Aidan Delaney’s weblog

Still on the exam countdown, Friday’s the day. I can’t wait to be finished and I’ll be home to good food and beer on Saturday.

I got in two hours early this morning (bus schedule is infrequent during summer) and decided to take a study break. So I browsed to breakmygentoo.org and snagged their gnome-volume-manager ebuilds, cooked them up and started the service. The result is


balor@navi ~ $ gnome-volume-manager

now that mightn’t look like much, but it works. When I plug in my USB pendrive it recognises it, when I plug it out, the event is also recognised. It seems that the planned integration of gnome-volume-manager into Gnome 2.8 will actually work. For the first time on a GNU/Linux desktop we’ll have the “real” device hotplugging that Apple OS X and Windows 2k+ have enjoyed. One more step twords world domination

I’ll not play with this any further, but when I get home I’m gonna try and get all the nice GUI stuff around it working and post some screenshots.

Update:

Getting the GUI goodness was easy

Lori’s sister Diane got engaged to Paul on Saturday. Congratulations to both of them

As ever it was an eventful weekend (not). Mainly studied but my parents arrived in Tarragona for a weeks holiday yesterday. They brought me out for my first decent meal in a while. I really don’t like canteen food.

Four days to go to my exam, everyone is getting a bit nervous. No matter how much I study I still don’t feel prepared.

I havn’t posted in about a week which must be nearly a record around here. I’m very busy at the moment with study for my exam in 7 days. This time next Friday I’ll be half way through a three hour exam. I can’t wait to be finished. So I’ve no other real news, except by brother emailed me with a progress report on his adventures in Europe. Seemingly he’s hit some of Europe’s main cultural highlights Champs Elisee, Amsterdam and he’s heading for Old Europe (Poland). Sounds like he’s having fun.

One of the major improvements in Gnome 2.6 was the inclusion of GtkFileChooser in GTK 2.4. The new widget is very nice, but after using Xdiv today I think it could be improved. I’m not going to explain the semantics of the Xdvi file chooser dialog. Needless to say, it looks like hell but is easy to use, once you ignore it’s pure uglyness. So here are some screenshots and some mockups of that a GTK FileChooser + Xdvi extensions would look like.

• The first is the current GTK FileChooser dialog,
• the second is the current Xdvi file chooser dialog,
• the third is a superimposition of the Xdvi functionality (that I like) on GTK FileChooser,
• the fourth is my (pretty shit) rendering of what GTK FileChooser + Xdvi stuff would look like.

As you can see the resultant widget is quite large, but given a larger screen I’d happily put up with it as I think it’s easier to use.

Earlier today it looked like Maynooth CS department (my home) fell of the internet. No POP, no HTTP and definatly none of those secure protocols like SSH. But it came up after morning coffee time. There was also some wierdness with the minds.cs.may.ie box after the rest of the network came up. I was on minds.may.ie (which is actually ego.cs.may.ie, same subnet) but couldn’t ping minds.cs.may.ie even though I was guaranteed (by a reliable source) that the box was actually up and running. I’ll see if I can dig up an explination later, it was all quite strange.

It’s come to my attention that most of my friends are mis-interpreting my blog. Unfortunatly I am not out on the beer all the time. In fact I’ve got classes for at least four hours every day (except weekends). In the evenings I study and I go jogging on Saturday mornings in order to wake up so I can do more study. It’s hard to keep a consistent work rate (especially in this weather) but I am doing so. Tonight will be the first night in three weeks that I won’t do at least two hours work.

So to Dez and all the naysayers…now you know what’s going on However my studies of Petri nets or descriptional complexity are not all that interesting to read about. Though if people want to hear about it I can rave on about communicating distributed grammar systems and the like? I’ve really come to appreciate the mathematical elegance of some of these formalisms.

Called Lori on Friday, she suggested that I go out and relax for a while. So Szliard and I got two litre bottles of cheap beer and went to Mihai’s place. We drank and watched some Moldovan rock videos. Laura (a Welsh girl) then called over and we all headed for Vacueria for a gig. The band ended up being shit, but there was a pool table and we met Remco, Carlos, Benoit and Massimo.

We left to go to Pernil, which (I’m told) is the cheapest bar in Tarragona. We bought the obligitory 1l beer’s (which we’re better than Estrella Damn) for €3 and stood out on the street talking. I got talking to some Austrians and figured out that my German is better after a few beers. Remco and I then ensured that some poor American chick knew exactly what Europeans thought about her political class. Stupid girl has never voted, and doesn’t see a point. We had a few quiet words over that

Benoit then suggested going to Sala Zero. I’d never been there before, but it rocks. It must be the first place I’ve been to where the DJ has played Beck’s “looser”. It wasn’t the usual Port style shit euro-dance. Anyway Remco, Carlos and I ended up outside Sala Rolfus drinking beer untill about 4:30. We unfortunalty lost Szliard on the way

Got a fair bit of study done on Saturday and Sunday, I think I’m really starting to understand a lot of this stuff. I also watched the Portugal and Spain matches in Mihai’s, though with a _lot_ less alcohol than the previous night. And to round off a fantastic weekend, England lost. Absolutely brilliant last three minutes by Zidane. A cracking free kick and a well placed peno.

So we’ve got 8 hours of lectures today and tomorrow, but I think we’re going to watch the Holland -v- Germany match in Remco’s tomorrow night.

I found “the other” music shop in Tarragona. I bought the classic Alice in Chans self titled album (a.k.a. Tripod, after the three legged dog on the cover) and NOFX “War on errorism” because the title sounded funny. It’s actually decent, but some of the lyrics are slightly corny.

For those of you still grappeling with spatial Nautilus, it takes a while. You have to reorganise your data a little to take advantage, but when you do, the results can be this good.

I don’t remember being able to do that with a hirearchical browser. Nautilus remembers the shape of the window for that directory, so every time I open that directory it’ll look like that. Makes it easy to find files

Tried to book tickets home this morning, but my credit card is maxed out. I’ll ask Lori to buy them for me later, might just be easier thaqt way.

I spent two hours walking around Tarragona yesterday looking for a music shop. The city has about 250,000 inhabitants but (I’m told) only two music shops. Both of which suck.

Check out good news on the Gnome front, looks like DBUS and HAL might make it into 2.8