god bless you, you wonderful little indian hackers 6

Posted by Mark 21/08/2006 at 08h52

after only a day, the people at Amida Simputers got back to me and sent the newest version of megawidgets. Now, you can bounce on comboboxes all day if you are so inclined, with nary a segfault. Granted, a pickier programmer might ask the question why they can’t make the code available on their site, rather than waiting for developers to stumble across the bug and ask for the update, but I’m so happy that it works that I’m in no mood to carp. I’d been contemplating porting the project to gtk, which would involve not only a fair amount of programming work but a shitload of deathly boring cross-compiling, and all the grovelling around with shared libraries that entails. Thank Christ, it won’t come to that.

Pic(303)#1

This is my setup. The laptop on the left is an awful POS Dell with a busted touchpad and a butt-ugly version of Mandrake installed. The Amida with the blue tape has updated megawidgets code on it; the other doesn’t. Bluetape Amida is hooked up via usbnet to POS Dell, as well as via serial so I can transfer code to it. (Neither ftpd nor sshd were too happy about running on the amida, remember.)

The laptop on the right is my aging but beloved loki, a 17” PowerBook. It’s controlling the POS Dell (also nicknamed pigdog and fivepoundbag) using synergy, a lovely little bit of software that lets you share a mouse and keyboard between two (or more) machines. And the headphones connected to the iPod are my new pride and joy, a pair of Sennheiser HD 555s, through which Mission of Burma is tearing “Careening with Conviction” right up. They’re twice the headphones Chris has, almost literally.

No-one who knows me ought to be surprised by what a mess this is, nor by the fact that in the first two photographs I took, there were elements of the super-hush-hush opening ceremony visible. Oops.

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  1. jules 21/08/2006 at 10h56

    not even two weeks into it and you’re already leaking top secret info. Bad, bad man. Keep it coming.

    sweet setup (well, except pigdog) - man, those headphones kick ass! good to hear things are going well.

  2. mark 21/08/2006 at 11h16

    Cheers Jules. I’ll try to keep almost spilling my guts. :)

  3. Mad 21/08/2006 at 21h53

    Where is your big arse ergonomic keyboard…..or are you just dislocating your writs in order to type.

  4. mark 22/08/2006 at 05h22

    The ergonomic keyboard now types ‘j’ when I hit ‘x’. It still types ‘j’ when I hit ‘j’, though, so my Jedi remapping tricks are no use at all.

    also, i broke the front part off by accidentally dropping it. All in all, I decided it made more sense to use the keyboard Jobs gave me.

  5. Bean 23/08/2006 at 05h11

    As if I wasn’t jealous enough of the whole Qatar gig, he has to rub in the headphones. /me weeps over a cheapish pair of audiotechnicas representing all that remains of a once superior collection.

  6. mark 25/08/2006 at 11h28

    Remember, the Buddha says attachment to material things is the source of pain.

    That said, these headphones are sweet.

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