MindlessCode.net

…but I don’t know it. That is, for “Typing the name of someone you know into Google”. Have you ever done that? Yeah, I have. It gets kind of interesting when you type your own name in:

MindlessCode.net
Yes, I can see all of you who know me going “Taj looking nice and wearing a bow
tie? … All content copyright © 2005 by Taj Morton. All Rights Reserved. …
www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/blog/ - 53k - Jan 29, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

Umm…interesting.

Anybody know of any good how tos on printing with Qt? Send em my way!

…Thunder, and Lightning, oh my.

Rained about 7.5cm (~3in) on Saturday, had lots of wind (blew the cover off our wood pile at 3:30 AM), and some amazing thunder and lightening. Damn, it was very close to us too, shook the windows. There’s currently a flood watch on the rivers around here too. Wow, some weather!

Warning: Totally boring post that means nothing coming up
Fiddle Camps! Yay! Oh, they’re all still 6 months away, *sigh*. We’re planning on going down to the Mark O’Connor fiddle camp in San Diego, CA in July with a few other friends. Yeah, 8 of us in a van driving 1,643.76km (~1021mi). Map Quest estimates 16 hours to San Diego, but it’s probably more like 13–they estimate you’ll drive about 80-90km on the freeway, which is pretty slow…usually the freeway moves at about 100-112km :).

Oh, and Booher Camp starts 2 days after the O’Connor camp ends. Yes, Booher Camp is still on the table–I want to go to Booher Camp, I do! It’s not negotiable! Well, we’ll see, I’ll probably be totally tired and exhausted by time we get there, but hey, it’s fun!

Heh, I broke my low E string for the second time stringing up my Guitar. Very funny, oh very funny.

Finally, some visible progress on QuickI! You can create an invoice, insert it, and load up and invoice and edit it! Yay! I love OOP, I love Qt, I tolerate C++. Now I can only hope that Qt is as portable to Windows as they claim.

XML-RPC seems to be pretty cool. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit, using PHP on the server, and QuteXR as a client. I’m finally getting the hang of it, and maybe I’ll put some XML-RPC stuff into QuickI. Maybe something to pull web orders out of the osCommerce DB and send it down to QuickI to create an invoice from.

Or maybe not, QuickI is taking shape, but very slowly. Qt rocks, C++ doesn’t exactly rock.

The Gaston Fiddle Contest is coming up February 4, yay!

Grrr, here I am rambling again, when I should be coding. Oh well, I’ll be eating dinner in a few minutes, so I guess I’m not going to write any more code…

I was singing “Where have all my files gone?” to the tune of “Where have all the flowers gone?” by Pete Seeger (I think). Kit suggested I shut up and start a geek band. Interesting idea, given I know about 3 Linux geeks who play the kind of music I play, one lives in Washington, and the other 2 in California–I’m in Oregon.

Night guys, this song rocks:

I don’t usually post stuff like this, but I thought it was too good to not post.

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted.
But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that
quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and
get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wiseman and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down,
in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

So if Dad is Pop, how come Mom isn’t Mop?
Author Unknown

Thanks Kara.

I recently won my fight against Qt-4.1 and got it compiled. Porting the existing QuickI code to Qt 3.3 was easy and took about 30 minutes, but then again, the existing code wasn’t much–just a bunch of database queries and obscure logic. Onto the GUI!

OK, I suck at designing anything. GUIs, Websites, Icons, anything–especially GUIs. Of course, I tried to make the new QuickI GUI look pretty and be easy to use…well, this is what I got:

The above is a mockup, for example, the text boxes under Ship/Bill To will be filled with an address from the combo boxes above, the Invoice # will be filled in, etc. But basically, that’s what I’m planning on doing. If you want to save the poor souls who will be using this, and you have some UI ideas, leave a comment, please.

We had our CJS concert today. That means we had to get dressed up in black slacks, white shirts, and these silly things called bow ties. Yes, I can see all of you who know me going “Taj looking nice and wearing a bow tie?”–for those who don’t know me, I’m a blue jeans and t-shirt kind of guy who doesn’t wear anything special unless I really need to(o? I forget…).

Anyway, random snippet of life:
While finding my black slacks, I found what looked like “a white lacy bow thingy with a loop underneath it” to the untrained eye (that would be me). I had no clue what it was, or where it came from. I threw it to my Mom, who looked at it and said:

It looks like something you stole out of a girl’s hair.

