Well, it has been a while since I've updated this site. It has mostly to do with the fact that my life has been completely turned upside down for the past month. For reasons beyond my control, life became difficult last semester and as a result I ended up being academically dismissed from my university. After having all winter break to dwell on the possibility of my life being irreparably altered, I found out on the Thursday before classes were to begin (January 13th) that the appeal I submitted to the Dean explaining my circumstances had been accepted and I was allowed back into the university. I was able to get into most of the classes I had planned on taking this semester, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get into all of them.

Maybe that was better than if I had been able to get into them. Apparently people look at you funny when you decide to take both MATH 440 Complex Variables and MATH 430 Advanced Calculus at the same time at Northern Illinois University so after being effectively told I was nuts by the head of the Computer Science department I was allowed to take a class (CSCI 462 Theoretical Computer Science) whose requirements I have not completely fulfilled, so now I should have a slightly lighter course-load than if I had taken both MATH 440 and MATH 430. So, I am now enrolled in only 13 credit-hours, however that is just fine with me.

My latest project to embark on is called Data Diaper. It is a program that I've been meaning to write. I've been wanting a project that should be easy to get results from so that progress can be seen when it is made. Also, I've been looking for a project idea to use to learn Python. My first idea was to code some utilities for handling my music collection in Python, but I rather enjoy the current utilities that I've made and couldn't think of any other music collection utilities that I needed.

My criteria for writing Data Diaper are these:

• Modular design to allow backups to be made to new destinations (e.g. CD-R/RW, HTTP, FTP, SFTP, NFS, SMB, etc.)
• Modular design to allow different sources for backups so that one could back up a collection of CDs, a directory on an FTP server, their home directory on a server they have SSH access to, etc.
• Support for incremental backups
• Written in Python
• Simplicity

These criteria present a few questions.

One of the largest problems with the Democratic party today is that it has trouble defining itself as anything but not Republican. The things the Democrats have stood for in the past have been demonized by the Republicans and the Right. Now, Democrats find themselves in a precarious position where their base tends to be more like the Green party and other more progressive and liberal parties than those at the helm of the Democratic party.

For the Democratic party to support things such as universal healthcare and free education from kindergarten through college, they need to be able to withstand the wrath of Republicans and the accusations of being "communist". They need to be able to effectively communicate that socialism is not the same as communism. They need to take back the word "liberal" and not treat it as something to be avoided like the plague. They need to show that it is possible to be both conservative and support social programs. They need to show that investing in the future is a smarter strategy than blowing the budget with tax-cuts. They need to show that universal healthcare will actually save people money and that the taxes needed for such healthcare will be far less than what people are currently paying for their HMOs or health insurance. They need to have spines.

Last weekend I went to a wedding. It was sweet, small, simple, private; and unfortunately, not recognized by the state. The wedding was between two men who wanted to declare their love for eachother. After seeing the two grooms walking down the aisle and hearing them say their vows, it became very apparent that this wasn't about sex. In fact, there was nothing sexual about any part of the ceremony. There was no mention of sodomy, fellatio or even kissing. The only exception to kissing was the customary kiss between the wedding participants.

Instead, there was love. Love tends to be forgotten when it comes to relationships between gays. People forget that relationships are more than just sex even though they'll claim otherwise. Yet when someone mentions "gay" or "homosexual" their thoughts immediately gravitate towards sodomy and other sexual acts. This is more a reflection upon their own faults than it is on gays.

Doing nothing is hard work. It is difficult to keep ones mind busy, and to keep ones days from dragging on and on when one isn't doing anything. I've had a lot of experience with this in the past few weeks since I decided to take a break from working on Wootella. I've been investigating what I can do that won't be as time-consuming as Wootella but is still something of which I can be proud.

Project ideas

• Learn 3D graphics programming.
• Study American history.
• Write musings on politics.
• Study electronic circuitry.
• Investigate troubles faced by Free Software.

Having resigned myself to the fact that Wootella won't be anywhere near operation by the time I head back to school, I've decided that I'll go ahead and take time to just enjoy the rest of summer. I'd like to have time to work on some other projects of mine such as getting this website customized instead of using the almost-default style of Wordpress. But, most importantly, I would like some more free time to spend with my kitties and my fiancée.

Well, duh. I've been working on Wootella for almost three years now. Most of that time, however, has been spent learning things like how to do network programming, multithreaded programming, software documenting, different libraries, and using the GNU autotools. Because of all those excuses I've made very little progress in actually getting anything written. My goal has been to get wootella-lib functional by the time I move in at Northern Illinois University in the Fall.

After a week of trying to get gtk-doc to play nice with automake, I've succeeded. It just so happens that all the answers to all my problems were in the gtk 2.4.0 Makefile.am's. During the process of examining the wootella-lib build system I noticed a couple bugs. One being that a header file that shouldn't be installed gets installed, and the other being one I can't remember. Although, none of that should matter since I don't yet have a website up for wootella, so nobody is actually using it. Also, wootella-lib doesn't really do anything useful at the moment anyhow.

Wootella-lib 0.3.0 is released! Changes include the addition of a buffer library for parsing and assembly buffers quickly, the addition of some utility libraries including one for stacks and one for lists, and the beginnings of the main-loop for the backend are beginning to come together.

I've not coded as much on Wootella as I would have liked in the past couple of days. The reasons are mostly that I'm trying to make sure that what I do code, I do it in a way that won't trap me into re-doing large sections of work for some unforseen reason.