Category: travel

Sat 06 Aug 2005

  • windmills: Today was a windmill-tilting kinda day…

  • evince: Kristian and I cleaned up the selection code this week. It’s still a bit raw, but it’s much, much smarter than before. It was naively drawing the whole selection every time the mouse moved, which felt sluggish. We now only redraw the regions that are changed, and do that only when new glyphs are selected.

    These changes make selection feel zippy and slick. It even respects theme colors!

    Now that we have that last issue fixed, it’s time to focus heavily on getting evince stable for GNOME-2.12. We still have too many bugs — crashers and otherwise — for my taste.

  • Travels: Zana and I spontaneously drove to Vermont a couple weekends ago. I had never been to that state before, and we thought it would be fun to go take a look. It was a gorgeous area, and we took a walk near Brattleboro across an old bridge and along the Connecticut river. We followed it up with a meal on a patio, suspended over the river.

    We definitely need to go back and go kayaking there before the summer’s end.

Mon 13 Sep 2004

  • Travels: I spent last week in Northern California meeting with a customer. The visit with the customer seemed to go pretty well, though it took a lot of my time. I also saw friends and family while out there, and was generally kept busy. On Wednesday, I made it to a Red Sox game at the Oakland Coliseum, which despite being an away game, had a large Red Sox contingent.

  • automata: Last Labor day I went with my parents to the San Francisco Exploratorium. It has a new exhibit of automata, which by itself is worth the price of admission. They were cleverly done with lots of intricate gears, cogs, bellows, levers, and pulleys, all intricately carved out of wood. They were modern and it showed in the themes and sensibilities of their vignettes. The lack of age didn’t detract from their cleverness and charm, though.

    It’s definitely worth a trip for those in San Francisco, even if you have seen the Exploratorium many times already.

  • Birthday: For my birthday, Zana made me crab and shrimp stuffed crepes. It was served with a side dish of asparagus, and stuffed shrimp and cheese as starters. She also got up at 5:00 in the morning to pick me up from the airport, which was very appreciated!

  • Crossword Helper: On the plane trip out last weekend, I wrote a simple little program to help with crossword puzzles. I wrote it from start to finish in about three hours in python. It searches for a list of words that match a partial word, and does simple anagram searches. The feature count was limited by the battery life on my laptop, though I did add a blinking cursor a couple days later. A screenshot is available at:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/crosswordhelper-1.png

    I don’t know if this is interesting enough to check into CVS or not, as it’s only a couple-hundred lines of code.

Thu 19 Aug 2004

  • kerberos: I was helping Chris Aillon work on a Kerberos renewel dialog for GNOME this week. It’s checked into CVS as krb5-auth-dialog, though I imagine we’d make it part of some other package in the future. The dialog has taken surprisingly long to do, in large part because kerberos isn’t translated at all. I would really loathe to ship a dialog that pops up every ten hours with an untranslated string.

    Unfortunately, to do this properly, we will need to get kerberos upstream to use gettext, and modify a lot of kerberos code. I don’t know if the upstream maintainers are interested in such a patch, but we’ll try to convince them of its necessity.

  • travels: Rosanna and I went back to Pasadena for a wedding over the weekend. My friends Sarah and Cameron got married after dating for twelve years, and we are all very happy for them. It was a casual affair; set in a garden with a Hawaiian theme. Everyone was handed an orchid lei upon arrival, and there was a sushi bar. It was good fun meeting a lot of old school friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

    On the flight back, we did the NY Times cryptic. It was refreshing to do a crossword with more American cultural references, as opposed to the British ones I’m used to. The clues were definitely easier, though, so I think we’ll stick to the London Times for now.

  • English: It’s really useful to be married to a grammarian.

Tue 22 Jun 2004

  • bad dog: Dogs should not be barking at 5:30 in the morning. Jester has been duly chastised. Gotta try to get back to sleep.

  • bugs: I found a cute bug in the control-center yesterday. The only way that gnome-window-properties has worked at all in the past (if it worked) is through relying on malloc reusing the same block that was freed. That is to say, after calling:

    g_free (struct->value); struct->value = g_strdup (str);

    it relied on struct->value pointing to the same block of memory, now with different contents. It’s been this way for over two years.

  • Running: I went to Cambridge this past weekend to help some friends compete in the Boston Urban Challenge. They took fourth, which was a very good finish and good enough to qualify them for the next round in Miami.

  • Travel: I misplaced my Green Card earlier this week. I was worried about making GUADEC but Zana went above the call of duty and sorted through the papers on my desk to find it.

Sat 14 Dec 2002

  • power: Zana and I lost power for four days. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

  • Travel: Everyone has a place they want to go sometime in their life. I would love to go to Iran. I’m not sure why I find it so appealing — it’s not the current regime that is interesting. I’d just love to see the ruins of Persia. Turkey is also high on my list of places to visit. I don’t see myself doing this any time soon, unfortunately.