packing again, me and Marta are leaving tomorrow for Berlin. we’ll get back in seven days, with a ton of photos.
Health
As usual, I’ve got a flu at the end of the year.
This really sucks, because due to the slight fever and the cold, I had to cut back hacking time; the re-write of the source dialog in Dictionary has begun but I don’t know if I can finish it up before the next release.
Other things I‘m was working on: new features for the Gnome2::GConf module; fleshing out the GTK2-Perl tutorial; writing the Dictionary manual; updates to the RecentManager/RecentChooser code.
Maybe this Christmas
Only a few minutes into Christmas, and a few hours before the traditional lunch and dinner of this day.
In the last four days I feel like I’ve already eaten more than I usually eat in a month. On Tuesday, me and Marta celebrated her birthday with some friends; on the 22nd – the real date of her birthday – just the two of us went to a japanese restaurant here in Milan, to celebrate by ourselves; on the 23rd we went with my family to a restaurant to celebrate both Marta’s and my father’s birthday. Today, we went to lunch with Marta’s parents. Tomorrow (well, today) we are going to have lunch with Marta’s relatives and dinner with my relatives.
This is our first Christmas together (last year, I had to go around all night with the band, playing christmas carrols from 10pm to 6am), and we are celebrating in our own way: she is finishing the translation of her under-grad thesis in order to send it around and get a PhD abroad and I’m finally committing the last features of the GNOME Dictionary. We’s so two geeks.
Now, Dictionary allows the creation (and the removal) of dictionary sources using a nifty UI (it already worked by dropping the dictionary source .desktop file inside $HOME/.gnome2/gnome-dictionary, but with a UI this becomes a little easier for everyone). The dialog still has rough edges, and I think that the code stands out as a little too messy – especially against the overall cleanliness that I tried to keep in the project. I’ll remove it as soon as I can, and will use a proper class for that dialog; for the time being, I tried on making the magic happen as fast as I could, since we are approaching release time.
The next gnome-utils release is due at January, 2nd; I’ll try and get everything in shape before that day, in order to let people use the new Dictionary application and begin filing bugs. I won’t be around when the next GNOME unstable release will happen; instead, I’ll be in Berlin since January, 3rd till January, 10th, for a week of well due holidays.
[hacking]
[geek+xmas]
[gnome]
[gnome+dictionary]
Birthday
0x19 years.
Presents so far:
- Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton, from Marta (at midnight)
- money, from my parents and relatives (I love it)
- the new Back to the Future pack from my former high-school mates (we still see each other to hang out in week-ends): because we love 1985 as well as 1955 as well as 2017 as well as 1885
- the first season DVD box of The OC – which is a great show, with great scripts, very good actors and a wonderful sound track; and the whole point of the show seems to be that “geek is cool”, which is undoubtely true
- this über-cool Victorinox swiss army knife
- various books
Dancing Barefoot
Marta, as an early (a week early) birthday present, bought me Dancing Barefoot, the first book written by Wil Wheaton. It arrived today, and I literally devoured it in an hour.
Wil writes gorgeously. I found myself smiling, grinning or plain laughing out loud while reading it. As a trekker, and a geek, I can’t but relate to the stories he wrote; I really can’t wait for Just a Geek to arrive (Marta bought me that too).
[books]
[wil+wheaton]
Dictionary Applet
With almost everyone in Boston, both the mailing lists and IRC channels are really quiet; feels a little weird – but I think it’s mostly envy for not being able to go to the other side of the pond and hack away.
Thus, staying here means choosing between 1. cleaning the house with Marta and 2. hacking on the dictionary applet. While the first option would significantly improve my life, the second option is the most tempting. I’ll be a good boy, though, and clean up, now that I finally found to what I’m allergic to (you wouldn’t believe it: absynthe pollen; a potential career as “damned poet” thrown out of the window). Tomorrow I’m going to stay eight hours at the university campus, so I’ll end up working on the dictionary applet anyway…
As a side project, I’ll have to update the desktop bookmarks specification. The new revision should take into account not only the storage format, but the file locations for recently used resources, desktop places and shortcuts; by defining locations and launch behaviour we will be able to create a standard way to access bookmarks to resources on a desktop box. You could access your favourite locations inside your browser, FileChooser dialogs and Nautilus; also, your system administrator could define system-wide locations, in order to access default positions on each machine and on the network – no matter which environment you are using.
Scary Voice Over
Since last tuesday, I’ve done little to nothing on the “hack” side; I’ve began a little project in Perl that should resolve in a backup manager (it’s called Hudson), but mostly I’ve done some code polishing to the libegg/recentchooser code, following the notes about the API review sent me by Matthias Clasen.
During a chat on IRC, he also raised the point of the Windows MRU system, and how to make it work with ours recently used resources list.
So, tonight, with a little help from Christopher Lee, I sent an email with a strategy on the gtk-devel mailing list. I hope to get some feedback from the win32 people.
university: lessons began. I’ve already missed one class (the bus arrived already late, and built up some considerable delay on the way), but stayed until 16 to follow a Network Security class – which began with the teacher requiring us to read and discuss for the next time the six dumbest ideas in computer security – which I did already read beacuse linked on Planet GNOME some time ago.
Yarrr!
T' me,
Yo, Ho, Yo, Ho,
It's "Talk Like A Pirate" Day!
That time in September when sea dogs remember
That grown-ups still know how ta play!
When wenches are curvy and dogs are all scurvy
And a soft-wear patch covers your eye,
Ta hell with our jobs, for one day we're all swabs
And buccaneers all till we die!
So hoist up the mainsils and shut down your brain cells,
They only would get in the way,
Avast there, me hearty, we're havin' a party,
It's "Talk... Like... A Pirate" Day!
Wild life
You can’t say to have done any good deed, unless you saved a week old cat from death.
Check out
I’m back from Amsterdam with a ton of pictures (most of them really ugly: I’m not much of a photographer), that will be uploaded on Flickr, if and when I find the time/bandwidth.
Since my parents first, and my brother next are leaving for their holidays too, me and Marta are going to stay at my parents place for a week or so; unfortunately, here I don’t have a broadband connection but just a 56k one – and that is paaaainfully sloooooow: how on earth did we use it and survive after using it? And mind you me: I’ve used any connection from a 14.4k to a T3 connection, only that now I have a couple of CVS trees to look up and a box to maintain up to date.
Anyway, I’m preparing coffee and chocolate for a long night of downloads – just like when I dist-upgraded my old Potato to Unstable, three years ago.