Umm, yeah… No, I still don’t know how it got there (or what it is, for the matter!), although I’m guessing that it was in the pocket when I bought the pants from Goodwill, which is where all my clothes come from.

And:

Taj, stop being so self referentially incoherent!

Mary, quoting my violin teacher

…marches on.

I think Planet Autopackage is far too full of intellegent posts from Mike and they should be pushed down the page, replaced with unintellegable jibberish from me. NOT! Well, I guess I’ll add more jibberish anyway, sorry.

Yesterday was pretty good, although I had a dental cleaning thingy and sat around in their office for about 2 hours listening to LugRadio and reading Abyss, the book based off of this movie. Boring, but at least I know my teeth aren’t going to fall out.

After that we went to downtown Corvallis where the Van Buren Bridge was closed because it was flooded (!!!). I’m kicking myself because we didn’t have our camera with us, but it was pretty amazing. The river was at about 6.5 meters (21 feet), and the road had tons of water running over it. One lane was completely covered in water that must of been about 30 cm deep (or, 1 ft), and another was covered in a little water. Also, the golf course was completely flooded, and the OSU college students were rowing in the pond/river that the course had become. The GT has one little dinky picture.

We walked around for a while, crossed both the East and West bridges, and read the signs. Apparently the Van Buren bridge is one of the last bridges built in Oregon that can be disconnected from the mainland and rotated on the pier to allow boats to move up and down the river.

Enought about yesterday, onto today. Great things that happened today:

• Notified by our bank today that our debit card number has been stolen, and someone rang up $1000 at a knitting shop in Chicago.
• Became aware of the fact that the invoicing program that we’ve been using (that I wrote about a year and a half ago), has been randomly not inserting invoices into the SQLite database. This means 2 things; a) We are missing invoices (although we do have printed copies), and b) we have multiple invoices with the same invoice number (some of which went to the same company).

Apparently someone got the number from some place where we placed an order online. So, yeah, it sucks, but all we really have to do is cancel the card and get a new one. Two things amaze me, though:

• The stupidity of the credit card industry
• The fact that they know almost immediately when your card is stolen based of where it’s used

By stupidity, I mean “Why haven’t they introduced two-phase authentication, or whatever it’s called?”. I mean, where you actually need to confirm that you want to bill that amount to your card when you use it on the phone, on the web, or by mail. For example, when you place an order, you would get a “Confirmation Number”, and you would then call a 1-800 number, enter your confirmation number, the amount that could be billed, and a number similar to your PIN. Heck, you could make a web interface too. I don’t think that phising would be a problem, since you would only be entering your “PIN”, but never your card number.

There’s obviouly something wrong with the above, otherwise somebody would have already done it. Although I don’t know what it is.

Instead they introduced CVV, which doesn’t seem to do much except confuse people. It’s susposed to prove that you’re holding onto the card when you call or use it online, but if you physically get ahold of the card (e.g., while working at a restaurant), then the CVV is no good. Same thing if you steal it off of a website (e.g., you work at the company) or take it down when you phone in an order. I won’t even talk about sending your card number by mail–that’s just scary.

But, it is pretty amazing that they can tell when your card has been stolen almost right away–I do have to give them some credit for that.

Now, I had better get back to seriously working on the new QuickI–the old one is currently working like a type-writer.

GMail is at it again:

Shown next to this email:

Address book is all good. Trash still says “Malformed URL trash:/” but not
that big of deal.
System says, “Retrieving data from system is not supported.” and at the top it
says it is a KIOExec error.

Oh, and any ideas about those errors… If you go to trash:/ or system:/ in Konq., everything works fine–it only happens from .desktop files. I even copied trash.desktop from my system to the system with the problem, same error. KDE 3.4, Slack 10.1, Vanilla 2.4.30 Kernel.

Over the past three days, I’ve been trying to compile Qt 4.1.0. Compiling stuff is usually very easy, I know–I may lose my “Geek License” because of this.

Qt, the great cross-platform toolkit (which does everything from networking, to strings, to GUI that works almost everywhere) comes in the form of a 25MB tarball. “No problem”, I thought, “just run ./configure && make && make install.” Well, that probably would have worked, except for two things:

• libpng is broken
• ./configure doesn’t look in the right place for mysql.h.

