She’s also getting to the age where it’s a bit easier to find somebody to watch her while we go out for an evening. In the past couple weeks we were able to go see a theatre show and our first music concert in quite a while (a cd release show for one of my favorite local bands).

It feels like spring has finally arrived and Minneapolis is awaking from a long hibernation. This is definitely the best time of the year. It’s as if everybody’s just been huddled inside waiting for spring and then there’s just the sudden burst of activity. Everybody’s outside without coats (even though it’s still only in the 40s or 50s F), you see neighbors you’ve hardly seen for months. Of course, now that I say that, we’ll probably get hit with another big snowstorm…

I found a bit of time to hack on the nemiver debugger again lately. Since 0.6.5 I think I’ve closed about 10 bugs, getting the bug count below the century mark once again, which feels nice. I’m hoping I’ll have time to work on new features again in addition to just bugfixes, since there are still a few features missing that I think are really necessary for more widespread adoption.

The Toy Dogs today are bred solely as pets. They have no other purpose in life except to give pleasure, especially to ladies.

Also, I’ll be attending GUADEC for the first time this year, and I’m looking forward to a good time in Istanbul and finally meeting a lot of people in person that I’ve known online for a while.

WebKit work is going quite well. I’ve mostly been focusing on bug fixing so far, though I’ve added some new features as well (CSS text shadows are now supported in the Qt port, for instance). Overall I’ve been really impressed with how clean and well-organized WebKit is for such a large and complex project. I’ve also started playing around with ‘webkitmm’ in my spare time as well. Nothing much to show at the moment, I’m afraid, but I don’t expect it to take too much effort before it’s relatively usable.

Since then it seems like I’ve been sick most of the time. Instead of doing something useful, I’ve taken to fidding on a re-write of my Agave colorscheme designer, and I’ve made a decent amount of progress. It still lacks a lot of features of the original, but it benefits from my vastly better grasp of gtkmm and related technologies. I still don’t know if I’ll ever actually get around to releasing it. It’s currently serving as a way for me to relax and take breaks from my other projects. It’s become sort of a playground for me to try out new technologies, and I think I’ve succeeded in making it nearly impossible for normal users to build as it requires quite a few very new or unreleased libraries (goocanvasmm, giomm, glibmm-utils, etc).

Here’s a little screencast of what I’ve done so far:

I’ve set up a repository on github for anybody that’s interested in playing around with it.

Also, I’ll be taking over some glibmm maintainer duties from murray after the 2.16.0 release.

R has been making huge strides (haw!) in her walking ability. She’s practically up to running already, chasing the dog and cats around the house with glee. She’s pretty much completely given up on crawling at this point, and just walks everywhere. I’m also happy to report that she seems to be developing a love for music: whenever we start singing, she stops what she’s doing and starts swaying back and forth in a little dance.

We’re also nearly at the stage where we learn which words we say way too often. For instance, R has been making a lot of wordlike sounds lately, but she’s only just recently started saying ‘no’ very clearly and quite frequently. For instance, she’ll walk over and grab a big handful of dirt from the potted plant (to eat, naturally) while saying ‘no no no no’.

Update: by request, for those of you without flash, here’s a direct link to download A Sunday Smile in mp3 format.

In the past, I’ve used GNOME applications for web browsing, checking email, viewing images, listening to music, and all of my other day-to-day computer activities. But I’ve never really had any GNOME tools that I’ve been able to use for development. It feels like we’re finally making progress on some good basic development tools for GNOME, which makes me really happy. In addition to the ones I mentioned, there’s also some really great stuff happening in the new versions of glade3, and there seems to be some good stuff happening in Anjuta as well (though I don’t personally use an IDE). All in all, I’m pretty positive about the future of developer tools in GNOME.

In other news, Ruby is still the-cutest-baby-ever™ and doing really well. We’re even getting some decent sleep (though decent is pretty relative I suppose).

She’s sleeping on my arm right now.

It was a long labor, but Joanne made it through without needing any medication, and they’re both doing well. Now if we could just get some decent sleep…

I also stumbled upon a ticket for today’s playoff game between Minnesota and Oakland. My boss had a couple tickets but his friend got sick so he had an extra, which meant a half day off of work for a baseball game. Unfortunately, the Twins lost the game, but I still got my first taste of live playoff baseball, which was a blast (though the sheer volume of the noise in the dome left me with a bit headache).

Good days. I love ‘em.