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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Thu, 31 Jul 2003

New Phone Plan
blog

For some reason I have a cell phone up here, but I hardly use it. So this morning I called to switch from my current plan (something like eight million minutes on the weekends) to their cheapest plan. Lucky me, I got the smart-ass CellularOne rep who, upon looking at my past usage, just started laughing. Then he asked if my phone had been in a drawer all that time. And he laughed some more.

At first he was cautioning me about the 'Local 20' plan (60 minutes peak, 250 weekends for $20), but once he saw my usage, he thought it was the best solution. I asked about a 'Local 5' plan, but that doesn't exist. He said he'd suggest it in their next meeting and use me as a case study. That guy was a crackup.

Tried playing PlanetSide last night but got bored... didn't seem to be much going on. Then I installed the new Enemy Territory add-on for Wolf3D and shot a few folks online. I hadn't played that game in a while and it was nice to hear the familiar "Medic!" calls. But then that got boring, so I gave up gaming for the night.

Been watching "That's my Baby" on Animal Planet lately... it's where they follow an animal's birth from pregancy to birth. It's pretty interesting... we've seen a polar bear cub, a baby elephant, a horse, a couple monkeys... cool show.

Wed, 30 Jul 2003

#include <std_day.h>
blog

So not much really going on, hence the inactivity... Bozeman's still going great -- the weather has been a bit hot, but it really cools down at nights, so that's nice. I think the dogs are ready for some different weather, though... they're looking forward to the snow.

I've advanced up to BattleRank 9 in PlanetSide -- almost BR 10, actually. Still a fun game -- I've subscribed for three months, so I'll re-evaluate then. It might be time to pick up Star Wars Galaxies and see how it's going.

So BuyMusic started up recently trying to be to windows users what the iTunes store is to Mac users... and they really didn't do such a good job. I popped over there (after switching to a Windows machine since IE is required) all set to buy some music and was pretty disappointed. Their selection kind of sucks, and a lot of the songs are different prices, some can be bought as an album and some can't, etc... plus they all use windows media format which isn't much fun for home or my MP3 player.

So I left (virtually slamming the door) and didn't buy anything. That'll teach 'em. Apple's store, on the other hand, is pretty cool, and makes me want to buy an iMac and an iPod. They need a windows version!

In home news... Mystique repainted our entry and main hallway and it looks freakin' awesome... a chocolatey color that really updates the house... we added some new, larger, baseboards in a nice, bright white, which really accents it nicely. Pictures someday when I remember and when I'm not lazy...

Thu, 17 Jul 2003

I couldn't do it...
blog :: linux

I'm still with enlightenment, in case you're wondering... I didn't actually switch to FVWM for any amount of time... I just couldn't bring myself to do that. I did, however, pop in to the sawfish window manager for about 13 minutes... I thought I might switch to that because it uses lisp as its configuration scripting language... since I'm big on emacs, I thought it'd be fun to do all my window management in lisp.

As it turns out, sawfish is just a bit too minimalist for even me... it's really designed to be run inside of Gnome or KDE and not on its own... sure, there were probably things I could have added, but, for example, when I iconify a window, I expect it to go somewhere. With enlightenment it displays an icon in the bottom-right of my screen (with an actual pixmap of the window, by the way). With sawfish it would just disappear, apparently thinking that Gnome's panel was taking care of keeping track of it. Nope... no Gnome or KDE here... just me and my window manager.

Anyhow, on to more important things... some day, I'm not sure when, I will do the grand emacs experiment... I will spend the entire day in emacs (at work). I basically do everything in emacs anyhow, and anything I'm not currently doing I probably can do, but we'll see if that's entirely correct.

I can't decide if I should allow myself to switch emacs sessions, though... for example, from work I use an emacs run from my own machine for email, but my coding emacs I actually run from one of our development servers. Now, if I switch between those two emacs sessions, does that still count as spending the entire day in emacs? Techinically I think it does, but is the spirit of the day broken? Tough call... I'll have to think on that one for a while...

It's Montana Hot
blog

Ok, I know it's not 116 degrees here, and at least our low still gets down to 60 (not 96), but hey, it's been hot here! And our "AC unit" consists of ceiling fans and window fans which, of course, aren't all that helpful when the outside air is still hot. At night it cools down nicely (usually), but sometimes the air is stubborn and that takes a while. Boo hoo.

Exciting stuff going on here (not really)... over the weekend Mystique and I completed most of our new floor in the hallway... it's a pretty cool looking rustic wood floor that we created. I'll take some pictures someday once we get the baseboards on and the new door moldings. It was a fun project... it had a lot of power-tool usage and I had some quality shop-time doing the project. And I only messed up a few times, but that's ok -- my scrap wood collection is growing.

Still been playing PlanetSide -- last night I reached BattleRank 7 which gave me another certification point and somehow increased my armor's effectiveness. So now I have three cert points which I'll have to figure out where to put... I might start down the engineering track and have my dude be a nice support guy... or add some sort of vehicle so I don't have to walk around as much. We'll see.

