Older blog entries for sri (starting at number 15)

Happy New Years everyone!

Had my parents and my brother over. We had a pretty good time although a bit busy. I hope everyone else had a good time this year. We got ourselves a new phone and a new microwave. We got some other minor stuff. My dad got another pocket pc to replace his old one that he had lost. I also got a new 120G hard drive which is really nice to have. Considering my mp3/ogg has grown and the application/library codebase for GNOME is getting really huge now.

My kitten seemed to be the hit of the year and seemed to have charmed everyone here. The little guy is really growing up. He's started to learn some tricks now too. I almost have him walking on his hind legs by twirling a piece of paper on a string over his head. The funny thing is that after I stop he still starts looking up looking for that whirling piece of paper!

The weather has proven to be amazingly cold especially for Portland. We had a ton of snow and it was very amusing to watch all the cars slipping.

GNOME: I haven't done jack beans on this. I was able to pull out a summary with the help of Sayamindu Gupta for one week and Jim Hodapp on the second one. Jim in particular has embarked on doing something new like adding interviews. It's difficult to put original content week after week. I'm unhappy just copying what I see in footnotes. Thats the ultimate in lameness rehashing news IMHO. I really want to thank Sayamindu and Jim for the wonderful work they've been doing.

We hope that in the future gnome summary will have a magazine/newsletter component while maintaining the traditional summary. I read Andrew's blog about wanting to do a hacker version of the summary and that sounds like a grand idea. It would be nice to expand the team I currently have by another 3 or so. That would be very ideal and then we can do that sort of thing.

Rhythmbox: I've been doing some code work on here. One thing about hacking RB is that I can't seem to listen to music since I can't run two instances of RB. So my devel version will kill my stable. I"ve been having some trouble implementing my file chooser.

Merry Christmas everyone! Peace, Love, and international Groviness to all!

sri

Merry Christmas everyone! Peace, Love, and international Groviness to all!

sri

Wow, I can't believe they captured Saddam. Although I look upon it as both a blessing and a curse. Curse because we might have to put up with Bush, and more importantly Ashcroft. Bleah.

GNOME: I put out my gnome summary today. It was late unfortunately. I had no time at work so I wasn't able to complete it. Can't wait for these other guys to come in and get cvs access. Secondly, I think we are going to start putting in some different things in Gnome summary like Q&A and other stuff. Hopefully, we can branch that part off into a kind o newsletter.

Rhythmbox: My really simple status bar was put in RB. But Walters wanted me to merge the tooltips into the rb status bar. So I'll probably work on that. Wont' start on it until after I finish adding GtkFileChooser. It's pretty trivial to do it.

Personal: Tommorow I get to see Lord of the Rings:The Return of the King. I can't wait! I'm taking some time off of work to go see it. The tickets are paid for by a vendor and I'll probably be going in the morning before everybody else. My wife, Banu is also planning on coming along. So we should have a fun time I think.

Put together a piece of furniture in the bathroom. Looks alright.

Work: Work was kind of fun. I had to help with an AIX upgrade from AIX 4.3.3 to AIX 5.1. It's scary wiping out a whole server and then pray that it will come back when you do an importvg. It didn't quite work out since we had an automated installer that tried to recreate the filesystem. Oops.

It was also an end of an era. We removed the last of the old generation Auspex servers and we had a nice meal as we put an end to 8 years of troublesome servers. Yay! Tommorow should be fun with a all hands recreational event. Bowling and pizza! :) Looking forward to getting a decent score!

GNOME: Been working on getting the new GTK filechooser into the codebase. It's not very hard. But I haven't been able to get time to do it with everything else going on.

I was very sadden to hear about Ettore. While I've never interacted with him other than a few words here and there. I knew that a lot of people respected him and my heart goes out to those who were close to him. This has been the second death in a month in the GNOME community. It's been a tough time for the Ximian guys. The next drink will be in Ettore's honor.

I have to finish off my OGI (Oregon Graduate Institute) application by tommorow so that I can take classes in the spring!

Loosk like I haven't updated in awhile. Been busy and I've been trying to figure out how to mirror this blog to advogato. I've succeeded but I haven't been able to quite make it permanent yet.

Gnome-Summary Well, I've been doing a lot trying to get these summarys in shape. It's been a bit of a struggle and I have to do some development work in order to make the text files. So I have to quickly grok how to do these DTD's in docbook. That should prove interesting. Oh well. It's never boring in the FOSS community!

The nice thing is that I've gotten a number of volunteers who are willing to help out with the summary. So far there is four of us. I'd like to get a mailing list going and be able to get this really kicked off with doing some rotations so that people don't get burned out doing the summaries. It really requires some discipline and energy to want to find out whats new.

