Sat 23 Nov 2002

  • knitting: Apparently knitters have copyright problems too. A knitter/designer named Alice Starmore has been sending cease and desist letters to anyone using her name in any fashion. She has apparently even threatened people posting images of sweaters she designed that they’ve knit. Amazing. More links below.

    http://yarnbarn.com/Jameison_Unicorn/aliceindex.htm http://www.knittingbeyondthehebrides.org/

    I need to renew my EFF membership sometime…

  • themes: I have a plan. It’s going to be rough to implement. Fortunately, I have 20 hours in a train to figure it out.

  • sky events: I watched the Leonids with Zana, Garrett, and three of Garrett’s friends. It was a little dissapointing; there was a thin fog layer that meant that we missed all but the largest meteor strikes. Still, it wasn’t a bad show. Zana made muffins which were certainly appreciated.

    To top off the meteor shower, Zana and I saw an absolutely stunning lunar halo last night. It was much more impressive than the Leonids, and has made my month. I really wish I could have photographed it.

  • Food: Zana made a really interesting meal tonight. It had mashed sweet potatos and curried beef with currants. There was also grape tomatos, pine nuts, and broccoli lightly sauteed in apple cider vinegar and a touch of olive oil. It was extremely tasty, and not like most of the food I eat. Yum.

Fri 01 Nov 2002

  • health: Still not doing great. I’m able to get in to work when I try, but it’s still much more comfortable at home. I’m able to get a lot more work done here, anyway. I still wish I could get a good nights sleep.

  • themes: Wrote a metatheme capplet. Lets see what happens.

Tue 29 Oct 2002

  • health: A month ago, I was hiking around in the rockies. Three weeks ago, I had trouble walking up Couch Mountain with Owen (about 350 feet). Two weeks ago I couldn’t walk around the block. One week ago I was jogging the dog at 3:00 in the morning. I don’t know how I’m doing today. Most of me still works normally. Parts of me still don’t.

    It’s very unsettling to lose partial control of one’s body. I feel a lot of the little fictions I have over my life slipping away. The things that I thought ‘I’ controlled turned out to be such fickle things – heavily modified by the drugs and the disease. Many people deal with a much worse deal every day, so I can’t complain too much. And we all grow old in the end.

    Still, I wouldn’t mind my old body back.

  • bloat: In a fit of annoyance, I added dingus support to gnome-terminal for s/key challenge/response queries. I doubt many people will notice. I will, though, which is the most important thing.

  • themes: Thinking about metathemes. Have a plan. Need to write lots of code, now.

Wed 25 Sep 2002

  • laptop: This is my father’s axe… In the past couple months I’ve replaced the harddrive, the screen, the plastic backing to the screen, the keyboard, the motherboard (twice), and the processor. The only original piece remaining is the plastic on the bottom.

  • Psyche: It’s done! It should be available to the public really soon now. While every release has been better than the last, this one is more special than most. It feels extremely good. I think it will open some eyes to what the GNOME team is able to do.

Sun 01 Sep 2002

  • laptop: Now it’s really dying. The right hand side of the screen doesn’t work, and the harddrive keeps giving IO errors. Need to call Dell monday morning. I may have to get a replacement sometime.

  • spelling: jfleck kindly reminded me of a sign on the side of the Pasadena Playhouse. It said something to the effect of ‘”My people are the people of the dessert”, said T. E. Lawrence picking up his fork’

  • books: We are out of bookshelf space again. I need to get bookworm finished.

Sun 25 Aug 2002

  • work: Been a really hectic month. I’ve been working 12-15 hour days the last month or so on the next Red Hat release. It’s somewhat therapeutic to go through a bug list, and just close as many as you can. On the flip side, these hours are getting very old. Zana’s been very heroic putting up with it, but we both are going to need to take a break after this.

  • Void/Limbo: The beta’s have been surprisingly well recieved, a few small flame wars aside. The things that we expected to get flamed on (UTF-8, new gcc/glibc etc) were not remarked on. Everyone seems to get worked up about the pixels. On one of our testers list, there’s a thread complaining about us making GNOME look like KDE. On another, there’s a thread about us making KDE look like GNOME. People are also complaining that we’re copying Windows XP and OS/X. Maybe we’re doing something right, if we’ve riled up this many people.

  • bookworm: I have no time to work on it, unfortunately. I need to port it over to use the pgdb module, and clean up the UI a bit. Zana has been pestering me to finish the ‘Add Book’ druid so she can actually use it. Need to finish the next RH release…

Sun 04 Aug 2002

  • typography: At the GNOME Boston Summit, Owen gave an excellent talk about the parallels between typography and gui design. He made the point that a lot of the rules and conventions that typographers have are generally applicable to ui design. Typography as a field has had 500 years of trial and error to determine many of their principles. Computer interfaces have had only twenty or so. We are missing a lot of the vocabulary needed to describe various conventions and interface elements. Inspired by this, I went out and bought a copy of “Elements of Typographical Style”.

    This is an impressive book. I am thoroughly enjoying reading it, and am learning a huge amount. It gives rules (and more importantly, rationales!) to many of the things I do when desigining a dialog.

    It also raises the issue of what the important elements of an interface actually are. Consider an error dialog. It has a primary text message, a secondary message, an icon, and some buttons. It may also have extra details. Good error dialogs will also provide a way to fix the issue. This is crying out for some form of ‘logical’ markup, along the lines of docbook or latex, or even gtk_message_dialog_new (parent, flags, type, buttons, message);

    This approach breaks down the moment the interface gets sufficiently complicated. Every UI I’ve seen that tries to automate it’s UI has looked dreadful, and has been pain to deal with over the long run. Still, there are plenty of elements that exist on a larger scale than the current widget level. That seems to me to be the next place we should be looking into. I’d like to spend some time adding a set of ‘style sheets’ to the GNOME hig. I’m hoping to have a week or so to dedicate to this at the end of the month.

  • War Craft 3: Sucking away my life and my time. I can feel it… Weirdly enough, you start out playing a bad guy.

  • bookworm: I tried to work on bookworm again. I ran into problems serializing data, and creating new objects. My beautiful (and copied from Elliot) Library.py model is breaking down a bit. I can’t really create a new row in a table and then fill it — I have to insert some of the data simultaneously at creation time. This is a pain, as I’d hoped to be able to do:

    obj = library.create_object (‘Library.book’) obj.name = ‘Pride and Prejudice’

    I will have to do:

    obj = library.create_object (‘Library.book’, name=’Pride and Prejudice’)

    While this is shorter, I may not know all the information at creation time.

    Additionally, there’s no way to nest transactions (not too surprisingly) in postgresql. I would like to do:

    library.begin_transaction () obj = library.create_object (‘Library.book’, name=’Pride and Prejudice’) library.begin_transaction () obj2 = library.create_object (‘Library.person, name=’Jane Austne’) # whoops library.revert_transaction ()

    library.begin_transaction () obj2 = library.create_object (‘Library.person, name=’Jane Austen’) library.commit_transaction ()

    obj1.author = obj2 library.commit_transaction ()

    Will spend tomorrow thinking how best to do this. Elliot does it by serializing his transactions, and committing them all at once. He doesn’t need to access his information in the middle though, which lets his transactions be write only. I don’t want to replay the transactions to determine the state. Or rather, I don’t want to write the code to do that. This simple little project of mine is starting to get complicated.