Older blog entries for gman (starting at number 256)

A while back I had this glorified idea that I might be able to write a GNOME 2 book, which I think the GNOME project really deserves right now.

After spending an evening trying to write up the release notes for GNOME 2.2, I'm not really sure anymore.
Okay, so Apple might make some pretty nice hardware, but their power adaptors really suck. My iBook one snapped right at the plug revealing 2 really small wires almost like earphone connections. This blows. I ordered one of these gizmos today - hopefully it ships soon. I can't really do without a laptop :(
25 Jan 2003 (updated 25 Jan 2003 at 22:08 UTC) »
So the plan of avoiding maintaining gnome-utils didn't last very long when I had to release gnome-utils-2.2.0.1 that fixed a crash in gfloppy, and added some of the wonderful GNOME 2.2 docs from Sun.

Over the past couple of days I've managed to get myself completely tangled up in writing a power management preference dialog. Ordinarily this might be a really straightforward little piece of code, but now I think it's got a little bit out of hand. The fact that I'm trying to figure out CORBA and bonobo stuff, scares the willies out of me. I've already written the factory code, the DPMS stuff, most of the APM stuff and already pushing 3,000 lines of code. I haven't even written the notification icon stuff. I have a strange inkling that I'm just dumb at writing code.

A little while back, I joined about 60 people walking 56km into the Wicklow hills starting at midnight one Friday. It was a wonderful experience, although at times a little boring walking the roads. The weather was perfect, clear skies and a fresh blanket of snow. It was strangely eerie walking with so much light, since the skies had been invaded by a half moon and a few billion stars proving enough light to reflect off the snow. A little short of 12 hours, I had finished. Mostly tired, but well able to walk another 7km to the nearest pub for a pint. The day after, feeling a little stiff and sore, I decided to wander down to the crags in Glendalough. I think my body decided enough was enough. Now my foot is buggered and I limp a lot - I'm not entirely sure if I just pulled a muscle or incurred a stress fracture. I won't climb now for the next month or more.

This makes me sad.
I started writing silly commit messages when I added a few people to gnome-about/contributors.h - I'm not sure if I can really continue this for everyone. Really.

Open source is great. You get people like menthos coming along and doing really kickarse things - today's contribution is joint document about CVS and l10n from a translators point of view. No one could ever possibly have any concept of how important this contribution was. It really makes you wish that there was more menthos' in the world. I reckon every line of this document is worth at least 10 lines of code, if not more. Not enough people say thanks in the Open Source world.

Thank You.

mjs: Um, luck? ;)
So I released gnome-utils-2.2.0, did a bit of spring cleaning and handed in my maintenance apron. It's been a bunch of fun and I've learned heaps and heaps about CVS while I've been doing it. I said a while back that 2.2.0 would be my last - it's time to move on, I have stopped enjoying it.

It's not as if I'm going to disappear now, I'll still hang around on the bug list and maybe think about rewriting gnome-dictionary. I think that was my favourite of the utilities. I spent a few minutes every now and again just looking up new words in the dictionary.

I hope someone interested takes over - it's not hard, just needs a little bit of dedication to begin with.
Okay, so my pet project, zenity [cvs.gnome.org], is coming along nicely and it's almost ready for a 1.0 release. Spent a while today writing up the help documentation for it. The about dialog even has a new icon, which is as zen as you get really. I just wonder if anyone will use this, apart from MikeGTN who seems to be the only one sending me patches so far.

Other than that, life is as normal.
In the quest to become the first cvs.gnome.org module with the letter 'z', I called the gdialog rewrite 'zenity'.

Not more than an hour later hadess created the first cvs.gnome.org module with the letter 'q', a frontend to the ipod called 'qahog'.

Clearly, an important day in the life of GNOME.
The holiday period is so nice - it lets you do things that you normally don't have much time for. Consequently, I've been reading 'Just for Fun' and 'The Code Book', both fascinating reads in very, very different ways. My brothers bought my sister a DVD player for Christmas, so it's been nice to be able to watch some of the DVD's on a slightly bigger screen [my 12" laptop isn't all that good for DVD watching].

I've even been...
[gasp]
...coding - rewriting gdialog to be slightly less lame. There's a huge amount of code duplication right now but it's getting there [warning, error, question, entry, calendar, progress and file selection dialogs already completed]. It's also nice to be able to avoid adding curses support. I'm rather avoiding the command line argument parsing right now, but I guess I'm going to have to do that sometime real soon now. It's wonderfully easy coding that doesn't involve a huge amount of thought. It's not as if I'm 'scratching my own itch here' - I rather feel I owe it to gnome-utils now :/

Very much looking forward to spending New Year's up in the hills of Wicklow. Hopefully the weather will be good enough to spend the previous day walking...and um, drinking.
It has been a pretty interesting couple of months and it's nice to reflect a little while I have a few days of work away from the stresses...ahem...of my work life.

The GNOME work at Sun has been going pretty well - we're well on our way to getting GNOME 2 on Solaris, which I think is a pretty major achievement from all involved, including our friends at Ximian, Wipro and the wider community. It's pretty scarey to think that I've been on his project more than 2 years now. Just wonder what the future holds as we move into the new year.

From a hacking point of view, I still haven't achieved anything much - I'd like to think that this might change next year, but I can't imagine I'll have much time to sit down and put some serious effort into something worthwhile.

I still wonder sometimes how I managed to be a part of the release team and, just recently, the Foundation Board. I guess that shatters the long time ideology that open source is only about code. It clearly doesn't. I guess that I'm the living proof.

The office is getting increasingly lonely these days as more and more people start working remotely. It's nice to be on a project that allows you such freedom - while decreasing the amount of freedom for those souls who are working at the office. I'm now plagued by more mails, more queries and more meetings. It gets rather frustrating sometimes and I'm not entirely sure how to deal with it most effectively other than a polite, under the breath, 'fuck off. leave me alone'.

So will we see new things next year in GNOME?

You can bet on it.
o/~"

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...
Twelve GNOMErs GNOMEing,
Eleven directors boarding,
Ten schedules a creeping,
Nine Bowies trolling,
Eight Havocs a wncking,
Seven oggs a streaming,
Six Waughs a GARing,
Five transparent things,
Four #gnome nerds,
Three PayPal friends,
Two FIXED bugs
and GNOME with a rocking Metacity.
"o/~

Happy Christmas GNOME.

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