A whole lot of stuff has happened since my last diary entry here. Wow. I really wish I kept more up to date with this.

Way back in October I started The Debian Desktop subproject. Now it's a while later, and it's been a mixed success. Some patches have been made, and maintainers are now much more aware of end-users. But we haven't made the killer breakthrough that I was hoping for.

I got a job in grad school: teaching an introduction to Java. I don't like Java that much personally, but it is a lot of fun to try to get people interested in programming. I couldn't argue with free tuition or the stipend, either :)

A while back I mentioned that I was starting on Internet Radio support for Rhythmbox. However, after I had the rough outlines of the code committed, the Rhythmbox maintaine committed on a completely new user interface; this made my code not work at all. So I kind of stopped hacking on it for a while; about a month maybe. But I kept wanting to listen to internet radio, so after a week or two I grabbed snapshot of CVS from before his UI rewrite commit, and started using it. Then I got annoyed by some bugs, and fixed those. My changes started to get large enough that I wanted to use version control. During all of this time, the Rhythmbox maintainer's only focus was finding the perfect UI. I kept working, because I personally wanted a working music player to replace xmms. It was not long after that I realized it was turning into a very different branch, almost a fork, although I hated to use that word. But now the worst scenario has occurred: the Rhythmbox maintainer has retired, leaving me with the branch. I really wish things had turned out differently. I think there is still hope that we will merge. Having two music players for GNOME is stupid. I certainly didn't imagine ending up as the defacto maintainer for Rhythmbox, and I'm not sure I have the requisite skill to even do it. I just wish jorn had accepted releasing the branch as Rhythmbox 0.4.5, and then we could have focused on merging all of our work in CVS. But now we kind of have the worst of both worlds. It is a big mess. I don't know what's going to happen from here.