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

Like Havoc, I had a good weekend in NYC, with no laptop along, which was a nice change- first time I’ve traveled sans laptop for ages. Was a little cold, and we planned really poorly, so we saw no shows, spent a total of about two hours in a museum, and had only one really, really good meal. But we saw a couple of Krissa’s Peace Corps friends, we slept in, and we got out into the world and out of Boston, and just had some quality time. All in all a great weekend. Oh, and we stopped at the Chocolate Bar- it’s sort of disturbing when your candy shop has an entire esthetic. But the hot chocolate was oh sooo good, especially considering the cold. We haven’t yet tapped into the box of 24 chocolates, I think we’re afraid we might eat them all at once then have matching heartattacks.

On the GNOME front, it is great to get home, wade through several hundred spam, and see that my Quality email stirred a touch of action over the weekend- several bugs have been closed, and there was some discussion on d-d-l. It’s not the Quality Landslide I’d hoped for ;) but everything has to start somewhere. Thanks to all the devels who have looked at stuff this weekend.

After bug day yesterday, I got all motivated and stayed up late working on stuff. It was nice- got release team and board stuff done, which I hadn’t done in a while, and talked to some of the wipronians, which I also hadn’t done in a while. Was all good. JFDI is your friend and mine.

Sent a whole bunch of mail today too, mostly about bugs. There are still a lot of them in 2.5, just under 300 are high priority against 2.4 and 2.5, and we’ll probably find more at the next bug day. I hope we can nail a lot of them in the coming month, though- it would be really nice to end 2.6 on a high note.

Got a little depressed at the number of bitrotting patches in bugzilla. It would be cool if a bunch of experienced, motivated hackers formed a patch squad and got together and reviewed lots of those and committed them when appropriate. [And took the heat from maintainers :) That said, it’s a little unlikely to happen, and you don’t want me touching C anymore :)

Shaunm, the real lesson is not in statistics, but in politics. That’s not a real poll- most likely the RNC won’t even collate the data. It’s a push poll.

In ‘real life’, I’m excited to be leaving for NYC in the morning for an extended computer-free weekend, but it means doing some laundry and packing much later at night than I’d like. Oh, and Krissa made me roughly the greatest cheesecake ever for Valentine’s day. Life is not bad.

Bug Day was madly exciting today. It’s still going on, really, but I’d been in #bugs for 13 1/2 hours already so I was totally wiped and just had to leave. I love the international face of GNOME; besides the US we had bug day folks from at least 17 different companies (judging from a grep of the ‘has joined’ messages from my log.) Lots of new faces, too, from these various places. As usual, new bug people start slowly, but a lot of people doing a little bit of work adds up pretty fast- the primary link we were focusing on today (UNCONFIRMED bugs in core modules) dropped by 75%, and the number of un-triaged crashers in core modules also dropped significantly. Overall, a really good day for the bugsquad, and a fun day for me too.

[Later] Dave kindly pointed out that I’ve completely sold my soul, since I said ‘companies’ above where I meant ‘countries.’ Clearly I paid too much attention to Jennifer Government. And maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some more free time. :)

It’s not a good day when you ask your ops to fix something that is utterly blocking your work day at 10:30ish and it doesn’t get fixed until 6:30ish. It’s a much worse day when you get home and your HD starts spewing horrible errors that smell a whole lot like ‘massive drive failure.’ Thankfully the backup script seems to have run without incident, and I didn’t kill anyone.

On the plus side, we had a moderately productive board meeting today, and Jeff sounded more positive. In case it’s not clear, dude, I’m a big fan, with or without the pants.

Met another piece of software that will benefit so much when it can be integrated with the evo addressbook- exciting to see what will be able to happen there when it is all ready to rock.

Before work, I read this fascinating bit on dean and blogs. Lot to think on there for someone interested in the net and politics.

Hallski is completely insane, for the record- just walking back and forth to the grocery store in 20F (-6.6C) was unpleasant this afternoon.

I’m glad Mariano found this pango infinite loop. I knew something had been broken badly for a few days, but I hadn’t had the time to pin it down, or even to nag others about it much. ;) Reverting the specified file allowed me to log in to my jhbuilt env for the first time in several days, which is nice.

There are a couple Duke folks asking fairly intelligent questions on the bugsquad, which is cool to see- glad to see new bodies, of course, and cool to see some folks I know or know of from Duke getting more involved in GNOME.

Krissa cooked some wonderful meals this weekend, and we watched the first season of Coupling on Friday night, which was fun- the show is a riot; we hope to get the next two DVDs from netflix shortly. Hopefully our relationship is slightly more functional than those from the show. ;) Otherwise, most of the weekend was slack and basketball, which isn’t too bad. Hopefully we’ll get out a little more when the weather gets warmer and basketball season ends :)

Really good bug day today- lots of new faces, particularly in the morning. Look forward to more of these through the end of 2.6. Still lots of untriaged 2.4/2.5 bugs, but not the end of the world- very few really serious bugs that we didn’t know about that we ‘found’ today. Devs should look here to find things that they can do :)

Quote of the Day:

‘Luis … has rather passionate feelings about bug tracking.’ –Joe Shaw

Glynn, Bastien: the solution is to CC: yourself on all bugs and drop off all mailing lists. Trust me. ;)

Spent the evening feeling totally burnt and watching basketball. Also, I finished reading ‘Jennifer Government’ by Max Barry- what a riot. Makes a noble attempt at describing a virus on Solaris that operates using a buffer overflow. Good start, right, except that the buffer overflow is in… mcafee anti-virus. On Solaris. And HPUX. Close but no cigar. :) Other than that, it’s a really fun, light, dystopian read.

Before this fully turns into planet orkut, a bit about gnome. :) Elijah and aes continue to plug away on bugzila-test.gnome.org. It’s not perfect yet but it is very nice- will surely be a great upgrade for most people, and hopefully make it easier for us to upgrade to new bugzillas. It looks like upstream bugzilla is switching to time-based releases, which should be great for them, and if we can minimize the differences enough, would be great for us too.

HEAD continues to feel pretty solid- the mime/icon stuff is still funky, but otherwise I haven’t had any stability issues with it for some days now.

I get to bugday on Thursday- I’m excited about that. I’m helping (slowly, unfortunately) a Novell tools dude get ready to sync Novell’s internal bug-tracking and b.g.o and b.x.c., which will be another big step for Novell. And I’m doling out a touch of advice to some Novell folks who are planning to open source some madly cool code soon. I don’t want to steal their thunder, though, so don’t ask. :)

On planet orkut- it’s funny- like six people have declared that they were obviously the person who I deemed irritating :) So far none have actually been right. :) With Robert, it’s more like an active loathing than an irritation, so I guess he was close, but… :)

It took less than a day to get someone who mostly irritates me to no end to request a ‘friendship’ status on orkut. I’m a lot torn; the part of me that has integrity says ‘stop accepting friendship requests altogether’ and the rest of me says ‘fix it later when they introduce shades of gray.’ I’ve opted for the latter, and have invited fellow ‘play along’ member jrb to be my friend. It’s an amusing time-waster in the meantime.

Also, in the full spirit of openness and non-elitism, any GNOME contributor who feels left out of the whole thing should drop me an email- I’ll be happy to invite you.