Jason gave me the idea of using email instead. This was much easier to set up and since it uses a long standing standard, it shouldn't break.

This was good, but to respond to the messages I received, I'd still have to SSH into my computer, which is kind of painful on my phone over 3G and without a real keyboard.

To solve this non-issue (I really don't need to respond to people instantly), I wrote a python script for weechat that logs in to my secondary (or is it my tertiary) gmail account, where the replies are sent, and checks for new messages via imap. The only external library needed is imaplib, to facilitate imap communication. The format is easily abusable: If it is sent from my main gmail, then it assumes it is a reply. The subject contains the recipient of my message,  since my notifications put the person in the subject, and the body is the message itself. It's pretty simple to parse the imap message for this information, and even simpler to use the weechat library  to send the message to the appropriate person. I don't count the weechat library as external since it is implied when I say this is a weechat script.

The script checks every five minutes and so far works wonderfully.

I guess now that when I'm marked away, I'm not really away, per se.

I need to clean up the code a bit, make it more generic, and take advantage of setting options within weechat (I currently hard code my login information), but I plan to post the code here. I'll probably detail the entire set up I have since it is a combination of two plugins. Because of this requirement of the other script (away_action), I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to submit to the weechat script repository.

Anyway, I was able to whip this out in very little time, and I think I'm finally beginning to understand the appeal of python.

Posted from WordPress for Android

I've not had much time to work on this recently since I'm in between apartments at the moment.

But yeah, try it out, leave a comment.
Download

Posted from WordPress for Android

So, go for it.  Try all your stupid little user tricks, things I would never have thought of as the programmer (such as the multiple tab thing Richard showed me).

This project was really fun.  I got to learn some more php, expand upon my sql, learn how to use sql within php, and probably most fun of all: learn how to use ajax.  Since voters are to vote on multiple categories, I did not want to have to reload the page every time they voted in one category, that would be a waste of the voter's time.  Especially when the page gets to be pretty long with a ton of submissions (I'm assuming it will get long (there's twenty-nine categories after all), and that there will be a ton of submissions).  So, instead, when they vote on a category, it'll just collapse the form in that category into a "Thank you for voting!" message and the voter can go on unabated.  I like it, it's really cool :razz:

The thing logs based on IP address, so of course if you go to another computer and try to vote again, you'll succeed.  And of course if you use a proxy, etc. etc. 

--A dude just walked past my window and freaked me the hell out.  Looks like he was checking something on the outside of the buildings.--

Amber said that the people who will be participating are unlikely to go about vote stuffing in this manner since... well, they're generally fourteen year old fangirls who know shit about computers (though they can kick my ass at video editing, that's for sure). 

But yeah, try anything, everything.  And if you break it or find something that you think might be broken, just leave a comment on this post.

Also, yes.  It is intentionally ugly (this is Corey's big issue for some reason, and yet his IPRO site looks like it was made in frontpage).  I plan to just php include() them into Amber's site later on and CSS the hell out of them.

The link again.

I watched A Dog's Breakfast before going to bed last night.  It was surprisingly good.  It stars David Hewlett (Rodney McKay, Stargate: Atlantis), his sister Kate Hewlett (Jeannie Miller, Mckay's sister, Stargate: Atlantis), and Paul McGillion (Dr. Carson Beckett, Stargate: Atlantis; Young Dr. Ernest Littlefield, Stargate: SG-1 "The Torment of Tantalus").  The Hewletts again play siblings, with McGillion as Kate's actor fiancé.  It started out a little.. slowish for me, but then just took a turn for the awesome.  Especially the cameo by Christopher Judge (Teal'c, Stargate: SG-1).  Holy hell.  He plays such a serious character on SG-1, and while I knew he was a funny guy, I didn't realize just how awesome he could be.  He really needs more comedy jobs.  It's a small cast, and it's basically all Stargate regulars, but it's so refreshing to see them all outside of the Sci-Fi genre doing some good ol' comedy.

I recommend the movie, even if you aren't a fan of Stargate.  David Hewlett's performance is top-notch and his chemistry with Kate is perfect (which probably has something to do with the fact that, you know, they're siblings and all).  McGillion is great too (one of my all time favorite actors on Atlantis). 

The Prometheus ship set/stage also makes an appearance, as McGillion's character is an actor on a really bad Sci-Fi show (where Rachel Lutrell, also of Atlantis fame, makes a cameo) that seemingly takes place aboard an advanced space ship.

That joke turned into the project for the next ten minutes which included hunting down the XFCE Window Manager source code and finding where in said code the color for the shadow was defined.  Jeremy now has orange "glows" around his windows and pop up menus without the bloat and resource eating that Compiz would bring to ShinyCat.

It was fun.

On the todo list for the window manager is "selectable shadow colors."  I'm pretty sure I could patch it so that it accepts arguments from the command line for colors, but I wouldn't quite know how to bring it into the GUI (though maybe I should attempt that over break?  If it's still on the todo list (which is only a couple of months old?), that possibly means that someone hasn't submitted a patch to implement such a thing yet?).

The changelog for the latest 4.6 beta (current stable release is 4.4.3) says that they've implemented changing the opacity value but not color yet. =P

Before (on white):

After (on black):

Do not
turn off
Wii under
penalty of
DEATH!

