Wed 13 Jul 2005

  • bugs: There are forty bugs against the screenshooter! It just takes screenshots, for heaven’s sake — how can it be that buggy?? It looks like I’m definitely going to spend some time going through these bugs soon. The highlight of these is a patch from Dan Winship to draw the cursors in the screenshots. Awesome!

  • cooking: After the disasterous All Star game, we made a fruit tart. The crust came out really nicely and the fruit was beautiful. Unfortunately, we accidentally bought tiramisu marscapone instead of plain marscapone which gave the tart a slight coffee flavor. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it tasted a little weird.

  • bookworm: Zana has been bugging me for a long time about adding better syntax checking to bookworm. Instead of doing this, I spent a couple nights teaching her Python. She picked it up really quickly, and she spent most of tonight adding a bunch of sanity checks to the code. It should fail a lot less now.

    Tomorrow, we’re going to tackle the overview dialog and get that going. We’ll see if our relationship survives me teaching her about GtkTreeView…

Wed 06 Jul 2005

  • evince: We got a bunch of patches this weekend from Matt Wilson of rpath fame to fix up the tiff backend. If someone wants to hook us up to some telephony software, we’d make a pretty awesome display for a fax program. I also read in the ChangeLog that Marco put some code to make evince ‘spatial’. I do not think that that word means what I think it means. It sounds pretty cool, but sometime I’m going to have to figure out what it does.

  • cinema: When I was a kid, I remember watching the Three Amigos. I loved that movie, and remember laughing and laughing a lot at it. A decade later, I rented it to show it to Zana, promising her it would be a great movie. “You’ll love it! It’s funny!” It was terrible. None of the jokes were watchable, and we turned it off before we got to the end.

    (Actually, the bit where Martin Short shoots the invisible swordsman by mistake was pretty funny…)

    After watching Revenge of the Sith recently, I thought I’d rewatch the original Star Wars trilogy again. I’m not a really a Star Wars fan, but I do remember enjoying them a lot when I saw them, and, like everyone else, was disappointed with the second trilogy. I was afraid that watching the originals again would ruin them like it did for the Three Amigos, or at least diminish them in my memory.

    I needn’t have worried. It turns out that the first two were genuinely much better than the later movies. However, the Return of the Jedi was a surprise for me, as I really enjoyed it a lot. I remember it as good, but not great, and not as good as the other two. That also appears to be its reputation on the internet. In particular, the final lightsaber battle between Vader and Luke has got to top my list of favorite movie duels. It wasn’t as technically impressive as other sword fights, but the emotion of the moment and the music really swept me away. It was really worth a rewatch.

  • words: Nat is my literary hero this week! Not only did he write a play in a day, he used the word ‘uxoriousness’ in his blog. +1 style point for that.

  • independence day: Groton had its independence day celebration tonight. Zana and I went to go listen to music, eat fair food, watch the fireworks. We had a great time. It wasn’t clear to us why the town had their party a day late, though. I guess they just wanted to have their own Fifth of Fourth…

Fri 01 Jul 2005

  • evince: Last time I wrote about evince, I posted a fake screenshot of it reading mail. While I thought it was obviously a cheesy composite and a pretty funny idea, some people did not. In retrospect, I should have spent more time in the gimp to make it less realistic — and thus more obviously a joke. I promised a few people that my next screenshot would be both real and of a cool feature. So, without further ado:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/evince-selection.png

    This is evince with real text selection! Kristian and I worked hard over the last couple evenings to get this working. We were just doing a rectangular selection before which wasn’t nearly as good. This feels much more natural, and is a necessary feature for a modern PDF browser.

    It’s in CVS now, and requires poppler-HEAD built against cairo. We’ll be improving and fine tuning it over the next couple days. In particular, we think that we can make interactive dragging significantly faster than it is right now. Additionally, when you hit copy right now, you get the wrong text, and the old rectangular selection is totally broken. These should both be pretty easy to fix, though.

