About
jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

Subscribe
RSS: Subscribe

Links
These are a few of my favorite links.

Fri, 26 Mar 2004

A few more days...
blog

And baseball season starts. I'm not sure why I've been looking forward to the season so much... after all, last year was disappointing for the diamondbacks, and this year we don't have the Johnson/Schilling duo to look forward to. Webb should be fun to watch, but it's just not the same.

If anyone is keeping track, I have switched back to enlightenment as my desktop at home. Yep, yet again I've switched. Finicky.

Playstation linux kit should get here next week... looking forward to that, for some reason. I stink at graphics development, but I've heard that the linux kit can drive a high definition tv, so it might be interesting to see what I can do with that. Probably nothing, but you never know.

Zaurus news: it still rocks. I use it everyday to listen to espnradio (via an app i wrote) at work.

Bozeman: rocks even more than the Zaurus. Raining a bit today, but other than that the weather's great. Looking forward to some good outside time this weekend with the mutts. April 1st -> bring the car out of hiding from the snow.

TV notes: the West Wing was actually good on wednesday... I've figured out that I laugh harder watching will and grace than anything else... world poker tour commentary is getting tired, but otherwise the action is pretty good... HBO's deadwood has qualified for a season pass, but it's in HD so we watch it live, anyhow... still can't stop from watching fear factor, even though it's back to the normal format... "viewer's choice" friends episodes is lame.

Movies we're going to watch this weekend (courtesy of NetFlix): American Splendor, The Missing, Secondhand Lions.

Tue, 23 Mar 2004

Bad News for Linux Baseball Fans
blog :: linux

The folks at MLB.com have decided to go with Microsoft's technology for bringing baseball audio and video over the internet. This is a switch from the last three years when the streams were done by Real.

This sucks because, obviously, non-Windows users won't be able to watch or listen to the games... I was pretty impressed last year when I could watch the game using RealOne player on linux. Those days are over.

I guess it's not all that bad for me (since I have a windows box), but I'd still rather MLB use Real and not give in to microsoft. MS is basically taking a loss on this deal, but it adds content to their MSN subscribers, so I guess it's good for them. I just don't like it.

In other linux news... I couldn't resist the recent price drop of the linux kit for the Playstation 2, so I bought one yesterday. It's down to $99 if anyone's interested... it comes with a 40gb drive, network adapter, keyboard, and mouse, plus a 2-cd install kit that puts linux on the drive. I think it'll be pretty cool to use it as a music server downstairs, and maybe some other stuff once I get it up and running. If I always have it on and and input to my TV, I can even see some picture-in-picture surfing, or mail-checking, or something.

That's it for linux... still have the Zaurus, and while I haven't created anything new for it recently (still working on some apps), I have been using it as an actual PDA. Yay.

Mon, 22 Mar 2004

My Funny Wife
blog :: bozeman

You know your web log readership blows when your wife says to you, "we should start a bozeman blog...so we have a reminder of all the things we liked... like the bald eagle that no one notices but me." Hmmm... a bozeman web log. Wish I'd thought of that... actually, I think she was kidding. I hope.

Anyhow... the Bozeman weather has been just fantastic the past couple of days... all the snow is almost gone, the temperatures are getting into the 50's, and the sun is out, lighting up the big sky. The dogs have been getting some good exercise, and every now and then Mystique and I do, too. We even hit the park for a little aerobie and tennis-ball-throwing for the mutts. Good times until I managed to step in a dog's pile of crap. Leave it to me to find the fresh poo.

Did a lot of work on the house now that the flooring is in... I think the hallway is 90% finished! Hopefully this weekend we'll put the finishing touches on it and have (I think) our first 100% completed area of the house. That only took us 11 months!

Had a nice movie weekend provided by NetFlix... we saw "Runaway Jury", "Mona Lisa Smile", and "Seabiscuit" All good movies, I thought... Seabiscuit surprised me at how much I liked it. Makes me want to go read the book to find out what happened to all those folks.