My weather site should be back up... my new linux box is hosting the web site and it wasn't starting up apache automatically. I'm working on some new graphs and some summarization tools... I added a new month-to-date temperature graph but it seems to be taking a long time. Too much data...

A couple notes on the temperature sensors: the 'outside' sensor is actually in the sun, so sometimes it reads a bit warmer than the actual temperature. The 'dogs' sensor is a closet below our stairs where Gretta and Ember sleep. The 'wine' sensor is our crawlspace under the house... it's where we keep our wine that's not upstairs in the wine cellar. And, of course, the 'office' is where all my computers are... right now I've got three on most of the time, but I'm getting ready to move one of them downstairs to the crawlspace. It's a file server, so I thought it'd be cool to put it in a climate-controlled environment. Geek.

That's all for now!

Tue, 08 Jul 2003

Here I go Again...
blog :: linux

I'll kick off my new 'linux' category with something I have the bad habit of doing quite often... switching window managers. If you're not sure what a window manager is, you might just want to stop reading here... it might get boring and it might get scary.

Hello, my name is Jason... and I'm a window manager junkie. Hello, Jason. That's right... I love window managers. I don't know why... you'd think that by now I'd have a perfect setup already... heck, I've been messing with window managers for over ten years now. I'm no grizzled unix veteran, but I have been around the window manager block.

I'm currently running enlightenment which I recently switched to when I started my new job. I'm running it at home and at work, which is nice and consistent. It's nice -- it's great looking and it has some pretty cool advanced features that I actually use.

One of them is an enlightenment shell that gives you access to all the windows and functions that run on windows. Being a command-line utility, it's fully scriptable with shell scripts. So, for example, I can use the following at work to automatically switch me to my email desktop and pull up my emacs session I use for email:

#!/bin/bash
DESK_ID=0
WIN_ID=`eesh -ewait window_list|grep emacs@jhaslup|cut -d":" -f 1`
ICON=`eesh -ewait "win_op $WIN_ID iconify ?" |cut -d":" -f 2`
eesh -e "goto_desktop $DESK_ID"
if [ $ICON = "yes" ]; then
  eesh -e "win_op $WIN_ID iconify"
fi
SHADED=`eesh -ewait "win_op $WIN_ID shade ?" |cut -d":" -f 2`
if [ $SHADED = "yes" ]; then
  eesh -e "win_op $WIN_ID shade"
fi

eesh -e "win_op $WIN_ID raise"
eesh -e "win_op $WIN_ID focus"

Cool stuff. Of course, I've only written a couple of these scripts, so I guess I don't use it all that often. But it is kind of nice...

Enlightenment does a nice job with other stuff, as well... window groups are handy, for example. You can group a few windows together and any action taken on one will affect the others. I use that during development... I have a couple emacs windows open that I use together, so when I minimize or iconify one, I want them all to follow their 'parent'.

I'm actually convincing myself not to switch, now... maybe I just need to shake some things up -- change the theme, throw in some Epplets (enligthenment's applets). I dunno...

But if I were to switch... I was thinking about switching back to fvwm. Yes, that's right... old school fvwm. That's the window manager I was using back at motorola on my Sun box eight years ago. It's still going and it's going strong! I was reading some of the site tonight (and related sites), and it seemed like it had some nice features (that I'd never use, of course).

I was inspired enough, actually, to pull in the CVS repository of fvwm and it even compiled and installed just fine. It'd nice to use a window manager that's still being developed... I guess that's one knock against the version of enlightenment I'm using -- it's solid but the developers are working on E-17, the next generation environment.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts right now... one non-window manager comment: RealOne Player on linux rocks. I'm watching the diamondbacks game right now on my linux box. Kudos to MLB and Real for supporting linux...

Project Greenlight
blog

HBO's 'Project Greenlight' has started up again... this is the contest sponsored by Miramax, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and producer Chris Moore where they choose some new folks to create a movie. Last year's show was fun to watch but the movie never really took off, so this year they switched things around and picked two people: a director and a screenwriter.

Well, actually, they picked three people since the director is actually a two-person team. Anyhow, I think they've done three shows so far and it's been fun to watch... the directors are interesting... one's a pretty soft-spoken guy and the other is rather annoying. I think Mystique wants to throw her shoe at him everytime he pipes in with another stupid comment.

Last night's episode had some great content... the first was Chris Moore (executive producer) breaking a chair when he was sitting in it... that cracked me up for a few minutes if only because he's the executive producer.

But the best part was when the two directors were contemplating taking a stand on a casting decision... Miramax wanted to offer to an actress but the directors didn't want her, so they actually said something to the effect of, "what if we say we'll walk out if they offer the part to their actress and not ours?" Hah! Get a grip, kiddo... you won a contest to get to direct this film!

