Sun 06 Nov 2005

  • vote: As a reminder, there’s very little time left to vote. I voted No. Board size is being blamed for a lot of things, none of which are solved by cutting down on manpower. It’s not going to affect things one way or another, other than make the board less diverse.

  • 770: My Nokia 770 arrived on Thursday. I’ve been playing with it off and on since then. It’s really nice from the big picture, but is a bit raw in this incarnation. I can’t help but compare it to my sidekick, which fills a lot of the same functionality that the maemo has.

  • 770 (things I didn’t like): Given that they owned the hardware, I’m really surprised they didn’t include a scrollwheel of some kind. It would have made browsing that much better. It’s a little on the slow side too. I’m hoping that later versions will have a better processor. The lack of tooltips (which isn’t surprising with a touch screen) meant that I couldn’t figure out what any of the icons did in toolbars. There were a bunch of other small things, but I’ll bugzilla them.

  • 770 (things I liked): as everyone else has remarked, the screen had an amazing resolution! The color is a bit off on whites, but text is very readable. They got some very nice fonts for this device. I’d heard that the battery life was poor, so was actually pleasantly surprised with how long it lasted.

    In the long run, I could see dropping the sidekick in favor of a bluetooth-enabled phone and a maemo. Right now, it’s perfect for doing crosswords, and reading the news at breakfast.

Thu 08 Sep 2005

  • evince: GNOME-2.12 went out the door today with the new evince release. Version 0.4.0 is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the entire evince team. By blending a mixture of features and simplicity, we have reached a state of genuine usefulness. We are still very ambitious; there are a lot of awesome features currently on the drawing board.

    Of all the features in evince, the one that I’m most proud of is that we don’t have a preference dialog. It’s taken a lot of discipline and creativity along the way, but we managed.

  • zana: My wife rocks.

Wed 31 Aug 2005

  • evince: Bryan and I took another look at acroread today, and realized that we’re falling behind them in the web advertisement space! They have an toolbar just for Yahoo ads, and we don’t have anything like that at all. Since we had been looking for fundraiser opportunities anyway for the Evince Defence League, I whipped up Google AdWords support to the sidebar.

    http://jrb.webwynk.net/files/evince-sponsor.png

    Awesome. We’re planning on branching into personal ads, later.

Mon 29 Aug 2005

  • ridley: I finally got Project Ridley announced. This has been overdue for a long time, and I hope that we’ll get some good contributors to this project. I’ve gotten a number of replies from people interested in helping out, and there’s plenty to be done.

    There were a number of FAQs and some confusion about it, so I thought I’d give an effort to answer them:

    Q: What is the main goal of Project Ridley? A: We are really trying to clean up the existing library stack and platform. When we are done, we should have a better story for developers.

    Q: Are you going to write <my favorite feature> A: Depends if it’s in an existing library. There’s nothing that says that additional development can’t happen, but we’re going to be focusing on the functionality in libraries that currently exist.

    Q: Can I help? A: We always need help! There are some people signed up for projects already at the ProjectRidley page at live.gnome.org, but there’s plenty of room for more help. People interested in writing code should come to the GTK+ team meeting on Tuesdays. It’s typically held on IRC in -devel at 4:00 EDT.

    Q: <generic complaints about keybindings> A: This project has nothing to do with keybindings, dangit.

    Q: What does Project Ridley mean? A: I’m not telling. (-:

  • style: Zana got her hair cut short again. It looks really good!

  • dog: When we came back this evening after going out, we found a lot of muddy pawprints in the bathtub. The dog had jumped into it while we were gone. He hates baths! I have no idea what he was doing there.

  • sudoku: My mom bought us a book of sudoku puzzles, so I did what any good nerd would do — I wrote a simple solver in python. It’s now almost as good at these puzzles as my wife is. I need to add branching support to it, but it solves most of the puzzles I can throw at it.

  • New Orleans: We have been watching the really terrifying images on TV. The city was awesome when I visited it a couple months ago, and I really hope that it’s still there in the morning. It looks like it’s going to be horrible.

Sat 06 Aug 2005

  • windmills: Today was a windmill-tilting kinda day…

  • evince: Kristian and I cleaned up the selection code this week. It’s still a bit raw, but it’s much, much smarter than before. It was naively drawing the whole selection every time the mouse moved, which felt sluggish. We now only redraw the regions that are changed, and do that only when new glyphs are selected.

    These changes make selection feel zippy and slick. It even respects theme colors!

    Now that we have that last issue fixed, it’s time to focus heavily on getting evince stable for GNOME-2.12. We still have too many bugs — crashers and otherwise — for my taste.

  • Travels: Zana and I spontaneously drove to Vermont a couple weekends ago. I had never been to that state before, and we thought it would be fun to go take a look. It was a gorgeous area, and we took a walk near Brattleboro across an old bridge and along the Connecticut river. We followed it up with a meal on a patio, suspended over the river.

    We definitely need to go back and go kayaking there before the summer’s end.

Tue 19 Jul 2005

  • coding: Johann shamed me into starting a GtkTreeView editor for gazpacho. I spent a couple of hours tonight on it, and got a mockup going. I have a good idea of what I want it to look like, and will try hooking it up to Gazpacho tomorrow. This will make it easier to make a GtkTreeView, and more importantly, make it more obvious how to use the widget.

    It was also the first time that I’d used gazpacho for any real work. This program has matured a lot and I’m pretty excited for it. It had some quirks and bugs (which I’ll file tomorrow) but was basically usable. It acts a lot nicer than glade too, and more importantly, has a much nicer code base to hack on.

    Unfortunately, we’re still blocking on #69639, and thus this dialog will just be a novelty in the short term. gazpacho’s loader can handle GObjects, so python programs can use it, but other applications will have to wait until libglade lands in GTK+-2.10.

  • cooking: Zana and I made blueberry-rhubarb pie. We put in too much sugar, and it’s way too sweet. I’ll have to try again when we finish it.