    The other important thing about this change is that Kristian refactored the poppler text code a lot. It made it trivial to add I-beam support, and will make doing things like A11Y much easier to write. I’m going to keep cleaning up the selection code in the foreseeable future, but if anyone has any interest in tackling ATK support for ev-view, I’d love to hear from them. It is a self-contained project and should be straightforward to write.

  • features: One of the reasons I’m really excited about getting selection into evince is that it’s a great new feature that doesn’t involve a menu item. I feel like the shell of evince is starting to get cluttered, and we probably need to take the time to clean it up a bit. This feature will be really useful to the user without touching the interface at all.

    A lot of the best features are the ones you don’t notice.

  • hardware: I’ve had a really bad couple days. My sidekick crashed twice, and the harddrive on my desktop died destroying some pictures that I’d recently taken. My wireless access point has been flaky too, and gnome.org being moved hasn’t helped.

    I’ve been increasingly unhappy with the web-hosting I’ve gotten at pair.com, too. They do fine for what they are, but I don’t really want to put all my photos, etc. on that site at their current prices.

    One thing I miss about my old house in North Carolina is that I was able to get Speakeasy DSL service with a static IP. I’m stuck with a cable modem at my new place, and thus can’t reliably host services. I’ve been giving some thought to trying to put together a co-op of sorts, where I buy a server with a few others and host it at a colo. After the initial capital outlay, it seems to be competitive in price to most web-hosting services, and I’d have much more control over the box. We’d also be able to provide a lot more diskspace than most web-hosting people.

    I’m not completely convinced this is wise, as it’s one more box for me maintain, and it is a bit more expensive. I also need to find a few friends to do this with.

  • life: Zana keeps beating me at darts. It must be the shoes.

Sun 22 May 2005

  • evince: On a whim, I gave a quick look into writing a TIFF backend for evince. It only took an hour or so to do, and I was able to commit something this afternoon. It renders all the tiff files (two) that I have quite nicely.

    Marco also did a 0.3.1 release today. This version has really nice scrolling and zooming now. We’ve done a lot of tweaking of it, and I think it’s good enough that we can go a release or two without completely redoing it. Nikolay did a great job of adding an offset for resizing, and we now use a lot less memory for the thumbnails.

Sat 14 May 2005

  • introspection: Matthias has been doing fantastic work on the GObject introspection front. It’s currently in the gobject-introspection module in CVS if anyone wants to play with it. It is already mostly functional, if a bit untested. He added libffi support this week, meaning that g_function_info_invoke() now works.

    For those who haven’t been following this project, this is really exciting news. The introspection framework will give us the ability to find out what objects, functions and methods are available in a given library. Theoretically, a significant chunk of the work in a language binding can disappear when this lands. Additionally, libraries can be bindable without writing explicit bindings. It can also be used by glade-style applications to handle new libraries.

    To test it further, jdahlin started doing bindings for python, and I added the metadata to libpoppler. We’ve been able load in much of the poppler’s API into python, shaking out quite a few bugs along the way. The next step is to put together some working python bindings. We should be able to get something functional pretty soon.

  • evince: The latest version is pretty darned nice. We hit a lot of the initial features that we want, and it’s looking really sexy. We’ve gotten some great external patches, and there are a couple more good ones in the works.

    I started writing the presentation mode a couple weeks ago, and it turned out to be a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t really clear how many pdfs in the wild are actually used as presentations, and it seemed an awkward fit with the rest of the interface. It also is going to require a pretty big restructuring of some of the code.

    Just when I was putting it down and moving on, a powerpoint renderer appeared! This makes it much easier to justify spending time on this code. I haven’t seen a patch yet, but I can’t wait.

  • weather: Inexplicably, for five weekends in a row, we’ve had rain on both Saturday and Sunday. My grass is growing out of control, and I haven’t been able to cut it yet. There have been nice days during the week in April, just not on the weekends. I want a refund!

  • sports: I watched Jeff Weaver take a no-hitter into the seventh inning tonight. Regretfully, as with all other games I’ve seen, it was broken up when Horacio Ramirez hit a double. One of my life-goals is to catch no-hitter from start to finish, and I seem no closer today to that goal. I really enjoy watching a pitching dual, and keep hoping that I’ll catch that most magical of games.

