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.

Thu 14 Aug 2003

  • meta (ChangeLog): With some help from James Henstridge, I changed the way I generate the html for this site. He wrote a nifty python iterator that reads a ChangeLog file and yields its constituent parts. This made it much easier (and cleaner) to create the html. Also, as it’s the trendy thing to do, I now have an rss feed at http://webwynk.net/jrb/ChangeLog.rss

  • meta (webwynk.net): I could not get DSL at my new house, so am stuck connecting to the Internet over a cable modem. I’m not really happy with this and miss Speakeasy. The cable modem has terrible upload bandwidth, though download seems to be faster than my old connection ever was. The biggest downside thus far, is that I can’t host content reliably on my server anymore. I’ve had to move a lot of the services at webwynk.net to pair.com. We’ll see how that works out over the long run.