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.

work: Been a really hectic month. I’ve been working 12-15 hour days the last month or so on the next Red Hat release. It’s somewhat therapeutic to go through a bug list, and just close as many as you can. On the flip side, these hours are getting very old. Zana’s been very heroic putting up with it, but we both are going to need to take a break after this.

Void/Limbo: The beta’s have been surprisingly well recieved, a few small flame wars aside. The things that we expected to get flamed on (UTF-8, new gcc/glibc etc) were not remarked on. Everyone seems to get worked up about the pixels. On one of our testers list, there’s a thread complaining about us making GNOME look like KDE. On another, there’s a thread about us making KDE look like GNOME. People are also complaining that we’re copying Windows XP and OS/X. Maybe we’re doing something right, if we’ve riled up this many people.

bookworm: I have no time to work on it, unfortunately. I need to port it over to use the pgdb module, and clean up the UI a bit. Zana has been pestering me to finish the ‘Add Book’ druid so she can actually use it. Need to finish the next RH release…

Movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s an excellent, excellent movie. Definitely the most fun I’ve had with a movie this year.

Work: Wrote redhat-config-packages with Jeremy. Some screenshots are available at http://people.redhat.com/jrb/files/rcp/ It should be coming to a Red Hat Linux distribution near you.

Deals: Tomato Paste was on sale for 20 cents a can. I bought ten.

work: Went back to work on Wednesday. I got a lot more into my tree. It kept me busy all day, which was good. Still, it’s hard not to keep an eye on the news. All in all, it was a pretty dismal birthday. Zana tried really hard to make it nice though, and that was the best present I could have gotten.

present: Zana also got me a very cool Patriots cap, as well as tickets to the game against tha Panthers this weekend (not to mention train tickets down there.) Unfortunately, the game was canceled. I’m not sure how excited I could get at the moment about the game. For that matter, the Patriots were looking likely to lose. Still, it was an awesome idea, and I hope we can do it again some other time.

paper: Staying up late tonight working on my paper for the X technical conference for ALS. Fun fun fun.

fencing: Haven’t gone back. Too busy at work. They were probably canceled tuesday, anyways. I haven’t managed to get equipment, either. I will go next tuesday for sure.

flatulent doggy: The dog is having gas problems tonight. Blech.

work: Spent a lot of time at work last night.

toys: mkj and I got a cool powerball a few days ago. I don’t fully understand how it works. I don’t want to break it, but I do want to know how it lights up. Decisions…

work: Meridian Engineers meeting last night, where our new VP tried to work through some scheduling/resource issues. I don’t think that many of us feel like a lot of progress was made, though I feel like the managers were doing the best they could given their constraints. That’s all we can hope for.

nanotechnology: I finally understand why people on slashdot are so excited about nanotechnology. I finished the Diamond Age last night, and while I thought it had a weak ending, I thought it was an enjoyable piece of science fiction. Note the ‘fiction’ part guys…

sick: Two lovers were hanged by their respective families and friends in India this past Monday for having an intercaste relationship. I can’t believe it’s August 2001.

doomometer: We added a doomometer to our wall. It provides hours of entertainment. Well, minutes anyways…

hacking (AisleRiot2): Got cards drawing again — this time they’re scaled. Also started porting the drawing engine from AR1 over until I can get real SVG images.

hacking (GtkTreeView): I added the amazing focusing but non-activateable buttons today. These are buttons that you can click on to give focus (necessary for reordering columns). However you can’t actually activate them. It’s a nice, small touch…

work: Power outage caused by storm today. Fortunately, my roof didn’t leak for once.

food: Made pumpkin-blueberry pie for dessert. It’s interesting, though a little sweet.

work (conftools): Did a bunch of work on bindconf this week. Elliot put it in the tree tonight, and it should make its way out to rawhide eventually.

hacking (GTK+-HEAD): I gave some thought to dialog boxes. Bug #50537 has a simple solution, but I was thinking that it would be good to have a GTK_DIALOG_STYLE_ enum that would let you determine the style of the dialog (ie. buttons on the side, no hrule, message, tabbed). Not 100% sure where I’m going with this, but at least we should be able to get rid of the problematic hrule cleanly.

valentines day: I got a foil covered Britney Spears card from dcm to give to Zana. Who knew he was such a Britney fan???? I went with Zana shopping for a DVD player tonight. We were planning on buying one for ourselves as a present, but were overwhelmed by options. It seems like our previously cool TV is incapable of taking advantage of a lot of the features available. Went out to Four-Eleven afterward for dinner. Food was okay, but not great (given the price). Company was good though.

work (conftools): Went to bed at 5:30 last night, but woke up at 11:30 this morning b/c I had so much caffeine coursing through my blood. Zana spent yesterday reorganizing our books. We’re going to need to get another bookshelf.

work (conftools): Finally did the release of apacheconf to testers-list. Got moved to bindconf. Blah. I was hoping to clean up AisleRiot with Zana this weekend, but it looks like I’ll have to punt that yet again. )-:

food: Went to the very cool Indian restaurant with Zana and Owen where Owen and I nerded most of the time. Owen and I both got manly dishes spice at 8 in a scale from 1 to 10. They burnt all the hairs off of my tongue! Anyway, Owen helped me with my homework, so I can hopefully get a bunch of bindconf working this weekend.

clothes: It was too warm today to wear the sweater. In theory it will be 30 degrees (F) on Monday, so maybe I can wear it then.

suckiness (others): This seems to be making the rounds, but it’s pretty funny nonetheless. Someone’s having a worse week then me: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html