Mon 13 Sep 2004

  • Travels: I spent last week in Northern California meeting with a customer. The visit with the customer seemed to go pretty well, though it took a lot of my time. I also saw friends and family while out there, and was generally kept busy. On Wednesday, I made it to a Red Sox game at the Oakland Coliseum, which despite being an away game, had a large Red Sox contingent.

  • automata: Last Labor day I went with my parents to the San Francisco Exploratorium. It has a new exhibit of automata, which by itself is worth the price of admission. They were cleverly done with lots of intricate gears, cogs, bellows, levers, and pulleys, all intricately carved out of wood. They were modern and it showed in the themes and sensibilities of their vignettes. The lack of age didn’t detract from their cleverness and charm, though.

    It’s definitely worth a trip for those in San Francisco, even if you have seen the Exploratorium many times already.

  • Birthday: For my birthday, Zana made me crab and shrimp stuffed crepes. It was served with a side dish of asparagus, and stuffed shrimp and cheese as starters. She also got up at 5:00 in the morning to pick me up from the airport, which was very appreciated!

  • Crossword Helper: On the plane trip out last weekend, I wrote a simple little program to help with crossword puzzles. I wrote it from start to finish in about three hours in python. It searches for a list of words that match a partial word, and does simple anagram searches. The feature count was limited by the battery life on my laptop, though I did add a blinking cursor a couple days later. A screenshot is available at:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/crosswordhelper-1.png

    I don’t know if this is interesting enough to check into CVS or not, as it’s only a couple-hundred lines of code.

Wed 01 Sep 2004

  • games: We bought Pikmin 2 tonight. Zana promptly beat me in multi-player mode while claiming to be unable to figure out the keys. Very sneaky!

  • filechooser: Ellipsizing cell renderers now works well in GTK+-HEAD. I put a screenshot of the filechooser using this at http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/fileselellipse.png

    We really need to get tooltips on rows going now.

Mon 23 Aug 2004

  • life: It was a nice day today, so I did what I always seem to do on such nice days; I huddled in the basement fiddling with firewall rules.

  • car: I took my Saturn in to the dealership to get its 100,000 mile service. It was the first time in a while that I’ve stayed in the dealership for the duration of the service, instead of getting a ride. They now have wireless network support, which is a nice bonus. However, the bowl of jelly donuts and bananas is now gone. I’m not sure which I’d prefer.

  • crossword: We finished the Saturday prize puzzle! We’re definitely improving.

Thu 19 Aug 2004

  • kerberos: I was helping Chris Aillon work on a Kerberos renewel dialog for GNOME this week. It’s checked into CVS as krb5-auth-dialog, though I imagine we’d make it part of some other package in the future. The dialog has taken surprisingly long to do, in large part because kerberos isn’t translated at all. I would really loathe to ship a dialog that pops up every ten hours with an untranslated string.

    Unfortunately, to do this properly, we will need to get kerberos upstream to use gettext, and modify a lot of kerberos code. I don’t know if the upstream maintainers are interested in such a patch, but we’ll try to convince them of its necessity.

  • travels: Rosanna and I went back to Pasadena for a wedding over the weekend. My friends Sarah and Cameron got married after dating for twelve years, and we are all very happy for them. It was a casual affair; set in a garden with a Hawaiian theme. Everyone was handed an orchid lei upon arrival, and there was a sushi bar. It was good fun meeting a lot of old school friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

    On the flight back, we did the NY Times cryptic. It was refreshing to do a crossword with more American cultural references, as opposed to the British ones I’m used to. The clues were definitely easier, though, so I think we’ll stick to the London Times for now.

  • English: It’s really useful to be married to a grammarian.

Fri 30 Jul 2004

  • gtk: I finished my GtkTreeView typeahead patch earlier this week and posted it to gtk-devel-list. I also backported it to gtk+-2.4.4 and built it into rawhide. It requires installing ‘–nodeps’ for fc2, but seems work nicely.

    It makes using the filechooser a better experience and is good for lists in general. It could be a little bit better, though. I’m tempted to include a new signal for it that lets applications know when the entry was activated, so that selecting a directory would change it immediately instead of setting the cursor. Alternatively, we could expose the entry to applications, though I’m less happy with that approach. I could also special case it in the FileChooser and not worry about other applications. Either way, it’s much closer to the original vision of the FileChooser, and will hopefully make some of the grumbling about the lack of an entry go away.

Tue 27 Jul 2004

  • FIRE: The grill just caught fire! There were flames everywhere, and I had to grab a pitcher of water from the kitchen to put it out! Some leaves apparently blew into the control space in front, and they combusted sending flames directly into that space. I think the knobs are fried, and the paint is peeling.

    Bratwurst just doesnt taste the same when cooked in the kitchen.

Sat 24 Jul 2004

  • mime: Dave Camp, Ray Strode and I spent last week struggling with the MIME system. We made some headway (or at least managed to get a release out). Next week, we tackle monitoring. And fixing bugs. And ABI problems.

  • shadows: After chatting with Matthias last week, I decided to try to put together a visual index for the GTK+ docs. The current index is quite overwhelming, and not that useful. This would simply be an image of widgets linking to their location in the docs. I wrote a quick little program based on the hig-shooter/screenshooter to take these screenshots on Friday and put up some shots at http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/viogw/

    I haven’t written the index yet, and indeed, I should do a few more widgets before putting it up. We might want to also include a screenshot in the header of each widget page.

    Anders also contributed a drop shadow routine giving a nice appearance to the images. I took the shadow code, and added it to gnome-panel-screenshot (bug #148367). I need to update the hig-shooter next.

  • sports: What a Wild Red Sox game on TV today.

  • drinks: Zana made a gallon of sweet tea earlier this week. It was great to drink while working on the MIME code. She rocks!!