A Dreamer's Reality

VS2005 ... Rage.

2008-03-20T19:13:32Z

If you're ever feeling angry because Visual Studio managed to suddenly mess up for no apparent reason again -- maybe the find functionality just suddenly stopped working? Maybe you got a message similar to the following?


Find all "MySearchString", Subfolders, Find Results 1, "Entire Solution", "*.*"
No files were found to look in.
Find was stopped in progress.

Although I had been using the Find in Files functionality earlier in the day, it seemed to stop working when I decided to use it this afternoon. The quiet rage that had been slowly building up would probably have exploded in all kinds of nasty ways. In any case, to curb this oncoming fit of rage, simply press the following key combination to solve your undeniably random Visual Studio problem.


Ctrl-ScrollLock

Yep, the solution is that simple. And yet the problem still doesn't make any more sense than the solution to the problem. Pressing Scroll Lock in combination with Ctrl or by itself does not actually cause the problem to be reproduceable after being fixed. So what gives?

Perhaps you've had other problems in Visual Studio where the embedding manifest stage just never finishes. I know I have. I'm not sure yet why this happens, but it does seem to occur from time to time. I'm sure there's an explanation, though I hesitate to say that it would be "perfectly rational". If anyone has figured out which temporary files I should be deleting to resolve this problem, I'd really love to know. All I know is that it has to be something temporary since everything is all dandy once I reboot the computer. Oh Visual Studio, so useful, and yet so painful to use.

ayria @ 2007-09-19T17:46:00

2007-09-19T21:53:50Z

Because I feel like it.. And yes I've heard of the rich text format but I like my very plain "Notepad2.exe", thank you very much.

__ How To Set Up Remote Connections To The Linux MySQL Server/Database On Windows Using ODBC __
*** NOTE: Doing this is a security risk for your MySQL server. ***

1. Set up the Linux MySQL Server to allow remote connections
a) Editing your MySQL config
- Open the my.cnf file (/etc/my.cnf or /etc/mysql/my.cnf). (You must be root to edit this file.)
- Ensure that the "skip-networking" line is commented out
- In some cases, skip-networking is no longer used and is deprecated in favour of just "bind-address localhost" or "bind-address 127.0.0.1". This is more secure because it only allows local connections to your database, but this isn't what you want, so comment out that line.
- Now, add the line "bind-address <Server IP>" instead. <Local Server IP> is the IP of your Linux Server where the database is hosted. You can determine your internal IP by using the "ifconfig" command.
- Restart the MySQL daemon: /etc/init.d/mysql restart

b) Setting up the Database to allow remote access
- To allow remote access log into MySQL locally (on the Linux server).
- If you only ever want to allow access from one remote location (more secure than "any/all" locations) then execute one of the following statements:

GRANT <PERMISSIONS> TO <User>@'<IP>' ON <Database>.* [IDENTIFIED BY '<Password>'][WITH GRANT OPTION];
GRANT <PERMISSIONS> TO <User>@'%' ON <Database>.* [IDENTIFIED BY '<Password>'][WITH GRANT OPTION];

[] -> optional
<> -> replace with appropriate info

PERMISSIONS -> Either ALL or any of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP.
<IP> -> Remote IP you want to connect to the DB from.
<User> -> Username you want to connect to the DB with.
<Password> -> Password associated with the Username.
<Database> -> DB you want to connect to. This can be *.* instead of <Database>.* if you want to be able to connect to all databases remotely with the specified user.

c) Testing the connection
- If you want, the connection can be tested by telnetting to the server on port 3306 (or whatever port you set up your server on, but 3306 is the default).

2. Setting up Windows to access the MySQL Server remotely
a) Installing the driver
- Download the MySQL ODBC driver from the MySQL site (currently the released connector is ODBC 3.51, so that is what this document is based off of).

b) Setting up the data sources, etc
- Open Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources(ODBC)
- Under the 'Drivers' tab, there should be an entry with 'MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver' if the driver was installed properly.
- Go to the System DSN tab.
- Add a new System Data Source and select the MySQL ODBC driver.
- Fill in the information on the Login Tab:
Data Source Name: The local name you want for your database
Description: Just a description/comment
Server Name/IP: address of the Linux server
User: username to use to access the database
Password: password to identify the user
Database: The name of the Database on the server
- Click the "Test" button to verify your settings.

