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I came back from the grocery store last night to find out that my DSL was gone. My SBC phone service was gone too. I was shocked! Shocked I tell you! It turns out to be a little fiasco between SBC and Vonage that resulted in this…I’ve had to order new service, but I anticipate it might take up to two weeks for the service to be restored. Meanwhile, I probably won’t be able to access IRC at all, and may be a lot slower getting to my email.

I set up a bugtracker for the Enlightenment project yesterday on this server. Hopefully it will become a very useful tool for both developers and testers to coordinate the development process and track bugs/issues accurately. Since I may not be available on IRC for a while, you probably want to email me if you have any issues or questions.

This disturbing picture was received from the Spirit Rover, NASA’s flagship Mars exploration vehicle. Apparently the communications link was severed by disgruntled Martians in protest against ex-general Wesley Clark’s campaign for president in the USA, who has continually proven himself as a bumbling, naive political nincompoop. When asked in a nationally televised debate about a speech made in April 2003 in which he lavished glowing praise for George Bush and Tony Blair on the Iraqi war (“Exactly when did you realize that you’re a Democrat?”), he managed to hurriedly assemble an incoherent, evasive reply. “When I was in the military, I did not belong to any party — I was an independent, and that’s how it’s done in the state of Arkansas.” What the heck does Arkansas have to do with political affilition in the military? Of course, it would be really easy to ignore that embarassing moment – if only he had not stated that he “supported Bush when he attacked the Taliban in Iraq”. I’m sure he also supported the attack against the Gestapo in Yugoslavia, the S.S. in North Korea and the Ayatollahs in the USSR during the cold war. Politics can be incredibly entertaining at times.

I just can’t get enough of this scream. So I decided to put it up here for you to enjoy. As if that isn’t enough, we’ve got a funky remix too, courtesy of Barlow Farms. Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhhh!!!

In his latest blog, Tom Perrault comments on yet another manifestation of the intense and at-times frightening bellowings of democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, as well as other absurdities, such as Michael Jackson’s callous revelry in the face of a child molestation trial, or Al Gore wailing about global warming on the coldest day of the year. Actually, it was the coldest day in New York in 10 years. And the coldest day in Boston since 1957. Well, at least the sky hasn’t fallen. Yet.

After a couple of days of wrangling and trying to find my long-lost Perl skills (and lots of CVS spam along the way that must have been a bit irritating to some), I finally succeeded in getting CIABot to properly detect module names and filenames in E CVS. At least I was rewarded for my efforts … we now have per-project statistics on the stats page. Hopefully soon it will be possible to even see author statistics by module! Thanks to atmos, jaqque and ChipX86 for their assistance in making it work.

Took me a couple of hours to whip up this little app using Evas and Ecore. It is a simulation of the animation from the Matrix movies. I tried to make it sufficiently closer to the real thing than other attempts by using plenty of randomization, occasional character changes and smooth fading. It becomes a bit realistic after running for 30-40 seconds or so. It doesn’t handle window resize yet. I hope to eventually make a smart object out of this, and once I am able to hack a suitable “plugin” interface for Entrance, it could become part of a real-looking animated Matrix theme. Download tarball here and tell me what you think.

I just recreated my site using WordPress. Just decided to do so primarily because I was looking around at open source CMS packages and have been wanting to add RSS feed capabilities and some other stuff without writing the necessary PHP code…so the handwritten stuff goes out the window.