So after Google was so kind to pay me a flight from europe to the US and back I attended the Summer of Code mentor summit 2008 in Mountain View/CA.

The whole (un)conference was absolutly awesome with cool session interesting talks and tons of great people around. It is really nice to meet open source hackers from so many different projects and cultures. Leslie did a great job to make everybode happy in and outside the conference. (And yes, the Google caféteria is probably one of the best in the world).

Lot’s of people ask me why GNOME only send one mentor and I really think that is a pity. So please, if there will be a SoC in 2009 (which is likely) and you mentor some student then go to the mentor summit and I am sure you will not regret it.

After the summit some nice people from the tor project brought me back to San Francisco and showed me their “Hacker space” and some nice Burrito restaurant. This is my last day here now in one of the coolest hostels of the world and I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot.

Looking forward to another 13 hours flight and 8 hour timeshift

Anjuta start-up is really quite slow, taking about 5 seconds even if no session is loaded. So, I tried to find out what happens and why it is slow, using Frederico’s tools:

1.5 seconds => ld for linking about 80 libraries (will be improved by removing the deprecated bonobo/gnomeui/gnome-vfs stuff)

1.5 seconds => gtk_icon_theme_get_default()

2 seconds => loading the plugins

So, I think there is not much to improve for linking other then to remove some dependencies. For the plugins loading I hope to make some improvements but these are pretty big libraries so it might be difficult. But what annoys me is that the loading of the icon cache takes so long though it should actually get a shared object from the screen. Or am I wrong here? This is no cold start-up, the GNOME Desktop was already fully up. Any chance to shorten this time?

Update: alexl points out that it is because of the gtk-icon-cache being out-of-date and indeed running gtk-update-icon-cache on several directories fixed the issue. Anyway, I wonder if gtk+/gnome/something else should check for an up-to-date icon theme in the background and update it when idle.