:: xcomputerman.com ::

OK, it’s officially too long since I last updated this page. So here comes a long one…

Raster recently delivered his State of the E-nion address, so for those of you who have questions about E17 (when it will be ready and stuff), you can read at will. But for those who want the short answer: it will be ready when it is ready. Somehow I think sounded too much like KainX there…

Of particular interest is Entrance, the new display/login manager for X. Raster notes that this project needs additional contributors and additions etc. My development on Entrance is temporarily stalled until I can get school over with; right now I’ve got 3 senior design projects to deal with this semester and I just want to take care of them. Thanks to those who have sent in patches (if I haven’t worked in your patch, it means it required more extra work that I haven’t finished — it will be committed in due time!); more are welcomed.

Speaking of projects, I once again feel the need to vent over the handling of the ECE Senior Design course at UH. I don’t get the purpose of this course; as far as I am concerned it is a joke and is very poorly designed. There are many that I have talked to about this and they share my views on this matter. I have mentioned this issue before, particularly highlighting the ridiculous selection of available projects.

It’s even worse. We’re made to spend time preparing reports, presentations and other miscellaneous documents as if this were Yet Another English Class ™. I am tired of it. I did 6 hours of freshman english, another 6 hours of literature humanities, and a required business communication course on top of that (that already covers more than what we’re doing here). Why put us through this insanity? Plus, there is such a bad matchup of student skills, projects and assigned “facilitators” (professors) that sometimes I want to weep. Just a few days ago a purely EE team was being grilled during their oral presentation over calculation of torque and stuff like that. So now it’s their fault because they were stuck with a mechanical project without a mechanical engineer, and they couldn’t do the things that a normal mechanical engineer should be able to do? Many are being graded unfairly on their prototypes; robotics teams using Lego kits get maximum points over a few hours work that required putting some lego pieces together and modifying bundled sample code, while teams that have laboured for many days (often round the clock) to build something from scratch get bad grades because their prototype wasn’t as functional as the Lego robots. All because they’re being graded by professors that know next to nothing about electronics or computer systems — all they care about is whether it works or not. I repeat, THIS IS RIDICULOUS. Something needs to be done.

For those wanting to run E17 and related apps on Debian, you may be pleased to note that webfreak has put up an apt source for E17 packages over at http://webfreak.fallingsnow.net/e17/. This will allow you to apt-get enlightenment CVS packages that are very up-to-date quite conveniently. Just add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://webfreak.fallingsnow.net/e17 ./

Entrance is also included, so you can now apt-get Entrance if you want to try it out. Remember that this is alpha software, and is only intended for developers who are interested in contributing to the project at the moment.

Whee! It’s my last spring break at UH. Finally managed to resume work on Entrance, and with a few hours on my hands I managed to make a few updates, stabilizing the daemon further and more significantly creating a new Matrix-based theme. The idea just popped into my head, probably from anticipation of the new Matrix movies coming out this year. Yes, there is a screenshot. As usual, you can check out entrance from Enlightenment CVS. If you would like a tarball instead email me and I’ll provide you one.