Things that have happened recently:
- Laptop died. Replaced it. Little excitement.
- Visited the US and Canada. Came home again. Some excitement.
- Dasher heading for Gnome 2.6. Great excitement.
- IBM launched the X40. Much excitement.
- Became a student again, and have a nice office. Moderate excitement.
Things that are happening:
- Off to FOSDEM next week. Forecast: beer, potential excitement.
- Debconf in May. Forecast: beer (though I have no idea what beer is like in Brazil), potential excitement.
- GVADEC in June. Forecast: duty free whisky in order to avoid punative taxes on crap Norwegian beer, potential excitement.
Hacking on a Qt version of Dasher because it's probably more maintainable on MacOS X than the current Cocoa stuff is. Entertained to discover that the Carbon API allows you to write accessible applications, but doesn't seem to allow you to write applications that make accessible queries. And faking keyboard input looks astonishingly painful. It's like they've come up with an interface without any of the good bits of X, but with all the bad bits. Multiple APIs make Matthew inclined to engage in homicidal activity. I'm not hugely enjoying the Qt experience, though a large part of this is probably down to Designer - people who think that MDI is a good idea should be forced to use it on an 800x600 display for a while. I've already got a window manager that lets me stack windows usefully, replacing it with one that snaps them into each other is a regression. A large one. A sufficiently large regression that, were it to be turned into a phallic object and inserted into the developers of the software concerned, they'd be really quite unhappy.
XServer is unhappy about working with acceleration on Radeons on PPC. Which is a shame, because that's my only vaguely desktop machine at the moment.
Academics tend to release stuff under crackful licenses. The amount of code I've looked at over the past month saying "This code is in the public domain. You may not use it for commerical purposes" is quite terrifyingly large. One of these days, I'm going to have to write something quite insulting about it.
libtool still makes my eyes bleed.