Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 66)

Another pretty solid bug day. Found some more nasty 2.6.0-ish bugs, and have sent out another email about it. My last email got more than 1/2 of them fixed, so that was pretty good- I think we still have time to make this a pretty solid release. Everyone go kill a bug now.

I was a little surprised to discover that RH's bugzilla allows you to close a serious issue NOTABUG without so much as a single word why.

Was more pleasantly surprised to discover that the evo<->panel integration is even cooler than I thought.

I admit that I got more than a little pissed on Tuesday when /. declared that KDE's new Kuality Team was something new and innovative. We've been doing it for years. But I admit we haven't really stressed the holistic approach that they are explicitly taking- sure, I do it very naturally, but it's not something I talk about much in announces or explicitly coach people in. I guess I just assume that if you're involved in GNOME, you know that 'quality' means more than just 'does it not crash.' But if that's a revelation for some people... :) Probably I will stress it more in the future- I really do think it underlies everything I have done for the past two years, and I hope that shows through, but maybe it's not obvious enough.

[Later] I am still surprised at RH's bugzilla, but it's not Mike Harris's fault. I should have known better.

I want to bear Richard's children. I know it's krackful, but for some bizarre reason (maybe I was dropped on the head as a child) I've always loved the fuzzy clock in KDE. It's the only KDE feature I've seen I actually want.

Have felt sort of like ass all day, went home early. Still had a fairly productive day, which is surprising. Three meetings after getting home probably helped that, though I should have been napping. Hopefully going to bed soon (like, in the next five minutes) will make me more useful tomorrow.

Was very cool to see the positive responses to my 2.6.0 showstoppers query. Hope we have a solid release, though until I've read every single bug myself I always have my fears. :/

HEAD gimp has a ridiculously sweet about box, as TD pointed out this afternoon in IRC. Check it out if you have jhbuild installed.

Have generally had a pleasant post-birthday weekend; fresh scones yesterday morning and pancakes this morning. Watched Ran last night too, great flick even if it drags at times. Spent the afternoon at the MFA, checking out the new Gauguin exhibition. Cool exhibition, some wonderful pieces. Some serious 'I'm depressed and creating self-indulgent, overwrought stuff' pieces too, but I supposed that's possibly the nature of genius.

Enjoyed my birthday yesterday, and even got a bit of work done. ;) Was cool to have so many people from so many places say hi in IRC, and was more fun to have a few friends over, have a few drinks out of the nice new tumblers I was given, watch some Duke basketball, and have some of Krissa's incredible chocolate cake (with a touch of raspberry.) Hopefully more fun tonight at Flat Tops, with less worry about getting to work in the morning. ;)

I read Wabi-Sabi yesterday. Fun little book explaining an aesthetic very different from our modern Western aesthetic. Of course, since it is an aesthetic of impermanence, imperfection, and nature (among other things) it's a little hard to draw lessons for GNOME, unless someone wants to help me write a theme engine that changes over time (which would actually be pretty cool, come to think of it.) Ah, well, in the mean time, we will just have to continue to live with our lack of stetic.

jamesh: In the general case, I think I've come around to agree with you, certainly with regards to the foundation and probably with regards to 'real world' elections as well.

In the more specific case, I think that part of the frustration is that Nader is not a credible candidate- there is no way he'll draw more than 1-2%, so his presence in the race does nothing that he could not accomplish more effectively and less egotistically by staying out of the race and using some well-placed issue advertisements and/or doing things the way he's always done them. Were he seriously able to draw 15-20% right now, and more after a campaign, I'd have less objection to his participation.

plug: If you're interested in elections, particularly in the gnome space, and want to help out, the foundation's membership committee is looking for help.

I wish Nader had listened to Lessig.

[Later] Speaking of Lessig, I'm thinking about taking the plunge and trying to do the Lessig Challenge, where one gives as much money to pro-freedom groups like the EFF and Public Knowledge as one does to the movie, music, and cable industries. Given the size of my cable bill, this would be fairly stiff- I might knock out the cable and 'only' do 1:1 on my CDs and movies, which would still be stiff but not over $1K a year, which the cable bill is.

On a non-Lessig note, I just rebuilt planner, and the new resource view is very sweet, though I didn't have time to play with it much. On the negative side, I hate fussing with kernel mods like madwifi- I got it working once a few months ago, and it was great, but now I'm just feeling stupid and I have no idea what I'm doing differently than the first time.

Big Fish was incredible. It reminded me a lot of a friend of my dad's who passed away a few years ago, which choked me up a little at the end. Aside from that, I'm excited to see magico-realism come to film- there were hints of it in Amelie, but in Big Fish it's an integral part of the film, and it is very cool to see. In my lifetime we'll see '100 Years of Solitude, the Miniseries' on HBO34. And it'll be great.

I think at one point I sort of mocked gnome-blog as unnecessary, but now it fails for me completely (I tried to build from head after seeing some bugs had been fixed) and I feel totally hosed. Funny how things change. :)

This story rang true with what I saw in India. Interesting to see how things change- must be a fascinating time to be in that milieu. The Economist this week also has a long series of articles on India and the changes going on there. Very interesting stuff.

jfleck, you might be interested in Derek Powazek's (of fray fame) pictures from the SF marriage line. Some beautiful, affirming stuff. If I had some place to put it, I'd buy his poster- it's just pretty stuff.

Havoc, if you and the other NC refugees are looking for pretty good BBQ, come down in towards town and hit either Red Bones in Davis Sq. or Brother Jimmy's in Harvard Square. And tell me beforehand, I'll join you. ;)

Had a decent day so far, after falling asleep on my couch at like 10pm last night. Shouldn't have been so exhausted, last week was a pretty good week, but I just collapsed. Productive morning- lots of little shopping trips and such. And squeezed in a little fun bugzilla work in the afternoon- always nice to see bugs fixed. Especially one that irritated the hell out of me. :)

Looking forward to finally seeing Big Fish tonight with a couple of friends from Duke- should be fun.

Had a pretty sucessful bugday. Nothing earthshaking, but nice. We tackled a fair amount of nautilus bugs. I would have done more, but nautilus is hosed on my machine for some reason.

After Toshok got mime disabling working, I finally got Evo HEAD built on my home laptop. It's still got rough edges- the team definitely made the right, if hard, choice to withdraw from GNOME 2.6. But wow- it's going to be sweet when all this integration takes place for real in 2.8. I went to Apple's ical website, clicked on stuff, and *boom*- was just there, in my evo calendar. And it came by default with the Evo development schedule- published on www.gnome.org. Any idiot with a website, like myself, can publish a calendar and share- it's pretty cool. Rodney's little applet thingy makes that nice, and of course Ross's lookup applet is sweet too, though for some reason HEAD doesn't build for me ATM. Older version still works, though. Anyway, exciting time. Look for a Duke basketball and 2.6.0 .ics file in this space soon ;)

Had a pretty good day today- Duke lost a basketball game, but otherwise had some generally fun development discussions and hopefully got the ball rolling on lots of useful stuff.

I also met Nat's new boss, Marcus Rex, from SUSE. He seems like a pretty good guy, and I think we'll have a good relationship with him and with them as we work to integrate our stuff into their distro.