solid_liq's Journal: Monday, June 21st 2004

Ok, a little late on putting this in, but here I am at least.

Ok, today I took my car into Precision Alignment and Brake. Turned out the strut was bent, needs a new one. The toe was 2" in, and the strut seems to be bent about 2 degrees. Left my car overnight, and I am hoping I don't need a new ball end (?) or something like that. Piece of cast metal costs $150, used. The strut only costs $139.97 new. What a rip.

Saturday, the 19th, I used swaret. It updated aaa-something, which is a package which should never be updated. As a result, it screwed up my linkages. I'm not sure if I can fix them, so I'm now creating ISOs to burn for the Slackware 9.1 install. Crap, just stopped the iso creation process by pressing control-c, instinctively, to copy this message into here:

Error while reading `../../live/dev/core' - file will be ignored (Success)
Error while reading `../../live/usr/adm/messages' - file will be ignored (Success)
Error while reading `../../live/usr/adm/syslog' - file will be ignored (Success)
Error while reading `../../live/usr/tmp/kdecache-mike/http/e/weather.noaa.gov_pub_data_observations_metar_stations_KTUS.TXT_23361aed' - file will be ignored (Success)
Found 548 of the 550 files required by the template

Anyway, I'm creating the ISOs because the DVD I originally installed it from is a little scratched, and the installer would not boot from it. Just got this message:

Will not reuse existing temporary file `/home/mike/tmp/slackiso/slackware-9.1-install-d1.iso.tmp' - it was not created by jigdo-file, or is corrupted.

Well, I may do two installs, or not. We'll have to see. I have to remember to do custom kernel builds, no matter what. One install may be to see if I can get a 2.6.x kernel working with a bare install, and then custom build everything else (X Server, KDE, etc, etc, etc). That would be nice. Luckily, I believe I left a LOT of unused space on my 200 gig drive.

While swaret was updating my distro, I was making some changes to KPPP. The two files I modified are:

pppstatdlg.cpp
pppstatdlg.h

located in:

/home/mike/programming/kde_modifications/kdenetwork/kppp

I will have to remember to use them. I used kdecvs-build-0.65 to get the files I modified, located in:

/home/mike/archives/kde_source/cvs

Once I'm back up and running, I'll have to test the changes I already made, and see if I can do the ones I mentioned in the comments I added. One I may not have put in comments is an auto-scale method, to make the scale sane again after rediculous spikes. Possibly even put a peak detection in there, to ignore them (maybe account for lag where the actual transfer rate could not have been that high, it was rather just buffered data which was read-delayed).

I also made some inconsequential modifications to KWeather. I really need to dig into that after I have finished my KPPP mods. It needs several changes, including displaying a weather summary page for all the stations it collects data for, and the ability to graph out weather patterns.

I would also like to make a change to the new LCD clock, to give a proper font or background color (preferably font) when the transparent background has dark colors behind the text. My idea for that is to average the RGB components to (effectively) get a luminance value. If that doesn't work, then I could use the yuyv style conversion to get the luminence from that. Anyway, I'd like to use the luminence to determine a proper font color. I believe it will take experimentation to find a color determination method which will work well.

After that, I would like to hack on Konqueror to give it (in order)

1. Date and time display!!
2. Adblocking, ala Firefox plug-in
3. Some way to mark tabs and "Move selected tabs to %whatever% window," where %whatever% can be a named window, if the user chooses to give it a name. Then again, maybe no naming.
4. WHERE THE HELL is the missing "Properties" option in the context menu??? ADD it. Also, while at it, perhaps give it "themeable" context menus. Konqueror's context menu SUCKS ASS.
5. Completely overhaul the bookmarks system. I don't like it. Try to do this non-intrusively, of course, so as to not piss anyone off.

Also, making changes to the KMenu system, to give it the right-clicking capabilites of GNOME, might be a good idea.

Adding mouse wheel sensitivity to tabs in general within KDE has to be a good idea.

Finally get around to creating my generic KWin framework. The above tasks should give me a better working knowledge of KDE to help me out with this.

OH YEAH, SAW THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL SPACE LAUNCH OF THE SPACESHIP ONE ON TV TODAY!!!
It was on CNN and MSNBC. Hell yeah!! I love it. Can't wait for it to change the face of transportation! Or at least tourism. Also can't wait to see the Discovery channel special about it.

Recieved my July/August issue of MIT Technology Review today. Lots of articles on nanotech.

Saw 50 First Dates today. Not too bad. 3.5 or 4 out of 5.

For some reason

rm /home/mike/tmp/slackiso/ -rf

caused some lockup. Then an

ls /home/mike/tmp/slackiso

also locked up. Weird. Did this because of the screw up above. Need to retry creating the ISOs.