How do you respond to a long-outdated email, neglected like so many other things during the school year, sent by concerned grandparents? Answer: lyrical inspiration…

This is none else than the inspirational tale
Of an email which nearly failed
Sadly, to complete circulation
And put to rest wild and undue speculation

Concerning a certain well-meaning patron
Not, however, given to over-communication
Being as he is confined to a life of hard labor
(That is to books, and lectures, and paper,)

His good grandparents, in deep concern
Wrote an epistle to discern
The awful state which was ensuing
Their grandson and consuming

His life, a poor and gruesome fate
Concluded many, when the hour drew late
Rumors and speculations abounded
Greedy siblings his possessions divided

And when no reply was forthcoming
Cries and wails were heard in mourning
But hark! When all seemed despairing:

Projects were finished!
Deadlines were met!
Homework completed!
Procrastination repressed!

And the email lives! No more is it lost
Deep in the clutches of a cluttered in-box
In fully good health, the prodigal taps a reply
Sipping on coffee, which he has come by

Honestly, thanks to a generous donation
(Which, by the way, deserves admiration)
And hereby sends you his thanks, and moreover
Proof of existence, which can’t be glossed over

For chances of further survival is bleak
Due to threat of examinations, arriving in two weeks
And if God deems to stay their vicious attack
His kind roommates have offered to pick up the slack

But before he goes down in glorious battle
He feels it his duty to surface, and prattle
A bit, taking respite to thank his dear benefactors
Grateful for patience, thankful for prayers

As always, hoping to be reunited
Unless, of course, school his fate has decided
But until then he wishes his love to send…

And with that
this belated reply
does hereby
come to an end.

And now for an interruption for…

A Tale of Woe
By a Woeful Geek
After a lousy day on my way
to MyCompany, inc.

I don’t mean to whine
or throw a big fit
but today I built so much character
that I have to share it.

So at 5:45 this morning, I wake up to the sound of pounding rain. And I mean, pounding rain — the type that leaves big puddles on sidewalks, drains, and driveways. Eventually my foggy brain recognizes the fact that it’s Wednesday, and that the parts for my car will not be in until later in the afternoon — leaving it dead in the, um, water. I calmly walk down the stairs to face the day anyway. There, in the kitchen with a halo, stands my Saving Angel: a fellow resident who just happened to have a working car and was up eating breakfast. Ever so smoothly I drop the hint, “do you know where the nearest bus pick-up is?” all the while thinking, “DON’T YOU KNOW I WOULD DROWN ON THE WAY LADY!??” Unfortunately she is not yet awake enough to get my hint, or to recognize the wild look in my eyes. Descending into a calm panic, I scurry outside with a role of blue masking tape in a frantic attempt to tape my PCV hose together enough to where my car will run for a little while, just maybe.

Or maybe not. Scrunched up under the hood to stay dry, my attempts fail and the car won’t start. At this point I realize it’s going to be a long day. So after running back inside, I change into old stuff, cram all my electronics into plastic ziplock bags, and put them in my backpack. Continuing to think happy thoughts, I stuff a complete set of clothing (including shoes) into Walmart bags and then into my backpack…

Shirt.
Pants.
Belt.
Shoes.
Socks.
Other-wears.
Lunch.

I grab a baseball hat and a sweatshirt and my bike, and venture out into the dark, gloomy, and WET day.

It’s nearly 5 miles to work, but I haven’t hardly gone 200 feet and already my underwear is soaked, it’s raining that hard. By the time I get to the office I’m a drowned fish, so I sneakily squelch down the halls home to over 200 of my peers praying silently that God would freeze time, just once. Heading to a restroom stall to change, I can almost smell the coffee and dry clothes awaiting me in the kitchen, but upon throwing my wet clothes over the divider, my pocket change drops in the toilet bowl.

Clank.

I am proud to report that after all of this trauma, the only casualties are my pride, pruned skin, and a half-dozen passerbys from the morning commute who gave themselves hernias from laughing at the spectacle only a pale, half-drowned geek bicycling for all his might can produce.

As far as I’m concerned, it serves ‘em right.

The other day when I logged in on my Ubuntu installation, I received a rude shock: the file manager (Nautlius) would not load, so my desktop remained a bright, response-less green. Not only that, but 80% of my other programs would start and immediately crash with no warning, and no error output. None of my settings would persist. The only perceivable error that I received was one regarding a lack of permissions, which really threw me off.

Since I had just recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu, I thought part of the problem might have been due to my old applications settings that I had not removed from my separate home partition. As it turns out, these were not the problem: the mysterious crashings were all due to the fact that my home partition was full, so my applications could not write to them, resulting in a permission error if lucky and silent death otherwise!

After calming down and apologizing to Ubuntu for the names I’d called it, I realized that somewhere I vaguely remember this happening to me before… you’d think I would have learned my lesson the first time. Anyway, the moral of the story is to keep an eye on that disk space. I’m sure savvy users will have already installed Conky to do so for them — as for me, I think it’s high time to do so.

Work on GCast — the soon-to-be open-source screen capture and sharing utility for Linux — is continuing, albeit slowly, in between school, work, and everything else. Today I decided to take a break from working on the region-selector (which now masks the screen with a semi-transparent overlay like every other capture application worth its salt   and focus on completing the graphics editor, which still has some major work to be done. So far text and rectangles (with text) are supported, so I started to work on ellipses. After happily plunking away at a small bit of Cairo code, I was a little surprised at the results, which was anything but the smooth ellipse I was expecting:

I guess that’s what happens when you switch Bezier control points with nodes. Oops!

I have many more features planned than I have time to implement, but soon I hope to add support for undo/redo, Dropbox, Screencast.com (if they would only allow third-party applications to upload with their own api keys!), state-saving of all the graphics canvas and child items, as well as revision history. Watch this blog for updates concerning the development progress.