Working Hard, and Hardly Blogging

It’s been… three months since I’ve blogged!? No, I’m not dead, just dying one day at a time, like the rest of us. Actually, I’m far from glum, just busy busy busy.

Truth is that I’ve been working. Earlier this year I joined Google as a software engineer (on Google Maps / Google Earth). A month or so ago we launched a wagonload of new stuff – you can even see a photo of me from Mike Pegg’s incredible Google Maps Mania blog about the developer day that we hosted, right before Where 2.0. Mike’s a cool guy, who maintains the busy site in his spare time. I’m also fourth from the left, back row at the Sydney Googlers photo, safely avoiding those giant novelty foam letters.

Yeah, Google is awesome to work for – there’s the oft-mentioned perks like the food, there’s plenty of interesting, smart, techy people who work and give talks here (y’know, things like the guy who invented Python answers your dumb posts to the internal Python-help mailing list), and you get to goof around for hours on Google Earth for Linux and call it work because you’re, uh, testing its cross-platforminess.

On the downside, they do work you hard, and especially hard leading up to launch, and addressing the inevitable teething problems afterwards. Which means I have hardly (haha! pun!) done any significant GNOMEy stuff for a long, long time :-(, and I missed what looked like a fantastic GUADEC. Oh, yeah, and then there’s real life stuff like moving house, and the sleep deprivation that was the World Cup. My compatriot Wes sums up the Australian tilt at the goblet (and ‘that penalty’) thusly: “Watching the Soccerroos lose to Italy was
like taking a girl out for posh, gourmet dinner, then drinks at a
quiet dark bar playing jazz, maybe a slow dance – whispering cute
witticisms in her ear; hushed giggles in response, a slow drive home,
and at the last minute, as you walk her to her door, she is shot in
the head by an Italian Sniper.”

Deskbar sighting #1: Jorge Castro sneaks a peek at what will come in Deskbar 2.16.

Deskbar sighting #2: Mark Pilgrim switches from Mac to Linux, and soon afterwards adds his Bugzilla-searching Deskbar plugin (possibly based on Stewart Smith’s MySQL bug look-up plug-in??) to the GNOME Wiki. Hooray for Python applets in GNOME. No comment on Mono applets :-). Mark Pilgrim incidentally wrote the book that got me into Python. I went to the bookstore a few years ago, and saw a whole bunch of books on Perl, but not many Python books. My hypothesis is that potential Python book authors just give up in the face that Dive Into Python is both awesome and free to download (although the paperback is still nice to have), albeit written by a wacko who adds raisins to his fruit salads.

Deskbar sighting #3: Jokosher hacker Stuart Langridge took the PyGTK API plug-in and uses it to look up GStreamer API docs.