My Quiet Life

I am currently reading The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (the ubiquitous K&R).

I am also doing all the exercises chapter by chapter and I decided to put up a website to track my progress with the exercises and provide a space for people to critique my code. (or, just tell me how badly it sucks).

I have recently decided once and for all to learn how to program competently. The main reason for this is that I have grown tired of, upon sending feature suggestions or bug reports to various developers, getting “feel free to contribute code!” in response.

Then, instead of just saying “screw you, you’re the developer!”, I can whip up some code and wave it in their fat faces. Ah, spite, the great motivator.

Those of you that want a multi-IM client for windows, but are sick of Trillian, and yet, too wussy to switch to Jabber will be happy to know that there is a win32 executable of the latest GAIM alpha 0.60.0.

I only wish there was a better Jabber plugin for GAIM. The current one doesn’t even let you connect to a different server, which of course defeats the purpose of Jabber entirely, rendering it useless.

UPDATE: I am not a doctor. This is not a doctor’s website. I apologize if the tone of this entry is misleading. If you have arrived here because you are searching for things like “high eosinophil count” because you have one, and you are wondering what it means, you have come to the wrong place. You may want to re-consider the fact that your doctor or medical institution delivered you a medical statistic about your body without telling you what it means.

Thank you.

Today’s lesson:

This might be what is causing my urticaria, and my sinus infections. Now, to continue the lesson:

Stay tuned for next month’s installment! Stay in school!

I finally got antialiased fonts working on Opera this week. My fonts got screwed up somehow (I am still unclear on what happened, really), so I decided to get it working once and for all.

Things I did to get it working, in a not so particular order:

• TrueType Fonts (best for antialiasing):
• • Mounted “C:\Windows\fonts” on my WinXP PC from my laptop on /home/cwage/fonts
  • cd /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType
  • cp /home/cwage/fonts/*.ttf .
  • ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale
  • mkfontdir
  • (If you don’t already have /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/ in your FontPath in your XF86Config, add it now. I already had it)
• Opera:
• • In order for antialiased fonts to work with Opera, you must have the version that is built dynamically against QT. So, the first thing I did was: apt-get remove opera-static; I then downloaded the non-static package and installed it. You’ll need libqt2 if you don’t already have it.
  • Created a wrapper script to spawn opera in ~/bin/opera:

    #!/bin/sh
    
    export QT_XFT=true
    
    /usr/bin/opera
    

• Voila! The results: (Warning: big images)
• • Before.
  • After.

Okay, so the JPG sampling sorta makes it hard to tell. But, trust me, it looks nice. Oh so nice. Now if only I could get it working for all my GTK apps.

Priceline can bite me.

I am trying to fly to Philly next weekend to buy a car. So, I go there, and I put in BNA to PHL and set my price under $100. They couldn’t get me that price — not surprising — but they had a counteroffer. This is the webpage I was presented with.

That webpage clearly says that they are changing the airport I am flying from on the return flight. It doesn’t mention anything about changing my destination.

Despite this, This is the itinerary I got. They are sending me to Newark?!

I called their customer service and got in a shouting match. She said she could not refund anything (surprise), and when I asked to speak to a manager, she said, “there’s no one else to talk to, sir”.

Great. Thank you, priceline, for your expedient service in getting me cheap airfare .. to a city I wasn’t trying to go to.

I have some good news regarding my car.

Last month, my Passat’s heater core (the device that exchanges heat from the coolant to the air for the heat) blew up. I had already heard some horror stories about VW heater cores, so I did some research and found that there had already been some recalls on the heater cores from the Jettas and Corrados.

So, on the advice of some folks on the VR6 list, I e-mailed Volkswagen of America and complained. They told me that I should take it to the dealer, have them confirm that it’s the heater core, and they’d see what they could do.

It took them forever, but the end result was good news. VWofAmerica is paying for the whole thing! It’s a $600 job at most shops, so probably a $1000 job at a dealer. If they weren’t going to cover it, I would have had to tow it back to my place and fix it myself, which I was not looking forward to.

Let’s hear it for consumerism and complaining! Hooray!