Preparing for the birth of my third child next Tuesday. (It’s scheduled because reasons.) Practically speaking that means lots of cleaning and reorganizing around the house to maximize comfort for my wife while she recovers, as well as keeping the older kids busy to tire them out. :)
I’ll be glad if I can wash my clothes, cook food for next week and do some exercises. I wish I could do more personal-projects-stuff things, but it’s been hard enough just to do the basics =/
I’ll be moderating and participating in a panel entitled “You Are Not Your Major” at my alma mater’s Professional Networking Symposium, a gathering of nearly 500 alumni of our small school. The event is second in attendance size only to Homecoming. I’ve moderated or sat on a panel every event since 2013 when it started as a networking event for the business department and I was brought in to talk about tech entrepreneurship and Bitcoin.
“You Are Not Your Major” is this idea a professor of mine and I discussed a few months ago in preparation for tomorrow’s event.
You are not your major. You are an educated person who uses your training and ability to learn to solve problems from a starting point.
We want to convey to students, alumni, and friends alike that it’s OK to work outside your field. It’s OK to find ways to use your major knowledge in unconventional ways. As a programmer, I’ve worked with other programmers who majored in biology, chemistry, psychology, sociology, education, political science, and more.
I’ll be setting up my parents’ new computer immediately after the event, so wish me luck! I’ve not used a Windows computer as anything more than a gaming console in approximately 10 years so what could go wrong?
Just finished and posted most of the tedious release / writeup /video recording stuff for the latest Arcan 0.5.5 / Durden 0.5 meaning that I’m finally free to switch over to more experimental things.
Likely candidates:
Start working on the network- transparency layer (in Rust!)
Look into tui packing formats for moving font rendering / sharing glyph cache and texture atlas from clients into the server/composition stage
A VR glove that I’m prototyping
… or finishing the first out of three parts in an article series working through Xorg features point by point, explaining why my solution is better at everything.
I haven’t started yet, but I am planning to create a simple Notepad like application using GTK+ 3.x in C. I have planned out the list of functionalities that I need with initial version of editor. Once, I get grip with application development, I will planning to do some changes with Mousepad, an editor that comes with Xfce.
C on *nixes has awesome man pages for both the standard and the POSIX library, learning how to read the man pages if you’re not used to it will save you a lot of time and effort. Also info usually has more example code than man.
How did I never know about info before‽ There’s so much useful stuff in there. The difference in the amount of info between man dd and info dd is astounding.
Oh, neat and it even falls back to manpages for third-party stuff I’ve installed.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art visit, while the René Magritte exhibit is still going on. It may sound unusual for an engineer like me to visit an art museum, but I go because my hope is that I will learn at least one new thing from all the exposure to things I’m completely unfamiliar with.
Racing our sailing dinghy with my daughter, gardening and fixing up stuff around the house mostly I think.
Been idly thinking about how to remove the ethernet cable running up my stairs (carries two VDSL connections up the one cable to two modems in the office rack currently.) There’s a comms cabinet in the garage now, where I’d like the modems/router to live, so need to figure out how to get a cable from the hall into the garage now. Current thinking is to run it up the wall into the ceiling then across into the garage. Still super happy with the idea of shoving two VDSL connections down one ethernet cable, even though it’s a massive SPOF 😂
Did you just use two wall sockets and patch into a single cable, or did you find a commercial 2-to-1 paired jack? Or is it just a cable with the ends split and two RJ11’s on each end?
It’s currently using an inline coupler for ethernet (This one, or very similar), to go from two RJ11’s to one cat5 cable to two RJ11’s. I was eyeing an off the shelf solution for it, but it all added up to way more than two couplers and a punchdown tool. (I already had the three cables.)
I’m tempted to mount a dual-RJ11 socket on the wall next to the two phone lines terminate in BT master sockets currently. Then I can just use two RJ11 male-male leads to connect it, no punching down or couplers needed. Wire the back of the RJ11 sockets to one cat6 (as that’s what I have a reel of) and run that up, across into the garage and terminate in the comms cabinet somehow. Probably into RJ11 sockets in the comms cabinet, figure out some ghetto patch panel for them and then RJ11 male-male cables into the modems in there.
Thinking about it, if I put a keystone patch panel in that cabinet, I could have RJ11 keystones at one end, and then cat6 keystones in the rest of the patch panel (for uplinks to loft/hall socket termination.) That would be fairly tidy I think. 🤔
Painting a room in the basement. Finally setting up my lathe, a year after moving in to the house. Have an idea for a new kind of proportional pneumatic valve, if I have time will start with an oversized prototype.
