Hat tip: IO Error

* Oregon
Having never really been out of western Oregon (in a car, anyway), central and eastern Oregon were really very different that the western half (duh, I suppose). In central Oregon the land along the Columbia river was amazing. Sheer cliffs dropping down 10s of feet from beautiful sloping prairies on the N side of the Columbia, and amazing cliffs 100s of feet tall with tons of tali at the bottom of them. Water falls dropping 100’s of feet down these cliffs and crashing into rivers. Eastern Oregon was also beautiful with rolling hills, sage brush, and no trees for miles.

* Idaho
I have no idea–it was at night.

* Utah
The mountains we drove through on I-80 were amazing, with huge rock cuts on either side of the freeway. We also passed thousands of acres of “desert”–sage brush.

* Wyoming was very similar to Utah, with mountains and desert (even more that Utah). In eastern Wyoming we saw a “huge” wind-farm that was generating power for California. I’m sorry, but I think wind-farms are pretty, and I have no idea what people are talking about when they say that they “pollute the landscape”. If anything, it’s the oil field and refineries that do that. (Yes, we did pass a few refineries, but I didn’t get a picture for comparison.) We also met someone who collects dinosaur fossils–apparently Wyoming is full of the things. He gave us a fossilized dinosaur bone. Thanks!

* Nebraska
We sped through this state, only stopping for gas and lunch. The desert looks all the same from the road, but when you actually get out and walk around in it you realize that it’s actually very diverse with many different kinds of moss, flowers, and rocks (for those of us who are interested in moss, flowers, and rocks!). Trees are nowhere to be found, except tiny shrubs.

* Iowa
Ahh…this looks a little more like home! We started seeing green rolling hills, corn planted in terresces. many more trees (they’re also closer together!), as well as a few more wind mills. After we made it out of Iowa I went to sleep–I have no idea what Illinois or Indiana looked like.

* Ohio
Ahh, it’s the east–we have toll roads. It’s starting to look like the Eastern US here. I’m seeing lots of trees, water, and grass. We drove through Cleavland which is full of (old) factories made of solid brick (including the smoke stacks–made of round brick!). We stopped at Lake Michigan for lunch, which is huge and blue.

* New York
We avoided New York City like the plauge (hey, we’re from a small town!) and went through northern New York. It’s very nice up there with the interstate going through forests and farm land. Nice!

OK, so we’re here–it’s been a nice break-neck tour of the US, but I wouldn’t trade in anything for Philomath/Corvallis OR. We saw lots of spots that we would have liked to stop at (if we had time…). After the wedding, we are going to meander our way back across…fun!

The images are displayed through a PHP script that I wrote. If anyone else want’s it, just let me know and I’ll email it to you (taj at wildgardenseed dot com).

The play went really well (considering we had only 5.25 practices)–really, really well. I was happy :). Thank’s to everyone who helped.

The set’s (although you can’t see them all in the pictures) were awesome! They totaled something like 4.5 refrigerator boxes (see, that’s what happens when Kit and I are unsupervised). They wrapped around the whole front of the room (as Maria called it–”OmniMax”, although I have no idea what an OmniMax is :P).

Photo of (almost) everyone: From R to L:
Teresa H. (Servant), Abby H. (Lucentio), Maria H. (Bianca), Phillip H. (Hortensio), Kit M. (My brother–Petruchio), Joseph K. (Señor Minola), Monica H. (Katherina), Me (As a priest–I was also Gremio).

For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis that I wrote:

The Taming of the Shrew, written by William Shakespeare in 1594.

Baptista Minola, a rich merchant who lives in Padua, Italy has two daughters, Bianca and Katherina. They both are old enough to marry. Bianca has many suitors, but Katherina doesn’t because she has the temperament of a shrew. There are rumors that Minola will give a lot of money to the man who will marry Katherina. Señor Minola also has a rule; no one will marry Bianca until Katherina is married.

