Go forward in time to Feb 2001.
Unproductive day. Went CD-shopping; Miles Davis, György Ligeti, Alban Berg, Wolfgang Rihm, Frédéric Chopin.
Handmade paper is about the coolest writing surface you can get!
Hacking music in the morning. And then I realized that I had a couple of really simple bug in my Bonobo plug code that were causing focus not to be passed on correctly.
But fixing them uncovered a large problem. It turns out that focusing out of an embedded component is a major pain in the ass. I feel like the light at the end of the tunnel suddenly stepped back a few kilometers. Sigh.
Michael, my savior as usual, suggested using the xfocus.detail flags to see what kind of focus change event we actually got. I am not sure that I can do something with it, but it does look like a good idea.
Got frustrated, went out for a coffee instead.
Lots of loud hacking music, and lots of progress.
Sent off my Bonobo focusing patch for testing. I think I handle all cases except for one, where you click the mouse on a widget outside of the embedded component, it must somehow be told that it doesn't have the focus anymore, and the parent must claim the focus. I really don't know where to do that. Will need to investigate further.
Polishing Granada, the first piece from Albéniz's Spanish Suite. Anna's recommendation for finger warm-up exercies really helps.
Watched the first half of the Superbowl with my brother. My mother was not feeling well so I guess that is the reason why we did not go with the friends with whom we always watch the Superbowl.
Took a shower during the half time, and seeing that New York was sucking it up, decided to go and make phone calls instead.
Pervasive uncertainty.
Lunch at my grandmother's, delicious.
Picked up my developed slides from the historic center of the city. Some of them came out really well; this makes me very happy. I have to find a cheap slide-scanning service or something.
Almost done with Bonobo focusing! This is going to kick ass.
It is kind of scary when you find yourself thinking about simultaneous, asynchronous event queues in your head.
So JPR discovered a MAJOR bug in libical's parser for value types. This is a complete showstopper for the alarm system.
More work on focusing issues. The widget-level stuff on ETable seems to be done. The ETable internals are going to be tricker. I have to send a detailed mail to the People Who Know.
One of my favorite Japanese restaurants in Mexico City has opened a new location that is not far from my house. This totally kicks ass.
Kill them. Kill them all.
Finally found a camera store that carried 52mm lens covers for my 200mm telephoto. Whew.
Uncertainty is taking over my life and it is not a pleasant feeling.
Went to pick up my plane tickets for Sweden. Wheeeeee!
I guess I should prepare my talk and the whatnot.
Went with Ricardo to take lots of pictures in the city's historical center, i.e. downtown. If the ones I really want to come out well do come out well, I will be extremely happy.
Mano a mano with Bonobo focus problems.
Unproductive day; woke up late, listened to music, read a lot.
Watched Quills with Ricardo in the evening; awesome movie. Then went to his house to talk about life. It is good to talk to an old friend; he is going back to Ensenada in about two weeks.
Plenty of work on the focus stuff. I added custom focus handlers to the box widget (HBox, VBox, HButtonBox, VButtonBox) so that they do something more reasonable than the generic container focus handler.
NotZed found a couple of little bugs that are triggered in the calendar GUI client when a calendar cannot be loaded. It is good that both were caught by assertions instead of blindly crashing.
Listened to a lot of Bach, Granados, Messiaen, Skunk Anansie, Los Folkloristas. Lots of music good for hacking, and I am feeling insanely productive today.
The OAF bug seems to be fixed. Good.
Plenty of discussion with Anna and JPR about how to do the new reminders/alarms page for the event editor dialog. Things are looking very pretty!
Got fed up with calendar stuff and decided to tackle GTK+ focusing instead. It is ridiculous that we still do not have a toolkit that gets focusing right.
So I resurrected a patch by Jonathan and Tim that Owen had extensively commented on last October. Read through the GTK+ focusing code, made sense of it in my head, put the patch in with some changes and additions. Things are much better now; at last you don't get the effect where you hit Tab on the last widget in a window and everything loses focus. The patch is here. It will change a bit in the future, but the important parts seem to be all there.
I'll try to tackle Bonobo focusing over the weekend. If this works out, Evolution will be much, much more usable.
Wrote a little module for the calendar; it gets run on start-up, it takes your old tasks from the calendar folder and migrates them to the new calendar folder. Small and nifty; it may even make it into the developer's documentation as a cute example of how to use the CalClient functions.
Overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that still needs to be done.
OAF is launching two Wombats when you create two calendar clients in quick succession. This is NOT good.
So most of my cold seems to have disappeared. Which goes on to prove that plenty of sleep will cure almost anything.
Rewrote the calendar loading API and mechanism in the Wombat. Now it provides a much nicer interface and lets clients avoid having to maintain a state machine of their own.
Woke up. Felt like shit with a big cold.
Read mail. Ate something for breakfast. Went back to sleep.
Woke up again some time in the late afternoon, really felt like shit. Had some food, felt too ill to go across the street to the pharmacy, so just took an aspirin, and then went back to sleep.
Woke up in the middle of the night, wrote this thing, feeling a bit better. Hmmmm.
Joakim's birthday; I joined him, Belinda, Leo, and Aline for dinner at Cluny. Then we went to watch Way of the Gun, which was reasonably good. Went back home; started to feel like a big cold was about to take over my body.
