drboblog

I’m now 18! Had a great birthday involving several nice meals and some pinball, and I’m looking forward to being able to do all the things I’m now legally allowed to do…such as buy scissors, or go to prison.

I got back from Chile three days ago, and now I’m sufficiently caught-up with the goings-on of the past four weeks, it’s time to summarise what I did on this World Challenge expedition.

The expedition was split into four different phases: acclimatisation, project, main trek, and rest and relaxation. After flying into Santiago (via Paris), we did our acclimatisation in La Campana National Park, climbing the eponymous mountain and camping for three nights. Climbing La Campana was tough, and in hindsight, probably tougher than the main trek up Guane Guane.

Our project phase was in Iquique, where we re-painted an old people’s home, then part of the school in which we stayed. It was quite fulfilling, but somewhat longer than it could’ve been; we spent several days wandering around Iquique relaxing, when we could’ve instead had a longer main trek.

The main trek was in Lauca National Park at high altitude; we had to spend several days acclimatising to 3500masl in Putre before we could ascend to our base camp at Parinacota (4500masl). At Parinacota we had to spend more time acclimatising, before we attempted (and succeeded) a climb up Guane Guane. The views up on the altiplano were fantastic, and I’ve got (perhaps too?) many photos of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas.

Our rest and relaxation phase was a little short, but we managed to pack in most of the things San Pedro de Atacama offers, including sandboarding, a trip round the Valley of the Moon and a trip to see the El Tatio geysers.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who has the time, money and driving force. Some of us are already thinking of going back to have an attempt on Mount Parinacota!

I’m slowly putting photos up on Picasa before I go off on holiday again for a week on Monday.

The time has finally arrived, and I’m off on my travels in four days. I’ll be away from the computer for up to two months, spending a month trekking in Chile, then a month doing various other things. I might be back in time for the GNOME 2.24 string freeze, but I should definitely be back in time to see the release. In my absence, I obviously won’t be able to do any further work on this cycle, but I think all my current contributions are pretty much complete anyway. I won’t be replying to mail for at least the period I’m in Chile.

I won’t be around to see them get into the archives, but Stefan Ebner has been working on packaging both Diary (now called “Almanah” due to Fedora issues) and Hitori for Ubuntu. My thanks to him for his hard work on that, and patience in helping me fix all the nasty little autofoo problems.

I’ll try to make an Almanah (Diary) 0.4 release before I go, but I want to leave as long as possible for translations to catch up with the several string changes.
Almanah 0.4.0 is out! The main change for this release is to rename it and fix some problems preventing it being packaged, and so it should be compatible with old databases. The build requirements haven’t changed.

I have been led to believe I started this model matchstick train nine years ago (when I was eight); a present from my grandmother. I’m pleased to say it’s now finished!

Of course, that wasn’t nine years of hard work. Anybody would be hard-pressed to get me to do that; it was an initial spurt of activity, followed by years of bits of the model just sitting on a shelf. I picked up construction again last year, and I’ve been working on it on and off since then.

Unfortunately, it’s not as well-built as it could be, with several of the structural parts of the model not being square (or even flat, in places) due to mistakes I made all those years ago. Still, I think it’s turned out OK!

Next, I think I’ll finish off all those Airfix models I’ve neglected over the years. There are about three helicopters in various stages of misassembly or decay waiting for some love.

In GNOME news, I’m hacking on getting YouTube upload support into Conduit, with the eventual aim of adding a Conduit plugin in Totem to allow video upload to any supported video website. I’ve been having awful trouble with the Python GData API (again), but I think it’s just about sorted now. I got the first video uploaded ten minutes ago, and it’s cleanup from here on!

We’ve now cleared away the set from another WHP production, this time of Abigail’s Party (photos!). I can’t say it was the best play I’ve ever done; it was a departure from the normal type of comedy play we do, and although change is nice, I wouldn’t want to do another like this. I did not really find it funny, and while the five actors were doing phenomenally on stage, the script itself was what I didn’t like. That said, the audiences on all three nights appeared to really enjoy it, so perhaps I’m being too critical.

I was quite disappointed with how the lighting came out, and that’s entirely my fault. Having set it all up and gone through the dress rehearsal, I adjusted it to cover the few dark spots there were, and thought that was the end of it. However, by the time we were half-way through the first performance it was obvious to me that there were still some not-inconsiderable dark spots in a few areas which bugged me throughout. They weren’t bad enough for the audience to notice (as far as I could tell), but were in no way dismissable.

