Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 32)

It seemed inappropriate to post this last week. It was up to the folks at Eazel to tell the world they were done, and there was really no way to describe my visit there without mentioning that salient fact. Some journalist I turn out to be.

My timing is either the worst or the best, depending on how you look at it. I was heading to San Jose last week (the week of May 7) and sent email to Eli Goldberg at Eazel, telling him I'd like to come by and meet folks. He suggested Wednesday - they bring in lunch on Wednesdays, he said.

It has been clear for some time that the end was coming, but for those of us outside of Eazel, it was not clear exactly when. It seemed rude to ask, but there was a San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner piece April 19 saying Eazel had a month's worth of cash left. I can do arithmetic. I knew I was arriving right about the end. I sent Eli emails before I came, to make sure there would still be someone there to have lunch with. Eli assured me there would, there were a week's worth of fading embers left in the fire.

I've been working with the Eazel crew for the better part of a year now. Nautilus holds the GNOME help browser, and I've been doing a little development and a lot of QA on it. It's been terrifically fun, I've learned a lot, and I wanted to meet these people in person. Once I realized they were about to disappear, it became doubly important to somehow see the thing before it sank.

I suppose computer industry veterans have seen this sort of thing before, but the clean carnage left behind by a failing startup is a thing to behold. Fancy office furniture, colorful walls, the obligatory break room with fish tank and - I am not making this up - a scooter sitting there, just like on the TV commercials.

And the swag. Swag. When I walked in, Eskil started handing me T-shirts. One for me. "Do you have a small for my daughter?" "How about a medium."

Eli, who like everyone else I'd never met before in person, asked me if I wanted a mug. How could I refuse? He led me next door, to the former Jiffy Lube that had been converted to slick new office space based on what now seems like pathetic optimism that Eazel would be growing, growing. There was a large stack of boxed computer monitors on one side of the otherwise empty former Jiffy Lube (same colorful walls and carpet) and box after box of swag. Eli handed me an Eazel promotional brochure in Japanese, one in English, a file folder. There were boxes of really enormous coffee mugs.

Do software people drink enormous cups of coffee?

I hope you don't think less of me for the fact that I took two. I asked Eli if they had black, but alas, no. Does that seem greedy? They'll only end up at auction, Eli said, and who would bid on a giant white coffee mug plastered with an Eazel logo?

Back in the other building, there were few people remaining. Many had gone on to other jobs already. Others were doing what was euphamistically described as "working from home".

Don Melton, gramps, was busy primarily doing what he described as "reverse recruiting," trying to help folks land properly. Eli was there, as was mfleming, tying up loose ends.

Eli took me over to introduce me to Andy Hertzfeld, he whose Mac fame seemed to drive the Eazel truck. He's a little gnomish guy (pun completely intended), and he was sitting there hacking a cool new feature for Nautilus. Days away from Eazel's implosion, and the guy was hacking a cool new feature for Nautilus. "You work on the help system?" he asked "You'll love this." I sat down and he showed it to me - a tooltipish thing that displays a cartoon bubble window next to a file's note when you mouse over the little note icon, displaying the contents of the note. It really has exactly nothing to do with the help system, but I was happy for the excuse he offered, and I did love it.

Lunch was one of those catered spreads, rice dishes and grilled chicken bits and a curried meat thing. Free sodas in the coolers. And about 12 or so people eating who could not resist the temptation offered by last supper humor. "Who's Judas?" someone asked. Not knowing Eazel well enough, I had no guess, and no one seemed willing to point fingers.

Gramps realized I'm a newspaper guy, and regaled me with tales of his newspaper career. Before he became a hacker by profession, he was doing newspaper graphics at the Orange County Register and then Knight Ridder, where he helped introduce Macs to the newsroom. Which means he is indirectly responsible for my introduction to personal computing - a Mac at the Pasadena Star-News, which was a Knight Ridder newspaper.

There was no talk of Nautilus at lunch, a few feeble "what are you going to do" conversations among the doomed-to-be.

I am not good at ending things, and though there was really no point in staying any longer, there was no socially easy way to leave. How do you say this - "Sorry your ship is sinking, hope you make it to shore, see you later" and a cheerio wave?

So I wandered back to Mike and Eli's cubicle to talk software. I explained to Mike the new xml->html translator I'm building (jeez it's great to be able to talk to a human about this) and he pulled out his Mac OS X laptop to show me how *not* to build a help system. Rebecca Schulman showed up, and I had a chance to tell her how much I liked Medusa. That was important to say - it's gotten a bashing, but it's an incredibly valuable tool, and a great start on the problem.

Eli walked over to me with a black Eazel mug in his hand and gave it to me. It was his. I will treasure it always.

I shook a few hands, Mike gave me a ride to the Mountain View CalTrain station, and my visit to the heart of a free software startup meltdown was over.

This IRC thing is a wonderful invention.

"Bumped into" Stephan Kulow (the guy doing the KDE docs rendering system - coolo) on #docs this morning and he, gleblanc and I had an extremely useful conversation about how to structure our html rendering in similar - possibly identical - ways. I had looked at their code and thought we wouldn't be able to do it the same way they are until GNOME 2, but Greg prodded me into thinking about it again. I believe we could use a stylesheet almost identical to theirs, generate a complete version of the doc in a single pass, then hand off chunks of it to the Nautilus Mozilla component on request, saving the entire thing in a cache somewhere. Where would we put this? That seems a straightforward and solvable problem, but another one of those things that reminds me of my ignorance. Where's the right place to put something like this? Should we generate it once and save it forever, so when the user returns to the doc next week they get previously generated html rather than generating it anew? Should we generate it when the package is built and ship it (uggghhh - back to pre-generated html)? Should we generate it at install time on the user's machine? There must be a Right Way(tm).