When the producer (Jeff Balis) called Chris Moore, Chris' response was classic... he said, "well, if that's the case then we can easily find new directors for this movie." And then the show ended. What a crack up. Quite the smack down.

Diamondbacks won last night in a great game... it wasn't on ESPN HD but I did get to watch some of it via MLB.tv. The quality wasn't as good as my first game I watched over the internet, but it was ok. I did switch to the radio, though, partly because the stuttering was annoying, but also so I could download some stuff.

Got the new linux box up and running... it's currently serving up my weather pages at weather.haslup.net. The graphs aren't working yet, but I'll fix that tonight. It's nice having a fast linux machine... heck, I can even listen to (and watch!) the dbacks games on it now that Real has released their RealOne player for linux. Pretty cool stuff.

Mon, 07 Jul 2003

Now that's high definition
blog :: hdtv

ESPN HD's sunday night baseball game was the Diamondbacks versus the Dodgers... what a great looking picture! There's a huge difference in quality, especially on a large, widescreen TV... the extra width adds a lot on its own, but throw in the oustanding picture quality and you're in baseball heaven.

It looks like ESPN's doing a great job with their HD channel... they mix in SD footage nicely when showing highlights from other games, etc... during the game, the updates from other games will be shown in 4:3 format with bars on the side that aren't intrusive or annoying. All of their graphics are nicely formatted for HD, and the only thing I've noticed so far is that the game info indicator (in the upper left) is placed so that it works for HD and SD. So for HD viewing it's a little too far towards the middle.

Discover HD has been fun to watch, as well... they've got some nice documentaries filmed in HD. It's a nice channel to watch during the commercials of the baseball games.

HBO HD is still doing ok but most of their new shows in the summer aren't in high definition... so Sex and the City, The Wire, and Project Greenlight are all shown in standard definition, but they look good nonetheless. The've been showing Star Wars 2 fairly often in HD which is always nice to watch (and hear).

Wed, 02 Jul 2003

Media Box
blog

So my new computer came in yesterday (got a screamin' deal on Dell's discontinued 4550 model, but still brand new) and before I spend the time setting it up completely, I decided to try out one of the linux "media box" ISO images. These are bootable cd-roms that are supposed to turn your computer into a home entertainment hub... play CDs, DVDs, MP3 files, divx videos, etc... on your TV using linux software. I've come across a few TV shows in divx format lately, so I thought it'd be a nice way of watching them.

The one I tried is Movix. There are actually three versions of this image, once using a curses (text-only) interface, one with an X interface, and one built for the smaller Via boxes (which I dont' have).

It's a pretty small download and since the new computer came with a 40x CD-RW, it was darn fast in creating the actual CD. The computer also had a GeForce4 card with S Video out, so I took the computer in our bedroom, jacked it into the TV, and fired it up.

It's kind of funny seeing linux booting on your TV... once the image was done booting, I tried mounting one of my samba shares that had a TV show .avi file. The mounting worked (once I rememberd to plug in the ethernet cable, that is), but then mplayer failed to play the AVI. In fact, I couldn't even get it to play an MP3 file through a soundblaster audio card. Bummer.

So I messed around with various settings for a half hour or so, and then gave up. No media box for me last night... I'm not sure why it wasn't working... Movix is supposed to support the TV out for most video cards, but I couldn't get it going. I even tried an older TNT2 card I had with video out, as well... oh well. I think there are a couple of other similar distributions I can try, so someday I'll do that. The best part about these ISO images are that they don't touch what's on your computer's drives at all... they're designed to boot up into RAM and run everything from there. Makes it easy to try things out, that's for sure.

Watched some high definition last night, but not too much. I'm waiting for July 6th (maybe 4th) when a baseball game is on ESPN-HD. That'll be fun to watch... I haven't seen a baseball game in high definition yet.

Tue, 01 Jul 2003

It's On!
blog :: hdtv

Today is the first of July... which means that the DirecTV high definition package is officially turned on for all of us bleeding-edge folks out there. For some reason I have to go through a rural provider of DirecTV (don't get me started on that), but I just called them this morning (bright and early at 8am, probably their first call of the day), and was informed that ESPN HD is now live and on at my house. Woohoo!

Unfortunately, I am not at my house. And to make matters more interesting, Mystique's not answering the phone right now so I can see if it works. Can you believe that? She knows it's the biggest day in our DirecTV lives, yet she's outside feeding the dogs, or mowing the lawn, or making breakfast for her folks. The nerve.

Just for that, we're watching 48 hours of ESPN-HD this weekend.

Ok, Mystique just called me back. After telling me that five calls this morning was a bit unnecessary (and to be fair, only four were me... the fifth was the nice 3 Rivers lady calling me back with channel numbers), she tuned our TV to channel 73... and saw Sportscenter! We're in!

I'm starting to feel a bit of a fever coming on... I should probably go home so I don't infect the rest of RightNow...

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