Flooded basement be damned, I went out for dinner and dancing with some friends. Then the tornado sirens started, and we were all herded into the underground parking garage.
Dear Mother Nature: It’s June already. Do try to keep up.
Eight years ago, I spent my 22nd birthday helping my brother and his family move into their new house. It really drove home the point that, after 21, birthdays just don’t matter anymore. (Note to non-US readers: In the US, you can drink at 21.)
This morning, I woke up to my 30th birthday and was greeted by a basement full of water. Yay for adulthood!
Silke and I will be visiting Rio de Janeiro on our honeymoon in late July and early August. I know there’s quite a few Brazilians who read this, and I’m hoping somebody has suggestions for dance lessons while we’re there. What we’d like is a quick crash course in an authentic Brazilian dance (i.e. not Samba as it’s danced in ballrooms in the US). A little Wikipedia browsing has turned up Samba, Maxixe, Lambada, and Forró as possibilities.
We’d like to set up something like a two hour private lesson with a dance instructor in Rio some evening. We’re not expecting to become experts. We just want to get some exposure to dancing that we can’t get back home. It’s critical that the instructor speaks English, because we’ll never make it through on my few words of Portugese.
If anybody has any suggestions, please leave a comment.
Ice cream is nice and all. But it just can’t beat frozen custard, especially frozen custard made fresh by your local neighborhood custard stand.
You can spot the imposter because he’s wearing glasses:
Apparently, LASIK brings out your inner Cubs fan.
For anybody who missed the massively cross-posted announcement, we’re in the middle of the Word-a-Day program on gnome-doc-list. The terminology recommendations in our Style Guide are seriously out of date, so we’re doing a complete refresh. To get full community involvement, I’m sending one(-ish) word each(-ish) day to gnome-doc-list for discussion. If you like words as much as I do, join the fun.
So Silke’s off in San Francisco for the SIOP conference. I, apparently, am not capable of figuring out how to sleep properly on my own. I fell asleep on the couch last night watching Colbert and woke up at 7:30. Waking up on the couch when it’s already light outside is strange.
On the positive side, I’m using this as a chance to have some old friends in from out of town. Although so far, Bill’s the only out-of-towner confirmed, so it’ll mostly be local friends.
Yesterday I bought a bunch of cedar and starting building a potting bench for my greenhouse/shed. What happens when you take half an inch off of nine 6′ 2×4s in the planar? You get a huge pile of wonderfully aromatic cedar shavings. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the shavings yet, but they sure smell nice.
People who hang out on #gnome-hackers will have already heard me talking about Pulse. No, not the awesome audio server. That’s PulseAudio. Pulse is my project tracker. A crawler periodically rumages through things that are relevant to your software project and sticks things in a database. Then we can see nice summary pages like this page for the Gnome 2.22 desktop.
At first glance, it might appear I’m just trying to clone CIA or Ohloh. While I’ve taken some ideas from each, Pulse serves a different purpose. You might compare it to Launchpad, although Launchpad is an active project manager, whereas Pulse is a passive project tracker. marnanel described it as “Facebook for Gnome”. No, I am not going to add poke.
Pulse grew out of the documentation team’s need for an automated documentation tracker. We really need to be able to see, at a glance, what documents there are in a given release set. We need to see who’s working on what and how far along those documents are. And we need to see what modules should have documentation, but don’t. My obsessive abstractionitis, however, led me to create a system that tracks everything.
If anybody’s interested in playing with it, the code is in git: http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/git/pulse.git . Here’s a rundown of things abrewing:
Basically, Pulse should be useful, not just a collection of random interesting facts. (Random interesting facts are great too, but only in the context of an otherwise useful system.) If you’re a maintainer, I want the Pulse page for your module to be useful to you. If you’re an occasional contributor, I want Pulse to make it easier for you to contribute. If you’re a documentation writer, I want Pulse to help you find documentation to work on. et cetera, et cetera.
Comments, suggestions, criticisms, flames, and praises welcome.
Not long ago, somebody wrote a blog entry about recovering files from a partition. If anybody knows who that person was, please let me know in the comments.
Here’s what happened: Silke and I had a friend take a video of our latest Rueda performance on Saturday using our shiny new video camera. The camera just mounts USB mass storage. So I selected the videos in Nautilus, dragged them to a local folder, and deleted them. I know, dumb, right? The video of our performance is nowhere to be found, and I have no idea why. I know the video was actually taken, because we watched it on the camera right after the performance.
The first thing I did when I realized my mistake was dd the device to a local file. I’ve tried PhotoRec and Foremost. Foremost did jack for me. PhotoRec managed to recover some other videos I’d deleted, but not the one I want. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
Update, this is the blog post I was thinking of. Thanks to Tobias who pointed me to Jakub’s blog which had a comment with this link.
We’ll be having a long-overdue Mallard planning meeting this Sunday, 2000-02-03, at 16:00 UTC. That’s 10 in the morning for us Midwesters, and 17:00 for most of Europe. As usual, the meeting will take place over IRC in the #docs channel on irc.gnome.org. See our meeting page for the agenda.