Watch out for unattended-upgrades, which I think is default on 18.04+. We had some unfortunate mishaps when the server decided to take it upon itself to do security updates and managed to break some things.
Recording a podcast and then spending the weekend with the girlfriend. Wish I had some time to fix my corrupted system partition on my main machine. Next week probably.
Saturday we’re going on a family trip to Newcastle, where my wife and son will go to a drawing master class while I read La Belle Sauvage in a nearby cafe before we all head for sushi. Then heading home for a family Minecraft session, I suspect.
Sunday I’m going to paint a wall in one of our bedrooms green and literally watch the paint dry. I’m really excited to see how it will turn out, but I know from prior experience with this paint that it changes considerably as it dries. Good thing it’s a quick-drying water-based paint. :-)
Somewhere along the way there may be time for me to study some ClojureScript/re-frame/Reagent too, which I’m currently taking my first baby steps with.
Biking. I’m leaving work in a few minutes and heading to my buddy’s house for the night, and tomorrow morning we’re going for a ride near there. There was an organized group ride there last weekend, but I had a cold and he wasn’t feeling up for the last big climb so he headed home early. So we’re making up for it this weekend.
The rest of the weekend depends on how the ride goes and whether I stay up there Saturday night or head home.
Sunday evening I want to get back to work on my book scanner project. I got the ZBar bindings working and then got distracted by other projects and a head cold. For books without an ISBN barcode I want to scan the title page and use Tesseract to run OCR and get the title, and then lookup the book on isbndb that way. I did a little investigation into the Common Lisp binding (cl-tesseract), but I need to figure out how to use it with OpenCV images.
Ooh nice, hope it was fun. I’d never thought of doing an organised route after the fact, seems like a good idea if you can’t make the event (or it was that good a route!) Will have to remember that in future, there’s been a few events this year I’ve not managed to get to that I quite fancy giving a go.
Taking a weekend off development of appdocotor to try and build somewhat a social media presence before launch. Not at all my strong suit so I have alot to learn about that, sales and marketing.
Trying to beat Nix + home-manager into submission, such that I have my full dev environments at work & home merged into one ultimate set of .nix files.
Also life. Helping friend with a flat renovation, and resting/unwinding after the week doing nothing reasonable/procrastinating.
Unsure to be honest, nothing specific planned. I guess I should get some head on writing blog posts and some Rust stuff. But most importantly, rest. Past two weeks have been way too hectic and I’ve neglected important things.
A busy, bittersweet time - closing the camper for the season. Clean the camper, pull in the dock, take down the deck awning, that sort of stuff. Then we wait until next May. Sigh.
Mounted some of the windows in the extension I’m building to our 17th century farmhouse in the Swedish countryside. Since the thing will have 11 windows I did not finish them all, those on the second (first in European parlance) floor will have to wait a bit. The extension replaces a glass veranda - added somewhere in the 19th century - which was in a bad shape due to a leaky roof. I designed the extension (in Sketchup) on the base of some turn-of-the-century photographs I found of this place, added an extra level to it and built the thing this summer, it should be ready around Yule.
Hiking! This is probably one of the last weekends where the mountains are still snow-free.
Preparing for the birth of my third child next Tuesday. (It’s scheduled because reasons.) Practically speaking that means lots of cleaning and reorganizing around the house to maximize comfort for my wife while she recovers, as well as keeping the older kids busy to tire them out. :)
Congratz!
Congratulations!
I’ll be glad if I can wash my clothes, cook food for next week and do some exercises. I wish I could do more personal-projects-stuff things, but it’s been hard enough just to do the basics =/
Sleeping
Lucky you
I’ll be moderating and participating in a panel entitled “You Are Not Your Major” at my alma mater’s Professional Networking Symposium, a gathering of nearly 500 alumni of our small school. The event is second in attendance size only to Homecoming. I’ve moderated or sat on a panel every event since 2013 when it started as a networking event for the business department and I was brought in to talk about tech entrepreneurship and Bitcoin.
“You Are Not Your Major” is this idea a professor of mine and I discussed a few months ago in preparation for tomorrow’s event.
