After being physically maltreated to get some decent pictures taken to work with, getting nicened-up, re-assembled and undergoing other unspeakable treatment — it is done. Thanks a ton to the artist, a close friend of mine.

Oh, and yeah, unlike most pictures of me, I actually like my little hackergotchi.

You can find it live right next to my posts on Planet GNOME, Planet Openismus, as well as statically on my blog’s main site.

Besides some nicening up (A bunch of delimiting dashes with HTML and CSS? Yeah, right…), the reporter and some roles are now clearly stated for every comment. No more scrolling and jumping through the page, just to find out if the commenter is the original reporter. No more mouse twiddling, to see if a commenter is a Nokia employee. You now have that invaluable information right at your fingertips.

Yes, I’ve been spoiled by GNOME bugzilla. Probably the best bugzilla out there. There are a lot of features that just make a triagers life much easier. Supporting the workflow rather than being interruptive. And now we got the first set of bugzilla enhancements for maemo.org.

Hope you will enjoy these first custom features. Got some more tweaks like this and larger features on my list, and started working on that already…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:

I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.

And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.

Once again, this early testing revealed a number of serious issues with some of the GNOME applications. A bunch of bug reports where filed, resulting in new, fixed tarballs being rolled as quickly as possible — before the official release deadline. Of course, thanks to the developers too, who have been highly responsive.

Our contribution to make even unstable development releases a somewhat sane place to live. Thank you, #garnome!

1. Which, coincidentally, still has not been released due to one particular severe issue, spotted by the GARNOMEies. Bug 449318, immediately worked around by the GARNOME Team, so we could roll 2.19.4 in time.
2. Yes, Luis, I too love footnotes.

On a related note, GARNOME 2.19.3 has just been rolled and is available at a mirror near you.

Also pending, some test builds…

Almost felt like vacation. A constant rate of a thousand bugs per week for a couple of weeks really burned me out. But I feel like I should get back to Bugzilla again. Already started by processing that huge pile of backlogged Bugzilla spam. There’s a lot work awaiting me…

On another note, the GARNOME Team already is planning a new release, 2.16.2.1, which probably will be out later this week. Dot two already included a lot of serious crash, leak and security fixes. Some more have been released the days after the official GNOME release — and we always try to provide the best vanilla flavored distribution.