I Don't Hate Drawing

Well, I guess it's not drawing. I've been playing with The Gimp a bit this weekend, as I finally got so bored that I decided to buy a camera with which to record the drunken follies of my friends. Thanks to one of the handy tutorials on the gimp website, I've been converting these images to mock sketches.

The thing is that the "smudge" tool in gimp is really good. It's so good that once I have sketchified a given picture, it's damned near as natural to work with it as it is to work with charcoal.

For those that are interested, the crap that I've been playing with is here.

A Piece Of Advice

So, I've been trying to think of some advice for the world-at-large. There are so many people bitching and moaning about their problems anymore that I feel that it is my duty, as a pretentious know-it-all, to provide these people with a solution. During the pizza escapade, I believe that I unknowingly stumbled upon the perfect advice for the world. It is related as a cavemanesque anecdote:

Pan go into oven cold.
Pan come out of oven hot.
Head cold.
PUT HEAD IN OVEN!!!

This may, indeed, be the best advice that I've given anybody to date. Sure, I've turned a couple of lives around (who hasn't), but this one is VERY orthogonal.

I hope you take it to heart.

I Hate Frozen Pizza

Seriously ... I flat out hate frozen pizza (depsite the fact that I currently have a freezer full of prison pizzas). On the bright side, I've been depressed as shit for the last few days (I guess that I could have titled this entry "I Fucking Hate Women"), so I did some cooking. I now have a fridge full of non-frozen pizza.

So, six pizzas (cooked, not eaten) into my night last night, I decided that it would be an awesome April Fool's Day gag to take a perfectly good pizza in for my coworkers to have for lunch. They all know that I have a rather off sense of humor, so I didn't have to even infer that I'd laced the dough with strychnine or anything ... they all just assumed.

Turns out that the one that I took in was the best out of the bunch ... the dough that I'm using has such a high liquid content that it took for fucking EVER to cook, but it was the only pizza out of the batch that came out fully cooked ... I think that could also have something to do with using the proper heat setting, but who's counting?

Next time I cook pizza, I'm just gonna set the oven to self-cleaning mode. It's scarcely coal-oven quality, but 800 degrees (Fahrenheit) is bloody close enough. Also, I need to get some better pans. I was using the "get these three cookie sheets for three bucks" pans from WalMart (as it's what I had available), and those fuckers simply do not transfer heat well at all. As such, the very bottom of the pie and the edge crusts get good and done, but anything that's not directly hit by the heat is left feeling like a limp dick. I've never eaten limp dick, of course, so that comparison is purely by conjecture of knowing what a limp dick feels like and guessing as to the texture.

I Hate Web Coders

So I've been sitting here for the better part of four hours trying to make a particular bookmark management application validate against w3's document validator. The final word? The main view of the application went from having 450 VALIDATION ERRORS to one. I plan on squashing that last one eventually, but not until it's the only error left on any of the views.

Here's where the question comes in, though ... XHTML, HTML, XML, whateverthefuckML ... they are all REALLY well-documented. How hard can it possibly be to adhere to standards? It can't be too difficult, considering that the changes that I made did absolutely NOTHING to alter the appearance or functionality of the package. Don't think that I'm really familiar with the way that the package is put together, either. I just started screwing around with this a day or two ago, and haven't really put that much effort into it.

Not much effort. That's what it took to make the generated markup for the MAIN VIEW of the application, the part that everybody sees the first (and most subsequent) time(s) that they view the site, valid. This is the sort of lethargy that's putting a lot of FOSS projects to pasture. Sure, there are the successful projects (which need not be mentioned here), but for every one of those, there are hundreds of shitty lumps. A lot of that shititude (yay for made up words) comes from stupid ideas, but a lot of it also comes from crap like this.

So, some advice for free/open (web) software authors:

• If there's a standard, follow it. If there's not, create one, then follow it.
• If you're going to use a templating engine of any sort, use it in the manner that it was meant to be used ... write your templates, and keep your fucking code out of them. They use variable interpolation for a reason, you know.
• Finally, BELITTLE THOSE THAT DON'T FOLLOW AWESOME ADVICE LIKE THIS. That might be the most important part. If you're an author of a project like the one that I've been talking about, you should feel fucking ashamed. Where's the pride that you're supposed to be pouring into your work/hobby? "But it works" is no excuse for being lazy, ignorant, or illiterate.

I Hate mgetty And pppd

Why do I hate 'em? They're wonderful tools. For the unfamiliar, mgetty is a tty controller (this is not the correct term, but it is infinitely easier to understand this description than it is to try to wade through the formal definition) that is able to work with modems as well as pure ttys. pppd is (again, a simplified description) a server that allows for "dial-up networking" connections. That's friggin' great. Except for when it doesn't work.

So why wasn't it working? The definition of one of the pppd options changed between the version of pppd that was previously installed and the version that is installed on our new server box. The real problem there, though, is that having done not much more to get mgetty+pppd working aside from copying the configuration from the old server box is that the malfunction that we were experiencing was TERRIBLY FUCKING DIFFICULT to track down. I'm talking about an Amelia Earhart kind of elusive. That's balls.

So, I was sitting at work trying to find the fucking problem. Three hours later, I was ready to burn the office down. There was absolutely no reason that the old configs shouldn't have worked, considering that the behavior of this option hadn't been terribly well-documented, in my opinion. I actually solved the problem by trial-and-error, removing options one-at-a-time until I hit upon something that worked. Then I found the reason behind the breakage. Then I ranted, raved, put on my Hulk Hands, and started beating the hell out of things while listening to them say "HULK SMASH" and the like.

In that respect, at least, I guess it was a good day. HULK SMASH!

