Category: books

Wed 18 Feb 2004

  • File Selector: I volunteered to help Federico clean up the file selector for the 2.4 release. It’s been really nice to work on GTK+ again. I hadn’t done much in the way of widget work in the last couple months, and it felt good to write a size_allocate function.

  • Sysadmin: Spent large parts of last week and this doing sysadmin work, both for gnome.org and for my home machine. I’m currently fully stymied by cyrus. I tried to migrate Zana’s mail to a newer version, to no luck. It just isn’t noticing that the mail is there. It’s extremely frustrating for me, and I’m really close to just dumping cyrus for something I can understand. If anyone has a good idea of how cyrus’s on-disk format works, please let me know.

  • books: “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. It’s well written, and a good description of post-revolutionary Iran, albeit one that’s a few years dated. I would still love to go tour Iran some day, but not in the near future. Some day…

  • control center: As I promised Jody, I’ve been going through theme-manager bugs last week. A good chunk of the bugs are old and can be closed, but there were some good ones there. Hopefully it will play nicer with some people now.

Thu 06 Nov 2003

  • GConfPropertyEditor: I was unable to sleep last night, and ended up staying up until 4:30 in the morning watching reruns of “Who’s Line is it Anyway” and working on my rewrite of the GConfPropertyEditors. Now that James Henstridge has done work on bug #69639 I have a lot more interest in getting this into the GNOME library stack. I’m not 100% sure that I’ve gotten the interface right, but it should be good enough for a lot of cases. It has the potential to turn a number of capplets into simply glade files. If I get a couple of simple examples working, I’ll mail it to gnome-hackers.

  • GNOME: I was unable to sleep tonight and worked on my candidacy statement. I’m pretty bad at writing these things, but they get easier as it gets later.

  • books (Four Quartets): I recently picked up Four Quartets (by Lawrence Durrell) from the library. I enjoyed his younger brother’s books a lot as a kid and read a good fraction of them. I thus grew up with a health skepticism towards the arrogant and pretentious ‘Larry’. It is pretty dangerous to learn about people from their younger sibling. Still, I always wondered what the more (less?) famous brother’s books were like, so I started reading it.

    I am unable to describe how incredibly good this book is. It is intensely lyrical and extremely detailed, sucking me into the moment on every page. I’m reading through it slowly, enjoying every step it takes, not wanting it to end.

    I remember hearing a quote from a professor of Shakespeare. He had spent a lifetime studying Shakespeare’s plays and knew them all intimately. He loved his work, loved teaching, and loved being a professor. However, he said that he would happily give up all he ever learned about Shakespeare, if he could just get the chance to read “Romeo and Juliet” again for the first time.

    This book definitely feels like it should be read once, and treasured. I hope (expect!) that it ends as well as it begins.

  • sleep: I wish I could sleep more.

Fri 10 Oct 2003

  • work: I’ve been wrestling with rhgb for the last week or so. I’m still not really satisfied that we’ve gotten all of the kinks out of it, but it’s much better than it was last week. We’ve gotten it to the point that it doesn’t slow down the boot much more than it booting without it (on the order of 6 seconds on my test computer.) I’m much happier with the approach we’re taking now that kudzu doesn’t conflict with the X server. With some luck we can get a nice GTK+ front-end to kudzu in the future.

  • book: I am reading ‘Changing Planes’ by Ursula Le Guin. It’s very light and easy to read, and I am enjoying it much. It is also entirely predicated on a pun. This is more in keeping with a junky Piers Anthony novel than her other books. Additionally, it is explicitly airport reading material which leaves an ever-so-slight bad taste. Perhaps I should be saving it for a trip somewhere.

  • Bookworm: Everytime I think I’m getting closer to finishing this, I find a new bit that needs fixing. Zana is getting quite impatient. This weekend, it will be usable.

  • GNOME: There’s an upcoming summit in New York. I hope we get a decent turnout. It’s very last minute, though.

  • google: I’m losing the google battle for the term ‘Blandford’ to my Dad. I need more links to my page.

Sun 01 Sep 2002

  • laptop: Now it’s really dying. The right hand side of the screen doesn’t work, and the harddrive keeps giving IO errors. Need to call Dell monday morning. I may have to get a replacement sometime.

