Perfectly Normal Blag

This is a continuation of the story of Flexo.

Shortly after writing the last post, I lost interest, and abandoned work on Flexo. I have now revived it, and also published it on GitHub, as all cool Ruby-developers do. (this one can be found under “PerfectlyNormal/Flexo:http://github.com/PerfectlyNormal/flexo.)

The big changes since last time is that the plugins actually work now. Also fixed up some missing require’s that seemed to get included automatically on the Linux-box, but not on the Mac.

So it’s now possible, although a bit clumsy, to install Flexo and get it up and running. The rest of the work will be to write plugins allowing it to actually do anything. And to do that, documentation is useful. Meaning I should get the website up and running, and add some more comments on the inner workings on Flexo so it’s possible to create a RDoc that actually does anything.

And maybe create and publish a gem.

When ordering my MacBook Air, Apple claimed that it would ship within 24 hours. Impatient as I am, I sent a mail when it had been around 30, asking what was happening. They replied, telling me that each item would be shipped from their respective warehouses within 24 hours, then meet up at a central place, and finally be sent to my place, and that this process would probably take 24 more hours. Then, five hours later, they changed the estimated shipping time to “1-2 weeks” instead of “within 24 hours”, so I sent another mail, asking for an explanation for this.

Never got a reply, so after a day, I cancelled the order. Went down to a Apple-dealer in the neighbor-town, which, as it turns out, had one MacBook Air left in the entire store. This was exactly the model I had ordered, so I bought it.

I am now therefore the proud owner of a MacBook Air, and am using it to type this entry. The store was a bit more expensive than ordering online, but since I actually received it, I felt it was worth the extra money.

Been arguing with the keyboard working together with Terminal.app and my other machines, but it’s now only switching windows in irssi that’s complicated, and I can live with that, since I plan on finding a proper IRC client later on.

Finally got some money, and so I ran off to the nearest Apple-store (online of course), and purchased myself a MacBook Air.

So now I’m constantly refreshing the tracking page, waiting for it to be sent. Expected to be delivered between Friday 19th and Tuesday 23rd.

Can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait!

Not Invented Here is a way of life for most of my projects. Most, if not all, could easily be solved by finding some already existing product, and, if neccessary, tweaking it. Instead, I choose to create my own solution. Which usually ends up buggy, unmaintained, and I lose interest before moving on.

This time, I was thinking about my semi-working DVD ripper currently without a name. It was going to help me rip all my dvds into H264, to be stored on the fileserver, where I could access them all instantly. And then my interest died…

My previous version was pretty much complete. Only thing missing was a way to convert subtitles from vobsubs to a normal, sane format without having to start a Windows-box and run SubRip. Had a look around again, and found gpgm2srt. Downloaded and tested it, and it actually works.

But of course, it’s not perfect. And that’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to improve it. First, I’m planning on translating the entire thing to Ruby. Then, stuff it into my own project ruby-subtitles, rip out the GUI and replace it with Qt. When that is done, I’ll most likely be sick of it, and not do any more, but the plan was to then improve things a bit, and then finish up my ripper, making them work together for great justice.

Still no iEye.
Still not finished with Rye.
Still no recent updates here.
Still no switching between PulseAudio and SPDIF in my TV-script, so mplayer still requires exclusive access to the audio.
Still no proper /home in SVN (or Git).
Still no regular exercise.

I feel like there’s so much I have planned to do, but that I just can’t get around to doing. No matter what. These things have been on my list for ages, and I want to get it done soon.

But instead, I waste time watching movies and tv-series, reading blogs, reading discussions on forums, and everything except the things I would like to get done.