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. (-:

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!

GConfPropertyEditor: I was unable to sleep last night, and ended up staying up until 4:30 in the morning watching reruns of “Who’s Line is it Anyway” and working on my rewrite of the GConfPropertyEditors. Now that James Henstridge has done work on bug #69639 I have a lot more interest in getting this into the GNOME library stack. I’m not 100% sure that I’ve gotten the interface right, but it should be good enough for a lot of cases. It has the potential to turn a number of capplets into simply glade files. If I get a couple of simple examples working, I’ll mail it to gnome-hackers.

GNOME: I was unable to sleep tonight and worked on my candidacy statement. I’m pretty bad at writing these things, but they get easier as it gets later.

books (Four Quartets): I recently picked up Four Quartets (by Lawrence Durrell) from the library. I enjoyed his younger brother’s books a lot as a kid and read a good fraction of them. I thus grew up with a health skepticism towards the arrogant and pretentious ‘Larry’. It is pretty dangerous to learn about people from their younger sibling. Still, I always wondered what the more (less?) famous brother’s books were like, so I started reading it.

I am unable to describe how incredibly good this book is. It is intensely lyrical and extremely detailed, sucking me into the moment on every page. I’m reading through it slowly, enjoying every step it takes, not wanting it to end.

I remember hearing a quote from a professor of Shakespeare. He had spent a lifetime studying Shakespeare’s plays and knew them all intimately. He loved his work, loved teaching, and loved being a professor. However, he said that he would happily give up all he ever learned about Shakespeare, if he could just get the chance to read “Romeo and Juliet” again for the first time.

This book definitely feels like it should be read once, and treasured. I hope (expect!) that it ends as well as it begins.

sleep: I wish I could sleep more.

work: I’ve been wrestling with rhgb for the last week or so. I’m still not really satisfied that we’ve gotten all of the kinks out of it, but it’s much better than it was last week. We’ve gotten it to the point that it doesn’t slow down the boot much more than it booting without it (on the order of 6 seconds on my test computer.) I’m much happier with the approach we’re taking now that kudzu doesn’t conflict with the X server. With some luck we can get a nice GTK+ front-end to kudzu in the future.

book: I am reading ‘Changing Planes’ by Ursula Le Guin. It’s very light and easy to read, and I am enjoying it much. It is also entirely predicated on a pun. This is more in keeping with a junky Piers Anthony novel than her other books. Additionally, it is explicitly airport reading material which leaves an ever-so-slight bad taste. Perhaps I should be saving it for a trip somewhere.

Bookworm: Everytime I think I’m getting closer to finishing this, I find a new bit that needs fixing. Zana is getting quite impatient. This weekend, it will be usable.

GNOME: There’s an upcoming summit in New York. I hope we get a decent turnout. It’s very last minute, though.

google: I’m losing the google battle for the term ‘Blandford’ to my Dad. I need more links to my page.

GNOME (2.4): It’s out. It wasn’t the prettiest release thus far, but it’s in good shape. I have big plans for 2.6. But first…

GTK+ (2.4): This is in danger of slipping a bit. I really need to finish my GChildWatchSource patch and get it into glib. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a pretty tricky piece of code, and I’m happy about how it looks right now. Need to reply on the list.

(GtkTreeView): Kris and I came up with two optimizations for the GtkTreeView that will make an enormous speed difference in some common cases. I spent a bit of time arguing with Owen about how to enable the optimization (I wanted it to be automatic — Owen wanted the programmer to explicitly turn it on) and it’s going to result in a lot of people handling their column-sizing by hand. But off the cuff testing shows that we can handle about 100K rows of model per second instead of the 7K per second we were doing before.

Birthday: I don’t know what it says about me, but Zana gave me a great birthday present. A cotton robe, a box of Myntz, three pairs of really comfy socks, and a hand-knit pair of wool socks. I must be officially old, getting excited about socks.

GNOME: Had a surprisingly productive day building packages. Libtool still makes me contemplate taking up self-flagellation as a hobby, though.

Maintenance: I had to leave work a bit early to get my car from the repair shop. A gasket in the oil tank started leaking. As is typical with the problems with cars, it was $15 to get a replacement part and $250 to install it.

Bookworm: With the house much more under control, I’m back to working on Bookworm again. I’m really not happy with the interface, but it’s functional. A surprisingly large number of people (like three) have asked for it recently, so I am going to try to get it somewhat usable. I had an enjoyable discussion with Seth about the nature of Assistants, and how they should work in GNOME.

