Well, the word is out: Eazel has (effectively) closed its doors. Although I'm sad that Eazel is gone, the finality of it all is quite releaving. The last two months have been zombie-like, with the spirit broken but no real finality. I'm sad that such an incredible team is going to be scattered to the wind, and that some of them I may not see again. I am happy, however, that Nautilus 1.0 is done and that it will live on. This actually makes it the most successful software project I've worked on professionally.

Oh yeah, if you have the ammonite module installed on your system, you can probably remove it now.

I should record some thoughts about Eazel, GNOME, and free software, but that will have to wait.

I moved in with eskil, yakk and jsh in the Castro district of San Francisco this weekend. Previously, I had been living in the southern part of the city, near City College. I've never lived in the center of a city before, and I'm in love with it already.

I finally committed the additions to gnome-vfs that I've been working on, on and off, for the last month. The changes include a callback mechanism and other plumbing, and basic and proxy authentication for the HTTP module. I have a corresponding change to Nautilus to add an authentication dialog, but I have not committed that yet.

I've accepted a job at Danger Research, which I'm quite excited about. Perhaps some other ex-Eazelites will come on there as well, which would be really awesome.

What a mad week.

Everyone knows that Eazel is a dream, and perhaps a little bit of a far-out-there dream. Sure, we all should have bee prepared for the worst. Still, when the dream gets kicked in the groin and then people piss on its still-breathing body, it's a little hard to take.

Ok, I was going to post more here but its too depressing.

Ok, I'm continuing my pattern of going months between diary entries. Oh well.

Beautiful day here in San Francisco. Sunny, clear, and in the mid-70's. Pretty amazing for February, even here.

Hopped on my bike and went up to Sausalito and rented a kayak. I hadn't paddled since I left Seattle, I think. Sausalito, it turns out, is a beautiful place for a light-duty paddle. The little bay has harbour seals, quirky houseboats, a little shipwreak, and an incredible view of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge to the south. Oh yeah, and lots of pleasure boat traffic. Oh well.

People were passing me on my bike today. Clearly I am out of shape.

I caught the flu, probably from robey, a week and a half ago and I still have a lingering cough. The cough ended up thrashing my voice late last week, and the whole thing, combined with other events, has put me in an incredibly bad mood recently. Ugh. It'll be over soon.

Went to Japan Town today with sergent to buy Happy Hacking keyboards. Actually, Jonathan wanted to buy the keyboard and I ended up copy-catting him. We found the keyboard at a cute shop called User's Side which I'm convinced is one of the cutest (in the engrish sense) names for a computer store ever. I'm not sure that I'll be happy hacking with this keyboard, tho, since I actually do use arrow keys.

SF Japan Town is cool. Most of the shops are in indoor malls, but it certainly seems to represent the culture well and doesn't give me an MSG headache like China Town does.

Speaking of hacking, I spent some of the last week trying to improve the Nautilus/Gnome-VFS http performance problem. Ali/Rak gave me some hints that ended up being incorrect but led me to take measurements, which is the most important thing when trying to improve performance (as Pavel has taught me:). I've got a few tricks up my sleave that hopefully I'll get in next week.

I'd hoped that the time after PR2 would be relaxing and that I would have enough time to work on some of my own projects. It really hasn't been that way though. I think I end up doing almost as much work at the beginning of a milestone as I do at the end and then end up slumping off somewhere in the middle of the cycle. I'm less imbalanced these days then I once was, I think

So I was telling old-school hacker geek tales today. Like BBSs and red boxes and programming the Apple II and listening to Information Society. Man, those were the days. Maybe I'll collect some of my better tales in my diary here. I'll try to romanticize the random journeys of sex-starved geeky suburban teenagers in the late eighties as much as I can.