01/11/03: Where have I been?
 

Where the heck have I been? I fear I've really been neglecting the Cellar recently. I can't really make excuses, but I can at least tell you what I've been doing!

Well, for the past few days I've been working on coding up a gui for an irc-like program. I've always wanted to write a program that runs on Windows <i>and</i> Linux by using QT for the gui instead of MFC. No one ever seems to do this, despite the fact that's it's a great idea.

But writing a program that's actually good for something is much harder than it looks, and finding an idea that hasn't already been done 50 times is much harder. Plus, there's the fact that writing something that might be useful to someone takes a very, very long time, and I'll more than likely lose interest in it next week when I start school. Still, I really needed the practice, so I accepted the fact that I would probably never accomplish anything so that I could get some hands-dirtying experience.

So I've worked on it for about 2 1/2 days straight, and despite the fact that it's nothing but a dorky little window that you can type stuff in, I'm amazed at some of the problems I've solved. It's really fun! I even came up with a cool name for it: SilcWurm. Cool, huh? Here's a screenshot, just for kicks. Not bad for only 2 days worth of work.

Oh, I forgot to mention -- for the 2-3 days before this project, I was studying how mp3 encoding works. I get off on the wierdest kicks sometimes..

Assuming I don't lose interest, and can get it to actually connect, I want it to have a tabbed interface, like XChat. I really despise the MDI interface that mIRC uses.

Yep...you're a dork, though you might be the second smartest person ever from Arkansas.

I'd like to see YOU debug a failed assertion error, punk!

You mean like a sockbuf problem? Get a copy of ddd, and go to town.

Well, I haven't actually compiled it yet under Linux. I wanted to learn all the little nuances of setting up build environments in Visual C++, integrating third-party libraries, what run-time library to use, etc.

Somehow, the problem has gone away, though. It's very mysterious. :) I have no idea what I did to fix it.

Uh.. that is.. I mean.. I knew <i>exactly</i> what I was doing!