Older blog entries for julian (starting at number 345)

So, my first week of classes went pretty well. I really enjoy the professors for a few of them, and seem to be able to tolerate the rest so far. I'm looking forward to getting all these prereqs over with, though.

My parents came for a visit yesterday and we went shopping for general goods along with mikeszcz. Was a lot of fun. I think I've reached the point, though, where I feel pretty independent of my parents. I miss them and miss home and all, but it's certainly not like two summers ago when I was homesick and really wanted to go back. I want to continue on with my life... I may hate where I am now, but I want to go forward, not back. I do realize that some of my friends feel quite homesick right now, and I remember what that was like, but I just don't feel it anymore.

Looking back, I can't believe that I'm actually here at Carnegie Mellon now. It seemed so hard and so far away...

Now I need to start making real choices. I need to decide which jobs to persue, which to let go. I need to figure out who I want to be associating with and when. It's definitely a different game now.

I really want to get started working on gabber2 some more, but getting stuff running under Jaguar is harder than it should be. Fink still isn't completely updated for it, and I really don't know what the problems are to be able to fix them. I still don't have Gabber working under OS X either... sigh.

I was interviewed as the developer of the month for jabber.org. Cool. Funny that this was probably my least productive Jabber month ever ;)

Torn

So I left Boston, visited Bar Harbor, Maine, where I relaxed with my family a bit and took some photos, some of which turned out very well. After arriving home I received my TiBook, which I absolutely love, then left for Pittsburgh.

The first thing I'm torn about is Gabber. Now that I have extensively played with Mac OS X, I really like it. A lot. It almost hurts to return to Linux on the desktop when I can just run most of my programs fine under OS X. So that kind of takes the umpf away from working on Gabber, even Gabber for gtk2. Especially when I can't compile either on either of my computers right now due to the state of the red hat 8 beta and the fact that fink isn't quite ready for Jaguar.

The second thing I'm torn about is school-related. I am fairly certain that I do not want to do raw Computer Science. I really don't enjoy programming so much that I want it to be my career. However, the School of Computer Science here is very elitist, and it makes me jealous because I know I could be doing it... yet I didn't make it in and have chosen not to attempt to transfer. A part of me wants to do SCS just to prove that I can, but really I know I don't want to be in just SCS. So I continue with Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction as my majors.

All-in-all, I really like Carnegie Mellon and most of the people I've met so far. Classes start tomorrow... we'll see how that goes.

And in the end it all works out anyway!

I'm working on some (in my opinion) very cool stuff for Gabber2. I don't want to disclose exactly what it is just yet, but I'm getting to work with a technology which I'm pretty excited about. The technology itself isn't particularly complicated or difficult. It's simple, elegant, and the end result for the user is that they barely even know they're using it. That's exactly what I love about it.

I managed to get Gtk::TreeView and TreeModel to partially submit to my will, but it still seems that they were designed for displaying a mass amount of data, not necessarily for what I'm doing with them. I'll continue to hack away until I get something decent and clean. Dave Smith's original RosterView for Gabber based on GtkCTree kicked ass, so I have a lot to live up to.

temas and ns have sort of started working on their message routing framework for Gabber2. What they describe sounds somewhat overly-complicated to me, but they promise that the end result will be pretty powerful and work well (and they'll be able to get it done in a decent amount of time). I trust they know what they're doing.

Overall, I think Gabber2 may take a bit of time to get started, but once we have this new framework in place, it will take off much faster than Gabber ever did. Once it's usable, I want to push the limits of Jabber -- pubs and discos, baby.

Sometimes I just know from the start that things are meant to be... and everything keeps telling me it's not meant to happen the way I want it to, but I continue ignoring it because I think I can get around it. Of course, in the end, I have to face reality. Ugh. It does tend to work out for the better overall, when I look back on things. But I'm not at that point yet.

On a different note, The American Analog Set's music is cool. They played at a club on Saturday, very cool. I've been thinking of getting a fake ID, though, just so I don't have to be branded KIDDIE with thick black X's, or worse, get kicked out of places even though all I wanted to do was order food and hang out with friends. Ugh.

I'll break the news since he hasn't said anything yet. mikeszcz just got a Sony R505 laptop. He told me he'd try it out and give me all the juicy details before I make my laptop decision (school's starting soon enough and I want to be comfortable with my laptop by the time it starts). Of course, I haven't seen him online at all tonight. He's probably messing with getting linux on it or something like that.

