Viva Peru

July 20th, 2007 by kbrae

Thanks Diego and crew for the Pisco Sour, awesome drink! And a great stunt in the Etap lobby. :-) If you are nearby, you should hurry to get here and join the party. (Also, thanks to the hotel stuff for the support.)

Magic Spacebar on Caret

July 15th, 2007 by kbrae

My pleasure, Srini, you’re most welcome. :-)

Dancing to the Rhythm of the War Drums

June 26th, 2007 by kbrae

We are particularly proud of all the hacking and smoke-testing that has been going on during the GNOME 2.19.3 and .41 releases2. New tarballs have been built and tested by various GARNOMEies almost in real time, as fast as they have been uploaded and as fast as we could update SVN.

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. []

s/written/oral/ # exam

June 13th, 2007 by kbrae

Managed to negotiate an oral exam (for a later date), instead of the written exam, which was scheduled for the week of GUADEC. Yay.

Hasn’t been tough convincing the prof. Mentioning it’s a developer conference almost was sufficient, he supports things like this. While I didn’t really expect him to know about GUADEC… having to explain GNOME, however, was a little bit embarassing.

T minus 180 minutes

June 6th, 2007 by kbrae

Just a friendly reminder – 2.19.3 is due to be released before midnight UTC, today. ;-)   (Come on, this is supposed to be fun for volunteers, isn’t it? You know I love you guys.)

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

2.17.3 is OUT

December 6th, 2006 by kbrae

We are pleased to announce the release of GARNOME 2.17.3 — ahead of the official GNOME release, which is expected to be announced soon (read hours). After constant updating, tweaking and testing, especially the last 2 days, the actual release was smooth and quickly done.

Get the code while it’s hot, and fix (ok, or report) bugs before anyone else does. Get the love now!

xsnow ?!

December 5th, 2006 by kbrae

Dave, you are so right, xsnow is a great app for the holiday season (as is my “special” music CD dated 1994, but that would be a different story).

I first saw this years ago on my account in a Sparc Station pool. We have been limited to using OLVWM, but the admins where kind enough to add xsnow by default to the session early Dec. Nice surprise. I quickly got that for my own machines…

However, you probably do recall correctly, and there is an issue with running xsnow on a GNOME Desktop. At least it has been last time I checked. The issue is, that the snowflakes properly work with the background image, but cause “severe damage” to the icons on your Desktop. A snowflake falling right through these icons leave a trail behind, re-rendering the background image, instead of the icon. Just a couple of minutes, and you won’t see any icon unless you “wipe off the snow” with the mouse or, even better, a larg-ish window.

I spent some time hacking a custom version (2 years ago?), implementing some code from xpenguins. It kind of worked, and supported command line tweaking, but anything close to a smooth re-rendering appearance really hogged my CPU.

From your screenshot, it looks like there are no Desktop icons. So that would be the reason, why it now “works” for you running GNOME, I guess. Or maybe there finally *is* a fix? I need to check that… :)

(Unfortunately you still won’t see this on p.g.o, so I am going to poke you on IRC instead.)

Morning Notes

December 4th, 2006 by kbrae

Never announce while you are waiting for others to roll a tarball. Lesson learned.

GARNOME 2.16.2.1 expected on Monday

December 3rd, 2006 by kbrae

There are already a couple of updates and fixes in CVS, so we plan to roll 2.16.2.1 on Monday, releasing additional love to our users. Currently waiting for another Evolution tarball that fixes a bunch of leaks. Official tarballs with fixes are always preferable over patching the sources ourselfs.

Also pending, some test builds…

True Love should take all Night

November 30th, 2006 by kbrae

If all these “pretty looking girl”s who are sending me mail daily really would come to my place like they promised, I’d need some of these advertised “mens pills”. And I can afford them, cause I sure take advice from a complete stranger with low spelling abilities who knows about the finest penny stocks taking off soon. But please, no more Rolex replica offers or member enlargement devices — the girls find me attractive just as I am.

That’s what you get when you can’t sleep, and instead decide to check the low scoring Spam mails for false positives. On the plus side, I now do know that my hand tweaked SA is catching 400+ Spams a day, and doesn’t catch even a single good mail. Yay…