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evince: Given that half the Red Hat desktop team had left for vacation, we decided to have a mini-hackfest at work this week. After scrounging around for ideas, we came up with adding some features to gpdf. It turns out that the gpdf team were getting frustrated with the limitations of the current code base, and had planned to rewrite anyway. Marco committed his initial code and we all piled on.
After two days of hacking, we have something that actually almost works. It certainly isn’t good enough to replace ggv or gpdf yet, but it’s pretty awesome for such a quick project. It has search, printing, and a sidebar, as well as pdf, postscript, and image support. Anders also contributed initial thumbnailing support. Although the features are still raw, it’s a really promising application for future GNOME releases!
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Math: I bought a new car this week.
As part of the purchase of the car, I took out an auto loan from the local credit union. The loan computer there only listed the current ‘base’ rate, with a field for the discount to apply to that rate. The car dealer had offered me a better rate than they had, and the credit union agreed to match it.
This meant that the bank manager had to figure out the difference between the base rate and the target rate and enter that into the computer (eg, subtract one number from another). She got it wrong three times, despite writing all the digits out on a piece of paper, and my encouragements to go back and try again. The fact that a bank manager could get hired who was unable to do basic math is just incredible. I really hope she was just having a bad day, but it didn’t look very good.
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yelp: Yelp is really nice nowadays as a generic docbook viewer. It’s so much better than the old days of trying to get jade to behave. Shaun even added reload support to it for me. Thanks Shaun!