Older blog entries for sri (starting at number 24)

30 Apr 2004 (updated 30 Apr 2004 at 06:05 UTC) »

jdub congrats dude on your engagement!

Well, after many moons I blog again! I was going to write something short because I'm somewhat sleepy.

My cat seems to continue to have personality changes. The guy has developed quite a temper of late. He's been itching to go outside like all the time. Which is totally understandable because the days are gorgeous. Unfortunately, he always gets unwell when he goes out for a long time. But this one time we took him outside but never sat him down and then took back inside. Oh man, he was so mad he was trying to bite my wife and just overall showing his displeasure. hahaha. Silly kitten.

Hacking has been going downhill. I've been too busy enjoying the weather. Been doing a lot of gardening and working on my sprinkler/drip system. I think I'm at the stage where it would be nice to connect it directly to the water main coming into the house. But I'm going ot need so help there I think.

Finally, d.g.o is fixed and people can actually see the summaries. I've been working on them without releasing anything. I know I have one in the works that I need to finish and then I need to start on this weeks too. All my volunteers seem to be busy with other projects and I've been plodding on doing them myself. </whine>

I finally got time to look at rb's status bar code again. Goddam, what a pain in the ass. I have to do some serious re-working I think to actually get somewhere including changing the RBStatusBar struct somehow. I haven't figured out what all that needs to be done but I need to do it soon, but my motivation is not that great.

One thing I find when reading DDL is that technical arguments come up but there is never any follow up. It just sort of flares up and then there is never an concrete direction. I remember way back when we used to have flame wars that the GEP processes was put in place so that we can discuss and approve technical items. We should go back to that.

Finally, I'd like to talk about 2.8 direction for GNOME. One thing I've found is that our documentation sucks badly. I'm not talking about quality but rather quantatively things like APIs are not complete. It's hard for companies and external developers to use GNOME APIs if they aren't complete. It's just not professional. GNOME-VFS for instance has only 85% completion. Furthermore, I have no idea how much of that API documentation needs to be re-audited for accuracy. What I propose is to have a documentation day like we do a gnome love day (or it could be gnome love day) and we have a number of people come in and start writing API documentation with maintainers hanging around to ask questions. By 2.8 I would like to see core GNOME modules at least 90% API complete. I personally plan on working on GNOME-VFS which needs a lot of love.

I know I said 'finally'. But I lied. One last thing though, I promise. There is some truth from detractors like oGalaxyo when they say that GNOME apps are not all behaving consistently. For instance, GNOME branded apps like inkscape, Gnumeric and others should be able to read documents on remote filesystems through sftp:// and samba:// urls. Recently, Jody has made the fixes for Gnumeric to support this, but Id like to see all other GNOME applications behave similarly. We should start pushing on application writers to make things behave consistently.

Well, after many moons I blog again! I was going to write soething short because I'm somewhat sleepy.

My cat seems to continue to have personality changes. The guy has developed quite a temper of late. He's been itching to go outside like all the time. Which is totally understandable because the days are gorgeous. Unfortunately, he always gets unwell when he goes out for a long time. But this one time we took him outside but never sat him down and then took back inside. Oh man, he was so mad he was trying to bite my wife and just overall showing his displeasure. hahaha. Silly kitten.

Hacking has been going downhill. I've been too busy enjoying the weather. Been doing a lot of gardening and working on my sprinkler/drip system. I think I'm at the stage where it would be nice to connect it directly to the water main coming into the house. But I'm going ot need so help there I think.

Finally, d.g.o is fixed and people can actually see the summaries. I've been working on them without releasing anything. I know I have one in the works that I need to finish and then I need to start on this weeks too. All my volunteers seem to be busy with other projects and I've been plodding on doing them myself. </whine>

I finally got time to look at rb's status bar code again. Goddam, what a pain in the ass. I have to do some serious re-working I think to actually get somewhere including changing the RBStatusBar struct somehow. I haven't figured out what all that needs to be done but I need to do it soon, but my motivation is not that great.

One thing I find when reading DDL is that technical arguments come up but there is never any follow up. It just sort of flares up and then there is never an concrete direction. I remember way back when we used to have flame wars that the GEP processes was put in place so that we can discuss and approve technical items. We should go back to that.

