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Back in Xalapa. My mom and grandmother came to visit for a few days, and they left today.
We had Christmas Eve dinner at my the house of my grandmother's sisters. It is good to see the old ladies, even though they are all ill in one way or another.
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The other day we watched Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise, a delightful Chinese movie.
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I built a bunch of new libraries, and now my icons are totally screwed up. Nothing picks up icons, so the file chooser looks ugly, and Nautilus looks even uglier.
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We drove to Mexico City on Saturday to see our families for Christmas. It's a shame that my brother won't come back from Ensenada until after New Year's Day.
Mexico City is warmer than Xalapa these days, and it feels good. Oddly enough, drivers are not as insane here as they are there.
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I am in love with the tabletop tripod that I got in New York. It can actually hold an all-metal F2, unlike every other tabletop tripod I have had. I look forward to using it on Christmas Eve to shoot old ladies.
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I talked to my dad yesterday. He has a small store where they sell educational toys and books. They use some old, ass-sucking, proprietary software for doing their accounting, billing, and inventory control. So it would be good if I can find some eager volunteers in Xalapa to write a free replacement; that would be perfect for many such small stores. Maybe Pygestor, by the Chilean people, would be a good start.
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Grandma peeks over the balcony:
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We saw The Return of the King last night. It is so powerful.
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Today I started using distcc. It is just elegant. Building things on my laptop, aided by the desktop box, is not painful anymore.
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Started using Epiphany. It is really, really nice. Categories for bookmarks is the right way to do things. Isn't it the right way to do everything?
I'm very slow to change programs that I've been using for a long time. People keep telling me there's this fantastic new invention called hot water.
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Talked for a good while with Simon on #gimp about #115092. I don't think it is a Metacity bug or a GIMP bug; rather, it is the kind of perceived bug that results from people using broken user interfaces for a long time.
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LoTR was sold out. Bummer.
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The light was beautiful yesterday afternoon.
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We found a very good and rather cheap Italian restaurant last Friday, and we have been to it two times since then. Ettore would have enjoyed it.
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Angry as flaming sulphur from hell, sad and frustrated as Shostakovich's second violin concerto barely begins to describe how I feel about Ettore's death yesterday. Ettore was my best friend in Boston during the first months of my work at Ximian. I especially enjoyed going for dinner with him; we would laugh, talk, and give merciless thumbs up or thumbs down judgments to the restaurants where we went.
Ettore's first contribution to GNOME was a docking widget for application windows. It was a tense period, and Miguel and I had to choose among two competing implementations, Ettore's and someone else's. I was working at Red Hat Labs at that time, and I remember sitting with Miguel on the floor of my apartment in Chapel Hill, laptop on the futon, and we were both looking at the code for both candidates. The first one was messy, full of callbacks and bizarre data, and we were starting to get discouraged. But when we came to look at Ettore's code, it was beautiful. I thought to myself, this guy writes code exactly the way I would.
From there on, it was always a pleasure to work with Ettore. We both got interested in street photography, and lately we had been lurking and occasionally posting our pictures to the fantastic streetphoto mailing list. I saw Ettore in Boston a week before the GNOME Summit, had great Spanish food with Aaron and himself, and then went on to get drunk with him at his new apartment as we talked about life. We shared many tastes and quirks, and he was always a good friend.
I will miss him very dearly.
This is Ettore in the boat party in the Seine, in Paris/GUADEC 2000:
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I moved some widgets around in GtkFileChooser, but Tuomas will surely have better ideas.
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Oralia in her favorite street in Xalapa:
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Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, in Veracruz:
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Santiago de Chile:
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We went to Mexico City over the weekend, to see our respective families, pick up paperwork, etc. We finally brought our bicycles back to Xalapa. Riding the hills is going to be physically interesting.
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Jan Arne Petersen fixed the save-mode bug in GtkFileChooser! This makes my day; it means that the file chooser should be usable for most apps now. He has also been kicking ass, submitting a bunch of patches to make applications use GtkFileChooser:
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Oralia made the best Veracruz-style snapper ever.
I have a fish in my belly, and it feels good.
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Talked to Snorp and Paolo about the recent-files specification, which is about to be updated. It would be good if we could use that part of libegg from OpenOffice. Right now we have an expat-based implementation, and code duplication sucks.
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The endless discussion about viewports-versus-workspaces lives again. This is quite a shame, because once I wrote up a good explanation about what is really happening:
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The problem is really an implementation detail. Historically, window managers like fvwm did virtual desktops with XMoveWindow(); newer ones like Enlightenment used a combination of that plus "virtual root windows", handled through XRaiseWindow() or map/unmap calls. The big mistake was to expose this implementation detail in terms of which features are available in each scheme.
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And there are non-obvious implications for the user interface. If you provide the option of spilling large windows over to an adjoining virtual desktop, you a) absolutely need a pager that shows you the spatial arrangement of your desktops, and b) you ideally want to make some restrictions about how your panels are arranged — if you have a horizontal row of virtual desktops where wide windows can span more than one desktop, then it doesn't make sense to have vertical panels at the left or right edges of the screen.
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Pico de Orizaba, Mexico's tallest mountain, looked gorgeous today in the morning. This is from our rooftop; from the bedroom it is the same plus more power cables.
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Today we got a nice little round table and two garden/camping chairs to put on the roof next to my office. It was sunny for most of the day, so it was nice to be outdoors.
But. You cannot see a laptop's screen out in the sun. So while Oralia lounged outside, reading a good book while sipping limeade, I was inside my office room, making sense of GtkEntryCompletion. I thought that it would need some little API changes to support the file chooser in a more elegant way, but maybe it doesn't need anything after all. I still think it should do the work for longest common prefixes, automatic insertion and selection, and Tab completion/focusing all by itself.
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I've been doing some internal cleanups in GtkFileChooser. There are so many little details that need to be fixed, that each step feels like it is too small to accomplish anything.
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Wow. Someone still keeps an old VW Beetle with 1968 Olympic plates.
We found a little tapas restaurant today and had lunch there. Nothing spectacular, but not bad at all. And it is on the same street as the great little tea house downtown; we had evidently never walked through that street all the way to its other end.
