Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Had a decently productive day today. While continuing to wait for Ximian servers to recover from the move, I spent a lot of time looking at b.g.o. It’s been a while, and it feels good to plunge back in to something I mostly really enjoy and apparently have some bit of a knack for. I even started tentatively marking a few 2.6.0 showstoppers. If the ~200 bugs I’ve read are indicative of the true state of things, 2.6 should shape up into a pretty reasonable release from a QA perspective. Bugsquad has to get organized and drive hackers to fix things, though, and I’m not yet sure how that is going to happen or on whose time :) [Anyone up for a special friday bugday on the 2nd, BTW?]

Aside from that, five loads of laundry got done in the background, I restored the old Dell laptop to a state where I can send it in for further repairs (i.e., I installed windows), and generally neatened the apartment. I even vacuumed. I honestly don’t think it’s been this clean since we moved in. Now all I have to do is clean myself (I haven’t shaved since before Christmas) and Krissa will be quite pleased when she gets back from Cali in the morning. :)

rml: you sexy, sexy man.
jdub: headspace clearance is good.
jfleck: I guess I want to actively choose balance, instead of having it forced on me by burnout… that’s my fear.

Anyway, back from vacation. Aside from losing the laptop and fighting a cold the whole time, it was really good. Reading outside in the sunshine while laying on a hammock is good for the soul, as is driving a convertible very fast, which I did a lot of. Not enough, really- I need to go back soon. I’ll post some pictures of gators and the everglades whenever I can collaborate with someone with a working laptop.

The new office is pretty cool- the open spaces I loved in the old offices are even more open now, and we’re on the sunny side of the office, which is going to help my mood immeasurably in winters to come. I’d post some pictures, except I left my camera on all day yesterday, apparently with some buttons depressed, and didn’t discover that until I got to the office. Oh well- jtomorrow, tomorrow…j

Fun moving moment: guy comes around, says ‘is this your desk? I need to unplug your ethernet.’ ‘This is CAT 6, so you can get gigabit to the rest of the office.’

Since I can’t post to the xd-unstable blog right now, I’ll just mention that there have been a bunch of xd-unstable updates based on GNOME 2.5.1. Go forth and update. [Also, for anyone trying to get in touch with me, I have no reception in my mother’s house and my laptop appears gone for good. So… talk to you next week. :)

In the ‘things I really, really didn’t need today’ category, I left my laptop at the X-ray machine in the airport today. Hopefully the TSA will have good news for me in the morning.

[later] On the plus side, Andrew’s claim that the bugzilla upgrade is not far from being completed might be the best software news I’ve heard in ages. :)

I really love this time of year- I had a great time in NYC this weekend seeing old friends and doing more of the virtual-names-to-real-faces thing, and it’ll be very good to be back in sunny Miami this weekend. But I fear I’m reaching the point that lots of other monkeys have reached at some point or another- I’m looking forward to vacation too much. :/ We all started in this company because we absolutely loved every minute of what we did. And so we did a lot of it. We didn’t even take much vacation, because why take vacation when work is the most fun thing in the world? But… ATM I’m practically running away from work. That’s a real shame. :/ It’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Ximian or Novell- both companies are pretty much committed to doing the right things, both for their products and for their employees. But I’m spending way too much time in meetings[1] and too little time doing the bits that I actually love and got into this business for. :/ So I really need time away, and that sucks- I love free software, and I love GNOME, and they each should help destress me. But I just can’t focus on them right now because work just has me so stressed/overloaded. Shame. Hopefully when I get back from break I’ll be refreshed.

[1] some are fun, and some are productive- not slamming them all.

On the one hand, it’s great that QT supports accessibility- making Free Software available to all people is important.

On the other hand, I’m a little disappointed by the misleading KDE announcement that they have accessibility. The toolkit having accessibility is only one small step towards being accessible. Just a few off the top of my head, and I’m not even close to being an expert:

• every app must be audited for use of keybindings, color, and sound.
• every custom widget in the application stack must have new code to support ATK, not just the stock QT widgets.
• custom themes for colors/font sizes/icon designs/etc. must exist.
• every app must comply to centralized settings for things like theme, font size, etc., and it must be possible to configure those settings and other a11y tools in one place, more or less.

GNOME is far from perfect on these counts, despite Sun pouring man-years into exactly these types of issues. Novell’s internal highlights of the accessibility guidelines run to eight pages, and base toolkit is not really mentioned at all- every guideline must be enforced and checked per-application. For KDE to claim that they are accessible now (or for GNOME to rest on it’s laurels and think that it is accessible) risks us ending up with no accessible desktops at all.

It’s pretty exciting to open up planetgnome in the morning see a bunch of new faces.

Sri: thanks so much for re-starting the summaries. They are a really necessary thing for those among us who don’t open up planetgnome as their first link in the morning or spend all day in #gnome.

Robert: again, in a slightly more public forum, welcome on board. Good to see you on planetgnome, and great to have you on our team.

Thomas: Ximian and Novell definitely understand that multimedia is a huge part of what we need to offer in the desktop. You’ll note that the full gstreamer-based media stack is in xd-unstable. :) Our problem is that we can’t just say ‘here is totem’ and expect our customers to be happy- the media players we distribute must be able to offer codecs like DVDs or mp3 which are encumbered. Which is a headache, and has prevented us from being more aggressive. Hope that clarifies.

Nailed Dave’s bald head with a few snowballs this evening. It felt good. BTW, Provo in the snow is beautiful.

murrayc: I can’t speak for everyone, but I have been helped a lot by talking to people from all over the world who share my sense of emptiness right now. Thanks to everyone who has messaged and shared.

Ettore passed away suddenly last night. We will all miss him- it’s very hard to be a Monkey right now.

I used to tell people that open source was a great working environment, because when I first got involved with open source (through LegOS) I met with and talked once with an Italian, and I thought that was the greatest thing ever- to meet and talk with someone so far away. Then I got even luckier, and I got to work with an Italian every single day. And that was incredibly exciting, because he was just an awesome person to work with and around.

It’s hard to post this- my words don’t at all do him or the tragedy justice. But I guess I can say I tried. We’ll miss you, dude…

[Later]
Finally found a picture of Ettore that does him some justice. If anyone has the picture of him that used to be on duderino.org, please let me know- archive.org seems to have lost it and it’s sort of the way I’d like to remember him, odd as that may seem to anyone who saw it.

[Much Later] I’ve never had so many message tabs open before- lots of people really wanted to share memories and ease pain. Ximian is very much a family, and GNOME is too, even if that is only background noise behind the technical bits sometimes.

[Even Later] I found the duderino pic and put it here. That’s always going to be the ettore face, to me.