10/6

holy crap.

Now this is some wild stuff. i knew 6.5 was moving towards more *nix type functionality, but check this out:

One showing the familiar dsrepair, the other the regular console, sshing to the box from my laptop. It’s really about the little things in life.

legal stuff sucks.

Forget the last patch, it uses mp4.h, which is MPL. Muine is GPLed. See here for why this goes boom. sigh.

new patch to follow soon using mp4ff instead.

Ended up, through varied means, acquiring some .m4a files on my iPod, which I of course then copied to my laptop for listening there. Only to find that muine didn’t do the whole “AAC” thing yet. One hour of moderately frustrating hacking later, and it’s working (with the gstreamer backend, Xine backend not tested at all). Mailed the patch off to the muine list, and posting here for completeness sake. Already had one confirmation of it working for someone. hurrah.

While I was upstate, my brother and I were working on a fun wireless project to link our folks’ house up to the next closest neighbor that can get DSl in the middle of nowhere that is where they live. Unfortunately, we never got it working while we were there. Work will resume again this summer, hopefully. We were using two pre-assembly soekris boards + waterproof cases sold by Metrix. Very cool kits, if you don’t feel like doing all the nitty gritty. Includes the POE injectors, etc, etc. In the process, we ended up traisping throw the woods with a laptop, a 200mW Senao card, and a 14dBi antenna in the snow. Pictures of the craziness: #1, #2.

For good measure, what happens when stir sticks go missing: coffee stirrer reborn.

So, i finally got back to pondering lago last night after getting home far too late from work. I’ve come to the conclussion that I actually need to start over, having now created a completely convoluded, non-extensible, horrible code base.

Having admitted that, i started thinking about how it could be done better. Based on problems i ran into with the previous iteration:

1. MVC: Gotta do it. The previous code was horribly coupled between all the different items. I don’t have any UML diagrams or anything yet, but i’ve got some nice sketches on pieces of paper that make up for it. With that in mind, there are several other key points that go along with this necessary code division.
2. Rulesets: Different rulesets should be considered from the start. I didn’t do this before, and ended up with an impossible to handle task.
3. Pluggable UI: It’s feasible and possible to divide it up so that you can actually runtime plug on different UIs. Should be compilable with no Gtk#, and get you a console app, or even at runtime just do “lago –gui” or “lago –console” and start a different type of UI. Lets some sick motha do a SWF gui if they want to at some point.
4. abstract Player class: This is the one piece i’d realized in the last iteration, necessary to make network play, etc easy to add to this.

I’ve got most of the M of MVC done, and the beginnings of the C infrastructure (C as in Controller, not the language).
On the Gtk# GUI side of things, I’m going to say screw Gnome.Canvas, and do my own subclassed widget this time, with the hopes to make life nicer/more portage (yes, yes, windows blah blah).

Aaaahhh. Fresh starts.

well, i’m finally back to “Taking Care of Business” now that i’m back from a wonderfully relaxing vacation upstate. Spent most of the time with Stacey, snowboarding (i didn’t die, yay me), enjoying hicksville, doing fun things with wireless (no success yet), etc. Received many fun tech toys thanks to the fam, especially my brother.

Things I need to get working now:

• Cardbus Philips Bluetooth Adapter - This worked for eric under 2.4, something broke in the 2.6 serial driver.
• Cardbus USB-2.0 Adapter - no-name manufacturer, causes 2.6.10 to oops and disable irq 11 (on which my sound, intel nic, etc all reside).
• Random Belkin PCI 802.11b card - Admtek chipset. Given to me just to taunt me.
• C# classes for dealing with iTunesDB file format - New 40GB iPod. gtkpod works, but the obsessive in me wants to code some and make a nice gtk# gui to go with it

In Gentoo news, i’ve squashed the dotnet bugs down to only 23 as of this post. Feeling a lot more comfortable about the mono-1.0.5-r{2,3} ebuilds, that now build mcs + libs as well as the mono runtime. Not yet sure what i’m gonna do for the amd64 folks though, they’re mostly SOL? with no JIT. I’m slowly getting closer to my nirvana: a stable mono, gtk-sharp, muine, etc. Oh the day that is so.

Stacey is in italy for a two week vacation. She’s off skiing and flirting with cute Italian guys in Gucci G-strings, and i’m stuck working in NYC. Need i say more?

And finally, for your viewing pleasure, tiny stackable chairs:
Formation One: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.
Formation Two (Credit to Eric Johanson for construction): #1, #2.