*yawn* So now I can connect to my Linux MySQL stuff and test code without creating a local DB on Windows. It's only a bit of work to reuse already created databases. Makes my debugging life way easier and there's less chance that I'll have inconsistent testing databases if I just always use the same one. Of course we do have some different versions of the database for different releases of our software..

Windows and SVN hooks

2007-08-16T14:35:39Z

If you ever need to allow edits to commit logs, all you need to do is create a pre-revprop-change hook.

Just save this as "pre-revprop-change.bat" and throw it in the hooks directory.

@ECHO OFF
:: Set all parameters. Even though most are not used, in case you want to add
:: changes that allow, for example, editing of the author or addition of log messages.
set repository=%1
set revision=%2
set userName=%3
set propertyName=%4
set action=%5

:: Only allow the log message to be changed, but not author, etc.
if /I not "%propertyName%" == "svn:log" goto ERROR_PROPNAME

:: Only allow modification of a log message, not addition or deletion.
if /I not "%action%" == "M" goto ERROR_ACTION

:: Make sure that the new svn:log message is not empty.
set bIsEmpty=true
for /f "tokens=*" %%g in ('find /V ""') do (
set bIsEmpty=false
)
if "%bIsEmpty%" == "true" goto ERROR_EMPTY

goto :eof

:ERROR_EMPTY
echo Empty svn:log messages are not allowed. >&2
goto ERROR_EXIT

:ERROR_PROPNAME
echo Only changes to svn:log messages are allowed. >&2
goto ERROR_EXIT

:ERROR_ACTION
echo Only modifications to svn:log revision properties are allowed. >&2
goto ERROR_EXIT

:ERROR_EXIT
exit /b 1

Nothing else useful here.

Work, work.

2007-05-02T03:14:28Z

So it's crunch time and I just know I'm going to see the overtime hours pile up but I'm putting it off as long as I can. So far it has just been one night a week -- Thursday evening to push out the build for Friday morning. And as if crunch time wasn't enough fun, there's other background drama. One of the guys at work, let's just call him B, has kind of slacked off lately. Moreover, one of the other guys has finally had enough and talked to our manager about that. I wonder what will happen.

When B first started on the project he was just doing a little R&D. Later on when everyone was given specific tasks, he ended up with the job of trying to get multiplayer stuff set up. This included talking to the game DBs to set up game information for game creation and then some firewall punching with a 3rd party to get the clients to join games properly. He did a lot of work on this and almost got it all working. With two weeks left before the deadline, he still couldn't figure out what was wrong. So, management ended up turning around and giving his pet project to me. All I was asked was how much I knew about network programming, TCP, and firewall punching. The answer was, "not much". I mean, I did some network programming when I took Distributed in school, but other than that I have no idea. Anyway, after a week of trying to fully understand the problem, it took a day to fix the bug. As usual, it was one of those one liners that make everything work. All I can say is, he's been pretty depressed ever since they took his pet project away from him and replaced it with only part of my job -- a couple of UI screens for the game.

On the one hand I understand the frustration behind things not getting done and thus handing it over to somebody else who they *hope* can do it. Fortunately for them, I pulled through again. Yay me! However, they really could have handled the situation a lot better. First of all, when they took a small part of my job and gave me his entire job, they probably shouldn't have brought us both in together and told us both at the same time. I mean, you're kind of making him lose face in front of everyone, including me. You're not really helping his self-esteem any. If anything, they really should have, at the very least, spoken to us separately. Or even better, I'd say they should have made us do some pair programming. Given I didn't really know what his code did, I pretty much ate up a bunch of time getting him to point things out anyway.

Ah well, what can I say? I feel bad for B. It does however feel like he's not pulling his weight at the moment and that does put weight on the rest of us. I still, however, support him whenever somebody tries to say that he didn't get the networking stuff done. After all, he put it all together and I threw in one line to make it work. Granted, the one liner only made everything work with static ports. I went ahead and had the game bind to a random port (obviously the better thing to do). I'll give him the benefit of the doubt though and assume he would have put in the random port binding after he got the static port binding working.

