There’s an ’s’, it’s a plural, there are two. Two that’s actually going to conflict with each other. They really planned that out nicely, oh yeah. We’ve got JAX Asia 2007 in Singapore on November 26th and the 27th and in Jakarta on November 29th and the 30th. Then we’ve got OS Summit Asia on November 26th to the 30th in Hong Kong. I am not going to be there, of course. The flight costs would be ridiculous and I’d be missing too many classes just because of flying alone. I’ll rather miss class in the winter term for EclipseCon 2008 instead.

I think I’ve probably spent about a day and a half so far trying to get a build system working for our project. The Eclipse build process has a ridiculous amount of intertwining Ant files and it sure ain’t pretty. I mean, how hard could it be to tell Ant to fetch some files from a repository and then run a build on it? Oh, you’d be surprised, believe me.

From bug 189314:
“(By the way do committers have to be female? If gender is not important to the role, you can use “they”, “their”, & “them” - which refer to one or more of any combination of genders.)”

Truly an interesting question that I’m sure has been on everyone’s mind. Do committers have to be female? Well, no, they don’t, because I’m a committer and I’m a guy.

I have been trying to phase in the female pronouns to some stuff I write over the male pronoun. It is naturally an extremely difficult task. I also use the plural form at times. I’d say it sounds odd about half the time but can be usable in other times.

Well, seems like they have managed to keep their promise with the final release. I don’t personally expect to feel anything awkward whilst using the application since I’ve been using the 2.0.0 betas for a while, but I guess the switch in icons might get me to scratch my head a little. Anyway, since my notebook’s out of action, I won’t be giving it a test run for a while.

Tonight we’ve released Pidgin 2.0.0beta7. This is the last in our long series of betas. We anticipate a final release later this week.

Famous last words? Ah, well, let us check back “later this week”, I suppose.

In short, my notebook appears to be suffering from some display drivers that’s preventing me from using it. I mean, my Fujitsu is even freezing up when I’m tinkering around in my BIOS…I mean, you just know something’s wrong when your computer freezes while you’re in the damn BIOS configuration screen.

I bought this notebook in late February in 2005 about a week after my Inspiron 8600 got stole and it has served me well for these past two years. Abuse may have been a factor in its untimely demise, really. I mean, given the amount of time I spend in front of my notebook, it’s as if a normal user has been using it for five years, I dare say.

Anyway, I am typing this from my brother’s notebook and have no plans to purchase a new notebook at the moment as aforementioned in my previous blog posts. I will merely “suck it up” for now until I get a notebook from IBM two weeks later. Blogging activity will likely drop as a result during this time span, at least, I certainly won’t be writing any entries for my anime shows.

It’s official, Dell is going to go with pre-installing Ubuntu for their Linux offering side of things. This really shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise, I think, given how popular that distribution is.

I’m probably going to pick up a new notebook in early September…so will it be a Fujitsu or a Dell, or maybe something else? Who knows, there’s plenty of time to decide. I have other more important issues to tend to right now, really, such as looking for housing in Kanata. :(

The code was pretty straightforward, really. Some stuff had to be hacked up here and there, but it works.

As you can tell by the windows being drawn, the left picture was taken on Windows XP and the one on the right is on Linux.

While only two devices are being linked here, the code actually allows an infinite number of devices to be interconnected. Naturally, there will be problems with data replication and synchronization here if multiple people try to set a value to a cell (be it the same one or a different one), but whatever.

Building on top of Wayne and Chris’s work, everyone’s favourite mathematics puzzle (or not, because I don’t think any of my readers gives a damn about sudoku) can soon be solved on your own embedded device!

More to come tomorrow as I attempt to synchronize it up with my notebook via UW’s wireless services.

Generally, before you look or ask for help, you will whine and complain about it verbally to anyone that is near you or to yourself. I did a bit of that before proceeding to examine the source code itself directly to try and discover the cause for my problem. I did not from the get go because eRCP does not bundle source plug-ins with their SDK downloads. Thus, I actually had to check this code out from CVS.

And behold, look what I’ve found!

public void setAlpha(int alpha) {
        // do nothing, not supported for win or ppc
}

No wonder my GC doesn’t support transparency, code like this just might do it. It would’ve been nice if there was something in the javadocs, though, since SWT is advertised as being a “cross-platform widget toolkit”.