August 16th, 2004

Made a new category specifically for my PHD – woohoo!

Today i actually did a bit of work. Ive got a book that builds a basic window manager, a lot like that i have to do. Ive thought about jsut copying the code and modifying it, and ill probably do that, but i thought first id try to understand it a bit.

So i spent the morning (whilst waiting for my PeeCee parts) stepping manually through the code in the book, and looking up any function i didnt understand. Most of the XLib methods have good names and you can kinda guess what they do from just the name.

So yeah, i did most of the main event loop this morning, and i can honestly say i understand it. Tomorrow will be looking at the otehr more specific methods that handle the window management and stuff. Fun Stuff

This is a lot more fun then writing a Confirmation of Candidature report like Thomas has to do. Im glad mine is basically done with.

Speaking of which, i sent off my modified report a few weeks ago now to two people to look at, so far ive heard nothing back. Maybe its time i send an ujpdate email to remind them

So i finally got the parts i ordered. There was a BIG ordeal last friday with them. I was told that i would receieve them by 1:30pm Friday. Anyway, 2pm comes and nothing, so i call up the courier and am told that i would get it definately by 4:30pm (after having to tell them my address cause for some reason they didnt have it).
4:45pm comes and nothing so i call again and get some dead shit of a woman who at first told me she was customer service but then couldnt tell me anything as she ‘didnt have access’ – bleh – i was annoyed.

So i spent the weekend wondering where in Rocky my new bits were…

Today, i call up the place again and get a call back around 10am telling me that the courier had apparently had touble finding my place on friday afternoon. Now, ill jsut pause here to ponder a few things:

1) A courier that doesnt know where a street is?
2) A courier that doesnt have a street directory?
3) A courier that can call their office and ask where a street is?

ummm, i dont think so. I would have been more likely to believe some ‘truck broke down’ story – sheesh.

Anyway, 1pm rolls around and a van pulls up out the front – woo hoo.

After looking at them for a while, i went about ripping my old motherboard out and putting the new one in. Everything went well – the new CPU clamp on the AMD 64 cpus is great.

So i get it all together again, and then i notice that the fan on my video card isnt working. I tried putting some degreaser on it to loosen it up and it worked for a while.

During that time i go about installing XP, Since im using a SATA drive and windows doesnt support them by default, i have to insert a floppy with the SATA drivers. Why cant i tell it to look on a cd?

Its then i realise that i dont have a working PC to copy the drivers with. No worries i thought, ill use my powerbook which can read and write to PC floppies. Put the support cd in the drive and find out that i cant just copy the drivers over to the floopy disk – i have to run a windows executable

Meanwhile my video card fan stops working again, this time its toasted. So i give up for the night.

Tomorrow ive gotta go and find a fan that will suit my video card, hopefully it wont be a big deal. Ive also gotta make a SATA driver floppy disk to use – which means i have to install a floppy drive in order for the winodws installer to read the floppy – even though ill never use the floppy drive again.

Again i ask, why cant i browse a cd for drivers??? *sigh*

Ok, thats it for now… more to come later.

NOTE: Forgive the spelling mistakes in this, i typed it fast…