My blogspace

Another stable release on the horizon…

I’ve been doing a lot of valgrinding lately and I think we’ve gotten most of the important leaks fixed. Next step is to see if valgrind can shed some light on any of the crashes on the 2.10.0 milestone list. Tried running valgrind after enabling a11y today and that showed a lot of leakage in gok, gnopernicus, at-spi, and friends…I think there was close to 1 MB leaked after just logging in and out again…

Played another 9-ball tournament last weekend and got in 9th out of 50 or so. Pretty happy with that, but there’s definitely room for improvement. Time to fire up foobillard and play, play play, play…

I’ll nail those suckers next time…

Congrats to big N (I can see why Nat was persuaded now on the great hula launch. Definitely looking forward to seeing success in that camp…

Picking up the pace…

It’s been a while and a lot has happened since I last blogged.

On the GNOME front there was the 2.8.2 release before christmas, and since that there’s been a lot of work triaging bugs and fixing stuff for 2.10.0. People have kicked serious ass and gotten the bug count down to an almost managable level, but there’s clearly more triaging work left for anyone who’s interested. I got myself a copy of VMWare to use for work related testing, and I’ll be able to use that to test out a few of The New Kids On The Block

With regards to life in general it’s been a nice and warm winter, almost no snow and around 0 degrees C for a long time now. Christmas was nice, new years too. Still three pool tournaments left this season and I need to pick up the slack there if I want to have a chance of moving up to the next division next season.

Went to a couple of concerts the last couple of months too. If want to get the best of the Norway you need to check out these two, Magnet and Thomas Dybdahl. I went to see both in december and I was totally blown away by Thomas Dybdahl. Maybe because I had no expectations when I went there, but that doesn’t really matter.

And finally, let’s see if we can keep the frequency in this blog to something less than three months

Release is imminent!

So, we’re closing in on another stable release. I want to give a big thank you to all the developers, documenters, translators, bughunters, users and other people involved in getting this release out the door. We’re getting the releases out there in a timely fashion and still managing to maintain both quality and a steady inflow of new features which is a feat in and of itself. It’s always a pleasure working with you guys and gals

I’m off for a trip to to the countryside for a couple of days and will be back on friday. We’re heading off for a relaxing couple of days here: Wolf-gang Hotell for a bit of relaxation, work related stuff and hiking, drinking and much needed socializing.

The coming weekend the series kick off with a 9-ball tournament and it’s going to be fun to see how that’s going to work out. I guess it’ll be uphill for a couple of months before I see any results (if I get time to practice). On the bright side our club got 5th place in the european chamionship for veterans (40+) so there’s inspiration to be had there…

Time to pack the fishing gear and hiking boots…

By the way, have I mentioned that Valgrind ROCKS!?

Time flies when you’re having fun I guess. Been busy lately and haven’t updated this little thing called blog. Getting back into the groove at work has been hard, but I guess I’ve gotten rid of most of the holidayish feeling by now. Just about to start upgrading our messaging solution for 15.000 users before we roll it out to the remaining 30k so it’s best to keep sharp I guess…

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks using valgrind and sparse on GNOME modules. This has resulted in a ton of reports in bugzilla and a load of leaks fixed. There’s still loads of stuff to test and file bugs against so get to work and get stuff fixed for GNOME 2.8.0

Looking forward to getting back on track with the pool training as well. Haven’t really played since before summer and I’m badly in need of practice now. The series start soon so I need to hone whatever skills I have to have hopes of getting anywhere this season. Keep your fingers crossed

This last week sure was hectic. It started off with a trip to Halden, a nice little town close to the swedish border. I played a pool tournament there and came in fourth. Really happy about that, but I guess I’ll get less handicap next time around More practice and Micke won’t beat me at 6UADEC

We also went to a concert with a “local” band called WigWam. After reading their website I found out that they were originally from New York and emigrated to Norway in the seventies. They also entered the qualification for the european song contest to represent Norway, and I think we would have scored higher if they had won the local contest if this year’s winner is the standard…

After that I went right back to Oslo on sunday to pack my bags for GVADEC. Two quick telephone calls and I had tickets for the night train and hotel room outside Kristiansand.

I really liked GUADEC this year, but since I missed the pre-conference weekend stuff it felt like it was over almost before it started. I’ll try hard to make it to Boston in October to make up for that.

It’s not just food and beverages that are expensive in Norway it seems. Travelling from Kristiansand to Bergen robbed me of 400 NOK for the train to Stavanger, 900 NOK for a hotel there and then 600 NOK for the boat to Bergen…should have gotten a flight from Kristiansand it seems…

On the bright side, the boat trip gave me time to run valgrind against all of gnome-applets and I’ve got patches for quite a few leaks in there that are going into bugzilla this weekend. I’m thinking we need a new mailing list for stuff like running valgrind/memprof/sysprof and discussing how to improve stability/performance of GNOME as a whole, but I’m not sure we have the momentum to make them useful yet. Hopefully more people will want to join in on the fun

This is my first blog post

So, the GNOME 2.6.1 release is out and is looking good although it wasn’t released exactly on schedule. I’m going to try and stick with the date for the next release but there are no hard guarantees

Looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend.

Quarterly update

So, I’ve been assigned to the stable GNOME releases again and 2.6.1 is currently overdue waiting for a new glib/gtk+/pango release. Owen promised it this week so we should get the GNOME release out this weekend if all is well. This has given a few maintainers time to get releases out the door who would have missed the original deadline so there’s some good in it for all after all.

This means that now is the time to put in the extra effort to make 2.6.2 even better. There are tons of patches in bugzilla that need review and anyone with access to valgrind can make a difference if they file detailed reports of leaks and other memory access problems

Looking forward to meeting everyone at GU4DEC…

Another week passes by. Been doing random stuff like reading mail, updating translations, commiting various fixes from bugzilla and harassing maintainers to review patches also in bugzilla

Still waiting for a couple of packages for 2.4.2, but I’m not sure when those will be in. You know who you are…

Off to do some ice skating with my son now, more work after bedtime

Went to a really nice concert last night. For those of you who haven’t gotten to know the Magnet take a look at his site.

He is one of the better songwriters and performers I’ve seen.

On the GNOME side I merged some fixes to gnome-applets and made a 2.4.2 tarball yesterday. One more thing off the todo for GNOME 2.4.2. I think I’ll have to wait until next week to get the final tarballs from some of the other maintainers, but it will be worth the wait.

Other than that I’ve managed to get my desktop and developer’s platform translations over the 90 percent mark, and I’m continuing work to make the Norwegian translations complete.

Glynn, you hit the nail right on the head with your comment about the community. Being sucked in is a joy.