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.

Sat 25 Aug 2001

  • scanners: These things suck under linux. Apparently I’m pretty incompetent.

  • Usenix: Apparently I was never mailed that I was going to give a talk. I need to write the paper soon.

  • GNOME: I’ve signed up to do waaay too much. Man, I’m hosed. On the good side, I applied James Cape’s patch (after a lot of cleanup) to GnomeDruidPageStandard. The new standard druid is going to look a lot nicer.

  • sleep: Still staying up to late. Must end the vicious cycle sometime.

Thu 23 Aug 2001

  • consumerism (redux): Bought a scanner today. My attempts to get it to work with sane have been all for naught, thus far. Grrr…

  • druid: Spent the evening pretending to clean up GnomeDruidPageStandard while watching Scary Movie. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, or as good as I’d hoped. They managed to show all the jokes in the trailer.

  • GTK+ (GtkTreeView): I’ve been trying to pick up work on this after all the nautilus of the last few weeks. I’ve made surprising headway. I’m really excited about the animations that Anders added, as well as the prelighting support I through in. It didn’t take long, but made a huge huge difference in how it looks.

  • sleep: Damn. Up ’til 3:30 again. Must-get-sleep