auspex: So, you noticed why gnome-games is never maintained for a large amount of time by a single person? The code is hellish as much of it has been incrementally edited over many years.

I was the gnome-games maintainer up to... well... a few hours ago now, and didn't really have the time to seriously attack the code and clean it all up. Crufty code is why I was removing games which are not used. Luckily Callum McKenzie (the new maintainer) appears to have more free time that I do, which is good.

I do feel that the games have a far better look than they did in GNOME 2.0, but there is still a long way to go. Hopefully Callum can carry on the way he started -- which was very well, within a day of getting cvs commit access a serious amount of code was committed and a release was made -- and rework the code.

Does anyone set aside a day to refactor, to fix bugs, to close bugs, to look for bugs?

At work we spend serious amounts of time refactoring as required, but I do think this is something which not enough people do. Refactoring doesn't need to be done often, and when it does it has to be done carefully, but a time slot for checking bug reports/fixing open bugs is a very good idea.

auspex: that's exactly the sort of UI issues I am trying to remove from gnome-games for GNOME 2.4. Feel free to browse the bugzilla and file more bugs.

It is possible to get RSS views of people's diaries? I've started to use the wonderful Straw but I miss Advogato. If I could get the recentlog and individual diaries as RSS, I'd be a very happy man.

raph, any chance of this?

Right, I can subscribe to /articles.xml to get a RSS feed of the articles, but /recentlogs.xml doesn't exist.

Is there a way to get a RSS feed of the recent logs from Advogato?

Whoops

Hmm, I've been lacking in updating the diary a bit... Oh well. Today I am at home nursing a yucky cold, so I thought I'd write an entry.

Work is getting better recently - less assembler, low-level C and debugging, and more Java interface coding. I used to like Swing, but after using GTK+ 2, Swing has some really annoying features. A total lack of a single decent layout component, for starters. To help in the future I am planning on writing a clone of libglade for Swing, so I can design a UI using Glade, and then load it at runtime in Java. I'm not entirely sure how all this would work though, but I will at least need to write clones of the GTK+ layout components.

Book wise - I finished the The Return of the King, The Time Machine, started to read War of the Worlds (which bought back many memories of listening to the vinyl when I was 10). I'm currently re-reading Use of Weapons, and have Iain Bank's latest, Dead Air, sitting on my desk. I hope it's good, The Business didn't really do anything for me.

The best news I've seen for a long time is that Babylon 5 series 1 DVDs are being released in England, contatry to some people. I found play.com does them, with a very respectable discount.

Web Site

I finally uploaded the new layout (stolen from MovableType) to burtonini.com. All I need to do now is find a suitable smalll PHP based content server, which also does URL re-writing. I'd like to use AxKit but my hosting side doesn't run mod_perl. This looks interesting though, so I'll wait for mglazer to unveil the demo site.

URL re-writing is an essential part of the system, as the most annoying part of the dynamic web for me is seing URLs such as http://www.foo.com/page.pl?content=welcome. Totally uncachable by any proxy servers on web browsers, as the content could change every second. Of course, the appropriate cache control headers could be added as well, but then my objection is the vile URL.