sugardeath

And seems very unconventional when compared to C or Java or even Perl.

I downloaded a notification program called Mumbles that takes advantage of dbus messages to display things. Mumbles requires that plugins be written to catch these dbus messages so that they can be interpreted and displayed. It came with a pretty crappy Pidgin plugin that only showed notifications for messages received, and it only showed the generic Pidgin icon. So far I’ve got it displaying typing, idle, status change, and log on/off messages. It also displays icons based on whether the buddy is from AIM, Jabber, or Facebook. I might add the other protocols, shouldn’t be hard (though some may have some oddities like AIM*), I just need accounts on said protocols to make sure I’m getting everything right.

*Pidgin likes to some stupid things regarding its dbus messages: Every sort of message except for the typing one return a PurpleBuddy object, a “name” string, and other various variables, which I can get a whole ton of information from. BuddyTyping(), however, returns a PurpleAccount object and a “name” string. PurpleAccount has “alias” and “name” attributes like PurpleBuddy, which works fine for Facebook. But for some reason pidgin_interface.PurpleBuddyGetAlias(PurpleAccount buddy) returns a blank string, and “name” is their screenname, not the alias I gave them in my buddylist. What makes things worse is that PurpleAccount is a child of PurpleBuddy, and so it seems nigh impossible to get the alias from the mere account object. So I get things like “Sellers signed onto AIM” and “$PAULS_SCREENNAME_HERE is typing…”

Kinda dumb.

Also the Pidgin devs, in their infinite wisdom, decided to throw BuddyStatusChanged() twice, but only when a buddy goes away and only for buddies on AIM. Thankfully! the function returns not only the current status, but the previous status as well. And the “duplicate” throw has both the statuses (statii?) the same, which made for an easy, albeit somewhat frustrating, fix.

Anyway, yeah. I’d say I’ve been doing good with dbus and Python having only started getting my hands dirty a mere eleven hours ago.

And the only thing I’m noticing is swelling in my tonsils, which were GREAT for the past few days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shields_(diarist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

Here are some of my favorites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie (fucking creepy as fuck messed-up woman)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident (intriguing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_experiment (a must have on any list of this sort)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon (I actually laughed a little at the thought of this, also the name doesn’t help much)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla (another must have)

I’ll get around to posting some others later on.

Some of the monsters I’m going to be looking at for my SOC302 project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman (funny looking, but intriguing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatwoods_monster (fuck fuck fuck)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfordsville_monster (meh, can’t find pictures… really doesn’t bother me)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Devil (oh god oh god)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatman_(cryptozoology) (Goatman? Seriously?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra (obligatory)

Reading these at night sort creeps me out… I really need to stop…

I think my project is going to focus more on the mass hallucination involved with the monsters than on the monsters themselves. Perhaps not. I’m not sure yet. Fucking Jersey Devil and Flatwoods monster make me curl up beneath my blanket and stay up all night. Because, you know, blankets are an anti-monster force field Seriously, though. Reading about the Jersey devil makes me shit bricks. I think it’s cry is the worst part, something like a human female scream, and perhaps the eyewitness accounts of waking up to see it outside their fucking window. I just got chills as I typed this and an bag of chips slid down some trash in the trashcan, I jumped about a foot… Time to do something else to take my mind off it all…

It’s been a while, though, I haven’t read about the Jersey Devil in couple of years. I read about the Flatwoods monster a few days ago, however, and was all “oh, neat” until I saw it’s fucking picture. Fuck, I’m not even going to google it right now to link you the image. Maybe tomorrow during the day, when the lights are on. Or you can all just do it yourselves. Yeah, that’s a better plan. The less I have to see that thing the better. Will kinda suck for my project, though. Fuck the human imagination and it’s ridiculous ability to make things real.

I think I just got hit with the biggest wave of apathy ever. Here I am up at 4AM, class in eight hours, and I don’t feel the need to go to sleep anytime soon. Just finished the new Futurama movie (The Beast With a Billion Backs, out Tuesday), and I have to say that it’s pretty good. Definitely some sort of message thing going on there, will have to rewatch to pick up on it all. S’all about love. With a tentacle. Who’s a polygamist. Also the League of Robots.

I’ve been having some troubles with Sovereign (formally Frank(enstein)). I copy over the console only debian live install to a USB drive, boot from it, but I am unable to find an install script. OK, fine, we’ll do it the easy way: copy a gnome version to the USB. “Failed to load kernel: linux.” What a jerk, eh?

It’s definitely my graphics card, as Sovereign displayed low resolutions perfectly on my monitor. Well poop.

Did some math while talking to Jason earlier: At twenty-four hours a week, ten dollars an hour, I should be pulling in four hundred-eighty dollars every two weeks pre-tax. That’s nine hundred-sixty a month pretax. That’s… maybe I can finally start thinking about replacing my ailing computer.

Wordpress is saying “Draft saved at 2:05:05 am” even though the timezone is set to UTC-5 and it displays 4:05 am just fine there. Weird. I wonder what it’ll say on the main page when I finally post.

