Jonathan Blandford » jrb

google maps

jrb — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:55:25 +0000

trees: Neat! It looks like google street views has extended all the way to Westford, MA. They even have a picture of my favorite tree.

Edmund James Blandford

jrb — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:04:40 +0000

life: Edmund James Blandford was born November 15, 2007 at 4:01 PM EST. He was exactly eight pounds heavy and twenty inches long at birth. Mother and Son are doing well. We aren’t sleeping for particularly long stretches, but are happy that he is healthy and here.

Edmund getting ready to return from the hospital
Eleanor doesn’t know what to make of her brother yet, but is sweet and welcoming so far. She has been growing up so much recently; I hope she isn’t too put off by his arrival. She has been running up to him and saying ‘hi!’ while he’s in the kitchen.

Eleanor and Edmund
intlclock: I am glad that Federico is looking at merging intlclock upstream. I have wanted to see intlclock make it into mainline GNOME for a while, and it has definitely gotten more interesting for the wider exposure. While Federico is probably right that that code is not super efficient, I don’t think you can actually do a lot better than calculating the Sun’s position per-pixel when calculating day/night. That code is certainly a lot simpler than trying to project the circle onto our map projection. It also gives us the chance to calculate things like twilight, and adjust the shading of the pixel (and clocks) appropriately.
intlclock (background): One of the cooler features in Fedora 8 is the timelapsed background support that Søren wrote. The default background will get brighter as the day goes forward, and darker as night approaches. The times this happens are hardcoded into the slideshow, though. Given that we have some lovely code in intlclock to determine the sun position at a given location, and also know exactly where we are, it would be a pretty neat extention to tie that to the background.

Passages

jrb — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:00:30 +0000

meta: It has been a long time since I’ve written anything. Being a father has taken its toll on my free time, and I got out of the habit of writing. As has happened every time I have hit a dry spell in the past, I count on the same thing to get me started up again. I change software! This time to the WordPress instance at http://blogs.gnome.org/jrb. The old, elisp-based version I borrowed from Federico wasn’t working out for me anymore. We will see if this one does any better. I’m counting on gnome-blog to help keep it updated too. Many thanks to jdub for helping me get the old entries imported.
I have tried to keep the visual style of the old page — namely that of a ChangeLog entry. Nevertheless, I have made concessions to the modern web. ChangeLog entries should probably do the same. (-:
birthdays (GNOME): GNOME is now 10! Amazing. It has definitely been a long and strange trip. Dave’s recollection of Project Bob is a good memory. I’ll add my own:
The first time I met most of the people working on GNOME (at that time) was in Linux Expo in 1998. gnome-0.20 was just about to be released. This version featured a newly written Wanda the fish applet to play with. There was a demo machine there with someone showing off the coolest feature in in GNOME at that time, namely embeddable drawers. People were dragging them into the panel, and creating crazy shapes and figures. Naturally, it was buggy like crazy. Sopwith was sitting on the machine next to it and had logged in remotely, surreptitiously hacking on the panel, trying to fix the bugs people were hitting. When the panel (or an application) would crash, he would quickly restart them, making it seem more stable than it was.

Looking back on it, we had know idea of what we were getting ourselves into. I am sure if we knew back then what we know now, there is no way anyone would have started writing a desktop. It sure was a lot of fun though!
life (Eleanor): Eleanor has grown! She is sixteen months old, and is now spending her days running around the house, terrorizing the dog. She gets into a lot of mischief, but is very, very sweet. Zana and I don’t see her changing day by day, but just this weekend we had to put another box of clothes into the attic that she had outgrown. Her hair length is stuck somewhere in the middle of her back. It gets longer as she gets taller, but never quite seems to grow.

Eleanor and Uncle Ed