We want to convey to students, alumni, and friends alike that it’s OK to work outside your field. It’s OK to find ways to use your major knowledge in unconventional ways. As a programmer, I’ve worked with other programmers who majored in biology, chemistry, psychology, sociology, education, political science, and more.
I’ll be setting up my parents’ new computer immediately after the event, so wish me luck! I’ve not used a Windows computer as anything more than a gaming console in approximately 10 years so what could go wrong?
Busy Weekend.
Just finished and posted most of the tedious release / writeup /video recording stuff for the latest Arcan 0.5.5 / Durden 0.5 meaning that I’m finally free to switch over to more experimental things.
Likely candidates:
… or finishing the first out of three parts in an article series working through Xorg features point by point, explaining why my solution is better at everything.
Also redoing the floors in my lab.
Helping clean the area of the sort-of HOA our vacation home is in.
Parents are visiting to celebrate my birthday.
Getting back into Project Euler a bit, but want to avoid computers a bit because of twinges of RSI.
RSI is a piece of shit. Hope you get better!
Happy birthday / spirit journey formation anniversary!
Click only if it’s your birthday already, and I hope your RSI gets better.
I haven’t started yet, but I am planning to create a simple Notepad like application using GTK+ 3.x in C. I have planned out the list of functionalities that I need with initial version of editor. Once, I get grip with application development, I will planning to do some changes with Mousepad, an editor that comes with Xfce.
Any suggestions on GTK+ and C?
C on *nixes has awesome man pages for both the standard and the POSIX library, learning how to read the man pages if you’re not used to it will save you a lot of time and effort. Also
infousually has more example code thanman.How did I never know about
infobefore‽ There’s so much useful stuff in there. The difference in the amount of info betweenman ddandinfo ddis astounding.Oh, neat and it even falls back to manpages for third-party stuff I’ve installed.
Thanks for mentioning that.
On the other end of the spectrum, check out TLDR pages.
Info is awesome because texinfo is relatively easy enough to write manuals in for websites, pdfs, and .info pages.
The GNU culture around writing manuals is something more software projects should copy.
MTB coach development all day Saturday, in the Scottish Highlands :~)
Hopefully, starting a BCHS web app on Sunday.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art visit, while the René Magritte exhibit is still going on. It may sound unusual for an engineer like me to visit an art museum, but I go because my hope is that I will learn at least one new thing from all the exposure to things I’m completely unfamiliar with.
I’ll be traveling home from my first Strange Loop conference, which was amazing.
Racing our sailing dinghy with my daughter, gardening and fixing up stuff around the house mostly I think.
Been idly thinking about how to remove the ethernet cable running up my stairs (carries two VDSL connections up the one cable to two modems in the office rack currently.) There’s a comms cabinet in the garage now, where I’d like the modems/router to live, so need to figure out how to get a cable from the hall into the garage now. Current thinking is to run it up the wall into the ceiling then across into the garage. Still super happy with the idea of shoving two VDSL connections down one ethernet cable, even though it’s a massive SPOF 😂
Did you just use two wall sockets and patch into a single cable, or did you find a commercial 2-to-1 paired jack? Or is it just a cable with the ends split and two RJ11’s on each end?
It’s currently using an inline coupler for ethernet (This one, or very similar), to go from two RJ11’s to one cat5 cable to two RJ11’s. I was eyeing an off the shelf solution for it, but it all added up to way more than two couplers and a punchdown tool. (I already had the three cables.)
I’m tempted to mount a dual-RJ11 socket on the wall next to the two phone lines terminate in BT master sockets currently. Then I can just use two RJ11 male-male leads to connect it, no punching down or couplers needed. Wire the back of the RJ11 sockets to one cat6 (as that’s what I have a reel of) and run that up, across into the garage and terminate in the comms cabinet somehow. Probably into RJ11 sockets in the comms cabinet, figure out some ghetto patch panel for them and then RJ11 male-male cables into the modems in there.
Thinking about it, if I put a keystone patch panel in that cabinet, I could have RJ11 keystones at one end, and then cat6 keystones in the rest of the patch panel (for uplinks to loft/hall socket termination.) That would be fairly tidy I think. 🤔
Painting a room in the basement. Finally setting up my lathe, a year after moving in to the house. Have an idea for a new kind of proportional pneumatic valve, if I have time will start with an oversized prototype.
Nothing on the plan. And I will enjoy it.
Upgrading to Ubuntu 18.10 since it may fix the one remaining power management glitch on my laptop :)
Also continuing to train our new rescue dog.
