Matthew Walton’s Blog

Some people might think this is a post about being nice to redheads. It isn’t, although I suppose I could write something about the ridiculousness of that particular much-perpetuated image.

No, this is about drink!

Non-alcoholic, before you get too excited. It’s quite simple really. It goes like this:

1. take a decently-sized piece of fresh ginger
2. peel it
3. slice it thinly
4. tip it into a small saucepan with some water and a generous amount of sugar
5. heat it gently, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar to form a syrup
6. continue to cook gently until it tastes quite strongly gingery
7. add more sugar if it doesn’t seem syrupy enough
8. strain
9. allow to cool a bit, then place into a jar, bottle or other suitable lidded storage vessel

When you want to drink it, dilute some down with water. For strength, you’re aiming for something like commercial ‘high juice’ squashes. You could make it weaker, but then you just need a bigger helping in each glassful.

I have no idea how long this keeps, but if you make the syrup really sugary it should keep until you drink it, because it’ll get drunk fast, sugar’s a preservative and ginger’s antibacterial.

Okay so maybe not three steps. I got Dasher linking – hurrah! It turns out there was all sorts of fudging in the configure script to get it to work on the original Maemo for the Nokia 770, which is now unnecessary on OS2008. Hurrah for SDK improvements, but boo for not spotting that earlier.

The problem now is that libglade isn’t finding half the widgets in the glade file, and returns null pointers for them instead of the widget pointers. Every single one of the ones it’s failing to find is definitely in the XML, and the file’s definitely in the right place. I’ve checked – lots of times.

This might just be what makes me start to go bald.

After literally half an hour of further effort, I managed to get Dasher to link when built against the Maemo Chinook SDK. Hurrah!

Okay so it took a manual edit to the Makefiles. I think I’m going to have to consult somebody who knows this whole autoconf/automake business a bit better to see how I can get the Glade libraries referenced properly.

Then I need to get it to actually start up as it currently tries to dereference a null pointer and segfaults. This is probably due to my fairly cavalier #ifdefing out to get it to compile. Now I need to go back and figure out which bits are actually needed and how to get them to work.

Ultimately of course the UI under Maemo is going to be a bit different, especially once I get the thing working as an input method, but for now I just want it to work at all!

I’ve fallen way behind with my NaNoWriMo novel, but last night I decided that I really couldn’t give up, and calculated that I needed to write approximately 2.2k a day until the end of the month to finish. That didn’t sound too difficult, so I started writing and next thing I knew I had about 4.5k more words. Not bad really. The target is now 2.2k per day, with the hope of more when I have time and energy, so that I don’t end up in a panic trying to finish on the 30th of November.

The plot itself is going well, although I think I need to speed a few things up a bit because I’m at 18,620 words and most of the main characters haven’t even met each other yet, only one of the Gods has died and there’s not even a hint of who the bad guy is. I’m going to have to start dropping a couple so that the protagonists have something to work with when they all get together and embark on their quest to save the world.

Their wise magician mentor also hasn’t died yet, but since he hasn’t yet met one of his mentorees that’s probably a good thing. His days are still numbered though…

Current word count: 12,527.

I’m pleased, but I think I’m going to have a problem writing much more this week. I’ve got musical things here there and everywhere and a performance on Friday evening about which I’m panicking just a little bit and need to put in a fair amount of practice time for. My next semi-clear writing day is Saturday, and I’ve got a nanomeet and SRP meet then although at least the evening’s free.

Still, at least I’m ahead of the curve at the moment. It’ll make catching up after this week is over a bit easier.