currently on the plane on the way back home from uds. it’s been a pretty great week, but i’m glad to be getting home.
first thing: props to canonical. when i was checking out of the hotel the guy at the desk said something to the effect of “and canonical has everything covered”. that stuck with me.
earlier this year i was considering a job with canonical. it turns out that my interests were more aligned with work elsewhere and i ended up working for codethink. despite being employed elsewhere, canonical still invited me to uds. when you take a step back to consider that, you really realise that we live in a special sort of world. “normal companies” don’t tend to do things like that.
in any case, twice a year canonical flies a bunch of us out for this awesome event that they put on. this year i also attended fosscamp. for both events, the gnome group, as usual, spent a good deal of time on the hallway track getting things done.
a few hilights from this week:
notifications: by the end of the week many of us were refering to uds as “nbs: notification bikeshed summit”. in a way, it was a little bit demotivating to spend so much time talking on this subject. on thursday, however, christian hammond drove up to the googleplex from vmware and we all had a sitdown meeting. we came to a good compromise and — even better, as a result of the compromise — canonical’s changes are going upstream this cycle. in the end, i think this ended up being a pretty big win. also: awesome to see that rob carr is back. during uds he wrote what is probably the most awesome patch ever.
trash: i rewrote the gvfs trash backend and committed it to trunk on thursday. awalton (cool hacker who i met for the first time) is working on some associated UI changes to nautilus. seb will be rolling a jaunty package shortly after he arrives home. please try to break it — you know where to send the hatemail. :)
gnio: downloaded and started poking at gnio, which is a library to do networking in a way similar to gio (using the same stream abstractions, etc). started hacking on it a bit. christian and i are aiming to have this included in gio during this cycle (ie: by guadec time).
gritty: jono had one of the first sessions of fosscamp. his idea is that we’d have a lot more experimentation with the development of cool new software if it wasn’t so damned difficult to get your hacks on to other people’s machines. lowering the barrier to distribution would encourage people to share ideas. early exposure to users will encourage hackers to develop their ideas into proper projects. mvo and i have started hacking on a prototype for how this might work. gritty is a name chosen at random by mvo picking a number and me going to that line in /usr/share/dict/words (+/- about 10 lines… “groans” wasn’t such a good name). with any luck we can have a first version of this in jaunty.
in non-uds/fosscamp news, i’ve also heard word from rob that work on dconf will be starting within the next couple of weeks.
after a week, i am returning home with excitement and a renewed focus. i have a whole lot of projects that i’m pretty excited about.
time to start hacking!