Moving: Trying to put all the pieces of my life back together after the movers managed to spread them all over the new house. Lots of things went wrong. Lots of things went right. When all is said and done, I love the house and being back in New England. One thing that didn’t go so well was how the Mortgage turned out. I was very disappointed with the Walden Mortgage company of Concord, MA. If anyone is in the market for a loan in that area, I would not recommend them.

GNOME: I am also really enjoying back in the swing of things with GNOME. I’ve finally gotten the control-center back somewhat under control. It sounds like a broken record, but I really need to get a good chunk of it cleaner for 2.6. Mime-system, here we come…

Trips: I won two free tickets to anywhere in the continental North America in the company raffle. As I need to travel soon, I’m planning on going to visit Federico for a couple days. Should be a lot of fun. I’ve never seen Mexico City before — I’m quite psyched!

Life: We now tentatively have a house in Massachusetts. We’ll be moving up there after GU4DEC. It should be a lot of fun to be there, though the moving will be rough.

TV: I think my current favorite show on TV is Boomtown. It may be just because I grew up in LA and thus is more familiar to me than Law and Order is, but it is a much fresher show to me.

GNOME: I’m getting back into the swing of things after a little down time. I committed a pretty good set of changes today. And more importantly, I didn’t commit another change which would have broken sorting in the GtkTreeModelSort.

GNOME: I might have fixed a nautilus tree bug. I need to fix Drag and Drop. GNOME 2.0 is so close to being released. We only have nasty showstopper bugs left.

experience: In software, we often say “write it once intending to throw it away.” After spending a few months working on a workbench, I would like to redo all the holes I have drilled. I needed to do the joints first, and then do the large holes for the supporting legs. I’ve also learned that being off by an 1/8″ is way to much for a lot of things. I need to be more careful. I also need a workbench to build this on.

passings: Stephen Jay Gould died this past week. The two and a half years of Biology in college is largely a testament to his writings. Thanks for the inspiration.

GNOME: I did nothing productive on GNOME this weekend (except reply to a few bugs.) I feel a little lame, especially given the UI freeze tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be busy trying to finish the new mime capplet in time for the drop-dead date. It will be awfully tight.

Trading spaces: Something about this show makes me want to do crazy things to my house. I bought a large sheet of 3/4″ mdf and seven yeards of burgundy cloth. We’ll see what happens next.

Carpentry: I spent more time pretending I know something about wood working. This included drilling a lot of holes in the legs for my table. 16 down, 80 more to go.

Set (cards): Got my revenge for the game of gin I had with Zana last. I won 13-11!! I think this is the first time I’ve ever won set.

GNOME: I’ve noticed a couple of diary entries recently have said that there is less fun in GNOME than there used to be, and that we aren’t as productive as we used to be. I can’t speak for others, but I personally am thrilled at how well GNOME is currently progressing. The kind of problems we’re having nowadays are so much better than the ones we had even a year ago. Last year, at this time, we were still reeling from the loss of Eazel. Nautilus was basically unusable, and GTK 2.0 wasn’t close to out yet. Three years ago, we were trying to get GNOME 1.x stable and vaguely usable.

I have distinct memories of using the session manager to change directories in gmc at Linux World Expo with GNOME 0.93. I’d double click on a directory, it would update its restart command in the session manager, crash, and then start up in the correct directory. We had a similar experience adding launchers to the panel. The coolest ‘power’ feature in GNOME was the ability to drag colors to the terminal. One of the better dialogs in GNOME (and the one we were so proud of) was E-conf: http://people.redhat.com/jrb/files/e-conf.png

Compare that to Louie’s top ten list of gruesome bugs left for GNOME 2.0: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-April/msg00308.html They don’t even compare. Sure, there are plenty of bugs to fix, and room for improvement, but we’re really making great forward process.

If it seems like it’s less fun, it’s because we’re a lot better at doing the small stuff and we’re no longer making the huge, visible changes we once did. We now check error conditions regularly, and raise (mostly) useful error dialogs. We have the maturity to remove features and code, instead of always adding them. Higher standards leads to less tolerance for the bad hacks we used to do.

There are so many cool things on the desktop that are left to be done, that we now have the infrastructure to deal with. GTK 2.0 is a joy to work with, and has made a lot of problems we used to have just go away. GConf is plain cool. Adding things to make the users life easier is so simple now.

One of the great gifts of Eazel to GNOME was that it raised our awareness of usability issues, and taught us that we could make a beautiful desktop. I just step back and look at how the GNOME 2.0 desktop looks today, and am awed.