Older blog entries for RossBurton (starting at number 2)

24 Mar 2002 (updated 24 Mar 2002 at 13:00 UTC) »

GNOME 2

I finally got fed up waiting for the GNOME 2 packages to appear in Debian Sid (the "crypto-in-main" event is finally happening, when crypto-related software doesn't have to be in "non-US"), so I grabbed Garnome 0.8.

A full day of downloading and compiling later (this is a 550MHz P3 on a dial-up line) and I've got the GNOME 2 desktop for real! Excellent stuff guys. I've been running some of the applications at work but this is much better.

Now of course, I start filing bugs...

Books

I'm now reading 3001. 2061 was a bit of a let–down — as he explored life on Europa the concepts were good but it seemed that too much of it was just taken verbatim from 2001 and 2010. That ruined the feeling of "new territory" for me as entire chapters were familiar. Then again, ACC does acknowledge this at the end of the book. Also Heywood "ascending" to the same level as Dave and Hal seemed contrived, a bit hacky.

3001 is a return to form — so far (1/3 of the way through) it is an analysis of the current state of humanity, although Poole is about to go to Lucifer (né Jupiter) which will be fun. The tension is building as the last line of 2061 was "and the Monolith awoke for the second time".

London

This weekend my partner's father and step-mother came up to see us. As they have not been to London often (you don't really have the opportunity when you live in Plymouth) we went to London to do The Tourist Thing. Harrods, followed by meals in restaurants, then off to St Pauls Cathedral for a quick "oooh" and then down to the Millenium Bridge, sans wave motion. That bridge gets 9/10 from me, it looks really good and has an excellent view of the river. Then we wandered down Bankside and Southbank to the Millenium Eye (can you see the theme here yet?).

The Eye is really cool — I hope they keep it as a permament stucture. For a measly £10 you get a 30 minute ride which goes up 135 feet. The view is fantastic, even though the day we went it was cloudy. Amusingly enough we could see where our old flat in Crystal Palace, south London was, as there is the TV transmitter for south London about 500 meters away.

Damn. The last diary entry was almost a year ago (I will keep a diary, I will).

When I'm not doing real work (porting code to various embedded chips, hacking on compilers) I am starting to play around with the brand new GNOME 2 environment. It is so much cooler than GNOME 1, and I am going to write a few programs to learn the libraries:

  • An apt-get wrapping Druid to automate the tasks of updating my rather weird Debian APT setup.
  • A blog editor — several of these exist already and I am sure I saw one written for GNOME. I may just try the Mozilla one I saw yesterday. However, a pluggable GTKHTML2 editor application would be cool.
  • The long–term goal is to produce a decent XML editor. Conglomerate looked very cool but is now dead. Pollo is also a very nice Java tool — a merge of the two written in GTK+ 2 would be good. Of course for now there is always XEmacs+psgml+DTDs...

On a totally unrelated note I have been reading like mad recently. A few months ago I started reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series from start to end. I had read most of the books but reading them without a break gave me much more insight into the characters — there are far more cross-references than I even thought.

I have just started reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series. Last week I read 2001, which proved to be far better than I remembered (last time I read it was ~1995). Although Kubrick's film is excellent, it is missing some magical omph that the book has. Saturday just gone I started to read 2010 in the bath. Why oh why did ACC decide to base 2010 on the film of 2001 instead of the book? The resulting confusion is pretty hard to keep track off, I may have to watch the film again if I have the time.

What else is going on? For Christmas I bought myself a present: an IBM ThinkPad X22. What a toy! It's very handy now that I don't live very close to work, and have a 90 minute commute to do. If anyone else has one of these (or similar) and has got hiberation working, could you email me please?

Well, haven't I been busy recently. I decided that I wanted to learn C, so I picked up the C book by K&R, read it to learn the differences between Java (which I know well) and C.

Now, pick a subject... hmm. Galeon. That could do with XBEL (XML Bookmark Exchange Language) support.

Thus for the last few days I've been talking to the Python XML SIG about extending the XBEL specification while coding up XBEL import/export for Galeon. Good fun!

On another note: my Caffine t-shirt and fluffy tux from Think Geek turned up yesterday. Tux is so cute, I've got to buy more.

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