Wed 15 May 2002

  • bites: I got a nibble from someone who was interested in working on gnome-vfs. Hopefully it will work out well, but time will tell (as always).

  • Anders (the mime): Working with mime-types is sort of demoralizing. It’s not as hard as the documentation project, but can still be tricky.

  • UI-Freeze: We aren’t frozen in the control center yet. We are so tantalizingly close, though.

  • Zana: She totally rocks my world. That’s why I married her.

  • Weiqi (chic): I haven’t played Christian in a while. Maybe we’ll start playing again, it’s what all the cool kids are doing.

Mon 13 May 2002

  • GNOME: I did nothing productive on GNOME this weekend (except reply to a few bugs.) I feel a little lame, especially given the UI freeze tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be busy trying to finish the new mime capplet in time for the drop-dead date. It will be awfully tight.

  • Trading spaces: Something about this show makes me want to do crazy things to my house. I bought a large sheet of 3/4″ mdf and seven yeards of burgundy cloth. We’ll see what happens next.

  • Carpentry: I spent more time pretending I know something about wood working. This included drilling a lot of holes in the legs for my table. 16 down, 80 more to go.

  • Set (cards): Got my revenge for the game of gin I had with Zana last. I won 13-11!! I think this is the first time I’ve ever won set.

Wed 01 May 2002

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Zana: We’ve been married just over two years now. It’s been a wonderful 731 days.

  • 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?

  • 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

  • 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.

Sat 02 Mar 2002

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • GTK+: Monday morning. One more big bug for me to fix. Wheeeee!!!!!

Wed 27 Feb 2002

  • 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 17 Feb 2002

  • Puzzle: How many 3 letter body parts can you name? No slang allowed. Zana and I managed to name twelve.

  • 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.

  • GNOME: Idly working on the control-center again. It’ll get there by 2.0.