Older blog entries for murrayc (starting at number 150)

7 Jan 2004 (updated 7 Jan 2004 at 18:43 UTC) »

Daniel lives

Wonderful news. danielk (Daniel Elstner) is alive. I was really starting to worry that something fatal must have happened. But frehberg tracked him down in Berlin. It doesn't sound like things are going so well, but I'm just incredibly glad that he's still in the world.

It sounds like Daniel is looking for work, so someone should snap him up as soon as possible now that I'm putting the word out. He's simply the best programmer that I've ever encountered either in real life or open source.

He can make all the right decisions to design perfect architectures, and he can solve the in-depth problems that most people think are so difficult that they are impossible. And what he writes lasts, without all the niggly corner-case problems that most people end up with. He knows what the user needs at the same time as knowing what the OS and and compiler and processor needs - that is incredibly unusual. His knowledge of C++, and of linux and GNOME, is astounding. As if that wasn't enough, he has an amazing ability to explain all of that stuff to other people.

Escaped

Istanbul was refreshingly festive-free and distracting, though I managed to leave my bank card in an automat and leave my house keys in the hotel. Istanbul is hilly, with lots of little neighbourhoods that are mazes of little streets, and 2 huge waterways, one of which marks the end of 2 continents.

The turkish economy was the most interesting thing to me. Shopping is different in several ways:

  • Everything has fake brand names (jeans and backpacks for instance), but the products are nevertheless of high quality. I like the idea that brand originals are like a reference implementation of a standard design. You can quickly judge the quality of an item by measuring its similarity to the ideal without having to assess the merit of an individual design.

    And this is all at a fraction (typicaly 20%) of the price of the originals in the EU. They will never allow the fake brands or copied designs in the EU, but it's clear that Turkish manufacturers can produce quality products cheaply. The EU and Turkey already have a customs union but this doesn't seem to include textiles, which explains why things are still so expensive in the EU.

  • There are no prices. You haggle over everything, generally down to half of the start price. It's a two way thing, so prices are related to a product's worth to the individual buyer as well as the cost to seller and the general market value.

    As a hopeless shopper, I sometimes changed my mind about something while I was haggling, so I decided that I really didn't want it. In these cases, I found that the price dropped all the way because the buyer thought I was haggling as I walked away. I suspect that things might be yet cheaper than I thought.

  • Taxes. There are often no receipts and no tills and no standard prices, in businesses that employ lots of people. How on earth does the government ever collect any taxes? Apparently a fifth of people are employed by the government, so that's another large group that provide no income tax revenue.

  • Labour is cheap. Lots of businesses have extra people just standing around in case there's anything to do. A large, young, eager population could do great things for the EU economy.

  • The Turkish Lire has an insane number of zeroes, which people just ignore, but which make it very hard to distinguish Xm from X0m on notes. 1 Euro is about 1.7 million TL. After typing 30,000,000 into the bank automat, I had to hesitate before pressing the button.

  • As an owner of foreign currency, conversations are often less than full-duplex. After the standard annoying "Where you from?", and answer of "Greenland. I am an Eskimo." will not disturb the natural progression to "You like to see my carpets?".

gtkmm

I don't think people are using gtkmm 2.3 enough yet, because we haven't had the patches that we normally have. Maybe gtkmm 2.2 is too good, or people don't understand that API freeze will happen on February 16th.

I released an API-frozen Bakery 2.0.0 now that libxml++ is API stable. And libxml++ is now in GNOME's CVS, and HEAD now uses Glib::ustring from glibmm 2.3.

Platform Bindings

It doesn't look like pygtk will be in the Platform Bindings release set. I have asked enough times, but I get no response. However, there is still a chance.

Luckily, the Java bindings will almost certainly be part of it.

Escape

This year I will be escaping Christmas in Istanbul, but I'll be in Munich for New Year's Eve. Then Linz for a month, then Munich from February onwards. I may or may not be working while in Munich.

Little tasks completed

  • dbus-cpp is now in the freedesktop.org CVS and needs you to make it work.
  • libgnomeprint*mm tarballs are out there. Some people wanted this, so now I expect them to send patches.
  • The API/ABI-stable libxml++ 1.0.0 should be out there today.

Stories about nothing

As an early Christmas present, I was taken to hear Friedrich Ani read from, and discuss, his new Tabor Süden book in the Fraunhofer pub in Munich's Glochenbachviertel. I like the idea that he writes stories about nothing, kind of like Seinfeld without so many jokes. His new missing-persons detective book seems to be about the disappearance of an air-guitarist who plays in a band that does not exist, and the people who do not miss him. Of course it's the stuff that happens while nothing is happening that's more interesting.

13 Dec 2003 (updated 13 Dec 2003 at 14:07 UTC) »
Ettore

This must be an intense time for Ximian. I hope they are helped a little by the strong relationships everyone has built within the community.