In other news, we've finally decided to put together some standard coding practices (after another coworker left and we had to restructure what he did so that it was "human readable") as well as a code review structure. We've all got our very own primary and secondary code buddies who should be reviewing any code that we write before it gets checked in. We've also finally decided to make the move to subversion. Actually, what I mean to say is that we've finally got a subversion server up and running on Windows and we're going to then migrate our project to the server. After that, I just need to make sure I can access the repository from Linux and then we're all set. I can't believe we're finally going to use a half decent source control system. The only downside is that subversion tools in Windows really aren't all that great. I can't figure out how to get merge to work properly with Tortoise SVN. On the other hand, the client is a bit out of date so maybe I should just update that. In any case, the command line svn tools work (and that's what I'm used to anyway) so it isn't that big a deal.

And finally, ugh, I have to get to work by 8:30 tomorrow. That's crazy. I never get in that early. Hate. Who came up with the idea of having 8:30 meetings for knowledge transfer?! Seriously. Whose brain is working that early in the morning? Sigh.

Mooooo...

2007-04-21T22:30:04Z

So for those just catching up, I've been working at Fuel Industries since last May. It's been busy and crazy, but I've had the opportunity to work on multiple games in the time frame of less than a year.

Sadly, a fellow coworker has ditched the rest of us, leaving for a better company in Toronto. It just so happens that he's going to be working at Oculus. Anyway, we had a going away party for him this past Friday. There was a lot of vodka involved and some foosball. I have never been more smashed in my life. This would be the first time I've gone so far that I have huge swaths of the night that are not in my memory banks.

Awesomely enough I was also supposed to catch the train to Toronto the following day (Saturday) at 7:00. However, a group of First Nations were blockading the railroads so there were no trains traveling between Ottawa and Toronto. Turns out that I could instead get a flight at no extra cost at 9:15. I arrived at 10:20 instead of noonish. =) Yay!

The events of this day have so far been pretty uneventful. I was really, really tired though.

... And.. cut. I'll finish this entry some other time. I got distracted.

Of dark alleyways and sack beatings.

2006-04-10T16:20:31Z

There's something about a group of people going behind the back of a group member and handing in an assignment without their name on it that really bothers me. I don't know why that would irk me so much. But seriously, people should just out and say what's bothering them instead of hiding in those dark back alleys. How would anyone expect change when they don't so much as raise their voice a bit to get noticed and say something? I'm pretty sure sitting back and hoping and praying all day won't get you anywhere.

Now personally, I had my reasons for missing the last week of my economic forecasting class and I would do it again if I had to. Graphics is just that much more worthy of my time and attention than a boring 8:30 lecture. It so happens that I would have been aware of aforementioned assignment if I had gone to those lectures. Moreover, chances are my group members would have been unable to ditch me in such a disgraceful way. I went to pick up some other assignments and a midterm and "just happened" to talk to the professor for this course at the same time. He pointed out that he didn't have an assignment 4 for me because my group members had handed it in without me. Yeah, thanks guys. Some notification, at least, would have been appreciated. The least they could have done was tell me. That said, I can't argue with the mark. After all, I did do nothing on that assignment didn't I? Anyway this isn't at all about what I got so much as it is about how much it irks me when people can't just go ahead and tell people what bothers them. Yes, it might be a little awkward and uncomfortable, but life's tough, y'know? It seriously won't hurt to tell. I know I won't bite.. alright, maybe a bit.. but it won't hurt much. =)

Bah. All I'd do, probably, is sack beat my group members on the spot if I saw them right now.

Slacking off

2006-04-09T04:47:44Z

So after getting somewhat frustrated with working on my term project for economic forecasting, and in particular dealing with the crummy econometric program Shazam, I decided to slack off instead. To start with, I discovered how I might ensure a job for life! All you have to do is follow the suggestions listed in the following document on how NOT to code:
How To Write Unmaintainable Code
And I know that probably many people have already peeked at this document or some similar document before, but that doesn't make it less entertaining.

Similar-Sounding Similar-Looking Variable Names: This is a suggestion that musicdieu appears to already follow with his "foo" and "zoo" variable names.

