The Gist

I know there’s a lot of photo geeks in Gnome land, so I’m trolling here for
camera recommendations. I have only two requirements: it has to be small
enough to fit in my pocket, and it has to be good for low-light motion shots.
As for pockets, keep in mind that I have a
Neuros, and that beast manages to
fit in my pocket. Mostly, it can’t have a lens that sticks out. And as for
low-light motion shots,
here’s
a picture that should have been awesome, but was thwarted by a slow
shutter and my lack of experience.

Last night, there was a Groovatron
concert here in Champaign. Those who know me well may know that Groovatron
is one of my favorite jam bands. Their shows just kick ass. But I didn’t
go to the concert. Why? Dancing, that’s why.

This is what my schedule looks like right now:

Monday

9:15–whenever, dance practice with the Dancing Illini

Tuesday

9:30–10:45, Nightclub Two-Step and New York Hustle lessons
10:45–12:00, Salsa practice

Wednesday

8:30–10:00, Tango lessons

Thursday

8:00–9:15, Swing lessons
9:30–10:45, Salsa and Cha-Cha lessons

Friday

5:15–6:30, Salsa lessons
11:00–2:00, Salsa night at the Regent

In addition to all that, I’m going to a weekend-long hustle workshop
in Chicago tomorrow. I think I might be insane, but it’s a good kind
of insanity.

I’m looking for recommendations for books similar to
The
Elements of Typographic Style and
The
Chicago Manual of Style, but for other languages and writing systems. I’m
particularly interested in the typographic and writing style conventions of
non-Western languages, although there’s still plenty of variation in Western
languages that I’m not familiar with. Bonus points if I can get it translated
to English, but that’s not necessary.

Hey, I’ll even give you a
vote
if you buy it for me.

Sunday we’ll be having a GNOME love day dedicated to Yelp hacking.
Rather than pasting the announcement yet again, here’s the
email thread, and here’s the
FootNotes story.
There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, and some of our coolest hackers
will be there to help things move along.

John,
(that’s Fleck for the
google-fu) you should check out the
Periodic Table
Table. It’s a collection of nearly all the elements (well, 109
of them), organized nicely in a custom-built table. Theo Gray, the
creator of the table, has all sorts of fun knicknacks in the frontend
area at Wolfram, which is about three meters from my (comparitively
boring) cubicle. Note also the
Triangle
Table, which should excite any mathematician readers.

My hackergotchi makes
me look like a 13 year-old dweeb. This bothers me, because I am not 13.
I will destroy Curtis.

Made the drive to Chicago to see Ian
Moore again.
(Remember my ten
artists you’ve never heard of, but should have?) I’ve lost count of how
many times I’ve been to see him. Certain people (namely, my brother and his
wife) have been pestering him about playing in Indy. And Friday, he actually
played in Indiana, but he played in Evansville. Evansfreakingville!
What’s that? You’ve never heard of Evansville? Exactly my point.

Ian has a new CD out, “Luminaria”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t
seem to be on CDBaby yet, so I’ll give
some linkage to the megaconglomco.
Buy Luminaria. Go on, I’ll wait.

On the GNOME front (as if anyone else reads my blog): Yelp is now using
Gecko, James Bowes has done work on getting man pages back in, and I’ll
be making a gnome-doc-utils release this weekend (including Danilo’s
rocking xml2po). Yelp has 102 bugzilla entries.
My goal is to bring it to a dozen for GNOME 2.10. Who wants to share
in the excitement?

Oh, and it’s still not too late to
VOTE.

I saw Groovatron in concert last
night. They were opening for The Wailers. You know, of Bob Marley and.
As expected, Groovatron kicked ass.

So I decided to compile a list of ten artists you’ve never heard of, but
should have. Here goes:

• Afroskull
• Furley
• Garaj Mahal
  (featuring Fareed Haque)
• Groovatron
• Ian Moore
• Smokestack
• Tea Leaf Green
• ulu
• Umphrey’s McGee
• Watercress

Share and enjoy.

Introducing the all new Inverse Desktop Bounties for Shaun! If you’re
thinking “How can I get Shaun to work on man pages?� or “How can I get
Shaun to work on full text search?�, then this is for you. You can now
cast your vote for what I should work on.

Mind you, voting isn’t free. But it only costs a CD. And besides
supporting free software development, you’ll also be supporting
independant musicians. You can go to bed feeling good about yourself.

VOTE TODAY

Today is the 9th, for a little while longer. Tarballs for 2.8.0 are due
on Monday, the 13th. I’m sure everybody is very excited, and rightly so.
But perhaps you find yourself thinking, “Gee, there’s not much to do this
late in the release cycle. I should just kick back and take a well-earned
break, but I can’t. I’m bored!â€? If so, I have a solution: HELP ME.

Currently, I have maintainer approval to commit the following documents,
but have not yet committed new documentation:

• Bug Buddy Manual
• Character Map Manual
• Eye of GNOME Manual
• Disk Mounter Applet Manual
• Geyes Applet Manual
• Inbox Monitor Applet Manual
• Keyboard Layout Switcher Applet Manual
• Modem Lights Applet Manual
• Sticky Notes Applet Manual
• Stock Ticker Applet Manual
• System Monitor Applet Manual
• Volume Control Applet Manual
• Weather Report Applet Manual
• Wireless Link Monitor Applet Manual
• Network Manual Applet Manual
• GNOME PDF Viewer Manual

The following manuals appear either maintainerless or ostensibly maintained by
the GDP, but I haven’t heard back from the package maintainers:

• File Roller Manual
• GNOME Ghostview Manual
• Aisleriot Manual
• Glines Manual
• Gnect Manual
• Gnometris Manual
• Iagno Manual
• GNOME Klotski Manual
• Mahjongg Manual
• GNOME Mines Manual
• Gnibbles Manual
• GNOME Robots Manual
• Same-GNOME Manual
• GNOME Stones Manual
• Gtali Manual
• GNOME Tetravex Manual
• Clock Applet Manual
• Fish Applet Manual
• System Monitor Manual
• Dictionary Manual
• Floppy Formatter Manual
• Search for Files Manual
• System Log Manual
• GNOME Terminal Manual

We also still don’t have revisions in place for the User’s Guide and System
Administrator’s Guide. That’s 42 documents. Now you know the question.

I have contributed revisions for a number of these. Somebody has to look
them over, add some administrative DocBook crap, and commit them. So far,
that person is me. I don’t have contributions for all of them. Somebody
just has to update the documents.

If you’re feeling bored this weekend, please jump on IRC and give me a hand
in #docs. I could really use some help here.