Finally, I'd like to talk about 2.8 direction for GNOME. One thing I've found is that our documentation sucks badly. I'm not talking about quality but rather quantatively things like APIs are not complete. It's hard for companies and external developers to use GNOME APIs if they aren't complete. It's just not professional. GNOME-VFS for instance has only 85% completion. Furthermore, I have no idea how much of that API documentation needs to be re-audited for accuracy. What I propose is to have a documentation day like we do a gnome love day (or it could be gnome love day) and we have a number of people come in and start writing API documentation with maintainers hanging around to ask questions. By 2.8 I would like to see core GNOME modules at least 90% API complete. I personally plan on working on GNOME-VFS which needs a lot of love.

I know I said 'finally'. But I lied. One last thing though, I promise. There is some truth from detractors like oGalaxyo when they say that GNOME apps are not all behaving consistently. For instance, GNOME branded apps like inkscape, Gnumeric and others should be able to read documents on remote filesystems through sftp:// and samba:// urls. Recently, Jody has made the fixes for Gnumeric to support this, but Id like to see all other GNOME applications behave similarly. We should start pushing on application writers to make things behave consistently.

Okay, I'm finally getting off my ass and writing something. I never feel like I have the time to actually write something. Maybe it's because I want to write so much that I end up writing nothing. Thats usually the case.

Gnome: Well, I've not been having a lot of time to work on things. I should have finished off the status bar in RB but I haven't done crap. I've spent more time socializing on IRC than anything else. Also, my mind has been distracted with things at work and also gnome summary related side activities.

Gnome Summary is doing good. I've been falling behind on getting summaries out on time because I'm having less time to do it. It's not due to lack of volunteers. But CVS access is preventing at least one of them into becoming a full fledged editor. No big deal though. Gnome Summary days will probably be numbered here soon giving way to a new format. Hopefully that will take off. Although the role I have to play in that format will not nearly be as visible as it has in GNOME summary. But still if I accomplished anything, I've moved from doing gnome summary by myself to a team of 7 active people who are willing to help out and it's even seems to be growing. Not bad. :-) Who wants me next?

Regarding Havoc's blog entry. I'm not sure if we really need to be that alarmist. Seems like we are trying to choose between two evils since neither one of them are "good". Sun should trust the open source community. Personally, Mono seems to be the one that has been having the most momentum in Gnome. I don't really recall seeing any apps for Java at all. Market forces will force one or the other to open it up further. So while Sun is relunctant to open it up now; it will later when .Net starts cleaning up.

Life: I saw Dream Theater two weeks ago, and boy it was a great concert. I haven't gone out to rock out in awhile and it was great. I ended up going alone but it was still alright. The week afterwards I went to see Moya Brennan (http://www.moyabrennan.com/) Awesome, AWESOME voice. I've been listening to her longer than Dream Theater. She's the lead singer of Clannad, and elder sister to Enya. She sings mostly in Gaelic (Irish if you're in Ireland). Clannad was one of those groups that spurred the rekindling of interest in Gaelic. Anyways, It was a pretty good time if I don't say so myself.

Sayonara :-)

It seems like forever since I've written anything. I don't write because I'm kind of busy or something comes up. Dunno why that is. If I get disciplined enough to blog something every a couple of days, I know I'm getting somewhere. Look out this is going to be a long one.

Rhythmbox: Well, more work has gone into trying to merge the statusbar. This required lots of staring at rb code, staring at libbonoboui examples/tests trying to find the magic that will allow me to pack widgets into the bonobo statusbar. I finally was able to do that after much time. Yes, I'm scarred by bonobo. :-) It's sort of sad, as gnome was supposed to use bonobo but people are unwilling to help in general, the documentation is poor with missing APIs because nobody wants to do the documentation. Thats a problem. If it was more documented I think it would be used more. If I use something I'll stick in some documentation for it. Documentation is your friend. In any case, this going through the pain has kind of helped in developing some neato features like dynamic content popup. Currently it's fixed, and I'd like to add tooltips that will tell you what the next song is or what the previous song is. I tried to do this before but got stopped. Now I got some clue packets(tm) coming to me baby!

Gnome-Summary: Work goes slowly in trying to get translations and summary into shape. There are a lot of other plans as well. We sent out a call for volunteers to help and got 11 people signed up to help us out with gnome summary. Thats a lot of people! I am hoping that I can send some of them to Shaun McCance as he really needs developers to help him with yelp and I'm afraid he'll burn out at his current rate.