Hortensio are Gremio are two of Bianca’s suitors. Hortensio is young, and Gremio is old and wealthy. Because of Minola’s rule, they make a deal with each other to find a suitor for Katherina. Hortensio runs into his friend Petruchio who is in desperate need of money and is willing to marry Katherina. Minola says that he will give preference to anyone who can find a good tutor for his daughters. Gremio finds Lucentio, a scholar who has come to study in Pauda. He introduces him to Minola and expects to be rewarded.

Petruchio marries Katherina and wears out her head-strong manner with his constant nagging, badgering, and criticism.

Much to the dismay of Gremio and Hortensio, the scoundrel scholar Lucentio wins the heart of Bianca. When Hortensio learns that Lucentio will marry Bianca, he rushes off to find a rich widow to marry.

At the banquet celebrating the marriages, Hortensio and Minola ask Petruchio how life is now that he is married to such a difficult wife. Petruchio says that he doesn’t think that Katherina is very difficult and says he can prove it by placing a bet as to which of their new wives will come when called. Both Bianca and Hortensio’s wife refuse to come, but Katherina comes right away, bringing Bianca with her and admonishes her to be patient and considerate with her husband.

As for the script, email me (I only have the English version).

Kit and I placed 2^nd in the twin (duet) division and then tied for 6^th in the Junior division. That is, we got exactly the same score (770) (there were 5 judges). That’s bizarre :).

There was also a 3-way tie for 8^th. In the twin, there was 1 tie that had to be broken, as well as 2 ties that were not broken. There was also a tie in the Open that had to be broken. I’ve never been to a contest with so many ties!

Also, our friend Alex Hargraves (age 13) placed 1^st in the Open! Congratulations Alex!

I did have fun. It’s so fun to hear all those good players–as well as jam with them.

Then, on Sunday we have our Spanish play (pictures may arrive…), then on Tuesday we take off across the country!

Also, we need as many people as possible to test Autopackage 1.0.2 RC1. If you can lend a hand, please drop by #autopackage on irc.freenode.net and ask how to test RC1. Thanks!

Also, in need of reading material? Ask Google! Apparently, they recommend Solaris 9 Security…interesting.

Also, we got the forums setup for Autopackage, drop by!

In other news, I’ve been redesigning the Wild Garden Seed website using just CSS. Internet Explorer sucks! It has the worst CSS support that I’ve seen :(.

Also, we’ve been working on our spanish play (The Taming of the Shrew). We (my brother and I) painted 2 sets. One was a street that was made out of 3.5 refrigerator boxes (using two sets from [Link would exist but blog posts lost :(]last year’s set, The Pied Piper). The whole set ended up spanning almost the whole width of the room!

Also, the Oregon Old Time Fiddler’s state contest is coming up on the 21^st. Cool! After that, we’ve got our spanish play (the 22^nd), and then we’re taking off across the country (driving) to a wedding of my cousin in Rhode Island. After the wedding, we’ll be making our way back to Oregon going through all sorts of neat places! I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post or reply to email, but I’ll try to post whenever we show up in a hotel with internet access!

This would mean that we woun’t have to mess with the GTK apps in the Qt event loop (I think), and we certainly wouldn’t need any C bindings for KDE dialogs. Also, we could detect on the fly what DE is currently in use, and show whatever dialogs would make sense. For example, if the user is running GEdit under KDE, then KDE dialogs are show. However, if the same user was running Gnome, then Gnome/GTK+ dialogs would be shown. All this without recompiling the binary!

The problem? This would certainly slow down displaying dialogs (how much, I can’t say). The big problem is that I haven’t been able to get DBUS to work on Slack :(.

Also, I had to whip up a shell script to check if Firefox was running or not (you can’t run /usr/bin/firefox <url> is Firefox is already running–it brings up it’s stupid profile box, you also can use -remote if Firefox isn’t running…)

In case you want you want to know how to do it, the specfile is here: http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/autopackage/specs/firefox.apspec

UPDATE :: I have pulled this version of the Autopackage because fooling around with people’s systems isn’t nice. You can always find the latest Firefox Autopacakge at here.

