Campaign Season

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.

Nemiver and gio

Yesterday I added a configure switch to nemiver to use gio (via giomm, which is shaping up nicely) instead of gnomevfs for file loading, mime-type detection, and file change monitoring. The process was quite painless, and the code ended up being considerably nicer than the equivalent in gnomevfs. In theory this should bring us a bit closer to being portable to other platforms as well. Cheers to alexl and everybody else working on gio.

Now if we could just get a replacement for gnome_help_display() into GTK+, we’d be able to knock off a lot of other extra dependencies as well.

Musical Perfection

I like music. I like a lot of different kinds of music. But from time to time I hear a song that makes my body tingle, the sort of song that doesn’t sound like it was written, but rather discovered; a ‘perfect song’, so to speak. I discovered another perfect song this evening while listening to my local radio station: Beirut’s ‘A Sunday Smile’. Happily, it is currently available as a free mp3 download at Beirut’s official website, and I’ve been listening obsessively all night. I think maybe I should stop before I overdo it.

R has been making huge strides (haw!) in her walking ability. She’s practically up to running already, chasing the dog and cats around the house with glee. She’s pretty much completely given up on crawling at this point, and just walks everywhere. I’m also happy to report that she seems to be developing a love for music: whenever we start singing, she stops what she’s doing and starts swaying back and forth in a little dance.

DSC_5237

We’re also nearly at the stage where we learn which words we say way too often. For instance, R has been making a lot of wordlike sounds lately, but she’s only just recently started saying ‘no’ very clearly and quite frequently. For instance, she’ll walk over and grab a big handful of dirt from the potted plant (to eat, naturally) while saying ‘no no no no’.

Update: by request, for those of you without flash, here’s a direct link to download A Sunday Smile in mp3 format.

Hacking on GNOME, but with a healthy dose of C++

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0.