Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 4)

Spent last night answering board questions. Telsa picked some really good, hard questions. The toughest ones to answer, of course, were the ones that we knew were problems last year and have failed to resolve, like the one about transparency. Overall, I do think the board had a good year, but it took a lot of work to get there, probably more than it should have, and we did drop the ball on stuff like transparency, ad board relationships, and to a lesser degree marketing.

Otherwise, spent the day poking at nautilus and gnome-vfs bugs for the first time in a while- felt good, despite the constant interruptions. Sort of surprised to see things in a reasonably sane state- nautilus bug work can be draining, but the bugsquad folks who look after nautilus have given it quite a bit of care. Kudos. :)

I finally posted my pictures of my trip to Bangalore at my website. The team itself is also slowly spinning up- they've filed a number of patches this week, slowly figuring out the ropes of nasty raw C and good old 'diff'. The plan for now is pretty simple- they're just working their way through 'high' priority bugs in core modules. Nothing glamorous or exciting, but a good way to get their feet wet just like we all did at some point.

For what it's worth, I think this post by Nat is the best answer to the question everyone seems to be asking us these days- 'has Novell changed Ximian?'

Finally... Chema and I had some disagreements, but it was always about business issues. Personally, he was a great, big-hearted, outgoing guy and he'll be badly missed by all of us. Blue skies, dude.

Scary article on an author and athlete taking EPO, HGH, and other performance enhancement drugs. Not terribly relevant to programming yet, but the day is coming.

Also, joel, who I usually can't stand, has a nice context piece on character encoding. I think I finally understand the basics of that after having read that. [Link by way of aaron aka verbal.]

I certified dsandras today, the first time I did a certification in ages. I did it for a number of reasons- mostly those cited by DV. But additionally because he has mastered the art of perserverance and tact. GnomeMeeting is an underappreciated and under-respected app that has sucked up a lot of Damien's time and effort. That he has perservered and continued to contribute, despite the lack of glory, is, I think, an important difference between being 'just a hacker' and a true master of Free Software.

Happy, jfleck? :)