Lot of them know XSLT so there can be some real benefit there. Shaun, Danilo, and it looks like Marielo are tackling how to get docbook more translation friendly. G-S needs this in order to have multiple translations. We are thinking of going with a new css stylesheet in order to handle the translations. But no idea how to plan the infrastructure. I'm going to let Shaun and Danilo figure that part out since they look like they have a good base with the xml2po tool.

With this we will also start seeing hopefully a gnome newsletter type thing. Now, before people starts talking about footnotes and duplication. NO! There won't be any. Footnotes is like slashdot, it does not generate news it only reports it. Also, the newsletter will go out to a much larger audience rather than just gnome people.

Remember, we're talking about marketing and getting the GNOME buzz outside our community so that we can grow it. While we've been doing interviews and what not in summary it's not really the right format (eg it's a summary).

Anyways, how we do it will probably something similar to how g-s is being done. More later. We have another person added to our g-s team, and he's got some great ideas along with Jim Hodapp on creating some cool ideas that involve aspects of GNOME that we don't think about. There's some serious creative juices flowing here and I can't wait to see what they can do!

Danilo: I don't know where we picked him up, but this guy absolutely rocks! He's always there to lend a hand and is always looking out for the translators and translating issues. He's done a lot for g-s in trying to get it translated and out, writing a tool extract text so it can be translated. We need more Danilos. Thanks man, you're a gem of a person. So there's my fanboy for this week. :-)

Gnome: I'm looking forward to OSCON '04. I sent in my petition to do a presentation there. Although I confess I'm nervous. I'll have many of my peers in the GNOME community there and I want to make sure I make a presentation that doesn't suck. I'll probably have nightmares. (especially since I suck at being in the spotlight)

Anyways, It's over a use case study of how GNOME can help get shit done (tm). I haven't quite written up the presentation, as I didn't get permission to go until the very day the abstracts were due. I sent the abstracts today. I'm also planning on setting up a GNOME booth. This time, I'll make sure that everything is done at least two months in advance. Last time, 1 month wasn't enough because everybody was busy with GUADEC and I wasn't able to get a hold of anybody.

Kuru: Thats my cat's name, actually it's kitkat, but we got so many names for the critter, it just changes constantly. He doesn't care it's not like he responds to any of the names. :-) He's the big love in our lives. It's nice to come home to a loving animal it's a nice feeling.

Work: It's been alright, because of how things are with less people, and new hires going to the asian countries things have become more political. This causes a lot of stress because we spend more time farting around with people instead of just getting shit done. I've become fed up myself with the lack of strong leadership and direction. I'm half minded to start a coupe. Since I'm sure I can probably do it better than whose in charge now.

Ah well. At least I can work on GNOME and not worry too much about politics but instead work on getting stuff done. ALthough that reminds me it's time to hit up our finance guys about a little donation. They should give GNOME more than they gave the Jabber foundation. ;)

There I hope that made up for everything. I'll put more stuff later.

Orkut seems to be hitting the waves here. It's a wonderful little experiment and I'm more amused by others and my own reactions to Orkut. I know that my own reaction has been a need to join to not only get in because of it's supposed "exclusivity" but to pit myself against this social network and find out what happens. So far, my number of friends is climbing. No pictures. (maybe a good thing!) I have added several of my local friends and family in an effort to bring them into the fold. It seems like a good way to keep track of friends both distant and close. At the very least I will remember their birthdays! :-)

More Later.

Orkut seems to be hitting the waves here. It's a wonderful little experiment and I'm more amused by others and my own reactions to Orkut. I know that my own reaction has been a need to join to not only get in because of it's supposed "exclusivity" but to pit myself against this social network and find out what happens. So far, my number of friends is climbing. No pictures. (maybe a good thing!) I have added several of my local friends and family in an effort to bring them into the fold. It seems like a good way to keep track of friends both distant and close. At the very least I will remember their birthdays! :-)

More Later.

Boy it's been a long time since I've blogged. Whats wrong with me?!

Rhythmbox: I haven't done jack beans in awhile. The only thing I've done is updated my archives and played around with arch. Walters was able to do a dual central and distributed repository model with RB. Sometimes the whole model is more interesting than RB itself. :-)

GNOME: Greg and I have decided that we will try to do something for OSCON this time. Perhaps we will do a GNOME related track. Hopefully something relevant. Not decided what I would like to do as of yet. I'm also thinking of doing a track on the distributed repository model using arch.