    In the eighth, it fell apart for both pitchers as the Braves hit a grand slam and the Dodgers responded in kind. The Dodgers win, 7-4.

Wed 27 Apr 2005

  • life: I finally naturalized.

    As of two weeks ago, I’m an American citizen. It has been long overdue, and was a hectic process. It culminated in a six hour ceremony — or at least, four and a half hours of waiting followed by a thirty minute swearing-in process. All-in-all, it was a small price to pay for three years of waiting, filling out forms and dealing with the INS.

    I’m very excited about the whole thing. On one hand, I’ve always felt like an American, as my British Citizenship was primarily an accident of birth. On the other hand, I have wanted to vote for a long time, and I finally will get that opportunity.

    After the ceremony, Zana and I went walking through Boston. We stopped by the Boston Public Library and looked inside Trinity Church. I acquired a BPL card, and we hung out in the records room for a while, browsing through strange books. We also went (unsuccessfully) shopping for tea pots.

  • basement: As spring is finally here, Zana and I spent the weekend cleaning up the basement. There’s a lot more work to be done, but it’s much more open than before. Zana also bought a dart board cabinet and two sets of flights as a naturalization present. I hung them up in the basement and we played a few rounds of Cricket. The flights were a Union Jack and American Flag themed, and somewhat ominously, I threw much better with the Union Jack flights.

  • evince: As Bryan mentioned earlier, I finally landed the continuous and dual scrolling modes for evince. We’re getting a lot of really nice patches from other contributors now, and it’s hard to keep up with them. Selection is still broken, but we’re working through a lot of the kinks that the scrolling introduced. When we’re back to feature parity, we are going to make a pretty awesome release. I’m looking forward to working on a presentation mode next. That is going to be fun to write.

  • GUADEC: I bought my tickets to GUADEC this week. Unfortunately, the Red Hat summit overlaps with the end of GUADEC meaning that I’ll have to leave a little bit earlier than I’d like. I’m especially sad that I’m going to miss Dan Kuznetsky’s talk — I imagine that he’d have a lot of interesting things to say.

  • yarrr: arrr…

Mon 04 Apr 2005

  • evince: I spent a couple evenings last week trying to finish up the threading changes to evince. I got it complete enough that I added two new features this weekend. The first was completion in the entry (see the screenshot at #172453). The second was to add continuous scrolling. Unfortunately, the first requires a bugfix in GTK+ HEAD to be truly useful, and the second is too immature to land. However, the continuous scrolling seemed to perform really well, which makes me feel much better about all the dramatic changes we made to the core.

    After the release this week, I’m going to try to get these in a usable mode and commit them.

  • cars: Zana, Soeren, Seth and I went to the MFA last weekend to see the “Speed, Style and Beauty, the cars of Ralph Lauren” last weekend. It was pretty sweet. I’m not a giant car afficianado, but it was hard not to be appreciative of these cars. I have a new favorite car too — the 1954 Mercedes gullwing SL (with matching luggage.) It was a gorgeous, gorgeous car, and more affordable than the rest. I found one on EBay for only $400K USD, as opposed to the several million the other cars went for. Something to save my pennies for…

    We went to the North End for dinner afterward, and had Cannoli’s for dessert.

  • games: After we got back to Nashua, I tried out Seth’s copy of “Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat”. It was surprisingly fun, though I hit the Bongo’s too hard and my hands hurt after 20 minutes. It was quite gimmicky (I doubt other genres will benefit from a pair of bongos), but this one hit the spot. Crazy, crazy game.

  • basketball: After being demolished in the brackets by Rosanna’s magic nickel, I’m finally looking respectable after Arizona choked. If she’d pulled off both Arizona and Louisville, I’d never be able to live it down.

  • housekeeping (spring): Zana and I went to Raffi’s Daylight’s Savings party last night. We saw a bunch of old friends who we hadn’t seen in a while, and made plans for the upcoming months. Winter is finally over up here, and we’re crawling out of our bunker. It’s looking to be a pretty eventful spring.