Older blog entries for jdub (starting at number 65)

spiv and I have been enjoying some time in front of the oven and stove cooking dinner for our housemates. I've always loved cooking, spiv maintains that he doesn't know anything about it (which is complete bollocks), and we both dislike cleaning after it... we're hoping that at some stage, our less active housemates will realise this.

Tonight we cooked Tandoori Chicken and Potato Gourmet Pizza, and in true Advogato style, thought we should publish the recipe here. We've looked into the licensing and copyright issues, and whilst the "you must send the authors of this recipe a piece of your pizza" license sounds like a good idea, the soggy pizza envelopes might not. Besides, SharePizza sucks compared to Free Pizza.

Ingredients

• Pizza bases (more fun if you make them yourself)
• Thinly sliced chicken breasts (we used a small double per pizza)
• Tandoori paste (we used COTS parts, though I'd love to make it myself some time)
• Thinly sliced small potatoes (four per pizza)
• Crushed or whole pine nuts
• Tomato paste
• Cheese, but not too much on this pizza (if you're like me, it will be hard to resist, but it's worth it)

Directions

1. Brown the chicken, mix in tandoori paste to colour the pieces.
2. Fry the potatoes and some of the pine nuts. The pine nuts make it smell like popcorn. :-)
3. Cover the pizza bases with a mixture of tandoori and tomato paste, and sprinkle with cheese.
4. Top the pizza with potatoes, pine nuts, chicken and a small amount of cheese.
5. Cook until cheese browns, and tandoori paste on the chicken blackens - don't worry, it's not burnt! :-)
6. EAT!

Quiet. I'm going to be overseas for our release team debrief, the freeze, and the first weekly snapshot. Lots of cybercafe action, methinks. I'm glad the freeze will be occuring whilst I'm in Boston, for the GNOME Summit. Wheeee!

My doctor says I'm insane going overseas. Grr.

Dude, did you try sweep? Works on PPC. conrad used to be the SLUG El Presidente, and is an All Round Cool Dude.

Got the 2.0.x schedule and 2.1.x branching summary done. Two rapid maintenance releases, and we'll be most of the way to full-on 2.1.x development. The planets are aligning for some really cool stuff in GNOME 2.2, and I want to make sure that the release process works well for everyone.

Found my credit card in the mail, so the Rome/Boston trip is looking realistic - and it's only seven days away! Have to get a bunch of stuff done for work first to satisfy both my employers and my self-directed frustrations. Stupid arthritic GAR is making it hard to concentrate and motivate. Not sure how well I'm going to be for the trip, but it would be insane to miss out on. Grr.

Normally I'd try and catch up with people overseas, but Pia will be there in Rome, and I really need to take a relaxing break. The GNOME Summit will be slightly more work-oriented (in a fun way) than farting around Italy with Pia anyway. ;-)

People back from busy-ness, various things happening. I'm writing up a plan for the next six months or so, what I want to achieve with SLUG, and the motivational sparks required to get it going. We're in a comfort zone of sorts, not realising what we've got, nor what we can achieve. All very laid-back at the moment, hoping to light a bonfire under that inertia.

Bit sore inside and out, really.

Dude, GARNOME is a haw-haw-acronym for GAR and GNOME.

Now I get to do all the cleaning up I wanted to do before the G2D release but didn't have time for. Part of that is getting GARNOME optimised and cranky for my new hardware - I got myself a dual Athlon 1800+ MP mobo + DDR RAM as a post-G2D present. Hooray!

So, I'm getting the parallel build stuff fixed up (some modules don't build correctly with -j, so I'm overriding them), and adding some optimisation hints for people who have similar hardware to me. Should be a pretty sweet build in the end, and a lot faster for people with multiple CPUs.

Ron Yorgason posted to the GARNOME list in response to my List of Stuff That Needs To Be Done with a logo idea - a hiking boot print. It's perfect! ;-) I'm going to try my hand at it this week sometime. It will be in a strange opposition to the graphics on the new site.

Taking a few days out from IRC and the mailing lists, just replying to things here and there for urgent stuff. If you don't see me around, don't worry - I'm re-energising for further arse-kicking. With the G2D release done, and hopefully the tail end of my recent arthritis attack, I have a lot more life-space left over for other things. I just need a few days off. ;-)

Haven't had final confirmation of my credit card application yet, so the trip to Rome and Boston is still up in the air. Spending a few days in Rome with Pia, and then a few days in Boston with the GNOME crew sounds like the perfect holiday! I can't wait, but I shouldn't build myself up too much either. Either way, I'm going to arrange some serious time out soon.

It's just past 7am. I'm going to sleep. Very well.

