Hmm...read the newest meta article about advogato and everything that's surrounding it. Quite interesting. It seems to me that at times, people really just want to predict extreme consequences for relatively simple things happening. It seems like everybody wants to be a doomsayer or an unshakeable optimist.

Kinda funny how that article degenerated into name calling, arguments about sexism, and started to border on slurs about other people's sexual preference/identity. IMHO all of that stuff has nothing to do with free software and is therefore completely uninteresting to me when I come to advogato, but if that's what people want to talk about, they'll post regardless of what you think about it.

Did anybody but me see the article that said something along the lines of "This was our last chance for a site with rational discourse, and it has now failed"? -- that's just a little too weird for me, especially since it's in response to just one "bad" thread.

With regards to advogato, I think it works decently, I don't feel offended or oppressed by any of the ratings, and despite the limitless amounts of vitriol, I don't think that advogato is going down the shitter just because some people think that "Journeyman" is a sexist term. Chill out folks - use advogato for what it was meant to be - a place for the discussion of free software.

Other than that, in free software news, I've been learning Perl/Tk, which is CRIMINALLY easy. :) It's quite nice - last night in about 1 1/2 hours I was able to write an image viewing program which supports .xpm, .xbm, .gif, and .jpg (through Tk::JPEG). Really, it should be harder. :) I've always enjoyed perl, but I'm starting to respect it more and more since I've picked up some experience with DBI and Tk. It also seems to be roughly 20x faster than java on my machine too. :)

GTKeyboard 1.0 is coming along - actually the coding pace has slackened a bit as I've been involved with several other things simultaneously, but it will be out as soon as I'm done putting it through the wringer. As far as I can tell, the codebase that we've got now, (roughly 1.0pre6) should be released as 1.0, but I need to test it a bit more thoroughly before I'm convinced that it can roll without further modification.

EAQFFJ, Uruk