Socks for all

Bah! I’m still alive and kicking. Getting sick, that sucks. Last weekend there was a local ACM contest between some schools in the triad. My team took second place! Hooray (and it was close).

I’ve applied to Google’s Summer of Code. My project is entitled “Simplification of Authentication“, as part of Gnome. The gist is that on one machine you say “Allow others to log on via this machine” and on a bunch of others you say “Log on via that machine”. Now you only have one computer to keep up to date with everyone’s user names and passwords, and any computer in your network can use those. Hence the Authentication. Can you do this already? Yes. Can you do it easily, let alone with two clicks? No. Hence the Simplification part. That’s important when you discover you have seven+ logical operating systems:

• Main computer, Ubuntu Linux partition
• Main computer, Microsoft Windows Vista partition
• Main computer, Microsoft Windows Vista virtual machine (so I don’t have to reboot to test something)
• Server
• Netbook
• Girl friend’s computer
• Test computer
• Any other virtual machines I may run from time to time

Being able to have one log on helps tremendously here.

I wrote some patches to clean up Evolution, and remove some of the old libgnome (because libgnome Must Die).

Easter’s coming up. I’m going to Charlotte.

Goodbye.

Current Mood:  sick

Uncategorized gsoc, programming

Today Meg and I went to the gym after we discovered that we wouldn’t be gaming with friends today – we also got groceries and lots of meat.

I spent the rest of the day working on an older project that I started almost a year ago. After realizing that it just doesn’t compile with the newer GCC (that was rather irrating to make changes and all of a sudden it doesn’t work, but should) AND getting it to (kind of) work with autotools, I set off to do the real work – rewrite data sources into XML from the stupid dinky format that was earlier.

I thought XML was supposed to make things easier. Then again, I thought C++ was supposed to do the same thing. Actually libxml++ isn’t that bad, I think its just more a matter of I don’t know what I’m doing so I get all these extra results to parse through. Also, there wasn’t too much documentation to find on the website or on the web. Surely there’s a way to say “return all subchildren of this node WITH A MAX DEPTH OF ONE”. Anyway, I ended the day with fewer features than when I started with, but the rest should be easy to insert now. Perhaps if all goes according to plan I’ll code drop in a month or two.

This makes two days in a row that I’ve done something productive.

Current Mood:  accomplished

Uncategorized c++, programming, xml