Watch out for
unattended-upgrades, which I think is default on 18.04+. We had some unfortunate mishaps when the server decided to take it upon itself to do security updates and managed to break some things.FWIW the power management glitch was fixed by upgrading to the latest 4.19 RC kernel: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1796743
Now if I could only figure out this gdm bug on boot… :) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm3/+bug/1796614
I’ve been deep diving in the gdm3 source, but there’s a fair bit of complexity there and I’m just teaching myself Gtk so it’s a lot to chew on :)
Recording a podcast and then spending the weekend with the girlfriend. Wish I had some time to fix my corrupted system partition on my main machine. Next week probably.
Saturday we’re going on a family trip to Newcastle, where my wife and son will go to a drawing master class while I read La Belle Sauvage in a nearby cafe before we all head for sushi. Then heading home for a family Minecraft session, I suspect.
Sunday I’m going to paint a wall in one of our bedrooms green and literally watch the paint dry. I’m really excited to see how it will turn out, but I know from prior experience with this paint that it changes considerably as it dries. Good thing it’s a quick-drying water-based paint. :-)
Somewhere along the way there may be time for me to study some ClojureScript/re-frame/Reagent too, which I’m currently taking my first baby steps with.
I’ll be biking the Canary Challenge and then resting after that.
Biking. I’m leaving work in a few minutes and heading to my buddy’s house for the night, and tomorrow morning we’re going for a ride near there. There was an organized group ride there last weekend, but I had a cold and he wasn’t feeling up for the last big climb so he headed home early. So we’re making up for it this weekend.
The rest of the weekend depends on how the ride goes and whether I stay up there Saturday night or head home.
Sunday evening I want to get back to work on my book scanner project. I got the ZBar bindings working and then got distracted by other projects and a head cold. For books without an ISBN barcode I want to scan the title page and use Tesseract to run OCR and get the title, and then lookup the book on isbndb that way. I did a little investigation into the Common Lisp binding (cl-tesseract), but I need to figure out how to use it with OpenCV images.
Ooh nice, hope it was fun. I’d never thought of doing an organised route after the fact, seems like a good idea if you can’t make the event (or it was that good a route!) Will have to remember that in future, there’s been a few events this year I’ve not managed to get to that I quite fancy giving a go.
Trying to document parts of my encrypted backup design:
https://go.gliffy.com/go/share/snsw0vvrbuo0m4g09akr
It’s not so easy to make something other people can grok, I just need to work on how I explain things.
Do a formal spec and some flow charts. :)
My kids let me Github a little each night, so I’ll be githubbing this weekend a little bit
Taking a weekend off development of appdocotor to try and build somewhat a social media presence before launch. Not at all my strong suit so I have alot to learn about that, sales and marketing.
https://twitter.com/appdoctorio?s=09
Trying to beat Nix + home-manager into submission, such that I have my full dev environments at work & home merged into one ultimate set of .nix files.
Also life. Helping friend with a flat renovation, and resting/unwinding after the week doing nothing reasonable/procrastinating.
Unsure to be honest, nothing specific planned. I guess I should get some head on writing blog posts and some Rust stuff. But most importantly, rest. Past two weeks have been way too hectic and I’ve neglected important things.
Digging for this ticket to GitHub Universe: https://twitter.com/github/status/1046052486413520896
Contemplating whether to dive into one of the big development environments of the last century (common lisp, Smalltalk).
Learning ChaiScript as a possible way to script my simulator
A busy, bittersweet time - closing the camper for the season. Clean the camper, pull in the dock, take down the deck awning, that sort of stuff. Then we wait until next May. Sigh.
Scottish Games and Oktoberfest are both tomorrow.
Coding: always more improvements to my wiki bot, and resuscitating an old Android app by cutting out customized old libs with common ones.
Writing posts, some hiking, feeding peanuts to the crows down at the beach, mourning summer.
Canvasing for Sonja Trauss, potting some plants, catching up on sleep.
Mounted some of the windows in the extension I’m building to our 17th century farmhouse in the Swedish countryside. Since the thing will have 11 windows I did not finish them all, those on the second (first in European parlance) floor will have to wait a bit. The extension replaces a glass veranda - added somewhere in the 19th century - which was in a bad shape due to a leaky roof. I designed the extension (in Sketchup) on the base of some turn-of-the-century photographs I found of this place, added an extra level to it and built the thing this summer, it should be ready around Yule.