Alll my blogs begin with long time no post.. hah!

Well, look whose blogging!  That’s right, it’s me. Let’s see if I remember how to do all this bloggy stuff…

Last time or was that episode?  Episode then.  I”m feeling peevish,  I blogged I was defending vegetarianism and posted a picture.  Sorry no picture this time.  I have been eating good stuff though. 😉  Including a nice home made vegetarian pizza.  Maybe I’ll post it.  If y’all are nice to me and such.

Since then, I’ve been busy with school and not much time for GNOME other than to hang out.   I guess I’m here for the beer this year.  It was great meeting the lot of you at OSCON which seems to be the post destination after GUADEC.  Sadly, none of you bought me a t-shirt.  Shame on you.  I thought I was the mascot, I guess it was all pillow talk.

I have approximately less than a year to graduate with a M.S. in C.S. at  Portland State University.   I can’t wait since it’s been a real pain doing work and school and people have noticed that my contributions have shrunk to a trickle.

Anyways, knowing this audience, y’all want to talk about GNOMEy stuff.  Too bad.  We’re talking about me.  I’m taking over for Rich Burridge!  But we’re going to talk bout furry felines, not kids.  Which means we’re going to talk about David Schleef.  Don’t worry, he loves when we talk about him.  It makes Dirac development faster.  Anyhoo, Every friday, I intend to post some cynical observation about *something*.

I do have some stuff to talk bout that isn’t about my boring life.  That is that you may have noticed the GNOME Journal has been a bit stagnant due to its members being really busy with either their jobs or other projects that take up their time.  Some of you are probably read Planet for fun, and sometimes think “what a great bunch of people, I wish I could help out.  But I can’t because David Schleef won’t let me.”  You DON’T need David Schleef‘s permission.  (remember, Dirac code is speeding up now, keep talking about him!)  No, we are looking for a few good people, preferably human, but we have known to take on Vulcans; we aren’t racist, green blood not withstanding,  to help out with writing articles.  Maybe you think “I don’t know what to write”, or maybe you’re scared.  If your’e scared, it’s obvious you haven’t been to GUADEC.  There’s nothing to be scared of.  These people are pushovers.  if you get into a situation, remember “beer is GNOME kryptonite” keep a can with you always.  If they are Australian, Fosters will actually repel them it’s like holy water on vampires!  ANYWAYS..  We have plenty of ideas we think would make good articles.  We need people.  You are of course free to write your own as well.  Write what you think might be interesting and we’ll do the rest. Hope you’ll sign up.  Send me some email, or join us on irc in the -journal channel.  Bring your dog, we like pets.

The other thing is that I’ve been actually doing some hacking.  Yes, surprising as that might be.  I have taken an open source class, so I essentially got to take 8 weeks and learn glib/goject/sqlite and write me up a new backend for Rhythmbox.  It’s not quite finished but most of the major sutff is done and I’m trying to get into a useable state before sticking it in bugzilla.  One might be tempted to think sqlite is a superior solution cuz well it’s sqlite and it’s the best thing evah!  Keep in mind the current backend is pretty damn good and is a result of several years of tweaking.  It’ll be a while before this backend has any chance of being supported.  Huge thanks to teuf and moch for giving their time to help me and answer questions.  But the project has been good for me as I’ve finally got time to learn all those dependencies that I always whined about that I couldn’t learn.  Hopefully I get to participate more in the development process than I have.

Well, that’s it for me.  I’ll post something mildly amusing on Friday.

Oh yeah, contact information.. mail me at sriram DOT ramkrishna DOT gmail DOT com if you are interested in helping writing articles.  Free picture of me for the first person to respond!

Arriving somewhere not here.

It’s been a tough week. I spent the last 10 days working my butt off. I think at least 5 of those nights I was up late working into the wee mornings of the morning on a project. C can really get on my nerves, since most of my problems when I program with C is dealing with it’s memory management. While powerful it can really lead you astray even for proficient programmers.

