MindlessCode.net

Wow, what a great Christmas…I think 15 CDs landed in our house this Christmas, as well as a Banjo, and a few good books. Artists that we’ve got now:
Nickel Creek (Why Should the Fire Die)
Chris Thile (Stealing Second)
Mike Marshall
Pete Seger
Mark O’Conner
North Mississippi Allstars
And lots, lots more I haven’t even listened to yet!

My computer is ripping as fast as it can…

I love this kind of stuff, even though this story is kind of sad (hey, it’s happened to before, and it’s not fun!)

Anyway, this guys blog is really good if you’re interested in what makes a good UI. Although he seems to be a Gnome freak–and I don’t exactly agree with the Gnome HIG–he does have some very good points and suggestions.

My brother and I recently recorded some music for a CD to send out for Christmas. That is, we used Cakewalk 2 to overdub four instruments using one crappy uni-directional (we could only play one instrument at a time) mic from Radio Shack on a mic stand that is really a music stand turned upside down, listened to ourselves through a ViaVoice headset, and processed the waves with a SiS SI7012 card with a Realtek ALC200 chip. Wow!

The audio quality is pretty good (not sure about the music quality, though!). Due to copyrights, I wasn’t able to uploaded two (very awesome) songs, but the rest of them are availabe as OGGs under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. Yes, they are podsafe.

Photos of our very snazzy, hi-tech studio (hover for captions):

United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.
– Isaac Asimov

Thanks /usr/games/fortune

I use GMail, so I get to see the email-text-based ads that it displayes to my right. It doesn’t bother me–it’s certainly a lot better some (*wink*, *nod*) webmail companies do.

Here’s what I got today next to this emai:

I think I lost my Firefox bookmarks when we updated. Is there anyway of
recovering??

Sorry all you Planet Autopackage readers, nothing exciting about AP in this one, other than I’m sick again… Beta 2 landed on the FTP server a few days ago…Announce + Instructions here.

I asked SupremeCenter (our web host) tech-support today why they could not provide scp/sftp services, even though they provide SSH. Here is the reply:

Hello Taj,

our administrators have informed me that we cannot provide scp/sftp at the moment because the architecture of our system doesn’t allow it.

In case you would like to inquire about something else in the future, please let us know.

Umm…huh? /me smells lazy sysadmins
I am formulating a reply now.

In other worlds, I have been working on rewriting QuickI (our custom invoicing app) in C++ and Qt. Qt is an awesome library, and C++ is an OK language, I guess. I mean, what kind of language doesn’t come with a decimal data type? No, not a floating point data type, a decimal for storing money and weights… I looked around on Google a bunch, but couldn’t find ANY that were open source or public domain. IBM sells one for $3,000. So, I’m having to write one…it’s a good exercise, but I wish I could spend my time actually writing code instead of screwing around with decimal number…

Autopackage CVS (which will turn into 1.2) is chugging along nicely–but as always we could use more testers! Please swing by IRC of the forums for instructions on testing. Thanks!