  • spelling: jfleck kindly reminded me of a sign on the side of the Pasadena Playhouse. It said something to the effect of ‘”My people are the people of the dessert”, said T. E. Lawrence picking up his fork’

  • books: We are out of bookshelf space again. I need to get bookworm finished.

Fri 06 Jul 2001

  • kite: I got to fly my kite!!!! It wasn’t very windy, so I got to practice low speed flying. It was very tough to keep in the air, as it continually stalled and fluttered down. I managed to get Edward to fly it for a while, too. He thought it was pretty cool. Tomorrow we’re going to Ocracoke Island — with some luck I can fly it again then.

  • sports (windsurfing): My dad and I tried windsurfing today. I hadn’t been in many years, when I did it in Mission Bay with the Readheads. We were pretty incompetent, but managed to get the hang of it eventually.

  • definitions (hang of it): In this case “hang of it” means we were able to go forward pretty well, with a minimum of time spent in the very warm water. We were unable to tack very well, though, as we kept getting further and further away from the beach chairs.

  • tennis (wimbledon): All of the people I was cheering for lost today (though I think I have a mild preference for Henman, and he’s winning.) Suck.

  • book: While not windsurfing, I read the Tailor of Panama. I’m having trouble associating with such a congenital liar, though.

Thu 19 Apr 2001

  • pet peeve: There’s a commercial on TV advertising a CD-ROM that can “help you learn the computer!” It has a pretty vacuous blonde stating that “she has now learned the computer, thanks to [the product].” Try learning english first…

  • hacking: Spent half the week building GNOME 1.4 packages for RH. This took a long time.

  • books: Tales from Watership Down is turning out to be a major disappointment. I can barely get through it. )-:

  • hockey: Red Hat sponsored the hockey game last night and, Zana and I got free tickets to watch it. It was sort of fun to see a ‘Red Hat Replay’ everytime something cool happened. Much more disturbing were the ‘Glaxo Smith Kline Flonase Trips Down Memory Cane’. The name was so ridiculous, it overshadowed the fact that the Hurricanes are only 4 years old, and flashbacks are silly at this point.

    Anyway, it had been a while since I’d been to a hockey game and it was a lot of fun. It was well played, and the Canes won in an exciting fashion. If they win again tomorrow (unlikely) there’ll be a game 6 in the series in town on Sunday. I might even pay to go see them then.

  • hockey (food): The food at the hockey arena was pretty poor. It was too good to be yummy (but bad for you) stadium food, but it wasn’t good enough to be real food. Oh, for a Dodger Dog…

Mon 02 Apr 2001

  • hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Not a lot of work done today. Still, wrote a simple little test program to see if speed is a problem. I’m not sure yet.

  • movie (Being John Malkovich): Watched with Zana tonight while I did laundry.

  • books: Went used book shopping with Zana. We got $65 worth, which stretched pretty far. I got “Children of Dune”, 3 of the (very stupid, but influential in my life) Conrad Stargard books, a couple playing card books, and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” This should keep me busy for a while.

  • grout: Discovered an ant graveyard when removing grout. Very disturbing.

  • April Fools: There were no funny April Fools jokes this year. crackmonkey’s rant was pretty funny, but unintentional.

Tue 27 Mar 2001

  • Hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Massive amounts of GtkListStore hacking today. I felt like I’d been extremely productive at the end of the day, despite the fact I didn’t get to work until mid afternoon. I put up a cool (animated) screenshot on the labs website. I also learned how to change the timeout of a single frame in the gimp. What an amazingly broken system!!!

  • Havoc: Broke his left wrist. It sucks a lot. Further proof that vehicles with two wheels cannot be trusted. I visited him this morning and lent him my twiddler in the hopes he gets more use out of it then I did. He seemed a little doped up, but otherwise, about as good as you’d expect someone with a busted wrist to be. He also described the device used to set his wrist. I swear, in some aspects we haven’t left the Twelth Century.

  • Books (Fools War): Just finished this book. I enjoyed it a lot despite the fact it petered out at the end.