Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 32)

Oh my god. Jeff has no pants.

Spending the weekend helping my grandparents move into a big planned elderly facility. It's a nice campus on a former farm, with nice medical facilities, apartment-style housing, and regular support groups for wives of Alzheimer's patients, which will be great for my grandmother. It will be a hard weekend for them- they've lived in this house for a little over 40 years now, and I know it will hurt my grandmother not to have her little gardens to tend to. They'll get by, of course, but I don't think it'll ever be the same, and they know it, I'm sure. I'm already physically and mentally exhausted from travel and work- I fear this weekend will not help at all. But I have to do it- have to say goodbye to the house and help my grandparents through it.

In better news, generally 2.6 is looking pretty slick. Everyone who wants to know how UI design can work in free software should take a look at what Marco is doing. I'm sure the serious usability people can find holes in his process, but Marco is as usual really leading in what GNOME can and should do. The file selector still isn't finished, but it is coming along, and it's good to see that people are addressing showstopper bugs even if there are still many more showstoppers to go. Oh, and if aes finishes the bugzilla upgrade, he's my total, utter, complete hero. Bugzilla is generally thankless code to wade through (getting better in 2.16 and 2.17) and he's driven through the last bits to really get it going. Big, big thanks are due to him. When he finishes it, of course. ;)

I thought it was pretty cool to see that ejchang, skvidal's GF, was hanging out in #bugs yesterday. It's always pretty nifty when someone new contributes to GNOME, even if it is in the small, incremental way that bug work is.

I'm also pretty excited about what Novell is doing- I just saw the first demos of Groupwise IM and GAIM (which will be open source) and the iPrint team wants to open the client for iPrint as well, which is pretty neat.

Oh! And I nearly forgot- mibarra has done studly work and we're nearly ready to release xd-unstable for suse 9. Pretty sexy, I think, worthy even of a Very Big Release Announce. :) We'll see, of course :)

Ross: the contact applet will appear in xd-unstable as soon as we get the next evo point release out, since we need that evo API, right?

Last night I dreamed that I was in a meeting which never ended. We kept telling the presenter that they were not telling us anything relevant or interesting, and they kept nodding and continuing. Then I woke up and spent all day in meetings. Coincidence? Actually, today's meetings were really pretty good- lots of traction on important issues, which was great.

As a side note, we had a discussion about translation as one of the meetings today. In demonstrating that GNOME's translations are quite comprehensive, I ended up running GNOME in Spanish and Charlie, Ximian's head of marketing, in French. He was pretty impressed with the French, and I so far have only gnome-blog untranslated into Spanish. Big thanks to everyone on the translation teams who helped me impress people with that today :)

Oh, and Ross, the groupwise (novell mailserver/client) guys were like 'we'd really like to implement a quick ability to search on the addressbook'. It was nice to be able to say 'oh, no worries, someone implemented that already.' :)

BTW, does anyone know if someone has re-implemented/similarly-implemented the Google Deskbar as a panel applet? Someone brought it up today as something they missed from Windows, and it would be cool to drop them an email.

It is not a good day when you open your itinerary to check when your flight is leaving, and you discover that it left 5 hours ago. I think the uber-crappy online booking tool that Novell uses screwed me, but I really should have checked what it emailed me earlier. :/

Update: Amex Travel Services has hold music that could drive a deaf man insane. I've listened to a lot of it now.

Have spent most of the day watching NFL games with 1/4 of my brain and reading Freenix submissions with the rest of my brain. Some are really interesting, some... still need a little work :) Still, should be an interesting conference- if I could go. It conflicts with GUADEC, which was poor planning on GNOME's part. Hopefully in 2005 they won't conflict and GNOME can be better represented. Also, I wish the paper committee were a little larger- I've been working at this all day and am still only 2/3 of the way through my list of papers.

Dammit. Knew Mark was sick, and knew he hadn't blogged in a while, but I was hoping that was just travel or something. Happy trails, kid...

I'm testing gnome-blog. I guess I have to agree with thomas that I don't understand why gnome-blog is an applet, but otherwise it seems pretty sweet- fairly minimalist, but all I need. Also, I clearly need to test the link button. [Thomas, thanks for the packages.]

Bug squad is having a bug day tomorrow. Everyone curious about helping out GNOME and GNOME 2.6 should come along. Goal for the day is to get this list under 100.

Novell just sent around a request for nominations for 'Employee of the Year'. I suppose it's nice that they recognize folks, but given that this is such a team-oriented place (or it should be) I'd much prefer to see a 'Team of the Year' award. Since it can only be for one person, I went ahead and nominated the only thing I could.