Writing
I have been dissapointed in the lack of response to the
first chapter of
my book (which
I will shamelessly
plug again!)
Its not that I expected rave reviews and heaps of praise -
what I really wanted to solicit was constructive criticism.
I want to clean this thing up, because I know it needs work!
Instead I have heard almost -nothing-. I begin to wonder if
hackers are barbarians? ;-) It is odd, because within a few
hours of putting my Nautilus theme up on my web site I was
receiving lots of comments, even lots from people I had
never interacted with. hmmmm.... (update: heaps of thanks to
those of you who have begun writing me...more! more! :-)
Life and living
I am annoyed because Advogato ate my first entry today when
it was already completed. This one won't be as
comprehensive, because its always hard to get up the
gumption to rewrite a longish
segment...grrrrr!
Basically my family is returning to the US from the
Philippines - and they've decided to move into this area. My
father has taken a research position at Xerox PARC, and they
are now embroiled in looking for a house. I'm not 100% sure
how I feel about this, but I think I'm very glad on the
whole. There are obviously downsides, the most noticable of
which is friction I'm recently experiencing with my father.
The long and short is that I've recently become acutely
aware of all his failings and idiosynchratic behavior. Maybe
you're protected from seeing a lot of this as a child, but
it has begun to bother me immensely (probably because I fear
seeing it in myself). Comments that others have had the
grace to make to me (if nobody tells me its hard to
change....) I see applying 10x to him. So what's happened is
that I have grown immensely over the past year being young
and malleable while he has staid set in his ways, of course.
Which means that I have trouble just accepting all the
things that I've tried to prune from myself that I see in
him. Maybe this is good, because it suggests that I've grown
somewhat myself....
Hacking
#$%&**!!!! I'm sooooo tired of the symoblic link code.
Gnome-VFS is incredibly imalleable in some ways, and I'm
having to deal with all of them it seems :-) Its like I do
one thing and the library just slaps me back. I'm making
progress but its tedious and slow. In other fronts I did
some trivial work that enabled the simple search bar in
Nautilus. Hopefully when the symbolic link stuff is off my
plate I'll take a crack at writing the unescape/escape code
in Nautilus once and for all - just put that stuff to rest!
I like that sort of coding because I tend to be working in
environments where I can just write code - the interfaces to
the functions are very well defined and narrow. I like
architecture better, but if I'm just going to code this is
what I want to do.
In other news, I'll now be moving into spending
most of my time labouring over purify. I hate C. Its final.
It seems ironic that the person most supportive of garbage
collection and not having to do memory management will be
tasked with cleaning up the memory leaks ;-)
Of course, I knew this would be coming when I signed on but
that doesn't make it any more fun now that its hapenning.
The upside to this is that I hope to
drastically improve my ability to read other's code. I have
oft respected that in Darin and Pavel (and Maciej to a
lesser extent, it probably develops with years in the field)
and I hope to develop some of that in myself.<shrug>