Work on gabber2 is slowly progressing. GtkTextView and GtkTreeView are quite a bit more complex than their gtk1 predecessors. I wouldn't mind, as they clearly seem to be powerful for whoever their target audience is, except I don't appear to be in the target audience. I just want to do a few things with them, and the few things I want to do seem to involve a lot more work on my end than it used to. At least both widgets seem a lot more willing to take however much data I want to throw at them. That's definitely a major improvement (especially over GtkText). This may take even longer than I orginally anticipated...

(update: grammar. pfft.)

Stevey: I'm glad you're liking Jabber. We need some fresh blood ;)

respect

One of the best things about working on Open Source software as a volunteer effort is that if someone pisses you off sufficiently, you can disconnect yourself without any repercussions except the social.

While I appreciate any help that I can get, when the amount of shit that a certain person gave me exceeded the amount of useful information I got out of him. I told him I won't take it anymore and ignored him. And that was that. I really don't think it's too much to ask that I be given some respect... some treatment as if I am a semi-intelligent being that can speak somewhat definitively at times. If you report bugs as if the problem is so completely obviously my fault, acting as if I don't know how to take a simple average, when the reality is that you have no clue what you're talking about, you've crossed the line. When you do similar things repeatedly, even after being told that you've crossed the line. That's it.
K-19

The previews for K-19 are nothing like the movie. I had set my expectations so low when I went into that movie... wow.

Gnome Summit

It's been pretty good so far. I really like the direction GNOME is taking now. thomasvs's and jdub's talks have been good. I love the organizational meetings, they reenforce my feelings that the GNOME people know what they're doing.

What's somewhat annoying is that Nat and others have referred to the fact that they want to try to be more inclusive of the "third party" applications and then they look around trying to find Sean Egan of gaim. At this point, I think the only way in which gaim is third party is that the developers aren't really gnome developers and gaim doesn't make use of many gnome-specific features. If gaim is "third party" then Gabber is like fifth or sixth party. Sean is a really cool person, though.

One thing which got me thinking was yesterday when miguel saw Gabber on me screen. He asked what it was and then told me that he had tried it out, he just didn't have any friends who use Jabber, so he gave up. blah. I need to work on that.

The Fourth

4th of July in Boston was somewhat interesting. I went to a coworker's apartment and watched the fireworks from the roof. The photos turned out better than I was expecting.

Relaxing

I've been spending a lot of time playing games lately. My newly-purchased GameCube, Neverwinter Nights, and now WarCraft III have all contributed greatly to this latest game splurge. I think that after not gaming for so long, it's ok that I'm doing so much now.

I'm still trying to learn how to relax again. I spent the entire school year under pressure and spent few moments without anxiety. The sermon today was about exactly that, and I thought the priest did a very good job (especially since it's a pretty common complaint about today's society: little rest, must produce). He said one of the main things we need to do is figure out exactly what our priorities are. In order to do that, I feel I need to learn how to relax first, otherwise my priorities will probably be wrong.

I can only take so much gaming, however, and will probably return to doing some Gabber stuff in a few days (maybe more, since I'm going to be returning to work tomorrow).

GNOME Summit

Well, I'm in Boston. I certainly hope I'll be able to meet all of these people whose nicknames I know. If you're interesting in meeting up with me sometime, please let me know. Since I'm trying to relax, I have absolutely nothing to do. I'll take off work to meet people, I don't care :)

So I'm starting to get into a routine now and Boston feels like home again. All-in-all, I like Boston. I definitely want to live in a city for a while. I spent too much time in the middle of nowhere. I think I will eventually want to return to the suburbs, though. Just not yet.

I want to do something different. Just looking at the feature requests for Gabber is starting to sicken me. The usual thing for a Linux program to do is to become the combination of every similar piece of software from every single platform you can imagine.

That's not what I want Gabber2 to be. I'm going to spend some time trying to come up with very interesting and different things to do with Jabber. "Jabber is more than just IM" is the popular quote of the year. I hope to prove that in Gabber2. Unfortunately, at IBM I have seen some really cool things to do with pub/sub that I would love to implement in Gabber. But as always, the big corporation is not the friend of freedom. I hope the few people that are helping me with Gabber will come up with the same ideas.

GNOME 2.0 is pretty nice, but there are a lot of nitpicky things that annoy me. Some day I'm going to spend the entire day writing bug reports and patches for the little things that annoy me. And I'm going to fix the HIG.