Older blog entries for louie (starting at number 75)

Spent most of the weekend either watching basketball or fighting with networking; I appear to have a totally busted wireless setup and I have no clue why. Hopefully I can get meaningful fixage in the morning at the office before leaving for Germany.

Basketball was up and down- we lost, but it was an awesome tournament and were I an independent, unbiased observer I'd say that the last game (where we lost) was one of the best I've seen all season.

I bought a Bavaria guidebook yesterday for this week's trip to Nuremberg. Shame we won't have too much time to see the area, but hopefully we can steal some afternoons. And I'm sure we'll find some places that will sell us beer in the evenings. ;)

It's depressing, but the closest thing to a news show in this country that will do Murrow-like calling of a political spade a spade these days is The Daily Show. The other options either regurgitate both side's spins (calling that 'balance') or regurgitates one side's spin (also, oddly, calling that 'fair and balanced'). No wonder so many of us watch Daily Show, even if they do have to cloak it under the guise of humor. I suppose you have to- if you actually reported seriously on the hypocrisy and incompetence reeking in our politics, it would be too depressing to watch. I suppose the British have a sense of humour about it too, which is why I subscribe to the Economist.

[Few minutes later] As if on queue, a few minutes after I posted this Jon Stewart (delivered by way of ReplayTV) mentioned that next week is Estes Kefauver appreciation week on the Daily Show. I didn't even have to look it up. :)

Finally fixed gnome-blog to work again (it had been sort of hosed by me arrogantly trying to build it myself.) Dave is constantly reminding me that it is silly to build things myself, exactly because of problems like this. It does mostly work, but he is right- if we had regular snapshots again that would be better. :) Still, jhbuild is a nice second to that if you feel like you really need to test HEAD- which I feel like I do, and I hope lots of others are as well.

Amusingly, HEAD gnome-blog 'protects' you frompremature postulation by forcing you to enter a title before posting. This is a pretty good idea, I guess, except that advo doesn't support titles. So I guess I'll be typing asdadf in the title box a lot.

We had a good advisory board meeting yesterday; hopefully we'll get notes of that to the foundation list shortly. Dave and I have really polished up the roadmap- hopefully we'll be able to make that public soon too. If Dave ever tells you he is 'just' a coder, and not one smart mofo who is a damn good writer, ignore him, he's lying. The advisory board did what it was supposed to do by advising- both Sun and the FSF's advisory board members raised some interesting points that I hope we'll be able to act on soon. And Havoc (representing RH) was a muckraker. ;)

xd-unstable (currently being updated only for suse 9, unfortunately) is moving along at a great pace- we got evo 1.5 in there, ross's contact applet, and rodney's webcal stuff. And of course the new filesel. It is far from perfect but it is pretty damn nice- in my humble opinion, in many ways the best desktop out there. Nifty, huh? :)

Besides Miguel Ibarra's awesome packaging work, the reason xd-unstable is nice, FWIW, is that gnome has FIXED 1732 GNOMEVER2.4/2.5 bugs since the release of 2.4.0. 482 of those high/urg/imm priority. And in total there have been 3531 bugs marked FIXED since 2.4.0. As anyone who follows bugsquad knows, those numbers are imperfect for a number of reasons, but still... that's a huge number of bugs FIXED. I was really surprised- I would have guessed many less. Go us. :)

Shortly after posting this morning, found out about Madrid. I've been through Atocha... really, just a terrible thing. I think most Americans probably have a very good feeling for what most Spaniards are going through right now, and it is not a good one. I hope everyone in the Spanish GNOME community is OK and with their loved ones right now.

Was up late last night, sitting in a conference room with Dave and writing a doc for the board. It was awesome. I mean, I'm totally useless right now, and I forgot to mail out a bugday announce, but... it felt good to just burn all the way and end the day on 'hell yeah, I got this done' instead of 'ugh, I'll just finish it tomorrow' which is all too often my MO right now.

So after a 16 hour day yesterday, I'm going to quietly sit at home, maybe order some bad pizza, and chair another board meeting. I will resist the tempation to abuse my new replaytv until after 5:00pm. ;)

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.