Go forward in time to May 2001.
Quiet day at the office; only Hans Petter was here.
Felt ill for most of the day. Decided to go home early-ish and sleep.
Lunch at my grandmother's. Talked to my uncle about his trip to Oaxaca. Sigh, these days everybody seems to be going to Oaxaca and having a good time.
Oralia's and Axel's birthday. Had a party and a very good time.
Chema is off for a little skydiving vacation. I hope he takes lots of pictures.
Work on drag and drop within the calendar. Deja-vu from doing the MC DnD stuff. I like this API and yet it sucks to have to handle every possible case.
My stomach hurts.
Last night I cooked a stupid tunafish in mustard sauce, but apparently the fish fillet was past its prime. I had to pay a sudden visit to the porcelain goddess in the middle of the night. Not fun.
Found out why my SGML CATALOG file was screwed up. The thing is, it used to work and one day it just stopped working. The paths were wrong and it is not clear at all why they may have changed.
Anyways, gtk-doc stuff is being built again and it looks as ugly as ever...
Released gdk-pixbuf-0.11.0. This made me happy.
Oralia is back from Oaxaca.
Woke up way too late. Had some leftovers for breakfast, cleaned the stovetop. Organized a bunch of books in the tall bookcase, which is now full. Picked up bedside tables at the furniture place.
Polishing the focus patches for inclusion in CVS.
Went rock climbing with Luis and Iván in the morning. The idea was to take a bunch of pictures, so we did. Had a fun time. But boy, I do need to build up some strength in my fingers. I haven't played the piano for a month and it sucks to realize your fingers are weak.
Stopped taking pictures when it got cloudy and the light started to suck; the big wall of rock covered everything. 1/30 second at f/1.4 and you know it is time to stop shooting. It tried to start raining but only a few drops came down. All the rock climbers vanished in a second.
We had lunch with Gina, Paco's girlfriend. She told us about her visit to Ensenada a week ago. Had a good time.
Very lengthy talk with Gina. And my brother Axel and his girlfriend Areli unexpectedly dropped by; had a very amusing talk about the current gossip of the medicine students.
Lunch at my grandmother's. Great food as usual.
Organized a bunch of slides. I need a thicker binder.
Went to the park for a coffee and ran into Esteban around there. It was nice to see him again! Talked for a while, went CD shopping (Simon & Garfunkel set), went to the supermarket, got a bunch of stuff, and then went to his apartment to leave his stuff. He just moved to División del Norte, just a few blocks from here.
Esteban recommended a new brand of beer that I had not tried (Casta). Pretty damn good.
Big thunderstorm prior to going to the supermarket. Kick ass. Lots of rain while we were inside the supermarket. The air is fresh and cool outside now, and that is good.
Long, pleasant phone conversation with Luis in the evening.
Finally got around to organizing my CDs. It looks like they'll need a new bookcase soon, sigh.
BONOBO FOCUS WORKS!!!
BONOBO FOCUS WORKS!!!
BONOBO FOCUS WORKS!!!
And there was much rejoicing.
Discovered an obscure patch in GtkWindow that was causing those bogus focus events to be synthesized. Finally!
Had a very enlightening discussion with Owen in the afternoon. Apparently just need to tweak that patch to only consider windows that think their parent is the root window, not all toplevels like GtkPlug.
The people in the apartment downstairs finally seem to be moving in. Parking is getting cramped, sigh.
Woke up way too late.
Unfruitful focus hacking. Where the FUCK are those focus change events coming from?
Got very frustrated in the evening. Went home and made a fantastic stir-fry. I love my new wok.
Picked up the slides that Michelle and I took last week on Holy Friday. Have to sort them out and the whatnot. Have to buy more polypropylene sheets to hold the slides, damn.
Met Chema and Arturo in the office; disappointment because our ethernet cables seem to be flaky. Lots of kicking the network around and trying to find an ISP that doesn't punt us after 5 minutes of being connected. It seems we'll be getting DSL soon, though.
I noticed I haven't read Slashdot for about a month. That should add to my life expectancy or something.
This totally made my day.
To: gnome-devel-list@gnome.org
Subject: What the????
Ok, so I'm a newbie to gnome. But I just have to know.
What the heck are buckets_of_erogenous_nym?
Called Paco in Ensenada in the evening. It was very nice to talk to him. Apparently his life is completely consumed by hospital duties these days.
Picked up the gateway machine for our new office, which took an inordinate amount of time. When you ask for a machine to be built to a custom spec, that is what happens...
Joined Chema, Hans Petter, and Arturo in the new office. This is cool!
I need to get a bike to avoid using the stupid car every day.
Busy busy busy.
Over the past week got a fridge, a microwave, a toaster, a blender. The kitchen kicks ass these days. Got bed sheets. Sleep can be good now.