There are so many great ideas to sift through that it's hard to pick out which would impress me most. Nevertheless, the following example was pretty entertaining.

Choose variable names that masquerade as mathematical operators, e.g.:
openParen = (slash + asterix) / equals;

I mean.. WTF?

From there I wandered on to The Daily WTF for some more chuckles before I realized that it'd gotten a little late.

Anyway, to top it all off, This Code Sucks has some gems if you're really looking to laugh.. or cry.

Emergency shotgun anyone? Please? I'm begging.

2006-03-02T07:56:48Z

Almost 3am. The girls have managed to burn something and the whole place stinks, resulting in a headache on my part. Then they have a few guys over who are playing the parts of the singing drunks. The girls just add to all this racket by screeching in high pitched voices or just generally screaming. Seriously. If anyone has an emergency shotgun, now would be the time to come and make use of it.

Ugh. So tired, but not.

2006-02-15T12:39:06Z

Yay! I haven't gone to sleep yet! This is appalling given I'm not even taking real time anymore. I partially blame starting graphics late and mostly blame having to work on economic forecasting. Not only is the course uninteresting, the professor is also a jerk. He enjoys skipping through slides that he forces people to copy down by not providing.

Ech. But I think I'll stop complaining too much about econ. After all, that's pretty much all I do these days. And who could I blame for taking this course anyway?

A few last gripes though.. I hate that I have 8:30 classes with professors that have no course notes, followed by a class that attempts to force attendance by having six marks allocated to random attendance checks. Yippee! Okay, I'm done. I mean, I would head off to bed now, except that I find 20 minutes of sleep to be rather useless.

I <3 OpenOffice! Really, I do!

2006-02-07T02:21:07Z

Ack. OpenOffice has probably crashed on me about 4-5 times in a row just now. Okay I mean 6 or 7 times. If that isn't annoying, what is?

Take a look at the picture below. Do you see a 'Next' button? I guess I couldn't really submit a report that way even if I wanted to. Just a slight oversight on their part?

Okay by now I'm probably up to 10 crashes. Why am I still using it? Excellent question. Nobody ever said I was smart. =/

Edit: And.. now it's gone. Time to start all over again. Yippee! *curses have been sensored*
And no, I'm not still using OpenOffice.

Must get some blank printing paper.. damn it!

2006-01-25T16:21:55Z

Oh printing.. how difficult can it possibly be to print?

Note to self: Get some blank paper, because I have a printer at home and I hate getting the run-around. And aside from that, it's probably cheaper to print at home anyway. Bleh.

Anyway.. I go to the CHIP to put more money on my printing account and half-hope that they'll be willing to transfer the last $2.70 on my watcard to printing as well. Nope, go talk to the printing people up in 3017.

Why these people would have anything to do with moving watcard money to my printing account I don't know.. but anyway, as expected the response was, we don't do anything of the sort, you'll have to go back to the CHIP. Thanks guys. Really.

Anyway, I could just head over to the Student Life Centre and add the extra $2.30 to my watcard balance and then swipe away down on the first floor of the MC, just outside the CHIP, but that would be a hassle. Geh.

I'm just a little annoyed and put out by having to run around.

Anyway, I'll be going now. Graphics class in 10 minutes anyway.

Long overdue update..

2006-01-23T19:35:26Z

No, I have not fallen off the face of the Earth. In fact, you should all fear me because I've finally gotten around to attaining my full driver's license. Bwahahaha. The roads are no longer safe. =)

Last term, i disappeared into the dark depths of the sacred Real Time lab. I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the results, at least in terms of marks. I'm a little disappointed with the actual results of the project. I'm sure we could have done more. The project was initially supposed to be Pac-man-like, with up to two computer trains chasing down a user train. Of course, the computer trains were a little too good at tracking down the user train, so the user rarely got far. In addition, I was greatly amused (or not?) when the computer and user trains ended up being switched. How? Let's just say that our tracking lost both the user and computer trains. When the trains were picked up again, the computer train was also the user train. The nice thing about this is that I no longer have to pick up the bonuses randomly littered about the track. Why? Well, the randomly routing computer train picked them up for me. Woohoo!