This seems to be my month for music with Porcupine Tree, Rush, Lacuna Coil and others going on tour. I just saw Porcupine Tree and it was a great show. It’s not as much entertaining as some others, but they obviously are consummate musicians and that really all that matters. I’m also planning on taking a trip to Seattle to go see Loreena McKennit who hasn’t had an album in 10 years. Maybe others might be interested as well.

GNOME stuff has been pretty non-existent for me due to work and school pressures,. I’m moving to a new group on the condition I finish a particularly thorny project which has been kicking my butt since it’s really mostly about social engineering and project planning. My frustration proves that I’m not cut out to be doing managerial roles. I can do them, and do them well but it’s not what I like doing.

GNOME Journal is struggling to put out another release. THis is a tough project,and it can do with a lot more contributors who might be willing to do the job of finding intersting aspects of the project. If you’re interested I have several ideas including a running theme of GNOME companies that I think indicates some idea of where our project is going.

GNOME Journal has alwyas been rewarding because we always get the non-technical people where sometimes isn’t obvious where they might be able to contribute. GNOME Journal is an excellent starting pointing point. Especially if you’re a fan of a particular piece of software. You’re able to speak to the person and ask critical questions about the project. I think the quality is high, the motivation is high, but the lack of people to get things done is a little bit of a downer. People like Jim Hodap, Lucas Rocha, Ken Van Dine and others have really put a lot of effort into this project.

If you have interesting ideas that you want to express, you should write to us, we are interested!!

One other thing is that I’m really happy to see new faces on Planet GNOME. It’s really great to see all the great applications that people are writing. The vitality of a project like GNOME comes from the new contributors that come into the project, we live on their energy and their dedication on creating something great.

GNOME Journal Submission Deadline April 1st.

Greetings! Long time no blog…

Just wanted to let people know that the deadline for next issue of GNOME Journal is April 1st. Please get us your fun and interesting articles to us! You can mail me at:

sriram_*_*.ramkrishna_*_*@gmail.com

Other than that. It’s been pretty busy, finished off a very interesting class on operating systems and now looking forward to a class on network architecture.

GNOME Journal article deadline February 10th

Just a quick note to remind everyone that article submission deadline is due February 10th. We’re looking for about a total of 5 articles. So if you have an idea for an article, please mail me and let me know your ideas!

Well, that’s it. I’m not very witty on blogs.

Happy New Year!

Just want to wish my friends around the world a very happy and prosperous New Year and that I hope all that you wish to accomplish this year comes true.

Best Wishes!

GNOME Journal articles due August 1st.

Just a reminder for those who are writing articles or even want to write articles that the deadline is August 1st.

If you like to write an article and don’t know how to start (it’s easy!) bug us on irc in -journal or just subscribe to the mailing list.

-==-

That said, I had the advantage of doing several interviews including one through VOIP. I’m sure these people are all wondering what happened to the interviews I’ve done. I haven’t gotten around to them since when I came back I was hit with a lot of work and with my wife out of school, we’ve been busy with home stuff. So I’m hoping that I will be able to get articles in by August 1st.

Doctor in the house!

So, I haven’t been around the last couple of days with my house full of relatives. Yesterday, my wife after four years of hard work finally earned her degree in dentistry. It was a great time, we had two commencements; one was at the school itself and there was a more grandiose version that involves all the disciplines at a more formal locale in downtown Portland, at the Arlene Schnitzer Hall. The local commencement the class president was trying hard to not break down and cry during his speech. A good guy.

One’s interesting this time is that this is the first time that OHSU managed to stream the hooding ceremony. Reports from relatives in India was that they were all able to see it clearly. This is pretty good news. Alas, they used Real server to accomplish it. Obviously, we need to apply a little marketing to use Fluendo server might be more interesting. Next time I’m up on the hill, I should probably do a little speal on it.

(wow, I managed to say something GNOME related here. 🙂

Anyways, being gone for the past couple of days have made it hard for me to do some of the press work for GUADEC that I had volunteered to do. I had written down a couple of “mini-articles”. It’s a little hard to figure out the “marketing” since they are marketing. As usual, I’m probably over-complicating the issue. But I’ll probably post something to the guadec-list on what I have later today if I get a chance.