Travelling: Tomorrow, after work, I’ll be leaving for Milan where I’ll pick up my girlfriend Marta, and then we’ll be heading Stuttgart for GUADEC 2005. Yay! Since Stuttgart is 500 kilometers (for youn non-metric-system people, roughly 310 miles), we’ll be going with my car – its waaaay more economic than taking a plane or the train, and it gives us a little more flexibility on the timings; I’ll need to get back to work on Tuesday, so we’ll be leaving monday at lunch (and, since we are in route, we will go to see Ulm). Pity that I can’t leave on Wednesday, and attend the whole conference.
It’s my first GUADEC, and I think it’ll be Just Fun® to meet some of the best Gnome hackers from all around the world.
I plan to meet with some fellow italian hackers, and with some other people.
Desktop bookmarks: the work on the specification proceeds, even if not as fast as I thought at first; the spec itself changed quite a lot during the first reviewing iteration: I switched from a XML-like markup to a full XBEL-compliant specification, with custom metadata for our bookmarks. Since this would require a full XML parser, I’ve created a GObject wrapper around libxml2 just for XBEL entities; it has been quite a ride, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. I plan to release this library, since it might be useful for Gnome-based browsers like Epiphany or Galeon (which already do use XBEL for storing their bookmarks). The work on the spec and the parser library also has brought me to make changes to the Gnome library: now it’s more complete, and saner. I plan to release it just after the GUADEC (it will also have Perl bindings, so we will be the first language binding set to have it – so long for the Pythonistas in the Gnome world ;-)).
Work: my job at ${WE_TEACH_TO_TEENAGERS} is almost ended. It has been a strange year: I met some interesting people, and I’ve learned that the system administrator’s job sucks in ways that I did not know (even if I was prepared, having lurked the Scary Devil Monastery many years); nevertheless, it was fun, and I’d do it again – given a more consistent wage and more decisional power. I would also like to try a career in programming – but that has to wait at least the next year.
College: I’ve had little or no time for studying, so I’ll take my exams in September – which sucks, because in Semptember begins my last year, and I’ll have more courses, a stage and my thesis to write. I have an assignment for a C course due in July; I think I’ll take my teacher the tarball of my XBEL parser library, and pretending a 30 cum laude (basically, an A+).
Life: life has been very kind to me, this year. It all began when I met Marta – and I think that it’s not entirely unrelated.
