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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Thu, 19 Feb 2004

Streaming Nirvana
blog :: zaurus

I'm gearing up for the Arizona Diambondbacks on MLB.com's radio... last year MLB.com used RealOne as their streaming media. Unfortunately, that's not available on the Zaurus, so my dreams of listening to the games anywhere in the house easily were dashed.

Or so I thought! Last night I setup what I think will work out just fine for me: stream the audio on my linux machine or XP machine (RealOne is available for either), pipe that into my line-in on my linux box, and use Icecast to create an MP3 stream that I can use mplayer on my Zaurus to listen to wirelessly. Perfect. I'm using an application called DarkIce to do the streaming and it works well because I can specify a pretty low bitrate so the Zaurus isn't taxed too much.

Next up: video from MLB.tv! That one might be a bit more difficult... we'll see how I like the audio before I tackle that one.

Wed, 18 Feb 2004

Add me to My Yahoo!
blog

Yahoo recently introduced the ability to add RSS feeds to your My Yahoo page. This means that you can add my humble web log to your my yahoo page (if you use it) so you can keep up-to-date on all my ramblings. Pretty darn exciting, eh? Just click the yahoo graphic above and Yahoo! will step you through it.

Where'd winter go?
blog :: bozeman

I've been slacking a bit in updating my non-techie sections, so here's a little update on the goings-on in our sleepy town of Bozeman.

First of all... it's already February and I'm wondering where the winter went! It's in the 30's and 40's now and we haven't seen snow in almost a week. Well -- we see snow every day, but I haven't seen snow falling in Bozeman in a while. It actually might rain today -- not snow, rain.

Of course, I do remember that it still snowed through April and into May last year, so I'm pretty sure that the snow's not done for the season. Overall the winter was ok... we did have a couple weeks (maybed 10 days) where it was really cold and lots of snow fell. But we survived that alright (only one burst pipe and that was really my fault). I've even got my snowblower going which is pretty darn handy when the snow falls.

The lowest temperatures we saw were in the -20's (-29.1 to be exact), but that was only for a couple days (and obviously at night). I'm not sure exactly how much snowfall we had, but one day it seemed it wouldn't stop snowing and I was digging out at least eight inches, if not more. That was before the snowblower was fixed, so it was a nice workout.

We've settled in pretty nicely as Bozeman residents... we've staked out the restaurants and have fallen into a nice routine for the weekend. Breakfast at Main Street Overeasy on both saturday and sunday (it's nice that they recognize us... pretty soon I'm sure they'll start pre-ordering for us, as well)... saturday lunch isn't quite set, but on Sunday we'll hit the gym after breakfast which allows us to go to The Garage for a burger. They're starting to recognize us, as well... we'll probably shake up that routine after a while, but it's been fun trying to find all the good places to eat.

This past Sunday we went to West Yellowstone with Mystique's parents for all-day snowmobiling... that was a lot of fun, and it was nice getting out into the forest to see some of the Yellowstone country. West Yellowstone is fun because snowmobiles are everywhere... you're actually driving down the main streets of the town on your snowmobile. Very cool.

The house is coming along nicely... we're definitely not finished fixing it up, but it's getting there. Since we've moved the TV into the room with the heater (woohoo!), we've got the carpet in, and we started turning the old TV room into an entertaining-type room (for all the entertaining we do -- hah!). I had some screwy idea of doing a couple textures on the walls in that room and unfortunately Mystique agreed to it (I think out of pity because she knew how hard it would be). So it took us a good four days of painting and sort-of-plastering to get this room's walls done. Sort of. I took off all the baseboards so I need to put those back on, plus a chair rail, and some crown moulding. Dumb idea, jason! But as payback for all our hardwork we'll soon be able to play pool in that room. That should be fun.

I guess that's it... bottom-line: Bozeman's great. Updates (and maybe even some pics!) soon!

Tue, 10 Feb 2004

Zaurus Update
blog :: zaurus

Well, I've had the Zaurus for a few weeks now, so I thought I'd give a little update...

I've actually been pretty pleased with the Z, which is kind of nice. The developer community has certainly improved since two years ago (when I had my original Z), so it's nice to be able easily add packages and create applications without too much trouble.

Lately I've been using the Open Embedded build system. It allows someone to easily download and build software for the Z. Since I've installed OpenZaurus 3.3.6 I need to rebuild some things because 3.3.6 uses the gcc3 series compiler which isn't quite compatible with the older gcc2 series. But using OpenEmbedded, I've been able to recompile just about everything I wanted, so no problems there.

It's also nice having no problems with networking... at home I have the wireless card, and at work I can easily pop the Z into the cradle and it uses USB through my linux box (doing NAT) to get out to the real world. Nice and clean.

My own application development has been going well... so far all of it has been done using Python, PyQt, and sqlite. This is great because there's no compiling, I can write it all on my desktop machine (after some initial sizing on the Z), and in a pinch, I can always do the actual development on the Z. Speed hasn't been too bad... I'm in the process of writing two apps: one is my hold'em replay app, the other is a phone log for work (keep track of who called me and why). The hold'em app might take five seconds or so to load, but it's doing a bunch of image and color creation on startup. The phone log app takes just about two seconds to load which is perfectly acceptable.

That's it for now... screenshots and downloads once (if?) I ever finish an app!

Wed, 04 Feb 2004

jh-make-line-like-above
blog :: emacs

;;
;; Creates a line of dashes the same length as the line
;; above the current point.  I use this for my documentation
;; to underline headings:
;;
;; Example:
;;
;; Chapter One
;; ^
;;
;; With the point at the caret (^), type C-c C-l would create:
;;
;; Chapter One
;; -----------
;; ^
;;
;; Leaving the point at the caret (^). 
;;
(defun jh-make-line-like-above ()
  "Creates a line of dashes matching the string length of the line
  above."
  (interactive)
  (insert-char (string-to-char "-")
               (progn
                 (save-excursion
                   (beginning-of-line 0)
                   (end-of-line)
                   (- (point) (progn (beginning-of-line 1)
                   (point))))))
  (newline))

(global-set-key [(control c) (control l)] 'jh-make-line-like-above)

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