Documentation..

I found myself writing a lot of documentation from my work. Usually, I write a documentation only on source code. This helps me tracking what I did. I have a request to publish this in clear form to read, not in source code comment level. So, I revise my projects and move documents into HTML form. I remind the first time I came to work here.
Our department did NOT have CMS. No central documentation system. The defense word was, 'we are small.' I didn't bother to start one like tikiwiki. I actually enjoyed not documenting my work :) We have issue tracking system, but it is not used for programming issue. We purchased it long time ago, and I feel very sorry that we are stuck to this.
Back to documenting story, my best option to publish my work was HTML. When I listed number of my projects, gosh it went up to 20. It is still growing. Sure, I worked a lot. :)
I am moving on. I don't know what will be my next job, but excited to relocating to my new place in Atlanta, GA !!!

Suffering by cold

It's been a while that I didn't post any. Something big occurs these days, but not complete yet. When that happens, I will post.
One of major thing happened that I can reveal is "COLD". My big son suffered by this for 2 weeks. It got to worse to 'pneumonia'. Only thing I could do was just watch him fighting through it. After his recover, my little one suffered by the similar symptom. It had not worsened to pneumonia. However, it must have been very painful for 4 month old baby.
My wife was the next. She can not finish a sentence without intervened by cough. And once she starts to cough, it sounds very bad. She lost her voice significantly. She is recovering at this stage. I guess she need a week or two for complete recovery.
Now, I picked up a cold last weekend. Last saturday, it started with small escalated temperature. And, it is getting worse and worse. I don't cough, but headache is the most annoying. It is very bad for a programmer :(
Worse part is, I have no sick leave left. A hahaha. It was very nice to have a month of paternity leave when Jaron was born. :) I don't regret. Since I am a healthy young man, I think I can fight through this disease without any sick leave. Luckily, I don't cough. So, people don't feel get spread by me.
When Jake was sick, he had 103 F temperature. That must be very hard for him. I feel so much sorry about him, and I appreciate him to finish his sickness.

One main advantage of using/programming in KDE

IPC is a common problem for system programming. If IPC mechanism is designed poorly, the cost comes when the software needs scalability. However, designing full blown IO framework upfront is painful. ( Blocked forever is the worst case, and I may not want to think of non-blocking or asynchronous by signal yet. ) If this bothers, I recommend using DCOP interface.
Example will explain better. I am reading documents using 'kpdf'. And I want to trace my reading on this document. One application of this log will be my reading speed on this document.
If you are running KDE, dcop server is already running. If not, dcop server can be still manually started. Assuming we have dcop server, try this command.

$dcop

Then, a list of dcop(pable) application will appear. Then,

$ dcop kpdf-6961 kpdf currentPage
223

Walla. It gave me current page that I am on. If you play with dcop a little further, you will be amazed that it can be a better way to talk to another process. Registering a function to dcop(pability) isn't hard either. If IPC should be considered for local application, this approach should be very appealing.

krusader

I used konqueror as my file manager. konqueror supported enough features that I needed. A few days ago, I read something about KDE. I think it was about KDE4. In the article, krusader was mentioned and today I installed it. It was amazing. It had more than I needed, however having these feature in hands definitely should help.
I love KDE. Mostly this preference comes from my laziness.

compiz-fusion.

I have succeeded in installing compiz-fusion. I liked shift-switcher. I am greedy that I want shift-switcher to provide a mode change by short cut key. Currently only way to change mode from 'cover' to 'flip' can be done through menu, only. I hope this can be done ;)
In the meanwhile, I bound a short cut for CompizConfig. Ctrl + Super + Alt + 'C'. Couldn't bring any other unique combination without conflict.

KDE struggles on my new hardware

I am so depressed. I hope I know KDE framework better to fight through my favorite KDE applications. I sent a bug-report about amarok and konqueror, but I know I just gave them a burden without much of useful information. I couldn't attach any useful clue.

When I brought up amarok for the first, it gave me a pop up of 'want to install MP3 plugin?'. At that time, my wireless was struggling. So, 'not now' was my answer. After that, amarok wouldn't respond at all. I thought it remembers my network carrier as a wireless. So, I dropped ndiswrapper and plug in for eth1 (wired network). Not working still.. I am using audacious instead.

Konqueror is better than this situation. But, I can not bring many features as I expect. It is a big cost for very young and new hardwares.
To make all this worse, my right hand wrist is picking up a soaring pain. I am still young to have a joint problem :(

I am alive

I know that I am not a popular blogger, and nobody cares if I haven't pinged to my readers. But, I do anyway. Hey, I am alive :)

Okay, I got my new laptop which dragged me several days. I audaciously tried gentoo linux on brand new Dell 1521. It has 2x64bit turion with 2GB of memory. ATI Xpress 1270 onboard VGA. I was very brave to give gentoo on it, and I struggle, now.
Dell 1521 is introduced in the market only 2 months ago and its HW parts are very new. And it is 64bit processor.. sigh..