Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 70)

Decently productive day; wrote some project planning docs and did some poking at the gnome in the forthcoming suse 9.1, which we're helping to spruce up. Hopefully we'll get a few more cleanups in before it goes gold.

Got a Replay, finally, and set it up. Pretty nice, I think it'll turn out to be a nice investment. Also got the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack. Pretty good, but did remind me of Ettore a bit, which was not fun.

I also got corrected on iFolder- simias is just a component of iFolder. There are historical reasons why I was confused. :) My bad if I mislead or confused anyone.

I had three meetings scheduled at 4:00pm today. I'm pretty sure that (no matter what Dave says) I don't like attending this many meetings.

If anything, Edd understates what is coming from iFolder. iFolder (to be pronounced 'Simias' in free software form) is one of those things where the adjective that immediately springs to mind is 'sweeeeeet.' With exactly that many e's. The 'go public' switch will be flipped after brainshare. It's not just .NET, FWIW, it is also gtk#, and will eventually hook into Nautilus and probably Evo. The iFolder/Brainshare motto should be 'iFolder: even more exciting than Sammy Hagar.' It'll have some rough edges, to be sure, but I think it'll prove immediately fun to play with and very useful not too far after that.

I hope to find more time to stare at 2.6.0 buglists soon, but so far it's really not bad- it should be a solid, if not spectacular, release.

I absolutely love sound-juicer, but the music DB behind it (or the implementation of the music-ID-ing algorithm) blows. Today has been a game of 'how many multi-platinum albums are not in musicbrainz'. So far, I'm at Nevermind, Ten, 'Songs You Know by Heart', and Dark Side of the Moon. Oh well ;)

Spent a frustrating part of a day trying to get jabberd running, in my on-and-off-again quest to find a really easy to use web-based chat solution for DBR. jwchat is probably the sweetest web-based chat client I've ever seen, and it is open, which rules, but setting up jabberd is like pulling teeth so far- it is painful for someone and apparently requires several years of training to learn how to do correctly. It's the kind of thing that makes me miss Debian- installing a package, answering one or two questions, and having the package Just Work is a pretty nice design goal. Anyway, hopefully next weekend I'll get it going and be able to offer DBR some chat options.

Oh, and I finally broke down and bought a Replay. Between recording the NCAA tournament and Jon Stewart commenting on the election, it seems like the killer apps for it have finally come for me. ;)

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.