I feel like the only person who isn’t so excited by the N900. It looks like a beautiful device, and it’s built on the current Maemo platform that I’ve always liked and there’s so much to be excited about. But I’m not.

I feel like we’ve been wanting Nokia to make this device since Maemo was first released. They released an Internet tablet, and I figured maybe it’s just to get the platform out the door. Fine. But then they release another Internet tablet, and then another. They were cool devices, but I had no use for them. I just never wanted to carry around yet another device.

So now they release what I’ve been wanting for all this time, but on a platform that they’ve already declared is a dead end. Am I missing something, or does this feel very pointless?

I’m not trying to start any discussion about the toolkits, that’s not at all the point. It’s just confusing that they would never make a useful device that anyone really cares about until after they’ve declared an end to the platform. Now that they have a device I want to buy, there’s no point in buying it since it appears to has no future.

Only a few days ago Richard Stallman was speaking here at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and the subject of Mono inevitably came up. There was heated debate between Richard and others in the community. His position seemed to be that Mono was an important tool for migrating foreign software to a free platform, but it should be discouraged for use in developing new free software, regardless of technical advantages, because he was unconvinced that we would be allowed to continue using it (that Microsoft would sue us and require us to stop using it, etc).

I had the opportunity to ask him a question about this, which was something roughly like, “Is there anything Microsoft could do or say that would resolve some of the uncertainty around this issue?” I was very happy that Richard’s response was “yes”, and he went on to say how Microsoft could be more clear in their position of allowing free implementations of C#.

Interestingly, news regarding the C# standards were released today that will hopefully clear up things for people who were not convinced before. Undoubtedly there will be haters who continue to hate, but I really will be interested to see what Richard’s position will be after this (not that his position will affect mine, but I’m still curious).

So GLib and GTK+ have officially moved from svn to git this week. I had been doing some work in my own git repos, but they were based on various git-svn checkouts and they were all hashed differently, so it wasn’t possible to just merge from one of them into the new official git repos.

It turns out that it’s quite easy to merge your history over, though. Here’s what I did.

Say there is an old git repo with a branch called new-awesome-stuff. You want to create a branch in the new git repo with the same name, and merge the history over.

(in the old repo)

git checkout new-awesome-stuff
git format-patch master


This generates patches for each revision.. say there were 34 revisions in this branch. You’ll get 34 patch files whose names begin with 00nn (where nn is 01..34).

(in the new repo)

git checkout -b new-awesome-stuff
git am 00*.patch


If you’re putting things on github as I am, this should help you maintain your work in a single repo instead of having four different repos for the same project as I had.

Billboard Magazine is running some kind of photography contest, and there is a photo of my friend Susie that’s entered in the contest by photographer Angela Morris. However, I voted for it yesterday and at the time it had very few votes.. I read today a comment by one of her Facebook friends saying she had like 430 votes. So I went and looked at the contest page and it said she had like 21 votes or something.

WTF.

She has at least 60 people in her “vote for Susie” Facebook group, so it seems likely that even if her friend who said she had 430 votes was wrong, she must have at least 60 votes by now. I call vote fraud on Billboard Magazine’s contest! Maybe they discriminate against violinists or something.

Let’s fight this horrible injustice! Everyone go vote for Susie!!

There’s been some interest in getting some of the features from Christian Hammond’s awesome libsexy merged into GTK+, and I’m happy to report that some progress is finally being made on this. I just committed support for icons in entries into GTK+ a few minutes ago, and this will be available in GTK+ 2.16. This is based on SexyIconEntry, but supports some additional cool features that weren’t in SexyIconEntry. Some new things:

• Set icons from pixbufs, stock items, GIcons, and icon names
• Control sensitivity of each icon
• Tooltips on icons
• Drag and drop with icons

It’s also more memory efficient now, allocating the data and subwindows on demand. This is important since the new feature has been merged into GtkEntry itself rather than providing a new widget, and would more than double the size of every GtkEntry otherwise.

Thanks to everyone who helped: Matthias Clasen (tooltips, drag/drop support, patch review), Emanuele Bassi (review), Ross Burton (review), Christian Dywan (review, testing in Midori browser), and of course to Christian Hammond for making SexyIconEntry!

Project Ridley doesn’t explicitly mention libsexy, so I hereby create a new project specifically for merging libsexy features: Project Giggity!

Next I want to finish working on URL labels, like SexyUrlLabel.

Project Giggity

There’s been a lot of talk on the Gtk# mailing lists about the lack of a 2.12 installer for Win32. I finally took the time to roll a new MSI installer for Gtk# 2.12.3. But Medsphere is not using Gtk# 2.12, and we’re not planning to use it any time soon so I don’t think we really want to provide support for 2.12, or for 2.14 once it comes out, until we’re actually using them.

My long-term plan has been that I want to get gtk.org distributing its own official msi/msm installers for each component of the stack. Then other projects, such as gtk# or any gtk+ app, could consume the msm installers for their own msi containers.

Boston Summit is coming up pretty soon, and Brad and I plan to take the opportunity there to try to get Medsphere’s installer code into shape to do this and then push it into an upstream svn module, probably on Gnome’s svn.

Linux Journal has an article entitled The *Other* Vista: Successful and Open Source. It’s a brief introduction to the VistA system that is used by the VA and now many private hospitals, and which is the basis for Medsphere’s current products. The article talks a bit about Medsphere’s open source GTK-based OpenVista CIS, the new Medsphere.org initiative, and Congressman Pete Stark’s proposed Health-e Information Technology Act of 2008 bill that would advance open source medical software in the US if it were passed.

It’s really cool to see that our work is being noticed, and that people are starting to think about how open source can affect the medical industry.

Seven years, 157 comments later.. IT IS DONE!

I wasn’t even there and I can answer that question.

Megan and I went to the House of Blues in Dallas last night for the Raconteurs concert there. It was really awesome! Birds of Avalon opened for them. I had never heard of them before, but I thought they were okay. They had a funny gimmick where they have these little plastic birds, that I guess are battery powered since their wings could flap quickly, and the lead singer would turn them on and throw them out into the audience during one of the big instrumental sections of one song near the end. The Raconteurs came out later and it was the best show.. they did some stuff from their first album, and the new album, and a few songs that they have never recorded yet. Lots of fun. And House of Blues is a cool place, except that they charge you $5 for a can of beer.

I picked up a concert poster for it while I was there, of course.