OneFreeVoice

I had another tennis lesson tonight, and something finally clicked. I was doing as bad as ever… which wasn’t that bad… but totally inconsistent. First, I got really mad and then I got progressively worse. Then I just gave up and quit trying. I wasn’t putting any effort into it all… and suddenly everything was just working. I was just trying way too hard. As soon as I figured that out, I just started taking it easy and enjoying myself… and I did a lot better.

I spent the day inside of Brio, working on a few old programs. These programs were executed very poorly from the beginning, and over the last 3 years they have undergone many modifications and enhancements. Stacking bad code on top of bad code. The applications were still functional, but we got one more enhancement than it could handle, and the whole thing fell apart.

I had never looked closely at the internals of the program, and frankly I’m shocked that it functioned at all.

Fortunately, we have a quasi decent issues log, so I was at least able to determine exactly what the original report was supposed to do, and then stack up all the modifications over time. I first whipped together a quick functional spec, and then I basically started fresh. It was worth it… I not only got the program working correctly… I also uncovered additional errors with the original program that had gone unnoticed, and the end result performs a lot faster than the original kludge.

Installing Gentoo. I’ve done it twice before. Once as an experiment on my main workstation, and once on my laptop (to try to get some non-working hardware working).

It’s a time consuming process. Although, it’s not really time intensive. Hmmm… what am I trying to say here. It takes a long time, but it’s not dedicated time. You type a command here… wait a couple of hours… type a command there… wait a couple of hours, etc.

I started this morning, put the Gentoo LiveCD in my new box, made up all of my drive partitions, then grabbed the stage1 tarball and bootstrapped the machine. By the time I grabbed and installed all the main system packages it was time for dinner. Right now I’m downloading the kernel sources and hoping to be able to compile that before I’m off to bed.

The machine is running nicely. Stuff is compiling a lot faster than on my Athlon XP 1500+, and even with all that compiling, it’s still a lot quieter than my old 800Mhz Thunderbird machine which is sitting there serving webpages, generally with a CPU load of zero.

Today I received 1 of 2 packages for my new HTPC. I’m really excited about this project, so naturally the package was a welcome site. Unfortunately, I receieved everything but the computer case. It was nice that they were delivered 3 days ahead of time, but it looks like I’ll have to wait till Monday for the case. It’s going to be a slow torture looking at all those components over the weekend knowing I’ve got nothing to put them in. Since I have a dog and 3 cats, I can’t just leave them out anywhere… they pretty much have to stay packed.

Fridays at work have been pretty strange over the last few months. Usually, Friday is pretty low key… not much going on. But it seems lately that Friday has been the day that you run around everywhere solving little last minute issues with things, debugging stuff, answer help requests from end users, etc. Usually, I’m able to get in and get set, get a cup a coffee, and filter through the last nights email all before 8:30. Today I poured my first cup of coffee around 10:30… and hadn’t even finished it before lunch (I usually have at least 2 full cups in that amount of time). Still, it makes the day go by a little faster, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

I also spent some time trying to get my old analog joystick to work with xmame, but to no success. I’m not sure what the deal is, but if I cat /dev/input/js0 from the console, I can see that pushing buttons on the joystick (it’s really a gamepad) emits information to the screen. The weird thing is, I can’t even see joystick options from the user control pane in xmame.