Older blog entries for gman (starting at number 263)

Feel incredibly burnt out at the moment - it's not as if I've done huge amounts of hacking or anything. I'm just tired I think. GU4DEC is shaping up nicely and should be a source of much activity over the next week or two. It's looking as if I'll have a trip over to Beijing to contend with. Leaving Friday. Eeeep.

It's past 3am. I finally know what it's like to take *way* too many things on. My manager posted the project list to us today - my section seems overly excessive. Coupled with that list, I now have to figure out how to untangle the GUADEC mess, be less lame on the release team, try to kick arse on the foundation board and somewhere, probably buried at the bottom, have a bit of a life outside work.

If it wasn't well past 3am and if I wasn't dog tired and if I wasn't feeling large amounts of stress, I guess I would be incredibly excited about all this stuff. Should prove to be an interesting month once again.

I released 'battfink' today on ftp.gnome.org - an energy saver preference thing with a funky battery status icon. I'm not sure if it will be incredibly useful to anyone right now as it probably needs a little bit more work. I think it's nicer than the current battery applet in GNOME 2.x though.

I got a payrise yesterday which was kind of nice. I think I was a little bit selfish when I told my manager that I wanted to leave Ireland immediately after. Hopefully we can work something out, as I think I'm still 100% committed to Sun and GNOME at the moment - although there are days when it feels far from the truth.

I played pool yesterday with Patrick and Viv - I was on fire.

I got 4 hours of mostly unbroken sleep and woke up with a rather large hangover - Belgian beer proving to be pretty strong.

We made it to the University just before Michael's GNOME tutorial talk, which proved entertaining - definitely better than the previous days one. Then onto being publically mocked in Thomas' talk - really amazed to see that Pioneer are taking an interest in it. The final talk of the conference was Owen's file selector talk - really good to see that there is a lot of thought going into this. Just wonder what timeline we're still looking at.

Then after for a meal with all the GNOME people and a few others, a glass of Extra Export Guinness stout and then a rush to catch the train. Wandered around Ghent for a while and back to hack from the comfort of the couch.

It's been a fun time.

It's 5am, and off in the distance I feel a slight shudder from far distant continents as they rub off each other. thomasvs has been a super cool host - Belgium is a really fun place.

Got into Charleroi on Friday morning, and after meeting up with Mikael, Havoc Owen, Richard and Anders we headed out to Ghent, along the super slow route. It was great seeing those guys again - it's a pity that GUADEC is so far away.

The talks today were pretty cool - Havoc on freedesktop.org and Michael on GNOME 2. It's the first time I've seen Michael talk, all hilarious stuff, but somehow I think there's probably too much packed into the short space. Really nice to see lots of progress making the headlines.

After a Vietnamese restaurant we all retired to another Belgian pub [by way of a small like pokey Jazz club that sold Guinness] to drink the night away.

I think I'm still mostly drunk though ;)

Today Sun released GNOME 2.0 on Solaris here. Pretty happy that is all out of the way for now.

So now I just need to organize GUADEC, leave Ireland for a few years and start a flea circus.

Busy weekend.

Zenity 1.0 was released and almost immediately afterwards, I got sent a spec file and 2 rpm packages from Mihai Lazarescu.

Spent a while having a little release notes party on Friday night and soon got bored. Luckily murrayc, jfleck and hp have taken over and seem to be doing an excellent job.

I got frustrated at the lack of GUADEC happenings to the extent that I wrote a motivational email trying to tell people what they should do. I think it might have worked now. I've seen more emails in the course of 2 days than I saw all of last month.

I went into work on a Sunday. How sad is that? At least I caught up on a *HUGE* chunk of work I'd been slacking on last week.

I was too busy this weekend. I didn't even get a chance to watch the 5 DVD's I bought. Sigh.

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 :(

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.