To finish off the term of course, there was a pantsless run through campus, later followed by a relatively successful LAN party.

The Holidays
Christmas day was spent in an airplane, flying to L.A. to have dinner with the Grandparents. The following day involved flying to Taiwan, to spend New Year's and the rest of the holidays with the Other Grandparents. All in all, it was good fun.

Two days were spent in Hwalien (No I don't know how to really spell it.. and I don't care. =/ ). It's a quiet, scenic place.. I think that pretty much describes what I saw there -- water, trees, mountains, moo moo moo.. And I'm not kidding either, I did see some cows. And they did smell. Ah well, relaxing enough..

Most of the time was spent wandering the tech streets, or book stores.. and even the fashion streets. And since I was there, I couldn't miss the chance to visit the world's tallest building -- Taipei 101. It is one sexy building to look at, except when it has "Bravia by Sony" ads all over it. Ugh. Aside from that, it seems to be difficult to get a good picture of it. Oh and one last thing, it has been said that the fireworks on new year's eve here were awesome.

One thing that must be said, if anything at all, is that the night life in Taipei is awesome. Where the city seems to die out at around 9, except for perhaps some bars or restaurants, certain streets of Taipei are still packed with people. The streets are usually filled with roadside stands with people hawking their goods. And it isn't complete without the mini-arcade gaming area either. With that comes some other CNE-type games, some of which you would never find around here. An example is the shrimp fishing game. The idea is to hook as many shrimp as you can and dump them into a bucket using only a small stick with a string and hook on the end. If you're not careful, the shrimp will just cut your string and you'll have nothing to hook them with.

Now that I've vaguely described the things I've seen and done outside of home. Let's see what I did when I was lounging about at home during the days or evenings.. I basically played card games with my younger cousin or slipped upstairs to play Total Annihilation. I still haven't completed the entire campaign, but I've completed several missions. Now that I'm back in school though, it doesn't look like I'll have a chance to finish that off for a little while.

Blah.. speaking of school, I think I just finished missing my last class of the day. Woohoo! Unfortunately, I have a group meeting at 16:00 for which I need to do some work.

Stupid KMail

2005-08-20T13:09:59Z

Ugh. So, KMail has decided that sorting email by dates, specifically order by arrival, works as follows: Anything from a week ago has the actual date (i.e. 2005-08-13) in the date column. Anything else has "Monday", "Tuesday", "Yesterday", "Today", etc. One might expect, if we sort in reverse chronological order, that "Today" would be at the top, followed by "Yesterday", and everything else. However, instead we get all the dated entries (from last week and before that) followed by "Today", "Yesterday", etc. It seems that normal sorting by "Date" works fine. Blegh.

Birthday Dinner

2005-08-15T15:58:12Z

Since today is my birthday, everyone is invited to join me at Coasters tonight for dinner at 8pm (for now anyway).

ayria @ 2005-05-26T03:44:00

2005-05-26T08:04:28Z

Spent Saturday and Sunday with the parents in Ottawa. I took the Greyhound up to Ottawa and they drove up to meet me at the Greyhound terminal. Unfortunately my friend didn't manage to make it to the bus station in Montreal on time to catch the same bus to Ottawa. It would have been good to have the company, but the sleep was good too.

Unfortunately it was raining all weekend when I was in Ottawa. I think it was the last weekend of the Tulip Festival and rain definitely didn't make that any better. Fortunately we managed to see and take pictures of the many tulip gardens in a short period that was rain-free. But at the very end it started pouring. It should be noted that the rain was very much stop and go.

We also wandered the halls of the main Parliament building. It was pretty interesting. I think it's either the first or second time I've ever been for a tour of the parliament buildings. There was a security check that required me to empty out my pockets. I swear, it would have been faster to just drop my pants and dump that with my coat on the stupid x-ray machine or whatever. I could have waltzed through the metal detector without a blip. But no, I emptied out my pockets (quite the task actually) and the metal detector *still* beeped because I had stupid metal rings on my pants. Amusingly enough, the security lady asked with surprise, "That's all? Nothing in your pockets?" when my mom merely handed over her coat and purse. That's what happens when my mom goes through the security check *after* I do. Bwahaha.

