Harsh J

My undergraduate project is complete, with a few glitches to cover up. It ain’t much for now, but I guess its enough to make a sizable impact. I’d like to say that PyMT is an excellent library, and I can’t thank the developers behind it enough for their work so far (They’ve written a tracker too now, you gotta check that out). Maybe I shall contribute to it in near future, provided I have the time and skill. Contributing by code is something I only recently learned and its not wise to be hasty. Plus, there’s loads of math involved

Randomly placed warning for a random post.

On the Qt front, I have this draft of a PyQt4 + Designer tutorial lying around for 7 months and it still doesn’t feel complete (alright, am lazy to make it so). Maybe I should do another screenshot + diagramming session and see if that turns out satisfactory. Something brewing in my mind for a feature in KDE 4.5 has pushed me to handle XML with the same toolkit – and writing SAX parsers is ugly, even more so if its C++. I wish I didn’t have to do that, I hate writing readers of tags and the characters between them – it always conks out someday or sometime.

Poster to 'Fall of the Hulks'

Am addicted to comics these days, more than I’ve been to TV shows or movies (You may count “Lost” and ‘The Matrix’ as exclusions to that). Let’s talk about ‘Fall of the Hulks‘. Its twisted in its story, not many have great guesses on the new Red-Hulk (or Rulk) character and the entire screenplay is Nick Fury-esque; Apparently the story following this arc will have all major heroes of the Marvel Universe hulked up, which would be totally awesome to read (the covers are making me ogle already). For now Siege and Realm of Kings satisfy the addiction hunger. I’m not much of a fan when it comes to DC, having read pretty out-dated stuff only (such as Death of Superman or Knightfall), and thus am not quite enjoying the over-stretched Blackest Night titles they have everywhere. Karthik would not be happy with this, but fear not my friend – the completionist in me won’t give up till it ends.

Re-read Mostly Harmless and am dying to purchase and read ‘And Another Thing…‘ by Eoin Colfer but it seems too expensive even now. Will get it in the sale season probably, and read it at the Eloor libraries until that happens. H2G2 and its associated books are a must read for anyone with brains and capacity for painful-cheeks humor.

Until the next update!

Google Buzz’s spoiled the whole Google Reader experience. For starters, I don’t want to see comments from people I do not have on my contact list – I simply don’t care what they have to say since most go “Good one” when there’s a damn Like button they can use.

And if Reader’s linked to Buzz, sync’s supposed to work bi-directional since comments do so. Reading articles and comments in both places is just not good use of time. So until someone comes along and tells me this is done, Buzz’s turned off in my inbox. Like I care.

Well, since I couldn’t fix a particular bug myself and the other developers think all is working well with Yahoo under KDE’s Kopete software, I had to switch over to the second best way to connect to IM networks – BitlBee via Konversation. This post is merely a note to self for adding Jabber accounts for GMail and Google Apps Mail accounts in BitlBee, once setup.

To add GMail is easy, using the Jabber protocol:

account add jabber username@gmail.com password

To add Google Apps Mail needs one more step:

account add jabber username@domain.tld password
account set 0/server talk.google.com
# You may want to replace '0' with your account number via 'account list'

account on and have fun with your now-more-powerful IRC Client.

Another random update, in both time and space.

I’ve got less than a week left before I’m officially over due-date for a 50% working demo of my undergraduate project, hah. I hate it when they give me so many holidays – I get lazy and am too lazy to do anything about it too, hence a quicksand.

Guess the year has a lot of music stored in it for me, as my 21 has begun with plenty of those.

I have nothing against religion, but I absolutely dislike this missionary nearby with its loud volume and irregular sermons. It’s been three years since I told myself I’d get used to it, and not a day of those go by where am not thinking of ways to get their speaker wires cut. I’ve thought of the rat training too, so I am going insane due to that – yep. Then there’s this renovation fixation the people around me are having with their not-comfy-enough homes, and that’s making the head ache. I probably think I’ve mutated and have acquired a higher hearing sense.

Anyhow, back to work now. Here’s my current desktop, plastic as usual.

Days are getting a little tiring, but plenty interesting things to do nevertheless. There always will be, until I don’t have any more time for them.

Having finally seen my previous semester scores, which would be way better if instantaneous, I had a long talk-and-work session on LED wiring with Harshid. That bore a quick-fruit of this, my first ever ‘friode‘ which is cool but I never got to see the smoking diode stage if it happened, darn. The whole afternoon was lots of fun, thanks to him.

Then continued some gruelling search-work for my el-crapo Microdia Webcam drivers on Linux – It (ID: 0c45:614a) works with gspca_sonixj drivers right now but there are a few ‘JPEG format’ battles not won yet (unless v4l2 is used), I’ll probably not bother for another week if I can. The whole search thing has made me dizzy and makes me think of weird solutions like grabbing a video input source and feeding it back to another video input source after decompression via a loopback (sounds impossible too?) – a feat I’d need to achieve with a ton of manpages(3) and manpages(5) and an insane text-editor with motivating syntax highlight. No! Or, maybe…

Anyways, am looking forward to reading Marvel Comic’s Siege #1 as early as possible this week. I know I shouldn’t like him so much, but I absolutely enjoy reading Captain America – His shield and field mastery, it is just too… awesome.