Jonathan Blandford

Sun 29 Feb 2004

File Chooser: I did more work this weekend. It now handles the default size in a somewhat sane fashion and will resize well when the preview widget changes. There are still some sizing issues that don’t work well, but I’m busy tracking them down. Hopefully it will work correctly by the time we release on Monday.

Language: I found one mildly redeeming thing about Cyrus after spending a week cursing it. The authors decided that the collective noun for “cyrus imap servers” is “murder”, like crows. While they deserve all the confusion they get for choosing that particular term, it’s still pretty fun.

I wonder if languages other than English have the same, bizzare set of collective nouns. For that matter, I wonder if there’s a word for a set of collective nouns.

File Selector: Working with Federico on the filechooser has been a lot of fun!! The file selector is starting to feel really good. A few more tweaks and the “Open With” mode will be in good shape. The “Save as” mode needs more love, but we’re definitely making progress. This dialog is definitely going to excite a lot of people when it is released.

I’ve been tracking down some stray pixels the past week. I lost three on Friday, and seem to have an extra six today. I think I know where they’re coming from, but I’m going to have to a bit of refactoring to make them go away.
Hack: So, my sore throat appears to have developed into a full-blown cough. Blah. On the plus side, Zana has been very good to me. She made me Congee and dumplings tonight, with extra dumplings for me.

File Selector: I did more work. The path bar is almost done. I hope to spend the rest of next week getting the behavior right. It’s starting to look pretty nice now; at least on my machine. (-:
semantics: What does “troubled” mean?

When someone says they’re “troubled” by an event, does that mean that they’re against it? That they don’t understand it enough? It really sounds like a cop-out word to me.
Food: Went out for BBQ with some others from RH (though we left when the others went to see a movie). The food was pretty tasty, though a little on the dry side. I wasn’t in North Carolina quite long enough to become a BBQ snob, but I do enjoy it when it is good. The sweet-tea was not so good. So much so that Zana and I went to Chick-Fil-A earlier today.

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.

superbowl: Exciting game! Good beer. Pretty good food, although I was disappointed a bit in the mushroom dish. Good company. And now the Patriots are world champions again. I can go to bed happy now.
Orkut: I don’t fully get it. I’ll try to play along to see if I can figure it out, though.

salad: If macaroni salad has macaroni in it, and egg salad has egg in it, what does Chef’s salad contain?

fedora: Alex and I have been tag-team building, trying to get GNOME 2.5 into the Fedora Core 2 beta. As we didn’t get a GTK+ release until last Thursday, we weren’t able to build most of the packages until this week. We finally got most of them in, but it’s taken a number of pretty late nights.
ldap: I’ve also been reading about openldap for use in the new CVS machine. It’s got some pretty strange syntax and terminology, and I have a lot to learn.
house chores: Spent the better part of the evening putting up pictures. I keep thinking this task should be faster than it is, but it takes a surprising amount of time.

sorting: I explained how gtk_tree_model_ref_node works to Federico today. As the best example of this is probably in GtkTreeModelSort, I ended up reading the code again. I had forgotten how conceptially clean the code Kris and I came up with there.

While doing this, I had the sudden desire to update its API docs. I’m not super happy with what I wrote, but it looks much better than before. It should help answer a lot of questions people have with that object, if nothing else.

It felt quite therapeutic to write docs. I should do this more often.