I Hate Projects

I really do hate taking on new projects. Aside from the stuff that I've got going on at work, y'all know that I'm rewriting a X11 window manager and am drawing a comic. That's barely scratching the surface of the junk that I've got going on at the moment.

Read several books in the last week or so. This dude by the name of Betancourt has been writing new Amber books. As I'm reading them, I'm transcribing them as well (because i'm tired of losing and rebuying books every time I want to read them again, and no, I will not send you a copy). Thing is, that's even starting to piss me off. The reason for this is that Betancourt thanks his editors, proofreaders, et cetera, in all of these books. Why did he bother when it's rather apparent that the schmucks didn't do much more than take a cursory glance at the text?

So, the back-end for awflwm is getting to be a complete bitch to write. It's been so much of a bitch that I've asked a good friend for some help. This dude has been working on a kernel project ever since I've known him, and he's come a long way. He's aiming for full POSIX compliance, and he's nearly there. That's why I asked him for help. All-in-all, creating this back-end is going to consist of reimplimenting the API that it uses, and that's exactly what he's been doing for his brainix project. Aside from that, he's one of the finest coders that I've had the honor to meet, so he certainly seems like a good person to try and rope in. I'm still toying around with the idea of boosting the windowing code from blackbox, but that might still be more of a bitch than just writing everything from scratch. Glad I have somebody to at least help me with the decisions now.

The comic is coming along very slowly, as I just haven't had the time to devote to it that I wish that I did. I have a definite shape and form for Thor. Now I need to come up with everything else. I don't think that I'm going to have any dialog in the comic. I've read several comics that were bare of the dialog bubbles that us comic readers have grown to know and love, and I typically find them to be very well done. If actions speak louder than words, and a picture is worth a thousand words, then shouldn't pictures of actions speak a thousand loud words?

If anybody's wondering, I did quit the Sorcerer development team. I finally got sick of volunteering my time to non-Free software. Fearless Leader, as I've recently been calling project leader Kyle Sallee, is under the misinformed impression that I feel the way that I do about his license because I do not understand it. Rather, he believes that the meaning of his license became clear to me while I was being accosted on his project's mailing list. Either way, the man's off his nut. The concept of the SPL being rather like the BSD license was brought up during this process. I used to think about the SPL that way, but then I more-or-less woke up (my sense of loyalty to Mr. Sallee had waned long, long ago). The only thing that I've found that the SPL has in common with the BSD license is that the copyright information in SPL-licensed code cannot be removed. Aside from that (and the fact that they're both stored as plain ASCII documents), that is where the similarity stops. See "What's Wrong With Sorcerer Linux" for a better explanation of what it seems that the SPL is all about.

The following quote from an email related to the problem with Sorcerer might actually speak for itself, but I will clarify after getting the quote down:

Ever consider that an increase in popularity of the
distribution may provide me an opportunity to hang
some advertisement banners on the website or
something that might put a penny back in my pocket?
Only a few of you generous SAs have contributed any money.

--Kyle Sallee, Monday, June 28, 2004

One of the problems I have with these comments is not that I don't want Kyle to thrive. Rather, I don't suffer myself to communicate with hypocrites. I was one of the "generous SAs" that attempted to donate money a few years back when he was in some dire straits. The response, both times that I attempted this donation, was something akin to "I was never in this for the money." Along with this sentiment, the donation was refused.

The other problem that I have with this is that I volunteer my time to Free Software. I do not volunteer my time anywhere that the exchange of money is involved. That way, I don't have to feel shit on when I don't get a cut of the profits. None of that really matters, though. Sorcerer is losing popularity every day. I know why, most of the Sorcerer community knows part of the reason. The only person that doesn't quite understand why this is the case, once again, is Mr. Sallee. I've given him the three most common reasons that people give me for not using Sorcerer (some of them rather good friends that try to stay on my good side for fear of having the fuck beaten out of them), but it appears that some native English speakers have one hell of a time actually speaking English natively.

Well, it feels good to finally get all that out in a public forum. Upon leaving the project, my ethics came under personal attack, and all of that is basically what I thought of when that was going on. I don't steal code, and I do not appreciate being accused of this. That's why FreeSorcery (the Free replacement for the official sorcery (the package management tools used in Sorcerer)) shares no code with sorcery. They don't even share similar programming languages or similar programming paradigms. Also, keep in mind that FreeSorcery wouldn't have been released if I were not accused of code theft. Congrats, Kyle ... you have caused a Free replacement for the backbone of your project to be spawned. I do still work on low-grimoire (a contributed grimoire for Sorcerer), as it is licensed under a Free Software license. The other reason that I work on it is the same reason that I still have several subscriptions to the Sorcerer mailing lists (though I'm sure Kyle belives that he removed all of them) ... I have to keep abreast of changes in the Sorcerer spell format in order for FreeSorcery to continue to work with Sorcerer spells.

Don't you love it when I get pissed off enough to write?

I Hate Friends

Since they're friends, it would almost seem implicit that i would not hate them. Guess what. I do.

It's not really thier fault. The problem is that knowing a person like me eventually makes a person realize that I am of use on occasion, so favors start to be asked. So, a person of utility like myself ends up helping out with these favors in order to make a buddy's life easier. Eventually, in a scenario like this, the only reason that a person calls you is because you're useful. You stop having conversations that don't involve solving a person-not-yourself's problems. You stop working on fucked up cars that aren't yours. You stop beating the fuck out of people that didn't directly threaten you.

You know the deal ... sometimes you find drunks sleeping on your couch that aren't you.

Me, I'm definitely part of the problem ... I don't act like a complete idiot around friends all of the time. If you fancy yourself as a jack-of-all-trades, don't let people in on it. Or, in the words of Jimmy (one of the few friends that hasn't managed to piss me off), "Don't do that, that's something I would do."