Caught the last forty minutes of the program on National Geographic about Lakshmi, the girl with eight limbs. Neat stuff. Apparently the other limbs belonged to a partially developed, parasitic twin. And right after that? The Science of Dwarfism. This kind of stuff intrigues me immensely. I am so glad we get NatGeo. I don’t think we did last semester, or maybe fall semester.. I remember there being commercials for stuff that I was sad I couldn’t watch because we didn’t get the channel. The Science channel has also had some cool stuff on it, specifically How It’s Made. The glove making process was especially badass: they had a hand glove inverting machine!

I FINALLY found an mp3 of the american Pokemon theme. Kinda lame quality, though. Now to find the japanese opening. Actually, I just found a better quality one. It’s itunes m4a, though. Conversion time!

Done. Much better.

Played some Audiosurf the other night because Casey’s playing it really made me want to. Good stuff. It’s really neat, I’m rediscovering some of the songs I have in my collection.

Sovereign won’t see my second 120GB for some reason. That’s the one with the backup of all my movies and such. This is bothersome. I’ll have to whip out my ide->usb controller card and see if I can’t read it on AndrAIa. Problem is that the USB cable is on my printer currently and that’s an awful lot of work (not really, I just don’t feel like unhooking it because my printer is under my desk).

POKEMON OHHHH YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND
IN A WORLD WE MUST DEFEND

Perl script worked perfectly once I figured out how the XML libraries were parsing Microsoft’s shittastic XML.

Seriously, what is this?:

<media src="C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3" albumTitle="The World Ends With You OST" albumArtist="Square Enix" trackTitle="It's So Wonderful" trackArtist="Square Enix" duration="99082" />

Shouldn’t it be more like:

<media>
  <src>C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3</src>
  <albumTitle>The World Ends With You OST</albumTitle>
  <albumArtist>Square Enix</albumArtist>
  <trackTitle>It's So Wonderful</trackTitle>
  <trackArtist>Square Enix</trackArtist>
  <duration>99082</duration>
</media>

It’s almost like they’re trying to embed the song in a webpage or something.

Nevermind that the time is soooooo ridiculously wrong. Is it in milliseconds or something? I’m pretty sure m3u uses plain old seconds.

But yeah, the perl script worked perfectly on all my Zune playlists. The only problem is that I now have two music libraries (one in Windows and one in Linux) and changing “C:\Music” to “/home/satoshi/Music” ended up with a couple of missing songs… enough so that I edited the script to “/WINDOWS/Music.” Kinda lame… I really need to consolidate my music libraries, but putting it on one drive or the other… Actually, why do I even have them separate? I remember there being some trouble with colons and that the Zune didn’t read all of my linux directories? But I could be making that second one up, and the colon thing affected a whopping three directories (perl scripts are fun). What I really need is a third harddrive formatted FAT32 dedicated soley to my music. Good thing WinXP allows one to mount drives as directories (though the process is sort of contrived), so there’s no need to change anything in either OS. Huzzah. Now to find another drive :/

Ugh, the sky is lighting up: the first rays of day. Time to hit the hay.

Last edited by Tony on June 23, 2008 at 04:29
Draft Saved at 2:38:33 am.

What could that possibly mean?

I’m debating whether to go to sleep or just pull an all-nighter and go to sleep at a normal time for work on Tuesday. I’ve had a terrible sleep schedule this weekend and this would be a good way to right it out.

Probably going on a trip to the Apple Store today! Not to buy anything, just to look around. Should be fun. Went to Best Buy the other day, those new Apple keyboards are damn nice.

Though I should probably sleep just a bit, my tonsils started hurting more around 1AM or so. They had been fine all weekend too. I highly doubt it will develop into GRAY GOOP COVERING EVERYTHING this time, or even just ew little yellow guys like the first time.

Yeah, sleep it is. I am getting tired.

Casey had a friend over Friday and Saturday. Margie, I believe. Tall, about Casey’s height, I’d say. Totally didn’t expect her to sound and basically act just like Alyssa. Like, personality and everything. It was the weirdest thing. Cool gal (well, she’d have to be if she’s basically Alyssa’s clone).

Things are kinda sad socially. Two breakups last weekend, one this.

Yay Xbox Live! demos. Armored Core 4 is a must purchase, even though we don’t even own the Xbox I had so much fun with AC3 on the PS2, and from watching Casey play the AC4 demo it looks to be even better.

Microsoft aren’t total douchebags! The playlist format they use for the Zune aren’t m3us, which they should be (why wouldn’t they be? M3us are easy), but whatever. What they ARE is XML. Probably some bastardized form thereof, but just the same Firefox recognizes them as XML and I’m sure the perl XML libraries won’t have a problem with them. Time to write me a perl script to convert zune playlists to something I can use in Audacious (Amarok is still being a bitch and I really don’t need the full-on features of a music _manager_. That’s what the zune player is for, and only with the zune itself.