Gnome-Summary: Lots of discussions on what to do here. Our group has grown by at least one more. More on that later. Lots of discussions with Danilo Segan on translated summaries. The main goal is to have translated summaries for as many languages as we can. We hope that people from a wide variety of countries would be able to read the summaries. Still more work to do. We got ourselves another interview this week.

Work: Work is work. It's gotten a little more busier. I used rsync to do transfers between different places and somehow I got tagged as an expert. You can be an expert on rsync too, just read the damn man page. Got cornered after a presentation and grilled for 45 minutes. That was pleasant. That should happen again. Really!

sisob: Man, I have no idea whats going on here. Why are we having so many young lives cut short? I haven't met Mark all that much but remember all his postings to ddl and his blog entries. Particurly, looking at his old blog entries is heart breaking. Farewell Mark. We'll miss you.

Rhythmbox: Well having had my gtkchooser stuff into rhythmbox, I'm now working on getting the bookmark portions working. While I don't really think it needs it I'm doing it for completeness sake. But I have to put that off as I have to finish doing the status bar which I said I would finish. Currently we have an extra widget at the bottom of the RB window.

I see that jorn has released his music player, Muine. Looks cool. Great to see jorn back in the swing of things!

elanthis sorry to hear about your job man. I'm sure you'll be able to pick up another one soon. It seems strange that just one misstep would get you fired. Weird.

Politics: I hope this is the last year of Bush. I can't wait to do my patriotic duty and vote. I hope the rest of you will as well. This is the biggest thing we can do as citizens, participate in our govt. If they know we are watching they'll not be doing things.

Other Crap: Well I finally switched over to 2.6.1. I'm really pleased. It feels a lot faster and I can't wait to add dbus, udev, and hal in and check out some of the cool things that rml and others have been doing with kernel <-> desktop integration. Truly I think this year is going to be the year of the desktop.

I need to decide whether I'm going to do a GNOME booth at OSCON here in Portland, OR. I'd like to do it because this time it's going to be desktop oriented. But I can't do it without the proper planning. Last year was a disaster because everything was so rushed. I also want to make it a bit more social this time. We hardly got to spend a lot of time doing anything social with the people.

Time to work on gnome-summary and get it out.

11 Jan 2004 (updated 11 Jan 2004 at 03:01 UTC) »

It's disheartening to know how badly my programming skills has deteriorated. I was involved in some conversation regarding threads and locks and while I understood everything on a conceptual level I had no idea how I would sit down and code such a thing. Thats sad considering I'm half way through my Masters programs. Obviously, work + masters doesn't give you good programming skills.

Rhythmbox hacking took a turn for the better yesterday. I was finally able to get the new fileselector in. It should have only taken about an hour or so to implement but for some reason or another it took longer. It took longer because I was getting some really strange errors and my gdb wasn't working. Not easy without it. Here's what RB looks like with the new file chooser:

<img src="http://www.aracnet.com/~sri/rb-filechooser.png"> RB with New Filechooser </img>

I'm slowly started to understand Arch. So have many others. It's a pretty cool system. The learning curve is a bit high but with the right amount of documentation and what not I think it should turn out good. I use Arch primarily with Rhythmbox. Colin Walters is a pretty patient guy in answering all my questions.

Gnome Summary. I really want to give a big shoutout to Uraeus. I don't know how he was able to do this every week by himself. It really shows how much dedication and time he and others have put into this. Simply awesome. Currently, I'm trying to learn a little XSLT. I need to be able to put in the A11y bugs that are sent out weekly by Calum. The translation stuff still hasn't been put in either because I don't quite understand how to make those changes as of yet. The rest of the team finally got CVS accounts and now can modify the xml file directly. Jim did his first commit ever to a open source project. I remember how that felt. It felt awesome. He's got another interview coming up this week, that I'm eager to see. We didn't see as much commentary last time with rml's interview. But it was a good interview all the same.

I've missed 3 days of work last week. Well I attempted to work from home but VPN connections were really really slow. The first day I couldn't even attend any of my meetings because all of Intel's phones were busy. Oregon and it's deep freeze. :) Banu didn't attend school either. So we had ourselves a mini holiday but was forced to stay at home. By the third day it was cabin fever and we desperately wanted to get out and simply do something, anything!

Job review is coming up and I need to write something. I have no idea what the hell I did the past year. It all seemed to have gone so fast. I'm sure I"ll come up with some bullshit. It's not like we are going to get any raises or anything. Damn IT industry seemed have really taken a plunge.

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.

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