Nautilus

alex implemented the "shift means close the current window" feature, making the GNOME 2.5 spatial nautilus feel a lot like a classic Mac. Shift-double-click to open-and-close-the-current-one, to keep your screen uncluttered as you explore. And use shift-alt-down when using the arrow-key navigation. This makes Nautilus incredibly satisfying for me, and should make Mac users feel at home. You have to disable the current alt-shift-arrow keybindings in the "keyboard shortcuts" control panel, but I will try to persuade hp to change the defaults.

I noticed an easily reproducable samba-browsing crash in my Red Hat 9 GNOME 2.2. I thought I'd debug it in 2.5, but the crash is already gone. I had to install the Samba 3 rpm, from samba.org, and build gnome-vfs-extras. Nautilus now remembers your password, using the new keyring thingy, so you no don't need to type your password repeatedly. This will be another major item in the GNOME 2.6 release notes. Those Nautilus hackers are doing fantastic work.

System Tools

I tried out the GNOME System Tools again, for the the first time in a while, on Red Hat 9, and Debian. The UI has become a lot more GNOME like, and everything seems to work well. There's a few "More Options" buttons that I'm not too happy with, but I'm not sure how to deal with it better. I guess in future this stuff will just work without any configuration anway.

I think we'd be fools not to get the Time and Network control panels in to GNOME 2.6. I could live with the Services one too, if we need it for Time.

Platform Bindings

I'm signed up to lots of strange new lists, for C#, python, perl, and Java so far.

The java-gnome bindings are trying to get some stuff on to the schedule, and I think they will. The python people seem to want in, but it looks like jamesh is away, and I don't think the decision can be made without him. Everybody seems to be discussing the API stability issues seriously, and I think this is the first sign of our success.

December 22nd is the deadline for submitting the tarballs that will be on the schedule.

release team

It looks like I'm still on the release team. I tried to leave, I really did, but I have to stick around for now to push the Bindings release set. So you get to hear more of my random opinions. People should suggest themselves as replacements - I want to be obsolete.

For instance, it looks like clarkbw will take over UI Review herding this time, and probably do much better job than me.

gtkmm

I put out another set of releases, still in-sync with GTK+ itself.

I think I fixed the GTK+ TreeView crash, but only Kris can say whether it makes sense. Unfortuntely I didn't do it in time for the GTK+ 2.3.1 release. I find it very hard to get my head around GClosure's though I understand the concept just fine. The problem is all these GClosures, GCClosures, closures, and simple_closures, and marshallers and member callbacks and callbacks sent through void* data arguments and my mental stack overflows.

I heard some nonsense yesterday, and on consideration, I think it's silly nonsense.

going gnome-vfs

I rewrote regexxer and PrefixSuffix a bit to use our new C++ gnome-vfs bindings rather than just local file systems. Regexxer was much easier than I expected because danielk's code is so well structured. I haven't done a comparison, but I suspect that regexxer is slower now. If Daniel ever shows up again he's going to slap me around that. I am not worthy of hacking on Daniel's code.

It's nice to know that gnome-vfsmm really works. We will freeze the API for 2.0 soon, so we can branch for the parallel-installable gtkmm 2.4/GNOME 2.6 stuff.

GNOME

The DSL at work is down. I tried using an outdoor WLAN the other day, but my fingers froze up after 5 minutes.

Things I am trying to push at the moment, through the power of email:

Next year

I should be in Munich next year, from the end of January. possibly with free time for life and hacking. As well as trying to find an apartment, it's nice to think about all the things I could do if I had time.

Among other things, I'd like to finally get confident with French. A month-long intensive course should do it. This course in Grenoble looks sane, and it should be cheaper than Paris.

Maybe Spanish too.

Glynn, you know when your boss said you might make a good manager? Maybe this is what he meant. It's a good thing.

I sent my Foundation votes. I was surprised that I actually wanted to vote for 12 instead of 11. I wanted to vote for Sri, because I like the idea of having a newcomer, but that would have meant not voting for another fantastic candidate. I like that I could vote for people with varied affiliations and skill sets this year. But where's Jim Gettys? I hope he continues his recent run of success even when he's not on the board?

I was going to refuse to vote for anyone who didn't even have time to answer the 10 questions, but I forgot to be that stubborn.

Today I had to explain to the Anjuta developers that Glade-generated C code is bad and not something to recommend. I suspect that Anjuta is maybe what is making all those newbies thing Glade-generated C code is what everybody should do. How do we ask the newbies?

We are fantastically close to an API-frozen libxml++ 1.0.0. libxml++ is sooo good.

24 Nov 2003 (updated 24 Nov 2003 at 13:05 UTC) »

People seem to want something. A GNOME Bindings release set might be what they want.

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