In my previous job, I visited to the World Trade Center many times for meetings and presentations. I've stayed at the hotel right across the street, which is also now reported to have collapsed. I know plenty of people who work there.
It is impossible to imagine that the entire thing is now nothing but a pile of rubble.
Frantic Guppi hacking continues, including some major decrufting. The current short-term goal is Guppi/Gnumeric integration... Jody's new approach to this problem is much nicer than the old way we were doing things. We are definitely going to suck less.
Food
My current favorite place for "fast food" is Taqueria El Milagro, which is on 19th and Blue Island (just east of Ashland, in Pilsen). Be sure to try the tamales.
Music
I didn't really like RATM's Renegades when I bought it last year, but I pulled it off the shelf for another listen last week and I've been loving it ever since. And why can't I stop listening to XTC's Apple Venus and Wasp Star?
Early Warning
RMS is going to be vising Chicago at the end of October, an d will be speaking at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science on Wednesday, October 31. I'll have more details on his schedule closer to that date; e-mail me for more information.
I've got a half-finished chunk of major Guppi changes sitting in my local tree, but Evolution debugging is blocking all other tasks.
Adding new features is so much more fun than debugging. Feature freeze sucks.
Tasty Frozen Alcoholic Auto-Treats
I was in Lake Charles, Louisiana last weekend, attending a friend's wedding. In case you don't already know, Louisiana exists in a parallel universe when it comes to laws related to alcohol.
I've been to New Orleans a few time, where street vendors selling extremely alcoholic goodies are not uncommon. In Lake Charles, I was introduced to the small-town version of this tradition: the drive-through daiquiri stand The one we visited, "The Daiquiri Shack", had a full menu of frozen drinks, as well as Jello shots for the bargain price of $1. And I have to admit it: it was a really good Daiquiri
Apparently Louisiana does have some sort of "container law", but the great legal minds of the drive-through daiquiri industry have a solution. The plastic cup you are served your daiquiri in have a lid on top, and that lid is held in place by a piece of scotch tape. Thus the cup doesn't qualify as an "open container".
Luckily, the piece of tape doesn't obstruct the straw-hole in the lid.
The Dmitry Sklyarov/eBook Hacking/DMCA case has inspired me to finally join the EFF, which I'd been meaning to do for ages. If you haven't already, you should too.
All in all, a good one. Dan Mueth, hp (who was in Chicago to attend a wedding) and I spent a very late Saturday night hanging out at the neighborhood bar, discussing GNOME, free software, the meaning of life, and other weighty topics. Over our favorite beverages, we worked out some of the details of how we are going to implement the secret Red Hat/Ximian conspiracy to control GNOME. Oh wait... I'm not supposed to talk about that, right?
Confusion
I admit it. I just don't understand Bonobo.
I understand it enough to get it to occasionally do what I want it to do, but only by finding other code that sort of does what I want to do, and by copying/perturbing it. It gets the job done, but otherwise sucks. I hate not understanding what I'm doing. I hate that feeling of being... adrift.
I suppose I'll more-or-less figure this stuff out in time. Things are already slightly less hazy than they were just a few weeks ago. And the Bonobo API docs are (as far as API docs go) actually pretty useful. But it is still a laborious process.
Ximian has released some information on the Mono Project. I'm happy the word is out, because now maybe I can actually find out what Mono is all about.
Even though I'm a Ximian employee, I usually have no idea what we are up to. Since I work remotely, I miss out on all of the water-cooler gossip that goes on in Boston. As a result, I never have to worry about accidentally revealing proprietary information, because I never know any.
Hacking
I closed a bunch of Evolution bugs tonight (including a few I introduced with my big commit last Friday... oops!), so I rewarded myself with a few hours of Guppi hacking.
Guppi has been distressingly stagnant recently; Evolution hacking has been pretty all-consuming. However, the release of the new GnuCash (which uses Guppi) has caused a noticable increase in interest. And Jody is apparently hard at work on Gnumeric integration, so Guppi hacking is getting less lonely. If only I could find some Python guru to give some TLC to Guppi's badly-broken python bindings...
I'm also still playing around with subversion, but haven't gotten very far. I've finally gotten it to build w/ libtool 1.4; now I need to get it to not immediately segfault when I try to create a repository. There must be something screwed up on my system .
blockquote
I'm using <blockquote>s... I feel like such an Advogato user now!
On a whim, I ordered a bunch of CDs tonight. Most of my order was the glorious music of my misspent youth, filling out my CD collection with stuff I used to own on vinyl or cassette. Among other things, I picked up two by The Fall, a few XTC albums, "Meet the Residents", some Bowie ("Aladdin Sane" and "Heros") and Eno's "Before & After Science". Listening to these is going to be a big college flashback for me.
The big splurge item of the night was the four-CD William S. Burroughs boxed set that I've been coveting for some time. Burroughs has always been my favorite of the Beats, ever since I read Naked Lunch when I was seventeen. I didn't know what the hell to make of it, but suddenly all of that SF crap I'd been digesting for years didn't seem so clever anymore.
Listening to Burroughs read is a pleasure in itself. I'd recommend the excellent "Call Me Burroughs" to any of the adventurous among you. In fact, I'll make you this guarantee: if you buy this album, and if you really hate it, I'll defray your cost by buying you three beers. (This offer is only valid if the request for the beer is made to me in person. You must be able to verbalize your reason for not liking it coherently. "It sucks", "It is boring" and "All he does is talk about weird stuff" are not acceptable reasons. All three beers must be consumed in one sitting. Void where prohibited.)
T-iay s-iay a-ay eautiful-bay ay-day n-iay Hicago-cay, et-yay ere-hay I-ay m-aay acking-hay n-oay Volution-eay. Aybe-may fter-aay he-tay eature-fay reeze-fay (hich-way s-iay n-oay Onday-may) I-ay ill-way ave-hay a-ay ittle-lay ime-tay o-tay ack-hay n-oay Uppi-gay. Pig Latin impaired, fuck off.
Actually, I don't really have strong feelings about Bonobo one way or the other.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