Lunch at my grandmother's, as usual. Yummi.
My brother and I went to Casa Veerkamp, a music store, so that I could look for some piano exercises. Got the Beringer technical studies and book II of the Hanon. I haven't used those things for years; they even seem not to be terribly boring when I try them again now.
Breakfast with Raúl Herrera, a very good pianist and friend of mine. I had wanted to talk to him for a long time so that he would recommend me a piano teacher. Had a very interesting talk, and he gave me two good suggestions for teachers. I will call them over the following days.
Since it was still early-ish after breakfast, took a trip to the Yamaha piano store and tried out a nice 5' 8" grand. Not bad at all, but the sound has a bit too much brilliance for my taste. Still pricey for my bank account, though. Afterwards, went to the book store nearby and got myself an English language thesaurus because I did not have one.
Met Arturo, Joakim, and Belinda at the office. We went for lunch in Coyoacán, to the Arabian restaurant that Joakim and I wanted to go to the other day. Had a good meal. Then we went for coffee to El Jarocho, and we went to sit down somewhere at the park; on the way there I got three large sheets of very nice hand-made paper from a street vendor. We sat down in the park. I took a bunch of pictures of children terrorizing the pigeons and of people doing people-ish stuff. Arturo played with the light meter. Joakim and Belinda looked at my pictures from Ensenada and did their best not to appear in the pictures I was taking, but they candidly appear in some of them anyways. When we had seen enough human specimens pass by, we went back to the office.
So some dude knocks at the door (argh, during the Evolution conference call!) and tries to sell me an alarm security system for the house. This is ridiculous. Those guys must be making a total killing in this stupid neighborhood, which has turned into being overly paranoid about security in stupid ways. They have made some streets controlled-access only (by putting barriers and some hired policeman dude that will or will not let you in with your car), completely blocking off some streets and walkways, and other extremely annoying stuff.
Still, the number of burglarized houses or street muggings has not diminished, which proves that their measures are useless and just annoying. Mind you, most of the houses that got broken into had left a door or window open or whatever. So, well, duh.
The stupidity of the neighbors plus the fact that this is a suburb in a hill rather far away from the interesting parts of the city gives me a good reason to move down into civilization. As soon as I find an apartment or house in a more central neighborhood, I am moving out of here.
We are Ximian, Inc. now; Helix Code is deprecated. I am federico@gnome.org now.
Finally got off my butt and fixed the build of the Evolution Developer's Guide when gtk-doc is not installed. It should work fine in either situation now.
Dogfooded the Evolution mailer, sent a rather vicious report. I want a vicious report on the calendar's usability, too! Give me the kind of pain that hurts good!
Was awake before 7:00 AM. Practiced the piano for about an hour and a half, then went back to sleep until 10:30-ish.
Very pleasant lunch with Joakim, at El Morral in Coyoacán. Had a delicious chile en nogada which I could not finish and took the leftovers home.
Picked up my black and white prints that I took in Ensenada and the color slides from my first test roll from the F2. The former are reasonably butt-kicking, and some of them even deserve an enlargement. The roll of slides was completely blank. It turns out that I had loaded the film incorrectly and it had slipped from the little slit in the take-up spool. Sigh. Oh, well, they were lame test pictures taken around the house, anyways.
The alarm daemon is progressing nicely. Joakim had a cool idea for how to shut it down properly, by using the ::die signal from the session manager client object.
Luis's speakers are kind of broken, so the subwoofer was sounding properly. This picks up an interesting component of the nifty THX trademark sound if you play it. This is a source of good ideas for how to make a nice session startup jingle for GNOME.
Mark Crichton pointed me to the MNG specification. A little gem:
Applications that provide less than minimal MNG support should check the MHDR "simplicity profile" for the presence of features that they are unable to support or do not wish to support."Simplicity profile"? Someone is smoking crack. If your file format is supposed to be widely used yet it is so complicated that applications need to see if they can support all of it, something is highly wrong.
Anyways, we may have a MNG loader soon, and hopefully a better model object for animations; GdkPixbufAnimationa is rather crufty and limited right now.
Discovered that the new Nikon F3 body was waaaaaay overpriced, and so went looking for used cameras. Got a pretty inexpensive, kick-ass F2 body and with the money I saved I could afford used 50mm, 28mm wide angle, and 200mm telephoto lenses. This totally kicks ass. And the dude who sold me the lenses told me that the dude who had sold me the camera body had screwed up and had charged an extremely low price for that camera in such a good condition. Nice.
So it was a pretty unproductive day due to playing with my new toy...
Went with Joakim to downtown Mexico City, which is a great place to walk around. Had a late lunch that turned into dinner at the Café de Tacuba, and then we went to look for cameras. I will be getting a very pretty Nikon F3 tomorrow with a 50mm/1.4 lens. This should be good to get started with real film photography.
Practiced the Suite Española for quite a while. Only the Granada piece for now, but it is progressing along nicely.
Leonard Bernstein is a total genius. Motives = words, harmony/chords = adjectives, rhythm = verbs. This dude is Smart(tm).
Back from Ensenada. Once I have my pictures developed (yes, because my digital camera was unavailable) I should write something up about this great trip.
Go backward in time to Dec 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:39:13 CDT