:: xcomputerman.com ::

I’ve been pretty busy since my last post here. Most notably, Entrance has been coming along at remarkable speed. What’s that you say? This is the embodiment of the “elan concept” I talked about before. I should probably put up a separate page for it…not enough space to talk about it here. Meanwhile, those seeking eye candy can see what it looks like here.

I went to the new campus recreational center yesterday. Somehow along the way I managed to jerk up a weight the wrong way on the incline, and have been suffering the consequences ever since. The doctor has banned me from the gym and sports for 10 days, and I’ve got to take medication along the way. Oh well, one of those sucky things one has to deal with in life. On a brighter note, my senior design team finally got the robotics project we wanted. Yay! We met with our facilitator today, and I think this is going to go pretty well.

I’m a little late posting this, probably either because I’ve been busy coding or school, or both. My group didn’t get assigned the robotics project we wanted… that’s the bad news. We’re still hoping that can change.

A couple of days ago, I started thinking about elogin and came to the conclusion that the present code was too limited in terms of customizability, since there really is no point to having elogin unless it has something to offer that other display managers don’t. So I came up with the “Elan Concept”, a drastic UI redesign that would be fully themable, to the point of being able to specify the location, color, image etc. of any UI element. So I’m working on getting a decent alpha out in a couple of weeks. Of course, meanwhile the present version of elogin remains available and actively maintained, and additions to that version will be incorporated into the new version. That’s all for now.

Kind of a weird start to the semester. Still have yet to purchase a single book … in fact, I don’t even have any notebook, save my single IEEE pad. Had three classes yesterday, and all of a sudden I get the feeling that this semester isn’t exactly going to be an easy one.

So I got into the senior design class late in the evening, and the introduction of projects began. And it went on and on, one Mechanical Engineering project after the other. There are at least 3 times as many EE majors as ME or IE majors in that class, and yet there was almost one ME project per ME student. And we EE’s get to pick up the scraps, or become apprentices to the ME students. A total of 3 EE project choices to choose from, and one of them is an Access database. This is colossal crap. Of course, now we have a problem, because we have all the EE majors trying to enter the Robotics competition (which is almost the only real EE project left), and since the projects have to be “interdisciplinary”, there’s a major shortage of ME/IEs to join these teams.

This is WRONG, VERY WRONG. Looking in my inbox, I see yet another email from 3 EE students looking for an ME student to join their team. And the project? A hotplate for an etching system. I cannot believe that a group of EE students is forced to work on an ME project and can’t even find an ME student to help them out. I think EE students at the University of Houston need to get together and draft a formal complaint to the department. We need a separate senior design course for EE students, independent of other departments. Until that happens, this course will remain nothing but a waste of time to students who have spent years laboring to get their well-deserved degrees.

It’s Monday, and the spring semester begins. I keep wondering if it just me or like half of the school’s population has disappeared. The whole campus just seemed so quiet today, you’d think it was finals time. Professors were nice…didn’t have any actual lectures
today. Plus, all my academic petitions seem to have been granted, so I’m all set to graduate!

New round of Elogin patches committed to CVS. There isn’t a page for Elogin yet…I’ll try to get benr to update the E website. I’m thinking of deploying Elogin across the IEEE computer lab already. Hopefully by the time atmos and I are done with it, it’ll be a powerful display manager with less than half the bloat in gdm/kdm.

I suddenly felt the urge to code today. I’ve always had this phobia of GUI programming. Not anymore — suddenly it came to me: Evas rocks! I never imagined graphics programming could be this much fun. And so I tore into Elogin, a display manager for X based on Evas, and began to code. And a couple of hours later, behold, there was Xsession support. And I smiled, for I saw that it was good.

Well, everybody seemed to be redoing web sites, and I suddenly realized I was getting tired of mine, so here goes. I think it’s definitely better than the old one. If you like it, let me know.