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.

I’ve also spent some time in the past week adding a marginally useful feature to nemiver: highlighting memory values when they’ve changed since the last time the debugger stopped. Adding this functionality required some significant modifications to the shared GtkHex widget that we use, so it’s not checked into svn yet, but hopefully will be soon. I’m not sure how people did significant refactorings and API additions before tools like git-svn were available. It’s so nice to be able to try out different things and make changes locally with full version control support instead of trying to maintain a mega-patch or committing half-baked ideas to the central repository.

I also released a new version of cairomm to coincide with the 1.6 release of cairo.

On an unrelated note, we’re planning a new release of Nemiver in the coming week. It’s been quite a while since the last release, but there are quite a few new features even though we’ve both been slowed down a bit by real life in the past few months. I’ve been trying to polish up the user interface a bit as well, and in the process, some translatable strings have been changed slightly. So if any intrepid translators are interested in cleaning up after me, it would be greatly appreciated.

Now if we could just get a replacement for gnome_help_display() into GTK+, we’d be able to knock off a lot of other extra dependencies as well.

deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathon-jongsma/ubuntu feisty main universe
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathon-jongsma/ubuntu feisty main  universe

Followed by the requisite apt-get install nemiver.

I’ll try to upload new versions periodically. Let me know if you have any issues with them. All of the usual caveats apply — this is development code so may not be completely stable, etc.

Things with nemiver are coming along at a decent pace and we’ll probably be doing another release in the near future. The next release should bring quite a few nice new features and a lot of bugfixes, most of which Dodji has already mentioned.

I recently bought a new Digital SLR camera, the Nikon D40. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the best camera I could find, just something reasonably priced that took decent pictures. The D40 is relatively small so I don’t feel like I’m lugging a huge camera around (which is important or I probably wouldn’t end up using it as much), it’s cheap (it comes with a reasonable lens kit for around 600 US, which isn’t much more than I paid for my old point-and-shoot digital back in the day), and it takes vastly better pictures than my old camera. I’m really loving the fact that I can actually get decent pictures even if the lighting and environment is less than ideal. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a decent entry-level DSLR. I still clearly have a lot to learn about photography (this camera just lets me take better-looking crappy photos). But I’m slowly learning, and I’m getting lots of practice, like any new parent.

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).

Since it may be a while before we get to a nice restaurant, we went out for a meal at Vincent in downtown Minneapolis for Valentines day. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed food as much in my life. It was absolutely phenomenal. I didn’t even regret the small fortune we paid for the meal.

I just pushed out a new minor release of Agave and I’ve also recently added support for enabling and disabling breakpoints in Nemiver.