Anyways, I didn’t like the new HHG2G (Listen Here)

Cool!

I quote (typo’s are intentional–they’re in the PDF, emphasis it mime)

COMPLAINT
The Defendant FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION INC. has entered into contracts and otherwise conspired and agreed with individual software authors and commercial distributors of commodity software products such as Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. to artificially fix the prices charged for computer software programs through the promotion and use of an adhesion contract that was created, used and promoted since at least the year 1991 by the FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION INC. This license is known as the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. The price fixing scheme implemented with the use of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE substantially lessens the ability of individual software authors to compete in a free market through the creation, sale and distribution of computer software programs.

DAMAGES
The Defendant Daniel Wallace is educated in the art and science of physics and computer programming. The Defendant’s ability to work and create commercial computer programs is dependent upon a market free of restraints on trade through price-fixing schemes. The rapid adoption of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE in schemes to deflate or eliminate the free market valuation of computer programs threatens to diminish or destroy the ability of the Defendant to earn future revenues in the career field of computer programming.

REQUEST FOR RELIEF
The Defendant respectfully requests the Court grant a permanent injunction prohibiting the promotion or use of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE by the FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION INC. to artificially control the the pricing of computer software programs in the course of commerce and conducted in the United States.

Defendant FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION INC. is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization based in the State of Maine with mailing address:
[…]
Boston, Massachusetts, 02111-1307

Wow, now there are some statements! Oh, and BTW, just for the record, the Free Software Foundation is not an incorporated business (Inc=Incorporated). The FSF is actually a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization. According the the claim, they are based in Maine, but they’re actually based in Massachusetts…sounds like someone needed to do some fact checking :P.

Actually, you should read it, it’s very funny–I think I’ll print it out, make photo copies, and pin it up to the telephone poles with a sign above it saying “Help stomp out communism!” :> No, really… (/me sighs–what is the world coming too)

These are all great books, and you should read them.

You can never catch a tortise on a piece of paper. –Taj’s Interpretation of Zeno’s Paradox

Today I modified the blog theme a little bit (added the “Little Buttons”, “Syndicate”, and “Code is Poetry” sections) as well as made this monster valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (WordPress has a way of screwing with my posts and improperly nesting tags).

I’ve also been hacking out mime-types for Autopackage. Currently, we’re clocking at 3 different standards (KDE, Gnome, and FreeDesktop.org).

KDE implements mime-types with two .desktop files. One that connects a file to a mime-type (e.g., “Files with *.html are of type text/html), and another file that says “Open files that have a mime-type of text/html with Mozilla Firefox).

Gnome implements mime-types with two files as well. These files are in a very strange format (for which I have never been able to find documentation) and have all sorts of weird stuff (e.g., “short_list_application_ids_for_intermediate_user_level”) in them which make no sense.

The third standard is the spec provided by FreeDesktop.org. This one is at least documented. The problem? Nobody uses it. Gnome supports it (in version 2.10, I beleive), but KDE doesn’t (and has no plans to, AFAIK).

So, to be able to get mime-types to work the developer has to write 5 mandatory as well as 1 maybe-not-required file. Autopackage needs to figure out how to install them–it sucks.

Some people think I never do anything but program–they’re almost right. Actually, I’ve found that OpenTTD is a highly addictive game. There’s an autopackage which makes it very easy to install.

Also, we’ve been painting the scenes for our Spanish play (The Taming of the Shrew). The street scene is made out of 3½ refrigerator boxes (1.5 scenes from last years play, The Pied Piper+ 2 more new boxes). Here’s a pic from when it was still under development:

See, I do do something other than program!

The solution: Bad Behavior. It looks at the HTTP headers of people visiting your blog and then profiles them with a list of known spambots. If it thinks you’re a spambot, it keeps you from posting comments. Let me know if it keeps you out…