Nice to be home. I honestly hate work travel - stuck in hotels with no family to hang out with, having to smile too much and keep up long conversations with strangers about topics that interest me only vaguely, eating only restaurant food.

The one exception on my trip was my visit to Eazel. Those were people I was interested in, and topics to talk about that I care about. More on that later.

Last night we ordered pizza and ate in. This morning Lissa and I took the bikes down to the river and rode, then I went for another ride this afternoon up into the foothills. I had new shifters installed on the bike while I was gone. No more leaning down to shift - now I can do it while standing. It's way cool. Guess I'm back to my old self.

mfleming's tip helped me fix the problem I've been having with gnome-db2html3 crashing the Nautilus Mozilla component. The component can't handle relative paths to the img sources. I put a full path into the stylesheet to test, and bingo, no more crash. One more problem solved (well, I need to elegantize the stylesheet a bit beyond my little proof of principle test, but the rest is just workin' out details).

I had a lovely visit today with the folks at Eazel. Wednesday they have lunch brought in, so I timed my arrival carefully for free food. They generously shared.
I learned Don Melton is an old newspaper guy turned software engineer. He worked at the Orange County Register in the '80s, then at Knight Ridder, and helped bring Macs into the newsroom. That gives him some indirect role in my introduction to computing, because it was the Mac in the newsroom at the Pasadena Star News (a Knight Ridder paper) that really got me started in personal computing lo these many years ago.
Met Eli, who for so long guided my misguided Nautilus QA efforts, Michael Fleming and Ramiro, who helped sort out numerous Mozilla problems for our help system, and Rebecca, who I think is really on to something with Medusa.
It's fun to put faces with nicks and names.
I will note that Andy Hertzfeld looks like a gnome, and could hardly contain his enthusiasm when he showed me a cool new feature he's implementing for Nautilus - a tooltip- like way to display a note attached to a file in the main file browser window.
Whatever the outcome of the Eazel experiment, it's clear they did a good thing, and I was glad to get a chance to meet them and tell them that.

I'm off to San Jose. If you see a tall skinny guy walking through the San Jose airport wearing an Eazel t-shirt, say "hi". I'm not completely looking forward to this trip. As I get older, I'm increasingly comfortable just hanging out with my family at home. But it's for a good cause, and I will have a good time.

Every year this pisses me off. The big bed of iris in front is about to explode into bloom, and I have to leave for a week. It's the same trip every year at this time, the International Science and Engineering Fair - San Jose this year. I always enjoy the trip, but I almost always miss the peak of the iris bloom. I thought it was coming early this year, but a couple of days of cold weather have slowed things down.

So Nora came up with a plan for next year - Iris Cam. We'll put a web cam out in the front yard, and I can log in from the fair and check out the blooms.

This'll be great!

DV released the latest versions of libxml2 and libxslt yesterday. It has the sgml DocBook parser included that we need for parsing our old GNOME docs. This is a "hurray". I bow in the general direction of Grenoble.

Lissa put up the hummingbird feeders, and this morning the first one arrived at my back window. It looked all beat up from its very long commute. It's amazing to know that this is the same bird I had last year - back to this spot over thousands of miles of travel without Yahoo maps or anything.

This has been an intellectually exhausting week. The Rocky Mountain Section of the Geological Society of America is in town, and I've been in hard rock/dino fossil heaven. Got one story already out of Andy Heckert's vegetarian dinosaurs. I met Andy doing field work down in southern New Mexico three years ago, and he's been helping me out with dino history ever since. He's a classic dinosaur junkie paleontologist, obsessed with the scientific question of what made these big critters so phenomenally successful. We use the cliche of a "dinosaur" to mean something that is large, outlived its time and failed or is about to. But dinsosaurs had a good long run, longer than any other big critter. Why? It's a great question. I also spent a lot of time with a bunch of friends who have been working on some major regional structural issues across the intermountain west. It's been fun to watch them over time, to see how their ideas have evolved.

I swear this is the last patch to gnome-db2html2. At Dan's request, I modified support for the emphasis tag to support bold as well as italic presentation. Every time I work on that thing I cringe a bit, though it does have one virtue - it is faster than the new xslt version I'm working on. But since we're so dependent on mozilla, which is the slow link in the chain, it's not a user-noticeable speed issue anyway.

The KDE folks have come up with a good solution, which is to parse the whole document, hold it in memory, and parcel out the sections as needed. I think we need some sort of approach like that for GNOME 2.

I got the DocBook sgml parser DV added to libxml2 to work for our GNOME docs converter last night - one more requirement met as I continue working toward my Junior Hacking Merit Badge. Now I must tackle the stylesheet question in earnest, see if I can find out why the output, when piped to the Nautilus Mozilla component, crashes Moz every time it hits a figure.

Found a cool new neighborhood yesterday when I was out bike riding. It's called Sunset Canyon, up in the foothills on the east edge of town. I was seeking hills to ride up, and maybe the highest city street in town. I found a wonderful mix of older houses and new mansions - some beautiful and some hideous, but on balance lovely. Lissa and drove up there this morning for a walk, and fantasized about the empty lots still remaining. They come with their own rocks.

A quarter of an inch of rain last night! It's been dry here all month, so that makes today an ideal day to continue my romance with the weeds. Also, today's the plant sale at the garden center, so Lissa and I are going to hunt real plants grown by real people.

I've started integrating DV's sgml DocBook parser into the xml parser I'm making for GNOME documentation. For now I'm just testing based on file name to determine if a doc is sgml or xml. I'm sure there will be a more elegant way, involving checking the doc's dtd, but this will do for now as we are quite consistent in the naming of our own docs. We must eventually do this in a more general way, however, so the parser will work on other people's docs.