Hey look, another one!

Yes folks, I somehow was able to scrounge up enough time to (shudder) dial into my ISP and append some nonsense to my blog. Amazing. --Start Geek Stuff-- So I finally had the notion to post my various project ideas up here for the world to see. As of this writing, I only have three to speak of: A gnome-alarm clock Maybe I'm just missing something, but there doesn't seem to be any application that integrates with the GNOME 2 desktop. The only ones I can find are gtk+ or worse. I would like to create an alarm with a fairly simple interface that would sit happily in the panel waiting to perform it's simple purpose. Ideas are as follows: -Gnome HID compliant -A preferences window where you activate the alarm. Here there would be some options that Joe Windozuzer could understand. i.e. A check box that would show whether or not the alarm is set (also the icon on the panel should change to reflect this), and various radio buttons that read "At x time, I would like my computer to play this music file." "At x time, I would like my computer to beep." "At x time, I would like my computer to play this movie file." etc. -An "Advanced" tab in the preferences dialog that allows the user to specify a command to be run at the given time. -A count-down timer. They are _really_ nice for naps and laundry and naps. I think this will be the program that should get me a little more into programming. It's not terribly in depth, but it is something I think a lot of people would use. The next project idea is definitely one which I hope to get started and introduced into the world. (fanfaric music) PieWM2! For those of you who aren't familiar, piewm was a proof-of-concept window manager that introduced "pie" (circular, radial, etc) menus. This hackjob windowmanager based on tvtwm was written by Don Hopkins almost a thousand years ago. Ok, maybe not a thousand, but still long enough for piewm to be unusable with today's programs. Hell, if you get it to compile on your system you really need to update a few things. The current version of bison isn't compatable with pie. As it was a proof of concept wm, once Mr. Hopkins got it up and running, it fell to the wayside. I used it for almost the entire time I used FreeBSD as my main OS. It's ugly, it's not compliant with most anything, it's not terribly stable, but the speed and efficiency of the menus was absolutely incredible. I was able to navigate through various levels of menus without even watching the cursor/menu. Once you get familiar with where things are on the menus, the speed with which you can start the program that you want is impressive. I'm half debating about grabbing slackware 1 or 2 to install and a little partition just long enough to compile pie for slack 9.1... and I hate using binaries. (i.e. I compiled and installed Gnome 2.6 by hand) Anyhoos, before I rant myself into oblivion, I'll get to the point. I want to rewrite piewm from scratch, (or at least fork a current, efficient wm) and create a compliant, beautiful, bug-free implementation of pie. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please post them. I also have another project I'd like to talk about, but the impending work day is growing ever closer, so I'll leave that until later. --End Geek Stuff-- As for myself, I'm tired. There's not enough time in the day, and in order to do the things I want to do, I'm now beginning to cut into sleep. It's not fair that other people can exist of 5 hours or less of sleep a night. I try to do that and now I'm getting sick. I'm working 7 days a week, 50+ hours, and still trying to find time to relax, time to practice, time to spend with my friends, and time to sleep. It's really not working out very well. I'm almost hoping that I get violently sick so I can take a sick day to sleeeep. I'm beginning to dread work because I'm not exactly "Captain Speedy, the happy worker" in the first place, and now I'm dragging even more than ever. Stupid mistakes make for prolonged and boring projects, and I'm sure none of this is sitting to well with my employers; my Dad and Step-mom. We're way behind, and I'm not helping as much as I should. I need a weekend. And sleep. Speaking of work, it's time for me to finish getting ready for another 8+ hours of fun. Whee. I meant to post three days ago, but haven't had the time to even set up my computer... speaking of which, I'm posting this from my mother's laptop. How sad. I hate windows. Ta-ta to my 1 or 2 readers (if that). -Dave