Go forward in time to January 2007.
Before people start getting too excited about software licenses that don't allow using the software for military purposes, remember Freedom 0, also known as section 0 in the GPL:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, [...]
What happens without this freedom? Then anyone can get righteous and say:
Jeremy Allison of Samba fame leaves Novell for being pissed off about the Microsoft/Novell deal. It was a pleasure to work with Jeremy when we were integrating support for Active Directory in the distribution.
I will be giving a talk at FOSDEM 2007 about profiling desktop applications.
By the way, it seems that GNOME is not in the community booths at FOSDEM yet. Why not? Does anyone want to run a stand? You could even use the GNOME Events Box!
Tim Janik wrote an excellent mail on the state of GTK+ maintenance. In short: we need more volunteers to work on GTK+! Contributors are welcome to join the fun.
Interesting article on providing performance signatures for API calls. If you are writing a function which is intended to be of "medium cost", don't call any functions which are "high cost". If those annotations are machine-readable, you can do cool stuff like color-code things in your editor: if it looks like you are in an inner loop, functions more expensive than "low cost" would be highlighted in red.
Rendering text is becoming fast again. Behdad and his merry Cairo men have been kicking a lot of ass!
The merry Cairo men, led by the inimitable Carl Worth, seem to be close to being done with performance in Cairo itself. The next culprit is the X server.
When I grow up, I want to be as methodical and well-organized as Carl. I'm impressed by the extremely high-quality work that has gone into the Cairo testing and performance suites.
Callum is working on gathering statistics of the desktop's memory consumption. GNOME and KDE seem to be pretty close, to within a few MB. We should riot in the streets and demand a byte-by-byte recount, or just get the damn bugs fixed so that we can get unquestionable numbers ;)
Some months ago our beloved Krups Gusto espresso maker died due to a massive infestation of cockroaches. They crawled into the machine through the holes in its bottom plate, nested close to the warm boiler, reproduced a lot, and shit a lot — it seems that coffee is as much a laxative to them as it is to humans.
So, we replaced the coffee maker with a super-sexy La Pavoni Europiccola. Learning to use it properly has been quite an experience. This machine does not have an automatic pump; instead, it has a lever that pushes down a piston, and the piston pushes the water through the coffee. Espresso is very finicky about everything: temperature, grind, tamping, pressure, and the way you pull down on the lever makes a big difference in the quality of the coffee you get.
Also, this machine's steam wand has a different shape of nozzle than the one in our previous machine. The La Pavoni has a nozzle with three holes, while the old Krups had a single hole. With the new nozzle, I had a lot of trouble in foaming milk properly. The large amount of steam would heat the milk too quickly, and I couldn't get a whirlpool going on the cup used for frothing. Eventually I unscrewed the nozzle, put a bent sewing pin through two of the holes, and thus left a single hole with full steam and two holes with very little steam.
That was two months ago. Yesterday was the first time that I actually managed to get really good micro-foam on the milk on this machine. The next milestone in making breakfast will be to master latte art.
Go backward in time to November 2006.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Tue 2006/Dec/05 21:13:42 CST