We celebrated r’s 2nd birthday a bit over a week ago. She’s now old enough to understand the concept of a birthday, and it’s been really fun to watch her get excited about it.
She’s also getting to the age where it’s a bit easier to find somebody to watch her while we go out for an evening. In the past couple weeks we were able to go see a theatre show and our first music concert in quite a while (a cd release show for one of my favorite local bands).
It feels like spring has finally arrived and Minneapolis is awaking from a long hibernation. This is definitely the best time of the year. It’s as if everybody’s just been huddled inside waiting for spring and then there’s just the sudden burst of activity. Everybody’s outside without coats (even though it’s still only in the 40s or 50s F), you see neighbors you’ve hardly seen for months. Of course, now that I say that, we’ll probably get hit with another big snowstorm…
I found a bit of time to hack on the nemiver debugger again lately. Since 0.6.5 I think I’ve closed about 10 bugs, getting the bug count below the century mark once again, which feels nice. I’m hoping I’ll have time to work on new features again in addition to just bugfixes, since there are still a few features missing that I think are really necessary for more widespread adoption.
All the recent talk about tetris and canvases and animation prompted me to pick up the C++ bindings for clutter again and play around with it. I’ve added support for the clutter-cairo library and ported the ‘flowers’ demo to cluttermm.
I’ve also spent some time in the past week adding a marginally useful feature to nemiver: highlighting memory values when they’ve changed since the last time the debugger stopped. Adding this functionality required some significant modifications to the shared GtkHex widget that we use, so it’s not checked into svn yet, but hopefully will be soon. I’m not sure how people did significant refactorings and API additions before tools like git-svn were available. It’s so nice to be able to try out different things and make changes locally with full version control support instead of trying to maintain a mega-patch or committing half-baked ideas to the central repository.
I also released a new version of cairomm to coincide with the 1.6 release of cairo.
Being a political junky, I’ve of course been following the campaign season very closely here in the USA. This morning I was amused to receive a campaign email from a potential candidate for the US Senate here in Minnesota with the following engaging subject line: “General Campaign email template”. Well done, potential senator!
On an unrelated note, we’re planning a new release of Nemiver in the coming week. It’s been quite a while since the last release, but there are quite a few new features even though we’ve both been slowed down a bit by real life in the past few months. I’ve been trying to polish up the user interface a bit as well, and in the process, some translatable strings have been changed slightly. So if any intrepid translators are interested in cleaning up after me, it would be greatly appreciated.
