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!
Board? I have a better use for you..
Since we’re all talking about rockstars. I think we need to be talking about our rockstars who write articles to the journal. I will consider you a rockstar if you write articles for us. We have another issue coming up and I would like to see some more articles. No matter what kind of GNOME or even generic all purpose desktop architecture like for instance Galago or DBus; we’d be interested.
So help us come up with another great issue of GNOME Journal!
Long time no blog..
It’s been an eventful couple of months and I haven’t had time to really blog or even get too much involved in GNOME. Those of you who I have interviewed and are expecting that article, I beg patience as I try to work out my sudden busy home and work life.
Work has been pretty painful with a lot of changes. We had layoffs about 3 weeks ago and luckily I didn’t get voted off the island. But there is still a lot of upheaval. It’s also hard to watch people you’ve known over 10 years be let go.
My wife has been looking for work and in her free time has been working on organizing our house. Of course that frequently means that as her designated partner-in-crime that I have been given oversight powers regardless of whether I want them or not!
I’ve almost finished one article and have about 3 more to finish before my labours are complete. I encourage others to write for the journal. I have a number of articles that I think would be good to write. If you’re interested, please contact me.
The other day, we had someone running for the Oregon legislature going door to door. He looked pretty frazzled and he started going through his scripted introduction with my wife. Until of course I came to the door. Over the past couple of years I’ve become much more political active or more accurately, politically aware. Probably has a lot to do with the party in charge these days. I gave him an earful about what I felt was wrong with Oregon/Country/World. He perked up a bit after that. We had some discussions on open source/free software and he was a big proponent of it. I think it’s a good bet that he might win the seat. I have a unique opportunity to apply some influence in oregon politics and push for more free software/desktop whatever.
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 #gnome-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.
Guadec es muy bein!
That’s as good as my spanish gets. It’s my first (and of course best) GUADEC for me. I’ve been having a great time finally meeting the people I’ve been talking and emailing since the early days of GNOME. So it’s been a great treat for me to be able to come and meet everyone.
Special shout out to the Imendio guys for the many nights of awesome fun!
I’ll probably be coming back with some stuff to do it seems. But that’s alright.
Benjamin,
I’m not ignoring you, you bastard! Martyn.. you must admit I make a great model. I’m happy to model other bling. 🙂
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.
And away we go…
So once again it’s been forever since I’ve actually blogged something. We had some reorganization at work and it’s been kicking my ass in a majuor way. I’ve had no time to do anything useful other than to whine. My one claim is that I managed to write one article for GNOME Journal. The last release was somewhat disapointing as it didn’t seem to get as good a reception as the previous one. Maybe it’s just my perception I don’t know.
I’ve decided to give “gimmie” a try. Gimmie as people have noted before is sort of a replacement for your panel and consolidates common, repetitive tasks to a single location. I deleted my bottom panel and replaced it with Folgers crys.. er I mean gimmie. I’ve been doing this for like over a week now and I don’t miss my panel. I’ve also been able to delete the applications menu on top. My only complaint is the hideous pastel colors. I think Alex was in L.A. too long. 🙂 It would be interesting to turn this into a type of panel in GNOME.
Finally, I’ve decided to help out with GUADEC, in the Journal section since it seems that writing and marketing has been more my forte of late.
One final note on GUADEC, Quim Gil needs your help! It’s the last stretch and this is probably the hardest, most tension riddled time for Quim and I speak from someone who has been on a planning committee for a conference; this is the time for the GNOME community to help out!! Quim is probably too busy to actualy ask for help but please go to http://www.guadec.org/ and sign up to volunteer your time in helping GUADEC be an awesome event. Even if you’re not able to show up, I’m sure any time you could sink would be much appreciated.
I had my 37th birthday May 11th, and it was pretty pedestrian. Hard to believe you’re that old. I don’t feel that old, I feel the same as I did when I was 25. I guess you only feel as old as you think you are.
Anyways, the birthday was pretty pedestrian but I did manage to watch a hindi movie called Yaadon ki Bharaat . As with most bollywood movies there are a number of songs on it. This particular movie was made in 1973 and has a number of hippie references right down to the headbands. I’ve known the songs since I was little, but never watched the movie. Mostly because I’ve had situations where you really enjoy the songs and then when you watch the movie it’s this exceptionally painful, cheesy scene that you have to somehow erase from your mind in order to enjoy the song again. The songs, and the movie did not disapoint! What struck me though was the sophistication. The sets were way better than anything in the 80s, and the incredible wonderful wardrobe of Zeenat Aman ! The 70s were probably the best time period for Hindi movies. There was an avante garde attitude to the whole thing. Something happened around the late 70s, and I suspect that the “social police” decided that things were going out of control. I consider most of the movies made in the late 60s to the late 70s to be some of the best of indian cinema.