The cat sanctuary out by the parliament buildings is pretty neat too. I saw a lady with flame-coloured hair and a bright orange sweater to match, petting an orange coloured cat that was settled contentedly on her lap, purring loudly. I was very tempted to take a picture, but I'll respect the fact that she may not want a picture taken of her.

While there were plans to visit various museums in the area, including the new Canadian War Museum and the Aviation Museum, we ran out of time. This was rather unfortunate, as I had hoped to visit both museums. Perhaps I will visit them the next time I find myself in Ottawa.. especially the Aviation Museum, but especially the Canadian War Museum. You really can't go wrong with either.. can you?

There will be a preview of the shows for the Montreal Fringe Festival at 8pm tonight at Club Soda (1225 St-Laurent Blvd.). I've heard many good things about that and I'm looking forward to it. Apparently the lip-synching group Never Surrender is quite entertaining. We shall see.. Hopefully Jon will join me in the fun tomorrow. I haven't met up with him since we arrived in Montreal for the work term and I've been looking forward to meeting up with him. Of course, I'd encourage everyone to come along since it looks to be quite interesting.

I am proud to say that I have now seen all 6 episodes of Star Wars.. in order. I've managed to not see the entirety of episodes 4-6 until after seeing episodes 1-3. This must be an impressive feat -- living under a rock for most of my life that is. I'm so great.

ayria @ 2005-05-03T12:39:00

2005-05-03T16:42:33Z

It isn't daily that I get reminded about how difficult it can be to read an email that has almost no punctuation as well as no caps. Seriously, I can't imagine that it would be so difficult to just throw in some capitals at the beginnings of sentences, some periods at the end, and perhaps various other punctuation as necessary. *sigh* Stupid emails. It would probably also help if the email wasn't one big ass paragraph.

Yeah, okay. So that's my bitching for the day.

Way to get into work at 10:00. Woo. I'm already starting off on the right foot. =/
I guess it's time to make my short trek to work then.

Moo.

Montreal

2005-04-30T04:10:16Z

Heading to Montreal tomorrow. Early. Woohoo.
See you all soon.

Quest still sucks.

2005-04-23T03:51:13Z

It seems that Quest has improved a bit since the last time I read about complaints having to do with refreshing in order to see how you're doing in that Unofficial Transcript queue. Now the refreshing is done automatically.. but since I'm 412th in line, it's just going to refresh 412 times. It seems to do this once a second or something. I think that instead it should refresh *less* often.. but maybe some would disagree. In any case, it is somewhat of an improvement upon the previous version of Quest.

Wow.. that's kind of annoying.. I can see the tab for Quest is constantly refreshing, resulting in little flashes in the corner of my eye.

Anyway, the point is.. I'm pleased that exams and the school term are finally over so that I can relax and enjoy myself a bit.

Final note: I've made my way up to 329th in the Unofficial Transcript queue. That's 83 refreshes for me already.. and that's just going on the assumption of 1 refresh per update of position in the queue. Go Quest. Go whoever made Quest.

I am so great.

2005-04-13T06:27:46Z

Ignoring the lack of studying that is being accomplished..

Resnet fun results in the need for MAC address spoofing magic. Whee. Easily taken care of though.

Stupid arts package is officially b0rken. I'm not sure that it's entirely a Suse problem or if it is a KDE problem. Regardless, using KDE 3.4 with Suse 9.2 and whatever arts package gets installed results in no system notifications. Why? Because the sound doesn't work for them. Music works fine, but no system notifications. What to do in this unfortunate situation? Apparently downloading the source rpm for arts and recompiling it yourself then installing the resulting rpm will be sufficient. Tada! System notifications!

Of course, it turns out that my console sounds don't work since this is a laptop. And somehow I find that the settings for the system bell are hidden in a rather "intuitive" location: Regional & Accessibility -> Accessibility -> System bell settings! I guess this might sort of make sense in that you get to choose whether the system bell notification will be a sound or some kind of visual notification. I'm assuming this is for deaf people or something. Still, might it be helpful to have some sort of linkage or information as to where to set up this stuff when I change the setting for system notifications to always be system bell or even automatically turn on the system bell if it isn't already on? Apparently not. Blah.

