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08-Sep-04:    Oh, dear
    Not too may things happened lately. I'm drawing ever closer to finishing my v2 thesis according to Conor's points. It's quite interesting that it took almost 3 months to generate the extra results on an average of 6 CPUs... No wonder normal people don't use genetic algorithms in everyday life :)
    I've started redesigning the .msstyle loader now with a more decent (DCOP-based) architecture. More to learn CORBA things than anything else. I would have prefered to have "zero communication" (along the lines of shared memory objects), but Qt doesn't do that and creating shmem stuff every time is not my idea of fun :)
    Took some more photos on kite flying (see them in my album (Ireland section)).
    Done python bindings for Jean's iwlib (wireless tools). I thought of writing something to automatically scan for wireless APs, but it's not feasible at this time (wireless drivers need patching to support scanning, and not all of them have patches for that). Also, some guy wrote a nifty gnome applet.

07-Jul-04:    Ideas, ideas, ideas...
    In the past weeks I was thinking of what would be useful as "quickies"... So I thought of some small (really now..?) projects in a TODO list.
    First, something related to MP3 players... I've got a nice iRiver which claims to play MP3 and OGG files... Well, it does and it doesn't. I've got some high rate CBR MP3 files off AllOfMP3 and they're useless... I can't complain really, because only the MAD library can play them :). The same with OGG.. ish. The problem is that the player has a sampling limitation which is lower than my files... So I thought that it would be nice to have a frontend (just the gui stuff) dedicated to converting (on the fly) files to supported formats before transferring to the device. I looked at MUINE and writing something in C# looks interesting, but I think python (with Padraig's glade wrapper) maps better on the problem. It's only a frontend after all...
    I got a gmail account. Thanks a mill to Padraig and Darragh (hope I got the names right :) ). After an ad-hoc brainstorming we thought it would be nice to make use of the 1 Gig as backup.. If only google would publish some API for gmail....
    I still think automatic detection on WI-FI would be a really nice thing to have (especially when moving in a larger building).

28-Jun-04:    Emacs, oh dear!
    I started using Emacs! I'm nibbling away at its commands with a firefox instance and it's quite fun. Unfortunately, one needs to keep using the commands as they are not that intuitive :)
    This was indirectly triggered by the fact that SuSE 9.1 has a weird Motif version and Nedit does not compile (and I don't really like having statically linked software for no reason)...
    On other "planes", I was watching Euro 2004 on Tv (less interest here since neither Romania nor Ireland qualified). And it's a quite bad tournament... England got kicked out by Portugal and people are unhappy 'coz they (England) got a goal "e;disallowed"e;... what a crime! (my foot!). So far only the Czech played nice games (the one againes the Dutch was great!). Oh well, I could go on forever :)

05-Jun-04:    The Jerry Springer Nation
    Well, I'm back from the States and there are few things I wanted to write... Things I saw there. I guess I should start with the title. Ti's the day-time TV! (on free channels). My parents were watching TV in the mornings while I was there and I was amazed to the number of Jerry Springer-like shows. At any given time there is a JS or Maury or other tv show with the same theme: people solving their problems on TV. Why? I can't understand why any decent person would go on TV and tell his/hers partner "..err, I cheated on you ages ago and the baby might not be yours..". A cheap shrink alternative? Culture and/or education? I guess that's one way to becoming famous...
    It's funny to try to identify people on the street as "JS type" (i.e. would go to J.S. show to "solve" his/hers problems) or not. Most people I see are not. I guess that's not the way in Europe really, although in Ro some mild versions have popped up (so in Ireland...)
©2004 Laur Ivan