12:02
Sooooo... a weekend just Happened, and nothing else happened. I went to Kuhmo and came back.
Today's stuff: I woke up slightly late and went to the university by bus. Right on schedule. Considering the experiences I've had with the buses here before, this is something sort of a miracle, because usually walking is faster. =)
The lecture: Someone from F-Secure talked about Symbian's most amazing Epoc operating system.
It sounded like an interesting platform, until he mentioned the file system is based on VFAT, rather than database approach that PalmOS uses.
Here's why VFAT sucks on portable machines: block size is way too big. Yes, even at 512 bytes - consider that GSM mobile phones need to store a lot of 160-byte files... (Yes, I know they shouldn't store SMS messages that way, but at least my Nokia does just that. Memory consumption is HUGE.)
12:18
Some people seem to whine in Slashdot about How Online Diaries Suck - and
since this is an online diary of sorts, I want to share a few thoughts.
I keep online diary in two places: Here, and in
Advogato.
As you may have noticed, I don't take these things to too personal level.
Well, ocassionally, yes. Sometimes I vent my depression or whine that I can't
code myself out of a cardboard box... but that's all.
I try to keep these things "Look, this sort of cool things happened today,
enjoy". See above comment - I just told what I think of Epoc after a short
presentation. Here, I keep my small comments about other writeups, my strange
ideas that otherwise have no nodeworthiness, and my ocassional thoughts about
events of the world.
In other words, I keep this as a journal of stuff that's somehow tied to the
time it happens. The above is what I think of Epoc and the braindead Nokia way
of storing SMSes now. Let's see what I think of it in 2 years...
I don't document every move of my heart, or every detail of my life. Things
just happen...
21:00
Hmm... One thing is sure: Glade + Perl isn't as easy as Visual Basic. =( it's a lot cooler combination, though.
I'm making an admistration tool for YiffCam (a program to manage the archive and list of hosts that are allowed to view the camera picture =) ... it's something that actually has a GUI, as opposed to what I have usually done (Web/filter/CLI/Curses UI).
I'm using Glade-Perl package (glade2perl tool and related stuff). People told that Gtk::GladeXML is a better choice, though...
00:07
Okay, my whine about Perl Gtk+:
The module is still pretty darn hard to comprehend, and forced me to do pretty strange things.
The module I had problems with in particular was Gtk::CList (that represents a columned list). Dream things that the module was supposed to do:
- "Tell me which items of the list are selected."
- "Tell me how many items the list has."
What I needed to do instead was this:
- "Set up signal handlers for list select/unselect signals, and record each selected item to an array. (Caveat: Stub glade2perl generates doesn't have figurative 'row' and 'column' variables. It may look a bit confusing to a newbie.)"
- "Loop over each item of the list, and stop counting when the list returns undef."
This sort of things are fundamental and, as of yet, I have to say the GTK+ module has way too much complicatedness, probably owing to the C background. Damn.
The lack of query methods for list size is particularly unforgiveable...
Aside of this stuff, I was surprised how easily the UI and operations were built from ground up. This thing is, like, amazing once you get to know it. =)
Other day logs o' mine...
Noded today by y.t.:
undef
Updated:
Metal Gear Solid