Grainfuck

Two school projects are still unfinished but I lost an inspiration. Instead of coding a messenger server and an online shop I'm making Grainfuck, an IDE (if I have enough patience) and brainfuck interpreter for GNOME. There's something ready already but I would like to have code tracing feature with a possibility of viewing the memory contents, export to different programming languages and to binary executables. There are plenty of IDEs for Windows but I haven't found any for *nix. I have to use bfdev under wine which works just fine this way. But I want to have something native.

XMMS + aMSN

I found a plug-in for aMSN which can display currently playing music in a personal message. It supports quite many players including XMMS I'm using. It uses xmms-infopipe to get information about the playing song. The infopipe itself seems to be buggy and especially with this music plug-in. The XMMS starts to use from 30% to 80% of CPU and every time aMSN refreshes the song name the CPU usage increases to 100% and the messengers hangs for a couple of seconds. It's pretty annoying especially when I'm typing. And I'm not the only one having such a problem. Somebody was trying to rewrite the infopipe or music.tcl. I found another way to solve the problem. I wrote a short script in python and saved it as infoxmms in the plug-in directory. You'll need PyXMMS for it to work:

import sys
try:
    import xmms
except:
    print 0
else:
    if xmms.control.is_playing():
        current = xmms.control.get_playlist_pos()
        title = xmms.control.get_playlist_title(current)
        print title
    else:
        print 0

And modified two functions in music.tcl:

proc TreatSongXMMS {} {
    after 0 {::music::exec_async [list "python" [file join $::music::musicpluginpath "infoxmms"]]}
    return 0
}

proc GetSongXMMS {} {
    if { [catch {split $::music::actualsong "\n"} song] } {
        return 0
    }

    if {$song == "0"} {
        return 0
    } else {
        return $song
    }
}

It works just fine without using much CPU time and hanging the messenger.

My name in Chinese

Xie xie, Xu Lang!

Defective Screen

The screen was sent back home to China. I didn't notice right away that it was defective. It's not seen on backgrounds with colour but on white background it's quite clearly seen that the left part of the screen is of different shade than the right one. While the right half is white as it's supposed to be, the left one is slightly greenish and it bothers me so much when I try to read. I contacted the seller which said that it's ok to replce it. So in couple of weeks I'll have my PDA back with normal screen I hope.

My iPAQ Is Alive!

I was just about to send a message to the seller asking what's going on with the iPAQ screen I ordered because the tracking information hasn't been updating for awhile and the screen kind of disappeared. But this morning my purchase have finally arrived.

In the box I found the screen and a Torx T5 screwdriver. Though it was labeled as Torx T5 it was a little bit bigger than the screws in my iPAQ. But luckily I had a proper one which I bought around a year ago when I smashed the screen and started to look for a replacement.

I removed the side plastic panels, back panel and found out that the motherboard is attached to the front panels with screws I don't have a screwdriver for. Unfortunately, Wifey was quite ill to go to look for a screwdriver with me but luckily her mum visited us and offered a ride.

It wasn't easy to find such a small screwdriver but in the second place we visited after going around the shop for some time sales person noticed a proper kit I needed. We went home quite excited about having the Pocket PC back after a year of keeping it in a drawer.

I didn't find any manual about disassembling an hp iPAQ hx2410 so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I removed the screws holding the motherboard but it wasn't going anywhere. I was too afraid to brake something so I had to be very careful.

Finally I got it out, replaced the screen and assembled everything back the same way as I disassembled it. I should have taken some pics and wrote a manual for somebody trying to repeat the procedure but at that moment I was too nervous and pics were the last thing I was thinking about.

I switched my iPAQ on. It happily beeped and started to boot with the new screen working as good as the old one worked before braking.

Party Photos

19

Happy birthday to me. I'm 19 now. It's SO much! I could never imagine being so old. =) Well, Wifey turns 25 this year and I still can't accept the thought. She's still such a kid inside! She still sees a boa constrictor instead of a hat and sheep through boxes. I really hope to save this ability and not to turn into a grown-up too quickly.

iPAQ hx2410 Screen

I bought a screen for my hp iPAQ hx2410 on eBay. I smashed it around year ago and couldn't find a replacement for a reasonable price since then. In Europe it would cost more than 200€ to repair, a half of the price of the device itself. But I found one in China just for 74$ + 30$ for delivery to Finland. Now I'm quite excited about getting my Pocket PC back and checking the tracking number almost every hour. :) I'm just dying to get it.

Pullinki

It was really great! I was surprised that the staff the new owners hired spoke English. Last year some of them didn't even speak Finnish but this time we didn't have any communication problems. We should go some day again.