The story was okay, but not the best but it was an entertaining three hours and it’s worth it just watching Zeenat Aman and the funky dancing!
What if the last thing you hear was song?
Well another month has gone by. It’s been pretty busy for me. Been pushing on trying to get more articles for GJ this time around and it seems we got a better set of articles than before.
The deadline was supposed to be today, but we’ll probably extend it since we are expecting some articles. The article I was supposed to do has kind of sat by the wayside. I have no excuse. It was pure laziness. I also blame Ross, because he’s easy to blame.
Rhythmbox well probably be having another release here soon. Lots of bug fixes. I’m hoping the release name will be “Iain’s Pain” or “Et Tu, Iain?” due to the complete rejection of a certain Irishman of our software. May a thousand fleas molest him and his beer. That said, we’re close to a plugin system. Three cheers to kikidonk ! Of course I volunteered him by spreading a rumor that he was going to do it. 🙂
Started my next class which is actually an open source project called ‘xcb’. Some interesting with the composite stuff in Xorg. I’m hoping that it’ll be a great learning experince. The concept of my project is pretty exciting and it’s great to do some eye candy.
Listened to GWB’s SOTU; was underwhelmed.
Work’s been busy, finally started to finally do some development instead of my usual sysadmin duties. Been really ramping on python since most of it is in that. It’s a great language and it’s finally taken hold in our group. I’d like to think that I had something to do with that since I was doing most of the evangalism there. Of course other groups have already discovered python. We’re a bit late. 🙂
Joined the joint Freedesktop marketing team. Some nice discussions, and it’s nice to do something together insetad of having our users at loggerheads with each other because of their choice of desktops. But it’s always the case of human nature that we need to pick a side. I know I do that all the time, but then I like to argue. 🙂
What’s really been awesome has been the number of new volunteers working on GNOME documentation and the kind of stuff Shaun has been doing. Really good stuff. Nobody talks about documentation because it’s always a sidebar issue, but when it comes to selling to the masses or to the govt, good documentation is an important training issue.
I’ll participate later on the GNOME Sucks/Rocks. I do have some things I would like to weigh in on.
So thats the way it was, Wed Feb 1, 2006…
Feb 1st Article Submission Deadline for GJ
The GNOME Journal team is once again getting prepared to write some articles and we encourage others to write some kick butt articles for GJ.
The deadline for the articles is Feb 1st so if you have an idea to write about please contact us and let us know what you’re doing so that we can put it up in the wiki.
On the personal front, things are going well. I’m going to be doing a project on some xorg hacking. Check out XCB. The initial project is to write a reference window manager. Should be fun as my first class that lets me hack on free software.
There’s been a lot of talk from the mono folks about Banshee. I’ve looked at Banshee and what they have is pretty impressive; a great piece of work. However, don’t count out Rhythmbox! Our CVS committing action has been stupendous with a steady march towards 0.9.3. If you’ve been using the breezy version of Rhythmbox, you’ll see some cool features if you try out HEAD.
I’ve done some work in breaking out rhythmdb out of rhythmbox which was fairly easy to do. The idea is to be able to have a canonical source for a music database. My knowledge in databases is pretty near zilch so it will be a challenge trying to do something with this considering the amount of free time I have.
Saturday, My wife and I going to inner tubing on Mount Hood. That should be a blast. I really wish though I had one of those pocket cameras so I could take a picture on the way down! I’m looking forward to having some fun in the snow.
Happy New Year..
It’s been forever since I’ve blogged about anything and I’m afraid I still have nothing to blog about. heh. First off:
A very happy new year to everyone!
I have a big feeling that 2006 is going to be a much better year in 2005. 2005 was a mostly good year personally but I’m hoping next year will be better.
Finally, I want to do a shout out to all my gnome journal peeps. We’ve have completed one year of GNOME Journal and I’m looking forward to some new stuff this year.
We are still looking for people who are interested in writing about GNOME. This could be anything like interesting tricks, trends, or spot light on interesting features.
sri