Hey, your gnome-recent stuff might be appropriate for libegg, which is a staging library for stuff we intend to move into libgnome (or other platform libraries as appropriate). Talk to jamesh or andersca.

Man, reading recentlog is getting depressing. So much... angst. Advogato is for sharing, not for posturing.

That's why I love reading raph's entries. It seems he's taken to weblogging, but without the piecemeal approach - he actually fleshes out and completes thoughts, rather than just linking to them. An endearing mix of genius, humour and humility. That's what makes Advogato such a nice place to play.

Bloggers and web diarists have a tendency to use the phrase "to read" about a person, eg. "Do you read Mary?" This language is most often used when referring to Dead White Males (or, Real Writers), so it always amused me when I heard it about Normal People. Perhaps it indicates a change in how we understand and receive new media. Nice.

Having someone explode into your life like a flechette grenade, and then disappear off to Europe for six weeks is a bit like losing a watch. At first, something just feels out of place... Not quite there. But then you start losing track of everything else. Time becomes a confusing haze, routines deviate and fall apart, and scraps of the Old Way are elevated to mystical proportions.

When I look at release notes for software, and want to check if I should lodge a bug, or find out if the particular behaviour I'm seeing is meant to be there, I look for the "Known Issues" section.

The issues (as you say: a point of debate, controversy and I would add, 'question') may not be a bug at all. It may simply be a missing feature, a new behaviour (John chose to add a "Quirks" section for these, precisely because they weren't bugs), or other non-bug "issues" that users may come across.

It is a well-understood convention, because it encompasses more than just 'bugs'.

jfleck: I used to do a lot of theatre. After every performance run - without fail - I would feel horribly and excruciatingly empty. If I've felt anything similar to this in another situation, it would be the quiet, directionless hollow after leaving someone.

Putting a production together had us living in each other's pockets, sharing the intimate details of our lives, building our short-term cultures of in-jokes, politics and assumptions, and harnessing the competitive determination and anxious expectations of a group of people working their collective arses off.

It quietly becomes your life, and disappears in an instant.

Although it feels eerily similar to those experiences, all of our favourite GNOME people will still be here, and there's a ton of work left to do. :-)

Release Candidate 1

Fever Pitch. Rumble of the stadium. Roar of the crowd. So fucking close it hurts.

SLUG

SLUG feels very lame at the moment. Everything else seems to be in the limelight - high pressure, high commitment.

Life

Denmark, nutshell, infinite space, horrible timing, hair in my eyes, sleepless nights, arthritic knitting needles, longing. A freshly shaven head. So far away.

So, Nat tells me I should go to the Boston Summit. I didn't think I'd be of any use, so hadn't even thought of planning the trip. A few hours later and I'm waiting keenly on my travel agent's response, and drooling over the thought of catching a train across the United States.

This will be a fitting, Northern Hemisphere equivalent to my long-time dream of driving across Australia. I'll get to do that in January, for linux.conf.au!

Life

Life is work. Very busy doing stuff for - and trying to ignore everything else until - Friday, final presentation day for a very cool project. Shitloads of work though. I'll be able to use a lot of it beyond the current project anyway, so it's not too bad. Colleagues are getting antsy.

Unfortunately, my arthritis is back and fucking annoying. Terrible timing. Turns out that the lead singer of Silverchair has a very similar ailment, but is having what I fear the most - a proper, disabling, painful attack. I haven't had one in a few years, luckily getting away with just the usual seasonal pain and tightness. I didn't get on the news for my arthritis! :-D Again, colleagues are getting antsy.

Sawfish and Metacity

cactus: Dude, I wouldn't have thought you'd be into the conspiracy theories. :-)

The change was mostly due to the fact that Metacity has an interested, involved maintainer, whilst Sawfish pretty much doesn't. John is not hugely involved in GNOME right now, and I'm sure the idea of maintaining GNOME's preferred window manager is kind of daunting for him anyway.

The other reason was its size, complexity, and distance from GNOME. Sawfish is big and complicated in terms of code, functionality, options, and documentation + support requirements. Sawfish is written in rep (LISP or not, it's a one-man derivative when, if anything, GNOME should lean towards GNU technologies), and doesn't take full advantage of GTK+/GNOME technologies.

I spent quite a bit of time before, during and after GUADEC talking to people about this shift. If you want a conspiracy theory about it, blame me! ;-) Still, when Sun announced they'd do it, I was quite surprised; I didn't realise it was still being discussed there. For that, you can probably blame gman.

I think it's a great decision.

OPN and lilo

lilo: I don't get it. Coming from the perspective of running a Free Software related IRC node, and being a volunteer, highly active contributor (non-code) to a Free Software project, I don't understand why you'd be out there asking people for money. Perhaps you should get off IRC (the community will quite capably maintain the network) and get a job?