Or: turtle-0.00001 released
Writing new software is all about excitement. There’s the rush of writing something and having it work, there’s the desire to share your work.
But there’s also the desire to share something that’s perfect. It’s difficult to know when to release. The mantra is release early, release often, but as everyone knows that’s managed their own software project or been apart of many, it’s not always that easy. There’s always one more bug, and in the case of corporate development, there’s always one more customer problem.
Well, bugs or no bugs, it’s time to let people play with my latest baby.
I’ve disabled all the actual GPS unit communication because it’s surely bitrotted and I don’t have a working serial setup here to work with, so this release is basically to show of the UI and get ideas on the ways in which it can be improved.
http://toshok.org/software/turtle-0.00001.tar.gz.
(note the version number. Don’t complain that clicking the ‘X’ doesn’t close the window).
—
Some notes
It’s all written in C#, so you’ll need something that can deal with that. I’ve done all my work under mono, but there’s nothing in there (that I know of) that should keep it from working on portable .net, or even microsoft’s runtime. Let me know if you try and fail to get it working on either of the other two runtimes.
You will need gtk-sharp 1.9, though, which means installing libgnomeui and all its dependencies on whichever platform you choose.
Until recently I’d been using two methods to block comment spam:
- Jay Allen’s wonderful MT-Blacklist
- The following block in my httpd.conf file:
<Location /blog>
Deny via sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
Deny via list.dsbl.org
Deny via multihop.dsbl.org
</Location>
While at home I found that my dad’s ip was in one of those lists, which made managing my blog difficult, so I commented out the Deny lines above. This was two days ago.
Earlier today I spent an hour or so removing the 150 comment spams I received after I made that change. Of course, these comments had completely random urls in them, so MT-Blacklist’s regexp support was useless in bulk removing them. I had to remove each one manually.
This was the last straw, so I finally broke down and installed James Seng’s SCode plugin. I hate these things, personally, and wish I didn’t need it. Maybe I’ll try Seng’s bayesian plugin at some point, but I really don’t want to spend the time training it (and dealing with the spam coming in), and even bayesian filters can be fooled, especially by some of the stuff I’ve seen on my blog in recent months.
Standing alone in the kitchen, wrapping the last of my presents for my parents. I was doing it at almost 2am because I had to wait until they’d both gone upstairs to go to bed.
It had never really hit me before, but this is exactly what it must have been like for them when I was growing up. Christmas was so magical back them for me and my sisters. We’d tell my parents we were all going to sleep in my sister’s bedroom (I can’t remember which one, or maybe they shared one..) and we’d end up staying up much of the night. And my parents dutifully, quietly waited until we were asleep before they brought out the presents.
Maybe it was the fact that I’d been awake for almost 24 hours after sleeping for 2. Maybe it was all the chocolate I was eating. Maybe I’m just finally at that point in my life, but I found myself for the first time really wanting children.
I stood there cutting wrapping paper and taping it to boxes and I thought of doing it for my children, thought of creating that sense of wonder I felt when I came downstairs and saw the tree. That sense of wonder, that feeling of magic, that never disappeared, not even when I found out my parents were really Santa.
terraserver updated their db for san francisco (and possibly other cities) recently, with nice, nice aerial color photos from 2/27/2004.
The color makes my gps foo look so much nicer, I may have to start hacking on it again:
I should have been crowded in from both sides in a middle seat, in a thin skinned metal tube hurtling across Arizona at 32000 feet. Instead, I was driving us to breakfast at one of my favorite places in the city, a place you’d never been. I was about to get out of my car, out onto the wide streets of the Mission, out into the sun.
I should have been awake, alone, downstairs sitting on the couch, all the lights off except the one by which I was reading the book I’d stolen from your place after you left. Instead, I was driving toward a theater to meet someone. I had high hopes for the movie, but not much hope of staying awake through it. I thought it was my exhaustion that made me unable to appreciate the slowness, the random plot twists, the long winded dialog, but you started laughing from my left and then I knew: It wasn’t just me, and sometimes rotten tomatoes can be very, very wrong.
I should have just woken up to my father telling me we had to get a move on if we were going to start shopping at 9am. Instead, I was just waking up to my alarm after only a couple hours of fitful sleep, to wake you up and drive you back to your car. The streets were empty and wet and I could barely keep my eyes open. The music coming from my stereo seemed far away, as did my breathing, as did the throngs of people that normally crowd the streets of the Tenderloin. We made every light, and it seemed that I never needed to step on the gas to keep our speed up. Not even going up Franklin. This pleasant dream of a trip around the city at 4:30am even had a happy ending: A parking spot directly in front of my house when I returned.
I should be eating an afternoon snack before dinner while my father naps, stretched out on the couch, snoring lightly. Instead I’m trying to wake my leaden limbs and stiff joints and slow mind to meet you for brunch, before you get your own chance to board a thin skinned metal tube and wake up in a different state.
good morning.
