Choice quote from a real world example:

The moral of this story is that “flexibility” is rarely desired in programming! The less a program will accept/the less a program will do/the less options and preferences it has, the more usable it is/the more understandable it is/the more stable it is.

When designing a program, you’ve got to make some tough decisions .. and when you really can’t decide if this is something your users will need someday, err on the side of leaving it out.

踏入2008年，工作上除咗忙仲係忙，好似重來未咁忙過。每一日個bug list都有增無減，重要其他人嘅bug有時都要我睇埋，唉！睇怕要到beta先會無咁忙。

公司Mountain View租嘅辦公室之前比Google買咗，今日終於搬到Sunnyvale嘅新辦公室：http://hxbc.us/album/+name/2008/ 。遊戲室仲未有機會去睇，因為太忙！不過聽講有三部電視，Xbox360，Playstation 3，乒乓球枱，同埋air hockey枱。都唔知幾時先有機會玩。

I mentioned in my previous post about the lyric display system that I've working on for the last couple nights. Currently it involves a QuodLibet plugin and a script.

The script monitors the currently playing song using DBus events emitted from the QuodLibet plugin, using the file name with ".lrc" appended to the end as the lyric file. It should be fairly easy to modify it for use with other music players.

It also executes my now playing script to set pidgin's tune status.

Spent most of the Christmas day capturing dumps from Windows Live Messenger 8.1.0178 using oSpy and analyzing them. Previously I "only" gave the VM 328MB RAM which apparently wasn't enough for oSpy, and I had to increase it to 400MB RAM which leaves < 600MB for the host. I ended up getting offline messaging working correctly with Elliott Sales de Andrade's MSNP15 patch, turns out we need to use the ticket token from messengersecure.live.com which is not the domain we use to send out the offline message. It sort of makes sense, except MSNPiki lists messengersecure.live.com as unknown... Also fixed couple other issues in Elliott's patch, and fixed couple other leaks and a double free along the way. The MSNP15 stuff is not pushed yet, hopefully I will find some time this weekend to test it more thoroughly.

Spent most of Christmas night and tonight writing a program that would display the lyric as a song is played. My setup is quite complicated at the moment, it involves a python QuodLibet plugin that fires appropriate DBus events and a perl script that listens for those DBus events, find and parse the lyric file (which is currently something like LRC), then display each line as the song is played. Pausing and seeking within a song complicates it further. I think I am mostly done, but the tedious work of writing out the LRC files remains. I will probably post the code later.

I haven't had a picture taken in quite a while, and Ryan finally posted this picture that he took of me from a couple weeks ago. I thought he was taking a picture of the food, so I just looked down at the table waiting for him. Well, that didn't make the best picture ever:

I will neither confirm nor deny that I am more stylish than before.