Wed 09 Mar 2005

  • civics: I passed my American Citizenship civics exam last week. It had taken a long time for me to get all the necessary paperwork filled out, but I finally have a date to go get naturalized. The test itself wasn’t as hard as I’d been led to believe, but I can see it being tricky to people who didn’t have an American education. It had simple questions, such as “How many stars are on the US Flag?” and “What do they mean?”, through “What is the Bill of Rights?” and “Who was Martin Luther King?”

    I resisted the temptation to answer “Martin Luther King Jr’s Father” to the last one. That was probably wise. It might have been a test to weed out pedants.

Thu 17 Feb 2005

  • Road Warrior: I’ve been out of town for over three weeks. I went to Hawaii for the FSG Accessibility conference, and then flew to Hong Kong to visit Zana’s family for a week. We followed that up with a weeklong vacation in Japan. It was a huge blast, and I visited a lot of great places and tried a lot of really tasty food. I won’t bore people with a giant travelogue; at least not today. But I had an awesome time and would love to go back again in the future.

  • Network Warrior: During this trip, I flew nine different legs, visited nine different airports, and stayed in four hotels. Through out the travel, NetworkManager worked like a champ. I have spent too much of my life fiddling with networks on Linux, it was refreshing to not worry about getting my laptop working. I was always able to find an access point and select it, or to plug in a cable to get a network. Many kudos to Dan for making NetworkManager so useful.

  • LWE: I went to LWE yesterday. I hadn’t been to one in over a year, and it was pretty much like the all the other ones I’d seen. It was pretty exciting to see such vibrant booths for both GNOME and Fedora, and was good to see old and new faces. Luis’s live CD was really popular and was a great idea! We are definitely going to have to have these ready at future events and at release time.

    One thing I’m reminded of everytime I go to one of these things is how hard it is to name a new company and product. There were a lot of mediocre names with booths at the show. I’m positive that I wouldn’t be able to do much better than most of the efforts there (AisleRiot anyone?) but some names were really awful sounding.

  • evince: On the fourteen hour flight from Tokyo to DC, I added support to evince to make best-fit “sticky”. It’s a little slow but it really improves the feel of the application. It also shows that we need to move to use a threaded rendering system sooner rather than later. Once that’s done though, we can add the continuous scrolling support we need so badly.

Mon 17 Jan 2005

  • feet: During the Steelers game yesterday, the announcer described Jerome Bettis as having the body of a line backer and the feet of a ballerina. I’m pretty sure they’ve never seen a ballerina’s feet, though. Of all professions I know of, I doubt any are as tough on the feet as ballet. They’re always beat up and bandaged, and pretty ugly. Is that what he had in mind?

Thu 23 Dec 2004

  • evince: Given that half the Red Hat desktop team had left for vacation, we decided to have a mini-hackfest at work this week. After scrounging around for ideas, we came up with adding some features to gpdf. It turns out that the gpdf team were getting frustrated with the limitations of the current code base, and had planned to rewrite anyway. Marco committed his initial code and we all piled on.

    After two days of hacking, we have something that actually almost works. It certainly isn’t good enough to replace ggv or gpdf yet, but it’s pretty awesome for such a quick project. It has search, printing, and a sidebar, as well as pdf, postscript, and image support. Anders also contributed initial thumbnailing support. Although the features are still raw, it’s a really promising application for future GNOME releases!

  • Math: I bought a new car this week.

    As part of the purchase of the car, I took out an auto loan from the local credit union. The loan computer there only listed the current ‘base’ rate, with a field for the discount to apply to that rate. The car dealer had offered me a better rate than they had, and the credit union agreed to match it.

    This meant that the bank manager had to figure out the difference between the base rate and the target rate and enter that into the computer (eg, subtract one number from another). She got it wrong three times, despite writing all the digits out on a piece of paper, and my encouragements to go back and try again. The fact that a bank manager could get hired who was unable to do basic math is just incredible. I really hope she was just having a bad day, but it didn’t look very good.

  • yelp: Yelp is really nice nowadays as a generic docbook viewer. It’s so much better than the old days of trying to get jade to behave. Shaun even added reload support to it for me. Thanks Shaun!

Fri 19 Nov 2004

  • screenshots: I spent some time over the last month rewriting the screenshooting utility. The code had rotted considerably since last time I looked at it, and it needed refreshing. There was a cut-n-paste of gdk_pixbuf_save using libpng, as well as some pretty crufty dialog handling. It was clearly a GNOME 1 application that had had a straight port and little else.

    I started out by cleaning up the code and modularizing it, splitting it out into fourteen different files. This apparently violated the terms of my lease and markmc evicted me from the gnome-panel CVS module. Fortunately, the gnome-utils guys were kind enough to give the screenshooter a place to live, and I moved it over.

    A good deal of the impetus for doing the rework was to add gnome-vfs support to the dialog. I started work on a new library libgnomevfsui and needed an application to test it with. As a result, you can now save the image directly to remote location, and get a nice (semi-functional) progress bar while doing so. Here’s a screenshot of it that was saved directly to my gnome.org public_html directory:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/Screenshot-Save-Screenshot.png

    I also added a couple other features such as drop shadows, dark borders, and improved D-n-D handling. The child process handling was cleaned up and it’s much less likely to leak files in /tmp. Oh, and it also looks better now.

  • porting: While cleaning up old code, I decided to devote a few evenings to fixing up AisleRiot a bit. Callum has done a great job of keeping that code sane, but it really needs a good house keeping. It turns out that the guile API I used initially was deprecated a couple years ago. I went through and updated the code to the preferred method. As a bonus, I added some simple exception handlers so that we no longer crash when there’s a scheme error. Hopefully we’ll be able to pass the backtrace to bug-buddy and get real bug reports for GNOME 2.9.

  • planets: Seems like I temporarily broke planet.gnome.org. It’s not just Rich Burridge.

Fri 24 Sep 2004

  • Reader’s Block: Eric Eldred (of Eldred vs. Ashcroft fame) and his Bookmobile are coming to Groton. They are stopping at our local library (http://www.gpl.org) in a couple weeks, and are printing and binding free books for the first 25 people who reply. The texts are all public domain from Project Gutenburg and its ilk. It should be pretty cool to attend and hear what they have to say.

    I’m having trouble deciding on a book to print out though. There are so many options that I can’t narrow it to just one. I normally buy a book as the result of some external impetus, or on a recommendation, or perhaps because it just caught my eye. This is a little different; I have an entire blank book in front of me ready to be filled in and read! It is surprisingly hard to choose.