Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.  Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.  One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.

He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him.  She swam to the bottom and pulled him out.  When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, ‘Edna, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is you’re being discharged, since you
were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love.  I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him.  I am so sorry, but he’s dead.’

Edna replied, ‘He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry.  How soon can I go home?’

Today is Mental Health Day!  You can do your bit by remembering to
send an email to an unstable friend…

Done my part!!!

One of the more imaginative Nigerian schemes, to be sure, but still full of typos. Maybe I could get rich just getting hired out to make their emails look more realistice. A 1% fee should be a nice additional income, right?

Here’s the text of the email:

A while back my 6 month old laptop stopped booting up. Lights would come on, but nothing would ever happen. Wouldn’t even boot off of a CD.

So, I send an email, exchange a couple of things with this support person and before I even completely finished running the tests he suggested, I got an email that said they were sending a box for me to ship the laptop back in.

Box comes, I send it out, 5 or 6 days later I have it back with the memory replaced.

Great service, no questions, excellent experience.

Then there was today.I’ve had an HP PSC 750xi for several years now. I don’t even remember how long and it’s just sat here on the desk and copied, printed, and scanned with nary a hickup. The last few months it’s been showing signs of aging though.

Sometimes the scanner doesn’t want to initialize when the printer is powered up. It’s gotten very finicky about accepting ink cartridges, sometimes rejecting them between jobs when the printer hasn’t even been powered down. This morning I look and all the lights on the front are doing the “fast busy” flashing and it’s showing me an error on the display “b8000d08″.

I’m pretty sure that this means it’s the “end of life” for this particular machine, but since I got such great service from HP the last time I thought it might be worth the small effort to send in an email and just confirm it. After all, if it’s a small thing then it’s cheaper to fix it, but I’m guessing that on something like this it’s more expensive to fix than to replace.

Off goes the email and I get a response back: You didn’t put what the OS is that the computer is running that the printer is connected to.

Of course not – when a machine has failed internally it can’t possibly matter what OS the attached box is running. Still, I figure someone is following a script and I’ll not advance to the next stage without an answer, so I reply that I’m running Linux.

I get a response with the following:

I appreciate your patience and coopereation.

Ken, please go through the below weblink for Linux Support Overview. This document provides details about the Linux Operating System, Linux drivers for HP All-in-One products, and resources to locate additional information.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=bpu00658

Please copy the entire URL and paste it in a new window of Internet Explorer and press Enter.

OK, so I haven’t actually looked at the URL yet (and I’ll update this if I’m proven wrong), but after telling her that I’m running Linux, why on earth would she suggest that I paste the URL into Internet Explorer?

*sigh*

In a recent email to a Linux mailing list about backups and backup strategies, we find the following:

> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 08:36 -0700, XXXXX XXXXX wrote:
> > Fifth, restore capabilities are only a website away, and can easily be
> > performed by the end user (assuming they have enough rites to do so).
This is a case where the word “rites” obviously should have been “rights”. However, the wrong word really changes the meaning. My response to the author (which I made a private reply and not a reply back to the mailing list) was:

> Sorry, but I was very amused by your typo: "rites" should have been
> "rights", but the mental image of users making the proper sacrifices and
> chanting to get their files restored made me laugh.

When you take into account the common view that users don’t know how all that networking stuff really works and it’s all magic, only understood by the Administrator and his minions, that’s what really makes this funny.

In a follow on email the author noted that spell checkers don’t help when you spell the wrong word correctly.

It just reinforces what I’ve known for a long time – spellchecking is not the same as proofreading.

Some people say I have A.D.D., but I say … “Hey Look, a Chicken!”

I’ve been looking into writing (or rewriting) some sort of game. In fact, I’ve started more than once. One of the drawbacks is that I am intent on being platform independent and I keep finding different tools that seem to fit the bill but I end up getting bogged down in one way or another.

I’ve finally decided on using a combination of C#, SDL, and OpenGL. The problem I keep running into is that all the books and tutorials I’ve run across make the assumption (a valid one, unfortunately) that since most of the readers are using Windows, the tutorial or book can just use Windows specific code and no one will care (or, for that matter, even notice.)

One of the people I work with (in my full-time, bring-home-a-paycheck job) is also the author of several books and when I was complaining to him about this situation he mentioned that it sounded like a good opportunity for a book. So, in spite of the evidence that you get by reading this blog, I’m embarking, with him, on a journey to produce a book with the preliminary title of Platform Independent Game Programming using C#, OpenGL, and SDL.

The main reason that this is a preliminary title is because we’ve not actually talked to a publisher yet.

