unhand me, ruffian, or face my boomstick

Well, wow. Two posts in one month! Thats gotta be a record. 🙂 I sometimes find it more fun to read the blogs than to actually post. Funky.

GNOME stuff has been an all time low as domestic chores and what not have gone up taking up my time. It’s worse in the summer since you want to hang out outside instead of stuck inside. Luckily, I finally got around to installing a hammock so that I can celebrate summer with some beer and a laptop and do both. That is if my wife doesn’t kick me out so that she can enjoy it!

People maybe (or maybe not) have been wondering whats going on with GNOME Journal. GNOME Journal was delayed due to time constraints and will be released real soon now. We’ve added one more editor to the mix so that it’ll take some load off of Jim. Ken Vandine’s wife will be helping out here. Claus has been doing an excellent job though of trying to keep the issue on track and my hats off to him for doing so! That said, it would be really help the journal out if more volunteers could step up to help. Specifically, we’d love to see some people who are more of the liberal arts minded and are interested in journalism and writing. It’s good practice to be able to write. The upside is that your work will be translated and probably will be published in several countries. Those of you who are in contact with people who know writing please approach them! We’d love to hear from you.

I have agreed to set up a booth at OSCON this year. So far things are looking pretty good in terms of volunteers with several people that I know of that will be helping to man the booth. I’m hoping I’m getting an ubuntu t-shirt out of it 😉 That said, having someone coming up with a demo video that does a guided tour of everything GNOME does would be really really cool. When I run the booth last two years most people aren’t curious enough to play around with the desktop but they do take well to demonstrations from what people give. So it would be really awesome to have someone come up with that. I know that Murray had also mentioned something similar. That would kick butt.

No comment on my progress on other things since they are all stalled waiting for me to get some time to work on it.

Was somewhat disapointed with GNOME playing it safe and going with a wierd combo of subversion as the main repository and anoncvs using bazaar. It makes the mix complicated since you can’t really commit things via arch but have to use a different system. We should take more chances. Bazaar just makes more sense for the way we do things. For instance, translators could have their own archive that are mirrors of gnome cvs and we dont’ have to have this requirement that projects like abiword have to move to the GNOME cvs server. There are definitely some benefits. In any case, I’m happy that we actually decided on a direction and I haven’t really made much noise because I fear it will only contribute to stop energy. Hopefuly we’ll move in the future because I think Bazaar is the right tool for the job. Waiting for the rest of the world to realize.

This past weekend was my seventh wedding anniversary. We spent it camping at Lake Quinault in Washington on the Olympic penninsula. It’s the U.S.’s only rainforest. Pretty nice. It didn’t even rain until two hours after we packed up the tent. Overall it was fun, we were steps away from the water’s edge and we had a great view of mountains surrounding a lake. I have pictures.

This weekend I also learned that I have been accepted as a part time grad student at Portland State Unversity as a master’s student in Computer Science. My employer will be footing the bill. I’m looking forward to it. I plan to take two classes at a time in order to speed up graduation. I’ve already got half the credits needed to graduate! Of course this means that my time for other stuff is going to further diminish. :/

Finally, a rant about the Indian Consulate. Now, I ask you. For a country full of engineers, you’d think that they would have a website that would reflect that. Instead, the Indian consulate has a website that looks like my grandmother must have done using html 1.0. Utter, utter crap. High school students could come up with better. They should try hiring them. I’ve been trying for weeks to get these guys to answer a simple question, but I have been unable to do so. I am just frustrated with the lack of attention.

guadec and other stuff..

It’s been forever since I last wrote. Missed a whole month. May 11, was my birthday and I basically spent it walking around downtime Portland with a camera in hand. Picked up two CDs and pretty much spent half my day relaxing.

Been working on and off on my sprinkler system which seems never to be complete since I keep getting distracted by other things. Planning seems to be the biggest problem and the fact that my yard has a lot of roots that I have to plan around.

It’s great to see everyone so charged up after GUADEC! I haven’t heard all the talks but they all seemed really cool and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to go. Since I have to attend a wedding in August I wasn’t able to take the time off to go. Hope everyone is all motivated. 🙂

I haven’t been able to weigh in on the next gen VCS discussion, but I’m planning on writing an article on it. My focus is really about the social aspects of the change rather than technical merits. Especially how it relates to what discussions that have been going on at GUADEC. Some people want to start with subversion and then perhaps move to another one. Waste of time, you spend a lot of time setting up subversion only to throw it away in 6 months plus the work to convert things over? Not worth it and if I was the sysadmin I would not be happy.

Love the new planet stuff. Steve Gerrity’s work kicks ass. I hear he’s working on www.gnome.org. Which seriously needs work. If we want to look good we need to make our site be useful. But I’m repeating the obvious.

Put out some new pictures of spring that I took back in April. 🙂
look here

Thats it for now…