Hell Oh Entropy!

Finally over with the painting and tiling at home so we can now get back to business. I found out that we have hardcoded mozilla as the default browser command in ayttm. Spent 5 minutes finding a solution for it and then 1/2 hour trying to make the messages look pretty. In the end the configure script now looks for any one from a set of installed browsers (mozilla, firefox, iceweasel, opera, etc.)

We need to get a release for ayttm out soon; it's been long enough already. Philip hasn't come back with any bugs for some time now, so it could mean one of two things -- either he's busy with something else or ayttm is ready for release.

The strife for complete equality and non-discrimination will never work. The simple reason for that is that we always fall into groups and point fingers at each other. If it’s not race, then it’s money, gender, education, educational streams, geographical locations, age, disabilities, or even technological preferences.

If all else fails, there’s always physical looks and/or skin colour.

I read this comment on Slashdot on one of the reasons why Linux adoption is slow. Thought it was quite interesting:

When someone gets Windows, he installs it, starts it up and starts clicking around. Some things will work, some won't, but those that won't don't discourage him. After all, everyone says Windows is so easy to use, every dumbo can work it out. So they try. I mean, who wants to be dumber than... And they try. And putz around and finally (maybe after reinstalling, when they managed to click somewhere they really, really shouldn't) it works. When someone gets Linux, he installs is, starts it up and starts clicking around. Some things will work, some won't, but those that won't discourage him. After all, everyone says Linux is a geeks-only system, nobody but a true blooded geek can figure it out. So they don't even try and toss it as "too complicated".

I recently got an email from Nikhil Sinha who’s interested in writing some code for antidialer. He’s looking fix some stuff and also make a tray icon plugin which, I guess, is one of the must-have features that I was too lazy to write. It would be quite cool if he does get around to doing it.

Finally got back to working on ayttm after a, well, work break ;)

I spent the last 3 hours fighting with gpgme-1.x and have finally managed to get some things working. The strangest problem (and it took me quite a while to catch hold of) was that the deprecated gpgme_data_rewind(foo) was working but its non-deprecated replacement gpgme_data_seek(foo, 0, SEEK_SET) wouldn't work at all, unlike what the gpgme info docs said. Copy+paste it from the info docs and it still wouldn't work. I'll update if I get it working.

I’ll be at work this weekend too, and next week I’ll be practically living in office. Production releases are fun. Would have been even more fun if I was reimbursed for it ;)

Instead of GPGME API reference., I went for GPGME Reference and I found the GPGME API Reference Manual.

… apparently does not exist. Michael Belanger found out that Ayttm does not compile with GPGME v1.x, after which I found out that we’re compiling against GPGME v0.3.x. A lot seems to have changed since and I managed to get a list of what changed after a google search. If the 6 year old post on the gnupg mailing list still holds true, I’ll have to generate API docs using gnome doc tools on the gpgme source.

I had forgotten to test keyboard shortcuts for the ayttm chat window and main window. The chat window shortcuts were associated with a menu which was not associated with any window at all, hence the accelerators never got activated. Slept for most of the day and got it working at night. *Yawn* a very eventful day ;)

I also noticed something funny in the morning. Ayttm signs on with a blast of static noise, more static when you send/receive messages and a long static blast when it signs out. Ran through the code and found out that the .au file is cat'ed to /dev/audio. Initially I thought this was wrong and tried to find alternates. Turns out that is how you do sound with the .au format, so I've got to think of something else.

Today the ATM machine of my bank doled out two 50 Rupee notes for me when I asked for 100 Rs. This is good. Now I won’t have to run around asking for change :)