I’m in the process of defining what the book will contain, and my vision is to produce a basic game that takes advantage of the 3 legs I’m building on to produce a game at the end of the book. When I get real ambitious I also envision the followup book where the game morphs into a 3D version.

So, stay tuned. I’ll be posting up ideas here as we work out the details.

For several years now I’ve been listening to KALC (Alice 105.9) here in Denver, especially to the morning show. For a while they were using AIM to allow you to talk to them. I’m not sure why they stopped doing that, but I think it was network issues.

So, while the show was on I’d be sending in commentary on the show, occasionally getting a reply or two.

Then one day something I said hit a chord with Howie and he mentioned me on air. With Howie’s ever present careful analysis of whatever he reads he transformed “Mad Coder” into “Mad Cooter”. I, of course, sent in a response right away, but it mattered not. I was now know as Mad Cooter on Alice.

So, giving in to the inevitable, I started sending them emails (once AIM went offline for them) with the Mad Cooter signature block.

I got to sit in the studio once for about the last 10 minutes of the show and met them all. I still get occasional air time, but I get frequent responses to email. Once, one of my suggested Headlines was used by Howie.
It’s a fun show to interact with. You should listen.

You can listen to them by going to http://alice1059.com and navigating through to the “Listen Live” link.

I do have to wonder, however, why some people have to make things so difficult.

So, it turns out that if I look for a tutorial on just plain GTK then it’s easier to find what I’m looking for. On first blush it’s not all that easy to design a form using GTK. There are a lot of fiddly bits to get all lined up to make it work.

Now, I’ll admit right here that I’m not at one with graphical design (using graphical tools to create things) but to my way of thinking there is a lot of non-intuitive stuff going on.

When I first tried putting a menu on the form, I dragged it on and it promptly expanded to be full size – it took up the entire window. Now, that might be OK if the new object was resizable, but it’s not. It turns out that you need containers for all your widgets. This just seems counter-intuitive to me, but now that I know (or at least have an idea of) how it works, I’ll give using GTK another shot. I had switched back to using Windows Forms for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is that the GTK version wasn’t making sense. Secondly, I’ll give the designers at Microsoft kudos for how they implemented their stuff. It is much simpler and straight forward to implement than the folks at GTK came up with. Thirdly, since this is meant to be a cross platform application I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess around with adding a GTK requirement for the Windows folks.

I don’t know enough yet about distributing ECMA 334 applications yet, so that last point my be a non-issue. Far more important, to me, is the ease of programming. Especially as GTK seems so convoluted. I’ll try an example here to show you.

Windows Forms

public class RSSMenu : MainMenu
{
MenuItem miFile;
MenuItem miFileOpen;
MenuItem miFileClose;
MenuItem miFileExit;

public RSSMenu()
{
miFile = new MenuItem("&File");
MenuItems.Add(miFile);

miFileOpen = new MenuItem("&Open");
miFileClose = new MenuItem("&Close");
miFileExit = new MenuItem("&Exit");

miFile.MenuItems.Add(miFileOpen);
miFile.MenuItems.Add(miFileClose);
miFile.MenuItems.Add(new MenuItem("-"));
miFile.MenuItems.Add(miFileExit);

miFileOpen.Click += new EventHandler(miFileOpen_Click);
miFileClose.Click += new EventHandler(miFileClose_Click);
miFileExit.Click += new EventHandler(miFileExit_Click);

}

public void miFileOpen_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

}

Note how easy it is to add items to a menu and event handlers to the widgets.
GTK

menu = gtk_menu_new ();

/* Next we make a little loop that makes three menu-entries for "test-menu".
* Notice the call to gtk_menu_shell_append.  Here we are adding a list of
* menu items to our menu.  Normally, we'd also catch the "clicked"
* signal on each of the menu items and setup a callback for it,
* but it's omitted here to save space. */

for (i = 0; i < 3; i++)
{
/* Copy the names to the buf. */
sprintf (buf, "Test-undermenu - %d", i);

/* Create a new menu-item with a name... */
menu_items = gtk_menu_item_new_with_label (buf);

/* ...and add it to the menu. */
gtk_menu_shell_append (GTK_MENU_SHELL (menu), menu_items);

/* Do something interesting when the menuitem is selected */
g_signal_connect_swapped (G_OBJECT (menu_items), "activate",
G_CALLBACK (menuitem_response),
(gpointer) g_strdup (buf));

/* Show the widget */
gtk_widget_show (menu_items);
}

/* This is the root menu, and will be the label
* displayed on the menu bar.  There won't be a signal handler attached,
* as it only pops up the rest of the menu when pressed. */
root_menu = gtk_menu_item_new_with_label ("Root Menu");

gtk_widget_show (root_menu);