And now, it's time to install the kernel source. Bwahahaha. More power to me.

Laptop Fun. And.. Suse rules.

2005-04-05T08:13:51Z

New laptop => wasted days.

Ever since my parents got me a new laptop on the weekend, I've been messing around with it. When I got back to Waterloo on Sunday evening, it was partitioned in preparation for a dual boot system. This involved the installation of Windows XP Pro as well as much hassle in installing some form of Linux.

To say the least.. none of the (very few) Debian based distributions I tried seemed to properly detect the touchpad and keyboard for the laptop. With Knoppix both keyboard and mouse would be frozen. However, turning off ACPI seems to get the keyboard working again. I tried some touchpad drivers (Synaptics and Alps) and neither seemed to do the trick. Popping the Ubuntu CD into the drive resulted in frozen keyboards and touchpad/mouse as well. Whee! I didn't try turning off ACPI in this case. Instead, I went on to try Suse. That seemed to do the trick. After fussing around with some configurations, everything seems to be just peachy. I didn't have to fuck with anything to get keyboard or touchpad working. After all those hours of fucking with the various Debian distributions (mostly Knoppix), I spent just 30 min installing Suse and maybe another 30 min to an hour to update to KDE 3.4. All in all, that's not too bad.

I should, however, gripe about the installation script for Knoppix. Sigh. The script checks to see if certain requirements are satisfied. Such requirements included having a free partition with 2GB of space along with a strongly suggested minimum of 256MB swap partition. Both partitions existsed. Indeed, there was a 19GB partition free for installation along with a 1GB partition for the swap. Detected? Nope. Instead, it just kept whining and opening qtparted or something like that. In the end, frustrated with this idiocy, I just used IGNORE_CHECK=1 and told it where to install the damned thing. Anyway, all that for naught since the keyboard and touchpad didn't work with the 2.6 kernel anyway.

Anyway, I should probably stop playing around with the laptop and actually get to sleep at some decent times so that I'll be rested enough to study for finals. At this rate, I probably won't retain anything. Oh well. Off to bed for me, then.

ayria @ 2005-03-27T23:05:00

2005-03-28T04:40:26Z

The concurrency assignment seems to be doing well. So far it seems like we've worked out the deadlocks. Whee!

Aside from that, there was a cool robotics competition held here from March 24-26.
http://www.firstrobotics.uwaterloo.ca/

I missed most of the competition, however, Sergey and I did drop by to see part of the finals on Saturday. Apparently this year's theme was "Triple Play". I would suggest watching the animation that they provide. It's pretty neat and somewhat amusing. The competition, in general, was pretty neat. It can be boringly described as a bunch of robots attempting to put coloured pyramid shapes on top of "goal posts" to get three in a row and other robots from the other team either doing the same or trying to stop them. I think the animation describes the competition much better than I do.

Anyway, this brings me to the point that I'd been thinking of building a programmable robot for some time now. Thus far, I haven't made any steps that would bring me any closer to that goal. Watching the competition, however, reminded me of that desire. I will have to look into this sometime.. preferably sooner than later.

Last, but not least, I'm sick.. *glares at musicdieu* I think it's his fault.. and if it's not.. well.. *glares anyway*. That's one kick going your way the next time I see you, musicdieu.

Java fun, etc

2005-02-28T18:43:56Z

Ugh. Java again? I haven't had to code in Java since first year. Now I'm told I need to work with the utterly and ridiculously horrible Java I/O?! Ugh. BufferedReader and BufferedWriter. There really is no good way to work with I/O in Java. To read in integers from a file requires a BufferedReader along with a StringTokenizer followed by good old Integer.parseInt().. or some such. Memory does somewhat escape me. All this tedium could be removed by just using C++ and it's wonderful I/O. So simple.. so nice. Sigh.

Anyway, since I'm coding in Java, I needed to get myself the Java 2 SDK. While downloading and installing, I read this interesting article/essay by Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line.

Well back to the assignment now. The Java I/O has yet to be done, as I'm trying to avoid the torture while making progress in other areas instead.

Where to stay...