Phil and I got to the third stage of Wily's castle last night, but if you save the game and turn it off you start right back at the first stage of the castle, so we had to leave it on over night.  I got bored part way through the night and beat the third stage and got through the fourth, but kept dying on the final boss.. :neutral: I think it was the Oreos and half-gallon of milk that helped me get that far :razz:

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself this break (conscience says: "Get your chem lab done early, get caught up in data networks, look at your systems lab," but who listens to that anyway?).  I played around a bit with python last night.  Fairly simple stuff so far, just figuring out how loops and functions work in this crazy language.  Up next is GUI stuff.  The mpd side of things is damn easy, all the mpd commands are extremely straight forward (and are the exact same ones I've already played around with in perl, oddly), so once I get the GUI stuff down it should be pretty easy to implement a basic music controller.

..I think I'm going to fall asleep soon...  I slept from about four after my systems exam to roughly ten or so yesterday...  My sleep schedule is complete poop right now.  It's terrible.

I have always been of the minimalistic point of view.  This is evident in my no icons on the desktop belief as well as my attempt to use programs that take up the least amount of resources.  Amarok did get a bit heavy at times, but it was really nice so I kept using it.  That is until I just got fed up with its performance (it's really a good piece of software, no one else seems to be having the same problems as me).  Well, I haven't really listened to music much on my computer in the past few months.  Until I found MPD the other day.  Because it's server/client, it's inherently light on resources.  The server end runs as a daemon, it plays your music and manages your collection in the background.  When I want to switch tasks or load a playlist, I can load up one of the quick-launching client programs (I currently switch between a nice command-line one and a Rhythm Boxish GUI one), load a new playlist/song, and close it and everything is great.  This also frees up a spot in the system tray that would have an icon for the program (though I just installed an XFCE panel MPD controller that takes up like quadruple the visual space a system tray icon would).  It really is a neat way to implement a music manager.  There's also a webclient that I am interested in trying that will stream my music to another computer over the internet.  That'll be nice when I'm back at the reg office next semester.

So, basically, with the little bit of python I have done for extending the Mumbles Pidgin plugin, I decided that I should learn more about the language ad use it to develop a client for MPD.  I could then stick in what features I want and make it exactly how I want it; I could even make it send dbus messages and intercept them with Mumbles!  I bet the hardest part will be figuring out GUI stuff.  It'll be interesting getting used to Python's method of Object Oriented programming, I'm sure, but once you've done that stuff once, you've really done it a million times (I'll probably end up eating these words).

So, with the recent discovery that my graphics card no longer displays low resolutions (boot screen, Linux TTYs, etc.), the possibility of my computer failing has suddenly become very real.  While I really do not have the money for a replacement (nor should I spend the money on one in the near future), I should at least ready a list of parts so that I can make a sudden order just incase AndrAIa decides to call it poops.  What?  Yeah, I could just buy a new video card, but I'd essentially be wasting money.  Why should I buy a graphics card for a deprecated interface?  AGP cards are no longer the standard.  It's all about PCI-X.  But to get PCI-X, I'd have to upgrade my motherboard and with a new motherboard comes a new everything else.  I wanna go something midrange, sorta like David's which was a total cost of $450 while reusing as much as possible from his old machine.  Mine'll probably cost maybe $100-$300 more than his due to the fact that I will be reusing VERY little from AndrAIa.  Andy originally cost $850 when I bought her four or five years ago.  I'd say she was fairly high-end at the time.  She's served me well, and I hope she would continue to do so even after I build Ophiuchus (which I hope you'll remember is the thirteenth zodiac, because I'm an asshole like that).  Maybe she could be that media centered machine hooked up to a TV and stereo.  Maybe.  She'll serve some purpose, I just don't know what yet.  Anyway.  Back to Ophiuchus.  I'm thinking he'll (yeah, Ophi is a he) look good in either this case or this one.  Neither seem to have all too powerful power supplies, but I haven't done my research yet.  The problem with whitey there, despite how sexy it is, is that the power supply is of an incredibly ODD shape and quite weak to boot.  The only other similar power supply that newegg sells is... well... the same one.  So, whitey is out of the question.  Blackey seems to be using a regular power supply, but even at 400W, it seems a bit... weak.  But again I must first do my research and confirm that I should actually buy another power supply.  At least blackey is still pretty cool looking.

But wait Tony!  I know computers and that case looks kinda small!

Yeah, it is.  It's a Micro ATX case.  Brian got a Micro ATX machine last summer and, while his case is a normal ATX Mid-Tower case, it's a fair bit smaller than a normal ATX motherboard and...  I could do with a size reduction.  As stated earlier, I am not going for a high end machine here, it's not going to need everything a full ATX motherboard will offer (namely PCI slots).  Plus, you know, size.

Ugh, I wish I were in Windows so I could whip this up really quickly in Fireworks...  I haven't quite gotten used to The Gimp yet..

It's not a whole lot, but is definitely enough.  Considering that, at the moment, I lay Andy on her side so that I can place a fan on her graphics card to account for the fact that the card's fan died almost a year ago.  It actually keeps it pretty cool, I'm surprised.  But yeah, imagine skinny little Ophi taking up no space on my desk.  I would have so much room to.. do things with, maybe.  It'd be nice.

This was probably a pretty boring post to you not-so technically inclined/interested.  I've been writing a lot of stuff down while at work lately.  Maybe I'll post that eventually?

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.

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 :razz: I had so much fun with AC3 on the PS2, and from watching Casey play the AC4 demo it looks to be even better.