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.

Tue 02 Sep 2003

  • Milestone: In case you missed it, James just released gnome-python 2.0.0. This is a major piece of software, and James should be greatly commended for his tireless work. GTK+/Python is a really, really nice combination. I don’t regret us standardizing it at Red Hat at all.

Sun 31 Aug 2003

  • GNOME Lore: Apparently not everyone in the GNOME project knows what a Soptimization is. It’s a %0.001 speed up of code at the extreme cost of readability.

  • Bookworm: Elliot Lee’s wonderful db to Python class code is really making this easy to write. I’m almost at the point where I can make a semi-public release. I might even post screenshots.

Mon 25 Aug 2003

  • GNOME: Had a surprisingly productive day building packages. Libtool still makes me contemplate taking up self-flagellation as a hobby, though.

  • Maintenance: I had to leave work a bit early to get my car from the repair shop. A gasket in the oil tank started leaking. As is typical with the problems with cars, it was $15 to get a replacement part and $250 to install it.

  • Bookworm: With the house much more under control, I’m back to working on Bookworm again. I’m really not happy with the interface, but it’s functional. A surprisingly large number of people (like three) have asked for it recently, so I am going to try to get it somewhat usable. I had an enjoyable discussion with Seth about the nature of Assistants, and how they should work in GNOME.

Thu 21 Aug 2003

  • life: I got this nugget from Seth on irc today:

    seth> Jrb: but seriously, if you haven’t tried answering desktop-devel mail from a rowboat drifting through the night you have yet to live

  • life: I fear, by that definition, I’m living it up.