21.4.09

all of you didn't think the pirouettes would lift your skirt

Arghh...this gtk+ project is driving me up the wall. I made good progress today though. The basic idea is to launch Songbird in miniplayer mode, get its X.11 xid and then wrap it in a window that I have access to manipulate. The possible extensions available once I get that accomplished are a sort of combo widget/devilspie utility, or not. If I choose to pursue that I do, if I don't, I don't.

Today I managed to figure out how to navigate the libraries better, and I've got everything good to go except one important thing: gtk+ is based on gdk, which handles the interactions between gtk+ and the windowing manager, in this case X.11. I can get an xid with xwininfo, a bash command I found randomly, and I can pass it to my program, and then lookup the window with gdk_window_lookup(Xid xid), but... I can't figure out how to get the GdkWindow into the GtkWidget. I've tried a lot of stuff. I'm going to give up for now on that and come back to it later today or tomorrow.

Hopefully I'll be finishing the lab computer today. The "lab computer" as it's been called, is an 8-bit computer: processor, sram, address and data bus, the works. I coded it with a no-op yesterday that didn't work quite as desired, and may have fried my microprocessor? We'll see... after that is a quick lab on Digital to Analog conversion, and then my project. I've decided on Analog to Digital conversion, which requires both hardware additions and some microcoding. If I have time, I may see if I can hook up an electric guitar to it and convert the analog guitar signal to a digital out. I'm not sure if we have the hardware for that, and I may need a preamp, which I don't have, and thus might have to build.......which would also be fun, but maybe too much work.

I've discovered with projects that I need a small push in the right direction, a general topic, and then I manage to do something cool with it. But it's that small idea that is needed first, and that professors are not always willing to provide.

Tomorrow is capstone day. That means that we sit and listen to capstone presentations by graduating seniors instead of having Math and CS classes. I only have to attend two, which means I only need to stick around for about an hour of class before going on my way. I'll probably take advantage of this to go back to the digi lab to do more circuitry work, and/or remember how to do microcode....it's been so long since fall of my freshman year.

In one year I will be presenting on capstone day instead of listening to them. That's a scary thought.