I made a goodbye stencil:

The little red text says “Goodbye City Road.” The ink ran really badly on the fairly shiny door paint. I should have sanded it quickly first, but never mind.

So today I’ve done that and copied all my files off my big storage drive in the server. I need to convert it from ext2 to fat and then insert it into my/Louise’s win2k machine, Julia. I’ve got 28gb of stuff on that drive and it’s taking forever to copy over.

Louise and I have started thinking about packing, not a lot, but a tiny bit. We went in the shed and found a big box and I have used the word “packing” more than a couple of times. Tomorrow the fun really begins…

The Big Day is getting closer. I’ve just been to the pub to say a final goodbye to all the people I used to work with at Soup. On Tuesday I said goodbye to Tai Chi and we went for a meal with many of my closest friends at Pizza Express. So I’ve bid farewell to almost everybody, just the few close friends to say a final goodbye to. I think I’ll be back down the pub tonight to finish off, leaving only City Road and Thickthorn really.

All this saying goodbye belies the fact that we’ve got a fuckload of packing and general sorting out to do. We still don’t have any idea how we’re going to get proper TV (i.e. more than terrestrial) and we don’t really even know if we’re going to be able to fit everything into our new house! We’ve got a van sorted and Louise will be driving down as well. After that it’s very much a blank. I’ve got to return my library books…

Hmmm, slightly scared, slightly sad, slightly confused, fairly excited. My prevailing emotion is one of standoffishness. It will happen next week. Until then, I can’t really be bothered :-)

I brought Paragraph Generator back to life! Paragen is old, probably four years now, maybe five. Really it’s pretty simple as well, it’s more for nostalgia’s sake than anything else :-)

I’ve often wanted to improve it so that it has a better chance of making sense, but, since I can never remember which ones are verbs and which ones are adjectives, I think I might stick to what I’m good (better) at.

Well, I applied for a job that might involve some assembler. I haven’t really done much assemler, aside from polling devices on a Motorola 68k. I had a look at assembler on the PowerPC, hence my Mac (and the GameCube!). I came to the conclusion that no-one should ever write assembler. Fast as it may be it does not fit into projects and is uselessly hard to repurpose. Give me C++, a good optimizing compiler and some profiling tools anyday. That way of developing will probably yield code that is just as fast and will certainly leave you with a manageable project.

So instead I thought about having another go with Objective-C. Finding those renders that I posted yesterday made me think that it would be cool to revive that project under OS X. Turns out that it’s actually quite easy to do. The Objective-C OO Api for OS X, Cocoa, provides a hierarchy of classes. To get something done you just subclass one. So I subclassed NSOpenGLView into BasicRenderer and implemented a drawRect function with a handful of OpenGL calls in it. Trouble is, it doesn’t seem to work. Yet…

I’ve added a new content section. It’s a bunch of images I created by randomly creating geometry with OpenGL calls and then dumping the output. It’s not very sophis, but the images are quite nice. I did them about 18 months ago, during the winter at Clarence Road.

The sharp-eyed amongst you will also notice that I’ve plonked a new background in here at the journal. Whilst I’m quite proud of the texture which is about 7kb and tiles really nicely, it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the imagery. I’m going to replace it with something a bit more technical.

Well, I just sent my l33t points through the roof. I went to Greg’s to fix his SuSE install. We fixed it and hadn’t even spent five minutes discussing how evil KDE was before we decided to format his disk and install Debian. It took us all fucking night.

Why did Greg have SuSE in the first place when Debian is a far superior distro? Well, because Debian sucks to install. It asks too many challenging questions and it doesn’t give the user enough context information during the dpkg-configure phase. Worst of all, if you manage to get a working base system installed you’re suddenly left on your own! No networking, if you get networking there’s no DHCP. There’s no XFree, let alone GNOME. To fix all this you head to APT, Debian’s killer app (it makes the OS, really). You try to install an app and it works, but this doesn’t help. Greg and I tried installing a GNOME app or two to see if the dependency tree would require the install of a full system — a technique that has worked for me before. But not this time. We were forced to spend literally hours trawling through packages.debian.org, finding packages, installing them, seeing what bits of the system came along.

In case you’re wondering if you do something like:

apt-get install x-window-system-core sawfish gdm gnome-control-center gnome-session galeon nautilus evolution

You should get a fairly functional desktop system. But this won’t give you a fully usable Linux system, just a GUI really. From there you’ve still got to install the little things, like GIMP, Vim or sudo.

What was wrong with the task system? It served a purpose and I can’t see what the problem was with it all. Woody (Debian 3) has a tasksel app but the only tasks included are useless. One was called desktop system, but this failed to installed the GUI components we desired.

Bad show Debian volunteers.

I can barely move my hands now…