/* Now we specify that we want our newly created "menu" to be the menu
* for the "root menu" */
gtk_menu_item_set_submenu (GTK_MENU_ITEM (root_menu), menu);

/* Create a menu-bar to hold the menus and add it to our main window */
menu_bar = gtk_menu_bar_new ();

gtk_widget_show (menu_bar);

/* Create a button to which to attach menu as a popup */
button = gtk_button_new_with_label ("press me");
g_signal_connect_swapped (G_OBJECT (button), "event",
G_CALLBACK (button_press),
G_OBJECT (menu));

gtk_widget_show (button);

/* And finally we append the menu-item to the menu-bar -- this is the
* "root" menu-item I have been raving about =) */
gtk_menu_shell_append (GTK_MENU_SHELL (menu_bar), root_menu);

/* always display the window as the last step so it all splashes on
* the screen at once. */
gtk_widget_show (window);

The GTK code came from a tutorial located at http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/x1579.html. Note that I am not criticizing his programming techniques here, just contrasting the two methods.

The book is [i]Practical Mono[/i] by Mark Momone (APress) and the application is an RSS reader. This is application useful to me because I should be able to modify it to store the feeds in a common place on my server. Currently I’m using Thunderbird to read the RSS feeds I’m interested in, which works fine, but since the RSS info is stored locally I have to coordinate which things I’ve read where, etc. Having a common storage area would alleviate this problem.

OK, now that you have the background here’s my beef: The book uses System.Windows.Forms (that’s fine) but I want to use GTK#. In order to create the menus for the application the book puts it all in code. Any tutorials that reference creating menus using GTK# want me to use the graphical tool to do that.

I’m minimally competent in using designer interfaces. Actually, using the word “minimally” might be giving myself too much credit. My brain just doesn’t work that way. Simple stuff I’m OK with. I’m using MonoDevelop for the application work and I can muddle through that OK. But grab a picture of a control and put it on a page and then edit it? I just don’t see it.

As an aside, I was in some sort of “play nice with others” training at work (and got in trouble for stating that “sometimes I think other people are idiots because they are”, but never mind that) and the instructor used a bit of video tape with MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. After she was done with the clip, she was talking about how the words he used invoked a visual response. I told her that it didn’t for me. Yes, the words were inspiring, but I didn’t see pictures in my mind. Turns out everyone else did. I think this is just another aspect of my having issues with what appears to me to be complicated visual cues.

Oh, and I get my daughter to use The Gimp/Photoshop to fix up images for me. If it’s more than cropping or changing the size I just don’t get it. All those layers? Just more opportunity for me to get lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Am I the only person left who wants to write code instead of using drag and drop? I’ve wondered if it’s just something built into my brain or if all those years of only having a command line have ossified my brain paths into ruts that I can no longer see out of as I wander down the aisles of new development.

I’ve been given some minor inspiration that maybe my writing isn’t as bad as I think it is. I’m not yet convinced that that statement is true, but I’m willing to start the new year with an assumption that someone who makes at least part of their living by writing in a coherent manner might have a valid opinion.

Don’t expect to see grand things here – just me, blowing off steam, having a conversation with virtual friends, whatever.

We’ve had a lot of snow around here recently (I’m in the Denver area.) In late November/early December a local weatherman stated that because of El Nino it was going to be drier than usual and that we most likely wouldn’t get any real snow until February.

Then we had 2 blizzards in a row, just a week apart.

Then we had another snowstorm (only about 8 inches this time) a week after that.

Quite unusually for this part of the state, we still have snow on the ground. A lot of it. Even with the melting and settling I have about 18″ in the front yard. There’s even a good 4 to 6″ of packed snow/ice on the side roads yet.
I can hear you now – “But what about all that skiing in Colorado?”  Well folks, while we like it when it snows on Monday Night Football because it brings in the tourists, the reality is that down here on the high plains where the city is, snow usually lasts a week or less. If there’s any sunshine at all, the snow is melting off the next day. We’ve had foggy conditions because of the water sublimating off the streets. Now, go up a few thousand feet where the ski areas are and that’s a different story. They tend to keep the snow they get (which is, all in all, a good thing.)  While it’s unusual, one year there was only about 45 days when they weren’t skiing up there. They got a lot, it stayed cooler, they skiied until mid August, started up again the end of September.

Oh well, enough to get started with. Hopefully I will be able to maintain momentum and write something up every day or so.

Thanks for listening.

–

Artificial flowers cannot die, for life within them is illusion.