2005-01-13T05:31:06Z

So far my plans to visit Montreal have not been changed. I had booked a couple nights at the youth hostel for about $55. After telling my parents that, they decided they'd rather have me live in some hotel in the heart of downtown.. well.. 420 Sherbrooke.. I think. That's close. It's between Bleury and City Councillors on Sherbrooke. Hmm. The difference is that the cost will be about $120 *per night*!! Ouch. At least my parents will be reimbursing me. But I still can't believe they want me to do that. Waste of money is what I'd call it. Sigh.

In other news, I've gotten off my lazy ass and installed Ubuntu. I haven't had much time to play around with it yet though. But, things do seem to be running smoothly so far. =)

Anyway.. now that I've managed to get all the cancelling and booking straight.. I'll be off to bed. Good night!

Preempted! =/

2005-01-12T03:14:15Z

Last night attempts to watch a movie with Sergey and mksyunz were thwarted twice. We ended up with a movie that was on VHS since all the movies available at the residence office that were DVDs were crappy. I don't claim that the movie we chose (Mad Max, I think..) was good. Anyway, we first went to the lounge in the residence building I'm living in and watched the movie comfortably for a bit. Then at ~20:00, somebody decided to barge in and "see if a show was on". After determining that the show was indeed about to start, he declared, "It is on!" and sat down. Hmm.. Well, what followed was a clear example of idiocy. We foolishly evicted ourselves in favour of letting the guy watch his TV show (24). Now that we could not watch the movie there, we had to find some other means of finishing the movie. We went to the lounge of where Sergey is staying, followed by the one for where mksyunz is staying. The result was rather disappointing. Eventually I managed to get one of my friends to let me onto the 1st floor of Mackenzie King Village (MKV). We took over their TV and continued watching the movie. However, my friend eventually showed up and kicked us out, since it was his floor and he gets priority. Why? Well, apparently he wanted to watch wrestling. I don't know how wrestling could have higher priority than the movie we were watching.. Anyway, we never finished watching the movie. Oh well.

Today, I ran into a couple of friends after my Stat 331 class. After a bit of idle chatter, I was served up with a foosball challenge. Somebody thought that he could kick my ass at foosball. Well, if I have gained nothing else, I have at least gained some foosball skills during my stay at NITI. They didn't stand a chance. I even beat them in a nice 2 on 1 game. Whee!

Driving
pcolijn: I have heard of this trick as well. I'm more inclined to go through with the silly graduated licensing system of Ontario. However, should I change my mind, I can always try what you've suggested when I find myself in Montreal again next term.

Weekend fun.

2005-01-11T04:40:08Z

Apparently my parents won't let me do any 400 series highway driving until I drive on Hwy. 7.. some "more safe"?? highway close to where I live. Yay for preparation for the wonderful graduated driving license. I only have a G2.. and need to get my full G license sometime before it expires at the end of this year. As a result, I have been doing my "requisite" highway driving practice. That has, thus far, included both Hwy. 7 and a 400 series highway. =)

Anyway, the really annoying thing that happened on Sunday was that part of my false tooth broke off. Wheee! Yeah.. one of my front teeth is half fake because somebody pushed me down a slide and I wacked my teeth right into one of those bars that go across the slide. Ouch. So now I have a nice big hole in the back of that tooth. The damage is not all that apparent from the front. There is a little chip at the bottom corner, but no other hint of dental parts that are missing in action.

Since I'm babbling on about teeth anyway, I should also throw in a complaint about how horrible wisdom teeth are... I guess I should actually go and see if I should be getting any out anytime soon because they are really quite sore and painful by times..

On to other things of interest.. I have recently decided, on a whim, to do some soap carving. I wasn't sure that I'd actually sit down and do it since I'd merely been thinking about how it might be cool. However, I have actually sat my ass down and finished up a carving already. It was mostly done on Sunday and finished up this morning. =) I think it looks awesome considering that this is the first time I've ever carved anything. Maybe some of you will actually see it if you come visit my room, or those in Montreal may see it if I remember to bring it whenever I do go down to visit. And for others who still won't be able to see it.. well.. tough! Actually, anyone can ask for pictures if they want.. I'll be happy to send some.