Mon 19 Jan 2004

  • Meta: It’s been a while since I’ve updated this. The hard drive in my laptop is on its way to the great hardware dustbin in the sky, and thus was unable to use it at all over Christmas. I made a valiant attempt to revive it when I got home, to no luck. So I’ve moved over my ChangeLog onto another computer for the short term.

  • Mystery Hunt: This weekend was the annual MIT mystery hunt, and the first that I’ve been able to attend in person since moving to North Carolina. It’s also the first time I haven’t been on the Random Hall team, but instead formed a team with a couple of other alums.

    I had forgotten just how much fun this could be in person. We weren’t a particularly competitive team given our small size, but we did alright solving some puzzles. I got tired, went home, and slept for fifteen hours, which is a clear sign that I am not going to be competitive with undergraduates anymore. It lasted through early this morning.

    More information on past mystery hunts can be found at: http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/hunthistory.html

  • Football: The Patriots are headed back to the Superbowl!!! This should salve the wounds of the local Red Sox fanatics a little bit.

  • Football (commentators): Joe Buck is a pretty good commentator and generally improves the quality of the Fox broadcasts. However, his “nothing says hard-nosed, smash-mouth football like the music of James Taylor” comment last night left me scratching my head.

  • Plumbing: During the recent cold weather snap, we had a pipe freeze in the downstairs bathroom ceiling. The plumber had to put a large hole in that ceiling to fix it. The water ruined the kitchen ceiling as well. The insurance will cover some of it, but this is still a big pain.

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.