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.

Tue 21 Oct 2003

  • bookworm: It’s getting to be in pretty good shape. There aren’t too many crashers that I know about, and Zana’s definitely able to add more books. I also have another potential user, bringing the grand total of known users to two!

  • computer: I bought myself a new computer! It’s the first desktop machine I’ve had in a long time and I’m pretty excited about it. I don’t have a monitor or keyboard for it yet but I should have one soon.

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.

Wed 01 Oct 2003

  • Bookworm: Did a lot more work on this tonight. Found a tricky little bug in Library.py that I have now fixed. I feel like I could have done a nicer job of the overall design in places, but I’m pretty happy with how the code is looking. I got it so that adding a new person to the database through the UI completely works. Next is to finish off a Person/Job linking dialog and to finish dehydrating the new book dialog. Then Zana can start adding books. But as I have a release team meeting in seven hours, I’m not going to finish tonight.

  • Python: Gosh, the combination of python/glade/gtk+ is really nice to work with. I wonder why no-one has written a book on this. I wonder if glade is the weak point here — it’s interface has something be desired. Still, this would be quite a useful book to have. It would bring a lot of development to GNOME.

Sat 20 Sep 2003

  • Vacation: By the light of the moon, two tourists left from Boston. On Sunday morning, the warm sun came up and WHOOSH, they arrived in Mexico City. Out popped two very hungry tourists.

    On Sunday, they ate Tacos al Pastor. But they were still hungry.

    On Monday, they ate tortilla soup, mole de ciruela con pollo, a strawberry milkshake, and cecina de Yecapixtla. But they were still hungry.

    On Tuesday, they ate tayoyos, chile en nogada, and Manchamantel. But they were still hungry.

    On Wednesday, they ate picadas con huevo revuelto, pescado a la veracruzana, and ensalada de camarón, and lechero. They enjoyed the lechero. But they were still hungry.

    On Thursday, they ate huevos rancheros, huevos motuleños, more lecheros, pescado acuyo, baked stuffed filet of bass. They also had more lecheros. But they were still hungry.

    On Friday, they ate rughetta con penne, parrillada argentina, horchata and churros. But they were still hungry.

    On Saturday, they ate huevos con jamón, huevos ahogados, and curried beef with rice.

    That night they didn’t sleep.

    The next day was Sunday again. Now they weren’t very hungry tourists anymore. They put themselves in a big metal cocoon. They stayed inside for more than 10 hours. They opened a hole in the side and pushed their way out and…

Fri 12 Sep 2003

  • GNOME (2.4): It’s out. It wasn’t the prettiest release thus far, but it’s in good shape. I have big plans for 2.6. But first…

  • GTK+ (2.4): This is in danger of slipping a bit. I really need to finish my GChildWatchSource patch and get it into glib. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a pretty tricky piece of code, and I’m happy about how it looks right now. Need to reply on the list.

    (GtkTreeView): Kris and I came up with two optimizations for the GtkTreeView that will make an enormous speed difference in some common cases. I spent a bit of time arguing with Owen about how to enable the optimization (I wanted it to be automatic — Owen wanted the programmer to explicitly turn it on) and it’s going to result in a lot of people handling their column-sizing by hand. But off the cuff testing shows that we can handle about 100K rows of model per second instead of the 7K per second we were doing before.

  • Birthday: I don’t know what it says about me, but Zana gave me a great birthday present. A cotton robe, a box of Myntz, three pairs of really comfy socks, and a hand-knit pair of wool socks. I must be officially old, getting excited about socks.