Froo-its of the Dev-il.

November 29th, 2001

Yesterday I paid someone a lot of money to come in and run the cables from the attic down the walls into the boxes that already exist. This needed to be done in the two bedrooms and in the living room. Two guys showed up in the morning and got to work. The two bedrooms were a relative snap since there wasn't anything in the way between the attic and the boxes. (This is good information in case I ever want to put in something else.)
The living room wasn't so easy, though. There was a brace that ran diagonally through the wall preventing easy passage of a new cable through the wall. The guys that I hired, with their superior skills and tools, were able to locate the brace in the wall with relative ease and punched a hole right where the brace was. Interestingly enough, there was already a patch there from when the phone line had been originally installed. This means that we didn't have to do any additional damage in putting in new lines, which is always good news. In any case, the cable for the TV and the telephone connection were both successfully replaced.
I wish that all conversations were resolved this easily:
17:17:44 DrewAJackass: hello
17:18:05 blizzard: nice nick
17:18:15 DrewAJackass: yea
17:18:25 DrewAJackass: do u know josh9589
17:18:28 blizzard: no
17:18:32 DrewAJackass: ok
17:18:33 DrewAJackass: bye
17:18:38 blizzard: bye
17:18:47 DrewAJackass: want to talk to me
17:18:50 blizzard: not really
17:18:55 DrewAJackass: ok bye
    

November 27th, 2001

The living room cable drop didn't end up being as easy as I had hoped. There's a big thick piece of wood that I need to drill a hole through to drop more cable through to the box in the wall. The cable that's there now apparently goes through a small hole in another piece of wood or is wedged in between two things in the wall or something since it's not just possible to pull another wire through with it. Sadness.
We also had to remove the box in the wall so we could open up more holes in it so we could put through new telephone and TV cable wiring. Might as well run ethernet there, too. And maybe AV cable as well. Who knows? At this point I'm about ready to call up an electrician and get them to just run conduits to the rooms in question. It might save me time and therefore in the long run, money.
I've been working on the gtk2 port of mozilla. I've got a semi-working new container class that will handle the toplevel window and "real" child gtk widgets. It's also got drawing area shims for mozilla's scrolling drawing areas. You have to be able to have the toplevel container widget, shims in the middle and a gtk widget that is the physical child of the shim's inner window but is the logical child of the container widget. I have this sort of working with at least one test, the GtkButton widget which is surprisingly hard since it's a NO_WINDOW widget.
Put galeon 1.0 into gnomehide.
Life was good. We had untold wealth, a team of ninja accountants, and all the flan we could ever desire. But all it took was one woman and her dark secret to bring it all crashing down around us.

November 25th, 2001

It's almost the end of November and it hasn't snowed yet. It's really odd. I always remember the first snowfall of the year being some time around Halloween.
Shona and I managed to get one cable from the attic to one of the boxes in the walls today. This was the connection in the kitchen and probably was the easiest to do. It was still a pain in the butt. Apparently the existing cables, which I had hoped to use to pull the new cable through, went in front of a piece of wood or something right before they went into the box. This made it impossible to just pull the new cable through. I ended up fashoning a coat hanger into a poor man's snake and it was just long enough to reach from the wall in the kitchen up to the attic which made it possible to pull a new cable through. Yay! One down, three to go.

November 24th, 2001

Yesterday was turkey day for me and my family. We got together, ate and a good time was had by all. Other than that, not much going on at all. I finally finished The Radicalism of the American Revolution. It was an excellent book. I recommend it to anyone interested in politics or American history.
Here's a nice blumb from an article on CNN:
The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning Friday for Afghanistan, telling Americans who might be tempted by adventure that military operations, banditry, land mines and an acute food shortages make travel there unsafe.
Is that an actual problem? Do people think it would be fun to go to Afghanistan? I'm reminded of the legend that during the first battles of the American Civil War that people would put together picnic lunches to go and "watch the war" for leisure.

November 21st, 2001

Mozilla 0.9.6 is released. Whew. OK, off to do some hacking for a change.

November 19th, 2001

Today Shona and I caught up on paperwork.

It's been a quiet week. I was disappointed to discover that the phone line that runs from the basement to the attic is attached somewhere in the space that it runs through. This means that I can't use it to run new cabling and means that I have to pay someone who owns a snake to do it for me.

November 14th, 2001

Work, work work. Still working on the release.
Today I went out and bought a pre-made punchdown block for telephones so that I can try and get some real wiring done. It allows you to connect four phone lines to up to 6 outlets. Of course, I only need one phone line to connect to four outlets but if I ever feel like I'm not getting enough attention from telemarketers I can always exapand.
I also got a nice set of diagonal cutters for wires since the crimper, while having a cutter on it, becomes unruly when you try to cut a really small cable. Ahh, the small victories in life.
I think that the cold is finally ending. I only coughed a little today when I woke up and I had real energy to get things done.

November 12th, 2001

On a good note, my wife's sister came to visit with her boyfriend. He's an aspiring carpenter and he replaced all of the railings on the deck.
On a bad note, shona was very ill over the weekend and I'm still battling this ongoing cold. I didn't get as much rewiring done as I had hoped. I did however, invest in a lifetime supply of cat5 cable and my own crimping tool, punchdown tool and cable tester.

November 9th, 2001

Spent some time yesterday working on a silly image resizing cgi that lets me keep one image and resize on the fly. After seeing the amazing cpu usage that the little program used when it was running I added a cache to it so it will store common decoded images and just blat them out to the network if it's already been decoded once. It's much faster now.
I've still got this cold. I've got a minor cough now. Yucky.
Still working on the next Mozilla release.

November 7th, 2001

I've been working pretty hard on the next Mozilla release. I'm hoping that it turns out to be a good one.
My new (old?) keyboard arrived from EBay. It's one of those old IBM keyboards that makes a spring noise every time you hit a key. It's old enough so that it doesn't have a windows key on it. Even though it's old it seems to work great.

November 5th, 2001

I've got a cold. Yuck.

November 1st, 2001

Today I got sick of DSL that was flaking out so I went to Radio Shack, got 100 feet of phone cable and ran a cable directly from the network interface to my office. It's working great so far.
I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the phone cords that are in the house are located. They run from the network box, up through the inside wall of the house along the sewer vent that goes up to the roof. There turns out to be a tremendous amount of extra cable in the basement, coiled up and stuffed behind a piece of wood. I can probably use that as a runner to run new cable up the wall and up to the roof. Hopefully there won't be any snags on the way up the wall.
The attic, which I've never been in, was an interesting experience. There are standard rafters below the roof and lots of insulation. You can see the huge structure they built to support the full height ceiling in the living room. It's a huge amalgamation of 2x4s, sheetrock and insulation.
There is a combination of different types of insulation. There appears to be some fiberglass insulation covered by that spray on stuff. It creates a lot of dust and crap in the air and makes your skin all itchy. Yuck. Next time that I go up there you can bet I'm going to be wearing a mask.
Lucky thing is that the phone cords for my apartment appear to go directly from the attic, over the top of the rooms and down the walls. This means that there's a lot of opportunity to do rewriring, and to do it correctly. All I have to do is find some huge lengths of good phone cord and some decent crimping tools and maybe a good junction box. The current setup has some seriously ugly connections that need to be fixed.