I've had some discussions with Danilo on putting translation stats. I also have to follow up with Calum Benson about A11y stats as well. Then we should be able to get a good idea of how the project is coming along and maybe use it to figure out which parts need some lovin. Thanks to all those people who spoke up and want to get the summaries into good shape.

It was gratifying to see so many people appreciate the gnome summaries. I've taken a lot of the suggestions and criticisms to heart and hopefully this next one will be better. I've tried to get some real meat this time instead of repeating whats going on footnotes and announcement. Hopefully this will generate more buzz. I've also decided to take on Freedesktop because they haven't gotten anybody to pimp for them any of their accomplishment.

One last note. Gnome summary stuff is really well maintained. It took me no time to pickup and do it. Hats of to Uraeus and everyone else who helped really get this bad boy into a nice system that anybody can do.

Gnome-Marketing: I got on this mailing list recently because of my involvement with Gnome-Summary. Not much going on although we've kicked off several mailing lists to do activities in several countries. I really like to really see something with this. There is also a nice bit about a government entity mandating GNOME as their official desktop. Find out in the summary ;)

Rhythmbox: I have been hacking on this codebase to try to get this one feature in and it's been a pain in the ass. I ended up having to learn a little bonobui and learning the database code. I don't quite understand the database stuff yet. Walters hasn't been around due to school so I haevn't been able to get much enlightenment. The only thing I did do was write a patch that will show the tooltips for the menu on a status bar. Apparently you can't do tooltips on menus. Which I can understand as it would be annoying. I think I'm going to have to give up the idea of getting the next song and previous on hover.

Life: Well life has been really been busy for me. Work has been kind of bleah. I haven't been doing a hell of lot. But I do have a couple of projects that are long term. One is that we are going to have to update all our AIX servers to AIX5 from AIX4. So I need to figure out a long range plan in doing that. It's a cinch. Since most of the work has already been done. I'm doing some skunkworks stuff to. I've started learning python and was writing up some utilities that I could use to streamline some of the things I do. We have all team event next week. Going to do some bowling.

Banu has been really busy with school and I don't see her till the late evening. I need to come up with some better recipes to cook. It's kind of hard to get the motivation to do that.

Did some house lighting but ended up needing some extra gear to get it really nice. I have some other ideas that I'm going to try to do tomorow.

Well it's another thanksgiving. I actually took the trouble to get up at 5:45 and see if I can pick up any good deals. I picked up a new tv for the bedroom and some bathroom furniture. The prices were negligible though. What a rat race though. Next time I'm going to Frys! :-) I also started putting the home lights. Being on the roof is no fun. One thing not to do is to use your pocket pc as a mp3 player. The damn thing kept changing volumes, run other programs it was a pain in the ass.

GNOME - Well I've been trying to hack rhythmbox for awhile and trying to add this one feature I wanted. The codebase isn't that hard to learn but working with some of the routines can be kinda confusing. All I was trying to do was add some tooltip loving and it looks like it might actually be easy to do. Today I finally figured out the part of the code that will do it. Admittedly I didn't have to try too hard it took me about 25 minutes to figure what was going on. I hope to get it up and going tonight if at all possible. I would love to see an embedded version of RB so that I can put it in my palm pilot.

I need to finish up GNOME summary so that it's ready to go by Monday. Last week was a bit of a mess since I wasn't getting all my stats. In fact I think I'm still running into trouble. Hopefully I will get it in time and I can add it again this week.

Heard in #freedesktop with Keith convincing Havoc to do something interesting with minimizing of windows. Looks like there might be some very interesting things with the new compositing manager for X. I can't wait. Too bad it doesn't support my nvidia video card. :/

Sorry guys, last spam I promise.

I'm testing out this advodairy script to see if I can mirror my blog to here. So that I can actually have people read what I'm talking about. :-)

GNOME:

Man, these questions for the GNOME foundations can be quite thought provoking. I have the hardest time with the last one. What I want to say is that being a volunteer organization it's not going to be easy to summon up resources then prioritize for documentation. You just dont' have that kind of control. You have sort of nudge things into the right direction. Thats always the challenge of a large software project like GNOME.

Work:

I had another fileserver crash today. Lucky me I was at the vet when it happened. I also got tasked to find out how many times the servers I'm responsible for have gone down n the past year or so.

Life:

I took our kitten to the vet today. The vet says it might have worms and it definitely has upper tract infection. Poor kitty. And it's been behaving so well. After we gave the antibiotics today (that was fun) Kitkat seems to be a lot better. Animals can really improve your quality of life iff you're into that kind of thing.