Life:
My little baby girl is one today! That can't be right, it seems like she was just born. I must be having fun for time to fly like this. She's pretty much officially graduated from "baby" to "toddler" with a vengeance -- not just walking, but climing (she's determined to find a way to scale the outside of her Pack-n-Play), disdaining baby food, and working very hard on learning to talk. She's got a vocabulary of about three or four words, and is clearly working hard on catching up with her big brothers. Oh, and did I mention that she cut three teeth in less than twenty-four hours? :^)
Work:
It's scary what you can find in some factories. If you think "spaghetti code" is bad, try spaghetti wiring ...
I finally got AutoCAD 2000i yesterday, and hopefully will get it installed and kick the tires somewhat today. I'm looking forward to it -- besides the traditional AutoLISP, they're now touting something called VisualLISP. Also, this version includes VBA and better Automation support than AutoCAD 14 had. Time for some CAD system hacking!
CAD software is an area that is in great need of love and attention from free software hackers.
Hacking:
Very little of that going on. I need to make good on setting up autoconf for the PuffinPLC project. I've been trying to follow the debate/flamage on the gnome-office list (learned more about the internals of AbiWord than I thought I would ever need to know). My conclusion: we really really need a quality Win32 port of GTK+ (with native look-and-feel), plus a whole bunch of other libraries (gettext, libglade, etc.). Prefereably with mingw32 instead of the entire Cygwin project thrown in.
Spent a bit of time investigating gCAD. This is a very interesting project, especially with the promised integration with Varkon. Unfortunately, there's been no release for almost a year and a half, and it's hard to tell if the project is alive or dead. :^( I've emailed IƱigo Serna, but no response yet.