Sri Ramkrishna

Well, look whose blogging!  That’s right, it’s me. Let’s see if I remember how to do all this bloggy stuff…

Last time or was that episode?  Episode then.  I”m feeling peevish,  I blogged I was defending vegetarianism and posted a picture.  Sorry no picture this time.  I have been eating good stuff though.   Including a nice home made vegetarian pizza.  Maybe I’ll post it.  If y’all are nice to me and such.

Since then, I’ve been busy with school and not much time for GNOME other than to hang out.   I guess I’m here for the beer this year.  It was great meeting the lot of you at OSCON which seems to be the post destination after GUADEC.  Sadly, none of you bought me a t-shirt.  Shame on you.  I thought I was the mascot, I guess it was all pillow talk.

I have approximately less than a year to graduate with a M.S. in C.S. at  Portland State University.   I can’t wait since it’s been a real pain doing work and school and people have noticed that my contributions have shrunk to a trickle.

Anyways, knowing this audience, y’all want to talk about GNOMEy stuff.  Too bad.  We’re talking about me.  I’m taking over for Rich Burridge!  But we’re going to talk bout furry felines, not kids.  Which means we’re going to talk about David Schleef.  Don’t worry, he loves when we talk about him.  It makes Dirac development faster.  Anyhoo, Every friday, I intend to post some cynical observation about *something*.

I do have some stuff to talk bout that isn’t about my boring life.  That is that you may have noticed the GNOME Journal has been a bit stagnant due to its members being really busy with either their jobs or other projects that take up their time.  Some of you are probably read Planet for fun, and sometimes think “what a great bunch of people, I wish I could help out.  But I can’t because David Schleef won’t let me.”  You DON’T need David Schleef’s permission.  (remember, Dirac code is speeding up now, keep talking about him!)  No, we are looking for a few good people, preferably human, but we have known to take on Vulcans; we aren’t racist, green blood not withstanding,  to help out with writing articles.  Maybe you think “I don’t know what to write”, or maybe you’re scared.  If your’e scared, it’s obvious you haven’t been to GUADEC.  There’s nothing to be scared of.  These people are pushovers.  if you get into a situation, remember “beer is GNOME kryptonite” keep a can with you always.  If they are Australian, Fosters will actually repel them it’s like holy water on vampires!  ANYWAYS..  We have plenty of ideas we think would make good articles.  We need people.  You are of course free to write your own as well.  Write what you think might be interesting and we’ll do the rest. Hope you’ll sign up.  Send me some email, or join us on irc in the #gnome-journal channel.  Bring your dog, we like pets.

The other thing is that I’ve been actually doing some hacking.  Yes, surprising as that might be.  I have taken an open source class, so I essentially got to take 8 weeks and learn glib/goject/sqlite and write me up a new backend for Rhythmbox.  It’s not quite finished but most of the major sutff is done and I’m trying to get into a useable state before sticking it in bugzilla.  One might be tempted to think sqlite is a superior solution cuz well it’s sqlite and it’s the best thing evah!  Keep in mind the current backend is pretty damn good and is a result of several years of tweaking.  It’ll be a while before this backend has any chance of being supported.  Huge thanks to teuf and moch for giving their time to help me and answer questions.  But the project has been good for me as I’ve finally got time to learn all those dependencies that I always whined about that I couldn’t learn.  Hopefully I get to participate more in the development process than I have.

Well, that’s it for me.  I’ll post something mildly amusing on Friday.

Oh yeah, contact information.. mail me at sriram DOT ramkrishna DOT gmail DOT com if you are interested in helping writing articles.  Free picture of me for the first person to respond!

So once again it’s been forever since I’ve actually blogged something. We had some reorganization at work and it’s been kicking my ass in a majuor way. I’ve had no time to do anything useful other than to whine. My one claim is that I managed to write one article for GNOME Journal. The last release was somewhat disapointing as it didn’t seem to get as good a reception as the previous one. Maybe it’s just my perception I don’t know.

I’ve decided to give “gimmie” a try. Gimmie as people have noted before is sort of a replacement for your panel and consolidates common, repetitive tasks to a single location. I deleted my bottom panel and replaced it with Folgers crys.. er I mean gimmie. I’ve been doing this for like over a week now and I don’t miss my panel. I’ve also been able to delete the applications menu on top. My only complaint is the hideous pastel colors. I think Alex was in L.A. too long. It would be interesting to turn this into a type of panel in GNOME.

Finally, I’ve decided to help out with GUADEC, in the Journal section since it seems that writing and marketing has been more my forte of late.

One final note on GUADEC, Quim Gil needs your help! It’s the last stretch and this is probably the hardest, most tension riddled time for Quim and I speak from someone who has been on a planning committee for a conference; this is the time for the GNOME community to help out!! Quim is probably too busy to actualy ask for help but please go to http://www.guadec.org/ and sign up to volunteer your time in helping GUADEC be an awesome event. Even if you’re not able to show up, I’m sure any time you could sink would be much appreciated.

I had my 37th birthday May 11th, and it was pretty pedestrian. Hard to believe you’re that old. I don’t feel that old, I feel the same as I did when I was 25. I guess you only feel as old as you think you are.

Anyways, the birthday was pretty pedestrian but I did manage to watch a hindi movie called Yaadon ki Bharaat . As with most bollywood movies there are a number of songs on it. This particular movie was made in 1973 and has a number of hippie references right down to the headbands. I’ve known the songs since I was little, but never watched the movie. Mostly because I’ve had situations where you really enjoy the songs and then when you watch the movie it’s this exceptionally painful, cheesy scene that you have to somehow erase from your mind in order to enjoy the song again. The songs, and the movie did not disapoint! What struck me though was the sophistication. The sets were way better than anything in the 80s, and the incredible wonderful wardrobe of Zeenat Aman ! The 70s were probably the best time period for Hindi movies. There was an avante garde attitude to the whole thing. Something happened around the late 70s, and I suspect that the “social police” decided that things were going out of control. I consider most of the movies made in the late 60s to the late 70s to be some of the best of indian cinema.

The story was okay, but not the best but it was an entertaining three hours and it’s worth it just watching Zeenat Aman and the funky dancing!