Daisy.. daisy…

root@sigbox:~# uptime
12:23:26 up 152 days, 20:45, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.06

I have to shut sigbox down today for an upgrade 🙁 152 days, 20 hours, and 45 minutes without being powered down or restarted. But when it comes back up, it will be running a fresh install of Slackware Linux 10.0 and have a much larger storage capacity.

DCSquares News

I’ve spent the day adding a buddy list feature to the DCSquares site:

Now you can see how your friends are doing! Also, DCSquares 1.4 Beta is now available for the Mac. 1.4 final should be released in a week or so!

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Well, I’m finally almost happy with my desktop.

I curved the top corners of my menu panel, and added a 3 pixel drop shadow to the bottom to add more contrast between the wallpaper and the panel. Here’s a zoomed in version, for those of you without magnifying glasses:

I also made my own icon for the gnome-bluetooth bluetooth:// URI:

I’m still looking for something to replace the home icon, the one from the Snow-Apple icon theme looks kinda silly.

Finally, I got a nice blue GTK+ theme that isn’t so much of an aqua-clone that you wanna puke called Glossy P from art.gnome.org. Maybe I’ll make an orange version of it for Jay, but I kinda like the blue, so I’ll keep it for now. Lastly, my window border theme is a modified version of my most favorite theme ever: Crux. Someone finally updated it so it shows the application’s icon in the title bar instead of an empty box!

Here’s a screenshot of the whole thing together (click to enlarge):

Kinda like OSX, but without that stupid dock, and I get to keep the window list at the top, and a taskbar at the bottom 🙂

Crop circles

Well, SamTown suffered yet another UFO attack, and this time they left crop circles in my farm!

Isn’t that cute?

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Ok, so GNOME comes with this kick-ass Unicode Character Map:

It shows what those crazy non-arabic symbols mean in the status bar. Anyway, here’s a funny conversation I had with James (you probably wont be able to see the japanese characters, but you wouldn’t understand them anyway):

(12:09:16) Sam Steele: 下丌
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: I made something that makes sense!
(12:09:23) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:09:37) James F: lol but its in katakana!
(12:09:46) Sam Steele: lol
(12:10:22) Sam Steele: 丈 = unit of length equal 3.3 meters; gentleman, man, husband

how are those even related? rofl
(12:10:37) James F: lol they aren’t but i can explain’
(12:11:03) ***Sam Steele waits for explanation
(12:11:28) James F: ok japanese isn’t just japanese
(12:11:42) James F: the kanji are all borrowed from chinese
(12:12:10) Sam Steele: ah, so one country’s unit of measure is another country’s husband.. I get it.
(12:12:18) James F: and sometimes when things change meanings from china, such as the origin kanji meaning of height
(12:12:52) James F: they are borrowed into the language… just like how a pound means like 5 different things in the us…
(12:12:57) James F: to hit
(12:12:59) James F: to weigh
(12:13:05) James F: to spend english money.
(12:13:07) James F: uhh…
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: that’s 3
(12:13:20) Sam Steele: lol
(12:13:20) James F: many other adopted slang references… …
(12:13:28) Sam Steele: … .. sure.
(12:13:29) Sam Steele: hehe
(12:13:35) James F: lol yeah.
(12:13:39) James F: totally unrelated.

Fsck you, theif!

As my way of saying fsck you to who ever has my laptop, I’ve revived the MS-DOS build of DreamZZT, and decided to pit it head-to-head (or xdosemu window to xdosemu window) with the original ZZT:

It still needs a bit more polishing before release, but it works well enough (even saving / restoring!), and I’m not gonna let the loss of my laptop stop me from coding. I’m hoping to do another release within a few days.

Go penguin, it’s your birthday

I finally got around to doing a Linux port of DreamZZT:

Because it’s built with libSDL, it should also build on Mac OSX, BSD, and other platforms supported by SDL that Jay doesn’t believe exist. I don’t have access to a Mac, so anyone out there with OSX and the compiler that would be willing to compile and test dreamzzt for me, please let me know.

-Sam