Gulls scream and gods arise

Last weekend the Nijmegen frisbee team BFrisBee2's organised the "Schreeuw van de Meeuw", an indoor ultimate tournament. PANIC got themselves a spot on the teams list and I went along for the first day.
Having to catch a train at 6:45 is not my favourite start of a tournament, but the games were well worth it. Even though we lost all but one game the first day, we played really well at times and we gained some valuable indoor experience again. Then came a good meal followed by a party with three important ingredients: good music (partly live), beer, and wacky people on the dance floor.

After having downgraded my hangover to a slight headache the next morning, I left my team mates to play the second day of the tournament while I went to the plot and roles discussion day for the next Maerquin roleplay weekend. As usual, it was a great afternoon with lots of strange humour and weird cooked up ideas. The upcoming event (November 14-16) is the last weekend organised by the current team, and for starters, the official title that was revealed last week ("A dark and hungry god arises") does not prove much good. Having inside information about what is going to happen, I'm curious what the players will do and what situation I will be handed on my plate as member of the new writing team...

Qt and Phonon, or how to compile a pre-written application with the use of Google

I've been using XMMS for a long while now. When it comes to playing music, it does about everything I want, but its looks aren't the greatest. JuK and/or amaroK on the other hand, have a reasonably nice, but clogged UI, and I don't need them storing all information about my music if I have that myself anyway.
Hence, I thought about writing a simple Qt-based media player myself which would contain nothing more or less than what I wanted. A secondary and not less important goal being to get some experience with Qt.
For starters, the Qt 4 documentation contains a working media player that uses Phonon as a backend. So why not compile that, see how it works, and tweak some things, gradually learning?

So, let's start by grabbing the sources... by copying the text out of the manual, since I can't find the source files themselves, and apparently the qt4-examples package has been missing in action since quite a while in Debian.
Next step: put those files in a folder and compile. Of course, compiling simply by running g++ does not work. Should have known, but my hacking skills are a bit rusty. Instead, I have to run qmake, errm, I mean qmake-qt4.
Then run make, having made sure that all Phonon include files can be found.

Finally! It runs! But no music yet... I have to install the Phonon backend first. Silly me for thinking that installing the Phonon libraries and development packages would install the backend, which is required to be actually able to do anything with your newly compiled application, as well.
So now it should work, right? Oh, wait. It is not yet available at the expected location. And after that... Hurray!

I have to admit, once it works, it works like a charm, and the code is actually quite legible even though I have little knowledge of Qt (and C++, for that matter). But the process to get it working was a bit too bumpy to my taste.

Desktop sharing under X

The idea behind buying two identical TFTs was, once, that I would have a dual screen setup. Currently however, one of those is in use by my server, which has functioned as my primary desktop machine for a pretty while now. So I've been playing with the idea to keep my server only as a machine for remote logins and give my freshly reanimated desktop machine back its second screen. That turned out to be harder than I thought.

And that all because I still wanted to be able to access my X session once I would disconnect the display. Had I stuck with e-mail in mutt and instant messaging in BitlBee, that would all not be necessary. But I've become quite used to my KDE environment and it is just a bit too much hassle to switch back to console-only applications. Hence, I've tried various ways of connecting to my existing X session.

For some reason, the built-in KDE desktop sharing application krfb does not work well (this seems to be a known bug, although I have no SMP machine), so that option was out. Then I looked at RealVNC's solution called x0vncserver. Granted, its documentation says that it is a bit inefficient, but at least it was worth a try. Alas, the only message I got while trying was "Aborted", so, back to the drawing board it was. My final try was to install the vnc.so module that is packed along with RealVNC. Lo and behold, it works, and I can use krdc jsut as fine with it, although it still feels a little sluggish over my local 100 Mbit connection.

Of course, a better idea might be to skip the remote desktop connection story altogether and just run KMail, Kopete, and friends locally on my desktop. Using my server purely for fileserving and routing purposes might just be better suited as well. Still, at least I now know that setting up such a remote connection is really possible, and for small tasks it might actually work quite well.

My room has a wall there?

All at once the far corner of my room is a very strange sight... Instead of seeing a packed bookcase, I can stare at a blank wall and a dozen boxes.

Boxen

Well, once you decide to move, things will have to start rolling. And one of those things is, that things have to be packed. So now I've got 50 boxen in my room...
And that causes a slight problem. Since most of the things I have are books or things closely related, completely filling up a box proves quite hard. After all, they measure about 55x50x30 cm, and you want to be able to lift them off the floor afterwards. A rough calculation shows me that I can fit in about 65 kilograms worth of normal copier paper in such a box. No thanks.
On the plus side, I finally have a real reason to search through all the stuff I've managed to cram in this room and throw away what I really don't need.

Careering an alter ego

Last weekend I attended the Moots (a live roleplaying event, for those not acquainted). I'm playing a slightly flammable mage who, unlike my daily life personality, is actively pursuing a career path, and I'm now a student of a more experienced mage who can hopefully teach me how to get the most out of myself. Perhaps in a while I can manage to turn people to ashes...
Even though very few people of our group were present, and though it was a bit colder than expected, the event was nice and brought its usual moments of stress. And with weekends like those, I'm ever so happy to have my Mondays off. Time for cleaning and laundry!

Call in three months time and I'll be fine, I know

Let's hope the next line of Evita's text won't hold...

Three months seems quite long now, but once they're over, I reckon it will feel like I wrote this only a month before. After searching for a while, my better half and I have finally found a house with enough space for all our piles of stuff. We first wanted something with a proper garden, but the few reasonably priced offers we found, just did not cut it. Deciding to be less picky and accepting a balcony as well turned out to be a very good choice: the first apartment that seemed really interesting to the both of us, will likely be ours in three months time. It's only all the paperwork that is in the way.

I've been quite nervous for the past month and I'll continue to be so until we're finally settled. Not really strange, considering that I'm soon going to own an apartment about four times as large as the flat I currently live in, and that at the same time my girlfriend is going to move in with me. Now for moving in the midst of winter...

Too much, really?

After my old blog died a quiet death more than 1.5 years ago, quite a lot happened, but I simply did not have, or did not take, the time to write about it. Yet, a part of me remained that wanted to share stuff. That part has now gotten a new place to play, to be excited, to cry, to ponder, and perhaps even to ramble again. Probably for the good. Or at least for my own. Since whatever you look at, be it my interests, my current projects, or simply my thoughts, there is always too much to mention...
Hence, I warn you, beings interested in the inner workings of my mind. Caveat lector.