Wed 01 May 2002
May 1, 2002
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Gin (drink): I made Zana a nice mixed drink for dinner tonight with some left over Chambord, and some Gin. She was somewhat tipsy as a result.
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Gin (cards): After dinner, we determined that the drink aforementioned made Zana extraordinarily good at cards. She proceeded to kick my butt in Gin Rummy 287 – 0.
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Zana: We’ve been married just over two years now. It’s been a wonderful 731 days.
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gnome-vfs: Spent today playing with gnome-vfs. This could be such a cool library if we had someone to hack on it beyond just the maintenance that it gets. We need a cool daemon for a number of reasons. Any volunteers out there?
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apps: Wrote the worlds ugliest app for Garrett today. He needed something to test themes with, so I through as many widgets as possible together.
Fri 19 Apr 2002
April 19, 2002
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GNOME: I’ve noticed a couple of diary entries recently have said that there is less fun in GNOME than there used to be, and that we aren’t as productive as we used to be. I can’t speak for others, but I personally am thrilled at how well GNOME is currently progressing. The kind of problems we’re having nowadays are so much better than the ones we had even a year ago. Last year, at this time, we were still reeling from the loss of Eazel. Nautilus was basically unusable, and GTK 2.0 wasn’t close to out yet. Three years ago, we were trying to get GNOME 1.x stable and vaguely usable.
I have distinct memories of using the session manager to change directories in gmc at Linux World Expo with GNOME 0.93. I’d double click on a directory, it would update its restart command in the session manager, crash, and then start up in the correct directory. We had a similar experience adding launchers to the panel. The coolest ‘power’ feature in GNOME was the ability to drag colors to the terminal. One of the better dialogs in GNOME (and the one we were so proud of) was E-conf: http://people.redhat.com/jrb/files/e-conf.png
Compare that to Louie’s top ten list of gruesome bugs left for GNOME 2.0: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-April/msg00308.html They don’t even compare. Sure, there are plenty of bugs to fix, and room for improvement, but we’re really making great forward process.
If it seems like it’s less fun, it’s because we’re a lot better at doing the small stuff and we’re no longer making the huge, visible changes we once did. We now check error conditions regularly, and raise (mostly) useful error dialogs. We have the maturity to remove features and code, instead of always adding them. Higher standards leads to less tolerance for the bad hacks we used to do.
There are so many cool things on the desktop that are left to be done, that we now have the infrastructure to deal with. GTK 2.0 is a joy to work with, and has made a lot of problems we used to have just go away. GConf is plain cool. Adding things to make the users life easier is so simple now.
One of the great gifts of Eazel to GNOME was that it raised our awareness of usability issues, and taught us that we could make a beautiful desktop. I just step back and look at how the GNOME 2.0 desktop looks today, and am awed.
Wed 06 Mar 2002
March 6, 2002
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movie: Saw Urban Legends a couple days ago. Saw Urbania today. The latter is a much better movie than the former.
Sat 02 Mar 2002
March 2, 2002
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Adam Readhead: Came to visit today. He’s singing songs about hats at the piano right now. I’m putting his name here to try to increase his google count.
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songs (part2): It’s turned into a love song about an escaped prisoner and his pies and a bucket for his hat. Dog’s a little flustered though.
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GTK+: Monday morning. One more big bug for me to fix. Wheeeee!!!!!
Wed 27 Feb 2002
February 27, 2002
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Python tricks: Matt Wilson rocks my world. Some piece of code was doing a try … except: pass on a function I wrote way up the stack, making it impossible for me to debug it. He showed me how to use the traceback module to see what wasn’t working.
def foo(): try: # put code to be debugged here print “1” + 1 except: (type, value, tb) = sys.exc_info() frame = tb.tb_frame.f_back print “function”, frame.f_code.co_name print “file”, frame.f_code.co_filename print “line”, frame.f_lineno traceback.print_exc (None) raise
Sun 24 Feb 2002
February 24, 2002
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GTK+: One more week before 2.0. So much left to do, so few cycles to do it. Anders had a very cool statistic earlier today. Apparently, we’ve added a line of code to GTK+ every 5 minutes on average since it was branched three years ago.
Sun 17 Feb 2002
February 17, 2002
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Puzzle: How many 3 letter body parts can you name? No slang allowed. Zana and I managed to name twelve.
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Olympics: I wasn’t planning on watching much this year, but as always, I got sucked in. I discovered curling. What a great game! It’s a cross of billiards and chess, but on ice. I’m enjoying the hockey a lot too, as the level of play is excellent. The olympic rules definitely seem to lead to an improvement in play over the NHL.
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GNOME: Idly working on the control-center again. It’ll get there by 2.0.
Mon 17 Dec 2001
December 17, 2001
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passages: I threw out two old friends this weekend. I’ve had both of them since my freshman year in college, and both of them have survived the move between dorm rooms, apartments, and our house. The first was my old computer hutch. The second was my old smiley-face beanbag, that the dog had adopted. While both had lasted long beyond what was reasonable for their lifetime, I kept on to them.
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control center: Wrote a mouse-properties capplet this past week or two. Keyboard properties is next on my list. I’ll probably tackle it over Christmas.
Thu 13 Dec 2001
December 13, 2001
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computer: Got a newer computer for Zana for Christmas. It’s a nice Athalon, and seems to be pretty Zippy. It’s also very loud. I’m going to have to investigate quieter fans for the processor.