Oh yeah, the bald eagle that mystique mentioned... on the road to work there's a set of tall, dead (?) trees... right when we first moved here, or maybe even during our visit, we happened to see our first montana bald eagle sitting up on that tree one day. We pulled over and took pictures, of course. In the past week we've driven by those trees twice now and have seen a bald eagle perched up on the top of one of those trees. I wonder if it's the same one from a year ago... pretty cool, though. Mystique says she's losing count of all the eagles she's seen, but I doubt that's true... it's still an unforgettable sight to see for us newbie-Montanans.

Enjoy your day!

Wed, 17 Mar 2004

Diary Schedules
blog :: emacs

I use the following to toggle the Diamondbacks schedule in my emacs "diary". If I had all of the Diamondbacks games active, my calendar would look full. Now, if I hit '!', emacs will toggle to the Dbacks schedule and highlight the days with games.

;;
;; Some functions I use for managing my diary file.
;;


(add-hook 'calendar-load-hook 'jh-setup-dbacks-calendar)

(defvar jh-dbacks-diary-file "~/mine/dbacks_2004-visible"
  "The diary file containing the dbacks schedule.")

(defvar jh-original-diary-file diary-file
  "The original diary file.")

(defun jh-setup-dbacks-calendar ()
  "Sets up a dbacks schedule I can show in calendar mode."
  (define-key calendar-mode-map "!"   'jh-toggle-dbacks-in-calendar))

(defun jh-toggle-dbacks-in-calendar ()
  "Marks the dbacks schedule in calendar."
  (interactive)
  (setq diary-file (cond ( (string= diary-file jh-original-diary-file)
                           jh-dbacks-diary-file)
                         (t jh-original-diary-file)))
  (calendar-unmark)
  (mark-diary-entries)
  (setq jh-dbacks-showing-dbacks (not jh-dbacks-showing-dbacks)))

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;;; Local Variables: *
;;; auto-recompile: t 
;;; End: **
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

Tue, 09 Mar 2004

KDE 3.2
blog :: linux

Ahh, the winds of window managers has changed again... back to KDE 3.2! A semi-official release came out on one of the package sites I use for updates, so I installed it (loyal readers will remember that I built my own version, but had problems with it so I quit using it).

The good news is that my alt-tab issue is fixed! I knew it must've been something I messed up. Even better news is that I was able to compile a Qtopia application for the Zaurus using the new KDevelop IDE. Heck, the template application (pretty much) compiled all on its own and even ran in the Qtopia virtual framebuffer. Two years and one Zaurus ago, that took me a full weekend to get up and running. Impressive. Of course, I probably won't use it again, but it's nice to know I can. Me and my short attention span...

So I'll be running with KDE 3.2 for a while... I've only used it for a half hour or so, so there could be some issues down the road. But overall I think it's still a nice environment... speedy enough on my machine, and with enough eye-candy to keep me entertained.

Not much other linux news in my world... don't even have any Zaurus news to sneak in. Gotta work on that...

Thu, 04 Mar 2004

The Gentoo-Siren
blog :: linux

Gentoo Linux just released another version (more of a checkpoint, as lwn.net calls it). Why, oh why, am I being drawn to Gentoo all the time? I think I've tried installing it five or six times on various machines and I always give up at some stage of the installation and go back to old reliable... Red Hat. I guess since Red Hat's going away (although replaced by Fedora) I'm looking for a new distribution. Who knows.

Fedora seems to be running ok on my test box, so I guess I should just stick to that... I installed Fedora in order to check out KDE 3.2. I liked it enough that I installed it on my main box and even used it for a few days. One annoying bug killed it, though, and for all I know it's my fault: I couldn't alt-tab between windows. For me that's a huge deal... I avoid the mouse as much as I can and even though i could map some other keys, I'm just too used to alt-tab.

Other than that, though, the interface was nice... if I ever need to use a graphical file manager I always pull up konqueror which has some nice features. I've always wanted to write a KPart of konqueror for some reason, just haven't gotten around to it (one for my mp3 player would be nice, for example).

But, of course, I stopped using KDE and I'm back to enlightenment at home. Don't know why... I just thought I'd fire it up instead of going back to XFCE. No real reason, just thought I'd get back to the ultra-customizable E for a while.

2010 : February (2)
2009 : February (2)
2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3)
2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1)
2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2)
2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1)
2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3)
2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)