grumble.

I keep reading lots of pages about how awesome it is
to have sites that use “tags” to allow you to
search data (flckr, del.ico.us, etc).

Indeed. We should go one more step, and
add tags to web pages. We could even
add special syntax for it.

maybe something like:

<META name=”keywords” content=”foo,bar,blippy”>

Then search engines could use it for searcing.

That would be _so_ awesome.

Feature Constipation.

Aka, when a program gets to a certain point, and it’s
no longer possible to add features because everything
is at a point where it is about to be rewritten or
changed, or refactored.

Since one of the few things I actually like about
programming is being able to add new features, it
really annoys me when a project gets to this point.
Most of my work projects are at this point.
gimp has been at this stage for about 5 years.

It is very frustrating. Anything you want to
add or change is potentially obsoleted. With
OSS projects this can be particularly annoying
because very often, that big rewrite never ever
happens.

If I were a real programmer, I’d love the idea
of rewriting or heavily refactoring something to
make it “cleaner”. But I don’t like it. I do
it, but I don’t like doing it. Pulling teeth.

And of course, on the few occasions where I do
want to refactor something, I get about 70%
done and then suddenly, I have to add some
complicated new feature or bug fix immediately.
The only sane thing to do at that point is
to backport the fixes or features to the
stable branches. Grumble.

I would really like a verion of cscope for python. That
in combo with the xcscope.el module would be very handy.

Also, a version of cscope that understands that when
I ask for the defination of say, Blippy, that I
do not want the bit:

typedef struct _Blippy           Blippy;

But the actualy useful defination of _Blippy;

more gimp hacking…

gimp-smudge-brush

Just pics up at the moment, as I need to clean the patch up and remove some
of the various bits of half finished hacks that touch the same files.

Basic idea of that patch is to try to combine painting with a brush
and “smudge”‘ing with a brush into one step. Kind of a prototype/proof
of concept thing, as the patch is kind of craptastic and needs
a lot of work, but it seems to more or less do what I was
aiming for.

Most of the brushes used in those sample images are pixmap
brushes pulled out of various paintings (mostly from
Cezanne pieces). Now I need to get brush rotation and
hue rotation working for brushes and it starts to get
useful. And about a hundred other ideas…

For some reason, in the midst of the 4 hour drive last night, I
kept thinking that I wanted to make a road trip. Not sure
to where (though D.C seemed like a good candidate despite
coming from near D.C).

Haven’t gone on a good unplanned road trip in a while.
And driving for ~27 hours straight from Eau Claire doesn’t
exactly count.

Took the broken laptop to the apple store in the pit of hell called southpoint.

Went pretty much exactly the way I expected, except
for costing about 4 times as much.

Back in Raleigh.

To expand the list of christmas gifts:

black & decker workmate 425
14 kurt rambis trading cards (2 signed)
A collection of Eames films on DVD
The start wars triology dvd
a book on art inspired by/based on Rube Goldberg.
a Mustang book.
A fairly large Craftsman socket set.
Various t-shirts from bands I like (unfortunately,
bought early in the year and about a size or two too big…)

And for my birthday:
a creeper/floorjack/jackstand set

and things I got I didn’t want:

a cold
the backlight on the powerbook screen failing to work
about 3 extra pounds from stuffing my face

Not a bad Christmas haul. Up in Virginia at my sisters place so
I missed the Raleigh area snow.

Black & Decker Workmate 550 and a set of Kurt Rambis trading
cards were among the highlights.

Sitting around doing as much of nothing as possible.