In GNOME news, I’ve been unable to do anything except bug triaging for the past few weeks, due to a combination of exam revision and this play. Once my exams are over (in another couple of weeks), I hope to be back to working on Totem, ready for a GIO-filled 2.24 release.

Last weekend was my training weekend for this summer’s World Challenge trip to Chile. My World Challenge team spent two days camping in Buxton, with one of the main exercises being a 17km hike on Saturday.

For the hike, I had my GPS logger turned on, and collected rather a nice log for the round trip. As I alluded to previously, however, I can’t find a way to extract the data from the logger on Linux. Since mtkbabel explicitly can’t yet support the M-241, I had to extract the logs on Windows. Still, they turned out well.

philip:~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
85 exit
80 make
71 jhbuild
45 svn
23 sudo
20 grep
20 bzr
18 cd
17 ./src/diary
17 ./mtkbabel

The large number of calls to mtkbabel are because I was trying to get that to grab logged data off my GPS, somewhat unsuccessfully.

I’ve just finished converting the site to use Wordpress instead of the custom software I’d previously been using. It’d been getting too time-consuming to keep everything maintained and up-to-date with the latest things going on on the Internet, and I’d been reduced to making posts via phpMyAdmin due to various things breaking. Hopefully, this should be better, and a lot less hassle to keep running. I apologise if the transition has messed up the feed for anyone, but I’ve tried my hardest to redirect all the old URLs, so things should keep working as before.

Recently, I had to compile my computing coursework for Windows, as the person for whom it’s written only uses Windows. Much to my delight, once I’d figured out the terminology and basic principles, getting it to cross-compile for Windows using MinGW was quite easy! Since I couldn’t find much documentation on the process while doing it, I’ve written up the steps I took, and perhaps someone else will find them useful.

Last month, I also managed to write up some API documentation for totem-pl-parser, which has been on the to-do list for a little while. It was quite easy to get the hang of gtk-doc, too, and once I’d got started, the documentation got done quite quickly. If anyone’s implementing anything using totem-pl-parser, I’d appreciate any feedback on the usefulness of the documentation, as it can always be improved.

I’ve got a problem with C.

I’m trying to do something like the following:

#define FOOBAR 5
some_function_which_takes_an_integer (FOOBAR);
...
some_function_which_takes_a_string ("String literal with FOOBAR concatenated: "FOOBAR);

Which I want to expand to:

some_function_which_takes_an_integer (5);
...
some_function_which_takes_a_string ("String literal with FOOBAR concatenated: 5");

Unfortunately, I can’t, and I can’t see a way to do it. I’m basically looking for a way to stringise a preprocessor token’s value so that it can be concatenated with other string literals before the compiler is allowed to molest it.

I’ve been talking with a friend, and seeing as there’s a # preprocessor operator which stringises token names, it would make sense that there would be one for token values, but he can’t think of one, or any other way to do it apart from using sprintf.

One other way of doing it would be to have two different versions of each preprocessor token – one an integer, and one a string – but that’s ugly.

Anybody got any ideas?
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It’s been a busy week, but things should now be winding down (or up) for Christmas.

To begin with, I’ve got an e-mail from Kirk Bridger sitting in my inbox with a usability review of Totem’s Tracker plugin. I’m trying to find some time to go through it and deal with the five issues he brings up, since they’re all problems on one level or another. I’ve just about missed the period before UI change announcement comes in, but I should be able to get it done before the UI freeze.

Another area Totem’s getting some work done in is documentation. We’ve got two bugs open at the moment about it, and some other changes lying around in my local checkout. The current documentation for Totem ostensibly relates to version 1.6, but I suspect it’s actually a mish-mash of documentation for several versions, with small areas changed as and when necessary. It might be an idea to set another GHOP task to update the documentation.

Away from GNOME, I went go-karting yesterday as an outing to celebrate my brother’s birthday. Although it was freezing, we had fun, and my dad, brother and I all came very close together; if it wasn’t for each others’ mistakes, we wouldn’t have got past anyone at all. The problem now is that I ache everywhere, due to the kart’s seat being slightly too big, and the fuel tank being just a bit too wide to sit comfortably between my legs.

Moving back towards computing, I sat the British Informatics Olympiad again on Friday. I found it a lot easier this year than I previously have, as this year, VC++6 was available on the computers at school for me to use. In previous years I’ve been forced to use Visual Basic 6, and the lack of decent arrays makes taking the olympiad like swimming in treacle with your hands tied behind your back look easy.

Thanks to being able to use C, I managed to get complete solutions to the first two questions, and was half-way through a solution to the third (although I’m not sure I was taking the right approach) when the time ran out. Hopefully I’ll have got more than half marks this year.