedgehog is definitely my favorite character.
• Moves are way easier to pull off. Love chaining combos in midair? So much easier now.
• Way more floaty. Wee!
• Because there’s a lot more airtime, there’s a lot more focus on combat in the Y-axis. Sonic’s down stomping attack is used a lot.
• Sonic is now the fastest character. However, he doesn’t really move all that fast compared to the characters in Melee. Thus, everyone moves more slowly.
• The nerf bat hath smiteth Link, my previous main. He feels a lot less visceral than in Melee. Part of might be the animation cycles; in Meele it was totally possible to pull off two or three spins in a row on DK. Now, not so much. Things feel slower and smoother.
• SOOO much more of an emphasis on items. I have no problems with items normally, and Nintendo hit the sweet spot with the defaults in Melee. Now it just feels like too much.We’re talking like five smash balls in a single round, and two or three insane ships of doom, split into three pieces which everyone battles like crazy over. Yeah. When you play with items (he said, abusing italics), you fight for items. There are now at least five or six items of power equal to or greater than the stupid hammer. And they spawn all over the place! Seriously, it’s completely insane.
• However, you can turn it all down and/or off, so I’m not complaining too much.

So, there’s a third round of Hootenanny auditions. Huzzah!This means the chances of skit from James entering in the running again is much higher than it was several days ago, when the chances were zero.

We even have (extremely busy and pressed for time) actors this time.

To prepare (and because most of the penn2ers are noobs and needed to see it anyway), I watched about half an hour of the show from last year. My previous skit? Painful. Horribly painful and embarrassing. We were nervous, we fudged up lines, and most of the (extremely frequent) puns were either too subtle to show up in dialog, or not funny when they did. Overall, it just didn’t flow well at all.

Part of the issue was just how long and elaborate the lines were. Having taken speech since than, I now realize that part of the issue was that the script was not written to be verbal. One of the great and unique things about authors like Dickens and Wodehouse is that most of their work reads great on paper and sounds great when read out loud. I definitely lack that gift. Hence, the target time for this year is two to three minutes. Much longer than that, and the audience looses interest.

Another part of it was just The Stage and Preparation. Joking around and having fun with a skit while auditioning was great. We were all loose, we had scripts, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we had was a decent skit. I was wrong, but it didn’t really matter at that point because we didn’t know I was wrong, and it’s much easier to convince people that your skit is funny if you think it’s funny.

However, as the event drew closer, I became completely immersed in the dialog. I began to doubt that it was really as humorous as I’d previously supposed. Others in the cast felt the same way, so we began to edit. Humor is so much easier to deliver if you know exactly what part is supposed to be humorous. You can build up to it, emphasize it, and all sorts of wonderful things like that. But after going through the same lines so many times, we lost track of what was funny.

The writer behind Portal was interviewed recently, and he said something that resonated with me.

“Tough guy dialogue is just about as macho the 50th time you hear it. Funny dialogue is funny once — maybe.”

I can’t really say much about macho dialog as I can’t write it without instantly deleting my work and washing my hands to get rid of the slimy cliche,  but the latter part is definitely true about humor. This year, I am relying much more heavily on 3rd parties to see how much they laugh when reading the script.

But there are still issues. Especially tying it off neatly. Everyone loves a climax directly followed by a witty comment. Do you have any idea how insane that is to write? This is why half my skits don’t even have real endings and sort of trail off into the distance, much like this post.

Ah, well. At least I can write code.

Every platform has software that defines it; the “killer app.” The software everyone remembers and immediately thinks of when thinking about the platform. For DOS, it was stuff like lotus123. For the Open Source world, it’s GUN/Linux, LAMP, and Firefox. For Windows, it’s more or less every bit of proprietary software out there, singing songs of platform exclusivity and vendor lockin in beautiful chorus.

Well, Facebook’s killer app has surfaced. And what do you know? It’s a game. Why am I not surprised?

So, yes. It’s a simplistic MMORPG. Amazingly, it’s actually designed to be played in ways other than spamming your entire friends list with invites. It’s called PackRat, and it is, in fact, a collectable card game which focuses on getting ahead of everyone else by stealing their cards. Some people seem to like it a lot. Whatever. Either way, killer app or not, this is the first app I’ve seen to make good use of the Facebook API.

I have just discovered a wonderful ethical dilemma.

A man is hiding in your closet, and another man is standing before you in the doorway. You know that each wants to kill the other, and you suspect both are evil, but you don’t know for sure. Man number one, standing in the doorway demands to know if the other guy is in the closet. If you reply in the affirmative, he will shoot the man hiding in the closet. If you deny that man number two is hiding in the closet, he will pop out and shoot the blighter standing in the doorway.

Now, both men could be equally evil, one could be slightly eviler than the other, or one could be the evil train robber and the other a hero mounted atop a white horse. (Aside from the complete absence of handy monochromatic hats and/or quadruped transportation, that is) You just don’t know.

Assuming that it’s a binary situation, what is the best ethical choice?

In retrospect, I’m probably I’m the last person on the planet to come up with this situation, but it still amuses me.

Discuss.

I really hope I’m dreaming. It’s 3 am, I’m stuck on physics homework, and I could swear that someone is blasting harmonica music outside. There is a somewhat surreal element to the whole situation. o_O