You do not talk about fight club

Consequently, I shouldn’t have mentioned that in public either. Well, I’m not going to talk about fight club (even though it is a great movie, and I finally got the book)…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. 😉 Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:

I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.

And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.

Dancing to the Rhythm of the War Drums

We are particularly proud of all the hacking and smoke-testing that has been going on during the GNOME 2.19.3 and .4 ((Which, coincidentally, still has not been released due to one particular severe issue, spotted by the GARNOMEies. Bug 449318, immediately worked around by the GARNOME Team, so we could roll 2.19.4 in time.)) releases ((Yes, Luis, I too love footnotes.)). New tarballs have been built and tested by various GARNOMEies almost in real time, as fast as they have been uploaded and as fast as we could update SVN.

Once again, this early testing revealed a number of serious issues with some of the GNOME applications. A bunch of bug reports where filed, resulting in new, fixed tarballs being rolled as quickly as possible — before the official release deadline. Of course, thanks to the developers too, who have been highly responsive.

Our contribution to make even unstable development releases a somewhat sane place to live. Thank you, #garnome!

s/written/oral/ # exam

Managed to negotiate an oral exam (for a later date), instead of the written exam, which was scheduled for the week of GUADEC. Yay.

Hasn’t been tough convincing the prof. Mentioning it’s a developer conference almost was sufficient, he supports things like this. While I didn’t really expect him to know about GUADEC… having to explain GNOME, however, was a little bit embarassing.

T minus 180 minutes

Just a friendly reminder – 2.19.3 is due to be released before midnight UTC, today. 😉   (Come on, this is supposed to be fun for volunteers, isn’t it? You know I love you guys.)

On a related note, GARNOME 2.19.3 has just been rolled and is available at a mirror near you.

2.17.3 is OUT

We are pleased to announce the release of GARNOME 2.17.3 — ahead of the official GNOME release, which is expected to be announced soon (read hours). After constant updating, tweaking and testing, especially the last 2 days, the actual release was smooth and quickly done.

Get the code while it’s hot, and fix (ok, or report) bugs before anyone else does. Get the love now!

xsnow ?!

Dave, you are so right, xsnow is a great app for the holiday season (as is my “special” music CD dated 1994, but that would be a different story).

I first saw this years ago on my account in a Sparc Station pool. We have been limited to using OLVWM, but the admins where kind enough to add xsnow by default to the session early Dec. Nice surprise. I quickly got that for my own machines…

However, you probably do recall correctly, and there is an issue with running xsnow on a GNOME Desktop. At least it has been last time I checked. The issue is, that the snowflakes properly work with the background image, but cause “severe damage” to the icons on your Desktop. A snowflake falling right through these icons leave a trail behind, re-rendering the background image, instead of the icon. Just a couple of minutes, and you won’t see any icon unless you “wipe off the snow” with the mouse or, even better, a larg-ish window.

I spent some time hacking a custom version (2 years ago?), implementing some code from xpenguins. It kind of worked, and supported command line tweaking, but anything close to a smooth re-rendering appearance really hogged my CPU.

From your screenshot, it looks like there are no Desktop icons. So that would be the reason, why it now “works” for you running GNOME, I guess. Or maybe there finally *is* a fix? I need to check that… 🙂

(Unfortunately you still won’t see this on p.g.o, so I am going to poke you on IRC instead.)