Aidan Delaney’s weblog

The dodgy evoting system proposed for Ireland had been cancelled. Yay!! Good work ICTE. It’s been mentioned on slashdot, and I run the webserver…I’m waiting for slashdot to bring it on. I’ll post on how bad the slashdotting was over the weekend.

I’m sick but happy. We’re in the middle of our course on push down automaton. It was the course I was looking most forward to sitting, and it hasn’t dissapointed me. Work on Mitext is slow as I am doing more studying than hacking. I will (hopefully) be away on Saturday (my main hacking day) in some place in Catalunya as the Uni organises cheap trips to places of interest for foreign students. Makes me think that if we were really interested in promoting the Irish language that, we too, would offer free courses in Irish and organise cheap cultural trips.

I found what I think is a deep bug in Gnome on Sunday. I reported it yesterday and I hope someone will get back to me soon on it, at least to confirm/deny it’s existance. I wanted to do some more investigation on it last night but decided that I should study instead.
I got Ryanair tickets home for a weekend yesterday. I’m coming home between 21st of May and the 24th of May. I made a mistake in booking and booked a return ticket for Monday 24th instead of Sunday 23rd. I doubt it’ll be a big problem though as the flight is to Reus, so I’ll only miss two hours of lectures.

There are some more pictures in my Image Gallary. Just to show you how crazy these Spaniards actually are. The whole idea is to build a pyramid of people and send a really young kid up to the top to stick their hand in the air. It’s all in aid of the festival of Saint Jordi.

Apart from the Castells on Friday night, we played football with Prof. Mitrana on Saturday and went to the beach on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t get burnt thanks so the factor 60 suncream that Lori gave me.

Still writing my little text editor in C#, I’m trying to include some Nunit tests and change from using Gtk widgets to Gnome ones. I should have somthing working by next Friday. It’s difficult as the mono documentation is not complete and Monodevelop still has a few bugs.

I don’t usually complain about food. I’ve eaten quite a few “strange” things over here such as rice in squid ink, baby octupus and cuttlefish (which is really nice in garlic butter), however I had pigs cheek (jaw bone) today. It was catagorically awful. I honestly don’t know what they did to it to make it taste so bad. Anyway, I’ve put up some pictures of Lori and myself at Port Adventura.

Today is a mildly context sensitive day, it’s 20,04,2004 and Iuri is 33 (which itself is mildly-context sensitive) and he’s throwing a party in someone elses house I’m not really in the mood to go as I know I have 6 hours of lectures tomorrow, but I’ll probably go for one.

I’m finding the stuff on context sensitive grammars really interesting. It’s also answering many questions I had about context-free grammars and even real-time automata. Our current Prof. is staying with us in the student apartments. He used to play for Star Bucharest and want’s us to play soccer on Saturday. Should be fun.

Dave informed me that he didn’t own the copyright for the image I used on my webpage. I’ve since changed it. The new banner images is cut out of a picture I took of the University building in Tarragona.

I decided to take a look at some of the next generation GNU/Linux stuff. Some of the more interesting projects are DBUS/HAL, cairo and everything being done with evolution/dashboard and mono.

I’ve been running mono for a month or so and have written some simple apps (Hello world etc..) I’ll probably do more with it in the next few weeks. Its Gnome bindings are really nice. They seem to suit object oriented programming more than the Python or Java bindings do, I also like the way glade interacts with the object metadata. It’s just easy.

So I had a look at DBUS/HAL, which is nice but a bit rough at the moment. It works, screenshots are here. You can see that it correctly identifies my USB device as being a USB 1.1 device.

Dashboard is a little more user-oriented (at the moment). I couldn’t get the evolution backends working as that required compiling evolution-data-server, which I had no wish to do. So I got dashboard working with the epiphany, disk and gaim backends. Given that I don’t use Gaim (I will when the MiNDS> jabber server is up) there was little info it could bring up for me, but it did bring back interesting data anyway.

Cairo looks cool too, but I’m too tired and I want to get out into the sun. I’ll compile X.org’s X server on Monday and report back on it.

My “editorial” take is that most of this stuff is 6 months from 1.0 and 9 months from integration into good distributions. I’ll be happy to see C# becoming the de-facto language on top of the Gnome platform. If you look at what has been done with Java on GNU/Linux you’ll find little of interest to the desktop user. Novell/Ximian have been doing fantastic work with C# bindings for Gnome and have a GPL’ed runtime engine.

In summary we’re about 1.2 years from a truly usable GNU/Linux. By this statemet I mean that in 1.2 years MS and Apple will be trying to catch up with us. We’re currently behind MS only in hotpluggable devices, which DBUS/HAL will solve. The Gnome HIG has brought us up to reasonable parity with Apple, but HAL can help with system configuration like configuring a network interface, which is currently easier on OS X.

As astute and regular readers can see, I’ve chaged the design of the site. In fact I’ve changed the design of my MiNDS> site and my blog so that they match.

Many thanks to Dave for the design.

In other news, Lori left at 06:00 this morning, which sucks. I’m in for another day of context free grammars with Prof. Kudlek. I’m learning a hell of a lot from him. His way of explaining things is to produce a rigurous mathematical proof and go through it. It’s a breath of fresh air from my undergraduate days where explainations were similes or metaphors.

I’ve got loads of pictures of Tarragona. The first ones I took myself
http://ego.cs.may.ie/~balor/tarragona/index.html
but these ones
http://ego.cs.may.ie/~balor/parade
were taken by a friend (I forgot my camera)

enjoy

I’ve got loads of pictures of Tarragona. The first ones I took myself
http://ego.cs.may.ie/~balor/tarragona/index.html
but these ones
http://ego.cs.may.ie/~balor/parade
were taken by a friend (I forgot my camera)

enjoy