Open Source Developers are Amazing

I started writing Parcellite when I was a full time student, with little responsibilities. I was able to dedicate a large amount of time to carefully writing, testing, and debugging my little program during the week. Now that I have a full time job, I realize just how much dedication and effort other open source developers have to write great applications in what little free time they have. I am finding that either new responsibilities (which came with living my myself) and other interests (gaming/girlfriend) have kept me from quickly progressing on my program.

I have come up with an idea though: I will attempt to code 1 hour a day, every day. Be it a variable name change, testing a new function, fix comments, anything. As long as I keep myself busy with it, I'll be able to reach the goals that I have for this project in a reasonable amount of time.

*work work work*

If you haven't noticed, I have been a little inactive lately. That's because I started working full time and I'm still getting use to managing the little amount of time I have after my commute. I've also been working out some kinks on my grad school submission and my new apartment.

I really need to sit down and finish v0.8 of Parcellite. Though technically it's ready for release, I just need to clean it up a bit and add my own Spanish translation to it (and others). Version 0.7 is now available in Debian and Ubuntu's official repositories though :)

Finals &

This Friday I start finals, which I finish may 19th. I managed to commit some bugfixes for Parcellite during the weekend. As soon as finals are over I'll finish what it needs for a 0.8 release.

Employment GET!

I got offered a job in computer support at Lokheed Martin. The commute is about 50 minutes for 16 hours a week (20 hours max). It'sa welcome part-time job that will also be my internship and will help pay for my master's degree when I work full time starting in summer.

Speaking of which, I applied for graduate school last week, I'll be concentrating in software engineering. Hopefully soon I'll know if that essay I spent two weeks on had what it took to get in.

By the way, Smash Bros. Brawl will be EPIC. A friend of mine is importing it this week so I'll be up all next weekend playing it.

Random Update!

• Parcellite 0.6 is almost complete. I commited a released candidate to the svn but I'm going to go through the code a few more times before I release it.
• I pretty much got a job working tech support for Lockheed Martin.
• I have to submit my application for my master's degree within the next 2 weeks, going to be busy with that.
• I suck at poker.
  
• Calculus 2 is annoying me because I don't remember anything from calculus 1 or precalculus 2.
  

Trip Observations

For those of you who missed my last two posts, I spent 16 days in Winchester Virginia at my sister's house for the holidays. I have been there before, but never during winter. Some observations I made of Virginia compared to the place I grew up (and still live in), Puerto Rico...

• Everything was grey, there were absolutely no leaves on anything but pine trees. Puerto Rico is green all year long.
• It was cold as hell, I had never been in weather below 60. I've lived in tropical weather for 23 years, so I looked like an idiot when I wore skiing-type winter wear when people were only wearing a hoodie.
• Everyone drives really well. They use signal lights! You guys would have constant heart attacks if you drove here. We change lanes without using signals, all lanes are anything goes, we speed alot, tailgate alot, we don't stop when you turn (we just take the incoming lane to avoid slowing down), and we don't take down our long headlights for incoming cars.
• The sun goes down early, around 5:30pm. Over here it always goes down at the same time regardless of the season (around 6:30-7:00).
• Virginians are nice. Not say we aren't nice, people are extremely nice here. But what I mean is I expected some racism or strange looks when I spoke spanish, but got nothing. They were friendly, too friendly sometimes.
• Stuff is cheap. I saw a DS Lite for $120, over here it's $137 not including our 7% tax. Alot of stuff was very well priced, everything is expensive here, especially if you're a tourist. The only thing that's cheap here is housing, school ($45 a credit) and car insurance (what you guys pay a month, we pay per year). Internet is cheap too, my sister was paying $22 for a connection speed twice as fast as the one I had at home, and I pay $40 for mine.

Anyhow, now that I'm back I can concetrate on a few things I didn't do during my vacation. Like work on Parcellite, write an essay for my master's degree application, and prepare for my last semester of Computer Sciences.

While (Vacation == True)

Still freezing my nips off here in Winchester, Virginia. I'm back January 6th.

Happy New Years!

Vacation = True;

From today to Januarth 6th I'll be in Winchester, Virginia spending the holidays with my sister, aunt and the rest of the family. Not looking forward to the cold weather (which I have never experienced) or the snow (either). Wonder if I can build a tux snowman...

Couldn't finish translating Parcellite to C to release v0.5 before I left so I'll either finish it during my trip or as soon as I get back. It's pretty close to being done, it's missing the actions menu and the new CLI interface I've been experimenting with so you can have access to the clipboard through scripts and the terminal.

Happy Holidays!

Origins of C

"C is a programming language which is like, totally ghey. It's low-level and has those stupid pointers. It was superceded by Java 20 years ago and is virtually extinct today. The only actively developed code using C today is the Linux kernal and the Yahoo! search engine, both of whose user count do not exceed 16, combined.

C code often ends up looking like the output of figlet(6). This is to be expected from a language that has three different uses for '*' depending on context."

Seems pretty accurate to me.

Path Towards the Female Body

Saw this in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei the other day. I wonder what the geek's path towards the female body is...

Mailing List -> Forum -> IRC -> Messenger -> Webcam -> IRL