Fixed a stupid bug in the query engine. Mental note: ref yourself if you do CORBA callbacks, because the callee may unref you! Fixed parsing of sexps that consist only of an immediate value instead of a function application.
Hacking on the rooftop of the building is nice. You get fresh air and a nice view and no distractions.
Back from GUADEC!
Flying in was uneventful, but the flights were packed. From Mexico City to Newark on a Mexicana flight, and from there to København in a SAS flight. SAS is nice. They have decent food (big trays! yes!), good service, and they seem to take good care of you on a transatlantic flight. I think KLM had slightly nicer amenities, but SAS had better food. Chema hacked all the way through until his batteries died. I was too tired and just slept or listened to music for most of the flight.
København is a very pretty city. Cloudy and dark and cold-ish at this time of the year (isn't it supposed to be Spring, damnit?), but pretty nonetheless. We toured for a bit on the first day and I am a complete moron for missing the GNOME board meeting.
Danish food is seafood, cold cuts, good bread, salad-like thingies, and in general is dense and with either very sharp or very bland flavors. Still, there is some very good stuff. Especially the pickled herring and the excellent food we got on the last day in a little fancy restaurant that made very complicated dishes.
GUADEC itself was awesome. Lots of cool hackers, lots of hackers I didn't know personally, nice KDE hackers with plenty of interesting things to say, many old friends. I wish I had not been so jetlagged. I was not falling asleep all day long, but I felt tired.
I was especially glad to attend Dan Mueth's BOF on documentation. A complete upgrade of the developer's site is needed, and it seems that now we have a good plan. We need a scoreboard of API documentation for modules, better automatic generation of HTML docs, and other similar pieces of infrastructure. We should also have tighter policies about contributed patches with respect to documentation.
People seem to be excited about Bonobo. This is a good thing; it means we can finally have the component-based system that we wanted before we started GNOME. With cool projects like Nautilus, Evolution, and gIDE being based entirely on components, people should be able to look at plenty of examples.
It was interesting to see all of the RHAD lab rats again. They are good friends and they are doing cool work. JRB explained the internals of his tree/list view widget, Owen and Michael and I discussed focus issues, Havoc was running around all over the place with his broken wrist trying to coordinate stuff. Dave has a Leica now, which makes me envious. It is still not a cute chick magnet like my Rollei 35, but it is still a kick-ass camera.
Finally, Leslie Proctor and Tim Ney from the FSF are both very pleasant people. I always like talking to them. And the whole GNOME crowd from Spain was there as well, and those are fun people. Rodrigo even gave me three bottles of excellent wine to take back to Mexico. They wanted to bring a jamón ibérico, but with the foot and mouth disease going on all over the place, you cannot take meat products across countries. Oh well.
We had a great time outside of the conference, too. We found good Thai and Italian restaurants, as well as a couple of nice bars. Some of us went to Christiania, a little autonomous town inside of København. Interesting sights and people to be seen all over the place, especially the extremely stoned guy that started talking to us very loudly about how he was a social democrat and how he could lift a big wooden table with just his teeth...
The Ximian-sponsored party that we threw at The Globe Irish pub did kick ass. It was packed with loud, drunken hackers and every last corner of the very nice pub was full.
The hotel was, uh, compact. Tiny rooms with a quasi-bunk bed (smaller than an individual bed from the Americas! yeech!), an ultra-small all in one bathroom where the shower wets the whole thing, and instructions on the wall for the "little comfortable chair, a little complicated to assemble".
The flight back did suck. The flight from København to Newark had a 4-hour delay, so Jody, Chema, and myself hung around in the airport for a while. Another full flight. Jody left us quickly once in Newark so that he could catch his plane to Toronto; Chema and I took the next flight to Mexico City. But ah, there was a big thunderstorm going on and they had us inside the plane for 6 hours waiting on the runway. Not fun. Eventually the plane went back to the terminal, got re-stocked with food, some passengers left (including the fucking whiny Brazilian who was pestering the flight attendants all the time and who was kicking the back of my seat), and then the plane did leave for Mexico. We got here way too late and my body had no clue of what time it was supposed to be, but it was good to be back home.
I'll miss the hackers. We had a great time.
One of the lilies in our pretty lab flask that serves as a flower vase opened yesterday. Another one is halfway open. The sunflower is fully open now. Go, flowers, go!
Discovered that we have basically no naming convention for the Evolution IDL files; sent off mail asking for policy.
Got a Purify report from JP; wonderful. Plugged several leaks in ETable, as usual. Plugged some leaks in the calendar GUI. Sent off mail for advice on others in ETable and Bonobo. Purify absolutely rocks my world.
Huge lunch with Luis at Scoozi. I dislike the atmosphere in that place, but the food is oh so good.
Go backward in time to Mar 2001.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:45:59 CDT