Luckly, I caught both problems before I compiled everything. On Slackware, libpng does not link against libz, which is required. So, unless you manually pass -lz to gcc, you will get link errors. Oh, and I did get link errors. I’m not really sure if this is a Slackware or libpng problem, but I think it’s libpng–I don’t really see why Slackware would remove the -lz flag. I just modified the libpng test in config.tests/unix/libpng/png.pro and ran qmake.

The other problem was the MySQL test didn’t look in /usr/include/mysql for mysql.h–in fact it didn’t even look anywhere! I just added the following to config.tests/unix/mysql/mysql.pro:
INCPATH += /usr/include/mysql
and reran qmake.

I also editing the src/sql/sql.pro, or whatever it’s called and reran ./configure.
(I should tell Trolltech about these–I guess I will sometime)

Anyway, make should have “just worked” and I should of had a static and shared version of Qt 4.1 on my computer in a few hours. Note all those “should”s in there…

Nobody told me how much space was required to build Qt 4. Apparently the answer is “lots.” First, I tried compiling in /home/taj, I had about 500MB available there, and I figured that that would be enough to compile a 25MB tarball. Boy was I wrong!

I got lots of errors about “final link failed” because of lack of disk space on my home partition. Ugg. After deleting or moving about 2GB of stuff, I still was getting the error. What to do? Well, it turns out I have a 16GB partition that was formatted as NTFS, and was used for storing WAV files from our music recording. I moved the recordings onto xenon, our storage computer, and reformatted the partition. I untarred Qt there, hacked the libpng and mysql test qmake files, and ran ./configure && make.

Guess what I got! “ld: final link failed, no space left on device.” That is on a new, empty 16GB partition! That is, 16GB of files were created from a single 25MB tarball. What was taking up all that room? `du` revealed that the examples/ and demos/ directories were taking up about 15GB! I ran `make install` just for the fun of it, and my / partition, which had about 2GB available on it, gave me “cp: cannot copy, no space left on device”. The examples directory was 2.1GB! That is, the binaries and source of the examples is ~2.1GB!

Wow, that’s a lot! I went back to hacking .pro files. I edited projects.pro and removed both the demos and examples subprojects and reran qmake–sweet! I then ran `make distclean` (for some reason `make clean` left a bunch of stuff sitting on my disk, about 10GB of it, in fact!) in both of those dirs, and reconfigured. ./configure is now chunking along nicely, and my fresh partition “only” has 2.2GB in use.

Yay, yet another compile of Qt, it seems like it takes forever to compile. When I use -j with make (runs multiple compiles at once), I always get linker errors because one part of Qt is done compiling, but it depends on another part which isn’t finished yet. *sigh*

Oh well, it’s worth the wait and screwing around–Qt rocks, and Qt 4 looks like it’s going to rock even more!


taj@moria:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 21G 20G 564M 98% /
/dev/hda3 9.9G 9.9G 0K 100% /home
/dev/hda1 15G 14G 1.1G 93% /mnt/win
/dev/hda6 4.7G 2.9G 1.9G 61% /mnt/music
/dev/hda9 16G 1.7G 15G 11% /mnt/osx

That’s an 80GB HDD, by the way.

Oh, and I have no room in me /home because I’m trying to compile Qt 4.1. It almost finished, but errored with:

ld: final link failed: No space left on device


It’s a laptop, so I can’t just stick another HDD in there and use it with LVM or anything…

*shrugs* — maybe I’ll ditch my osx partition–I was running OS X through PearPC, then I used it to store audio from our recording session (hmm, I should really upload those in MP3s and make them useful…).

Or maybe I’ll delete my useless crap–although I’ve already (re)moved 3GB of it from /home. Qt 4 apparently requires lots of GBs to build… :!?

I just got a new WiFi card that actually works with Linux. I’ve suffered for about 2 years with a Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA card that barely works under Linux. Unfortunately, I have version 2 of the card, which looks exactly the same as version 1 on the outside, but has completely different insides. Anyway, this card used the Atmel WLAN Drivers, which haven’t been updated in about a year. I was never able to get this card to work with 2.6, only 2.4.

So, I bought a Cisco Aironet 340 PCMCIA card, which supposedl works out of the box with Linux. It did–I just needed to rebuild my kernel with the airo_cs module, which I had skipped before. The only physical thing about it that I don’t like is the flashing “Status” and “Activity” lights. Both were quickly removed with a little black tape.

Rock on, WiFi!