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

I used to believe that people who didn’t respond promptly to email were the worst kind of sinner. That was when I got several hundred email a month. Not a day. :/

[Later] Best summary of the Real/Apple rumble.

Because I have Connections, passes to the DNC fell from the sky this afternoon. I also got my new camera today, so I took some pictures. Was sort of fun- I have to think Jimmy Carter could win a second term right now if he wanted to. We jokingly started cheering ‘four more years’ after his speech. It was sort of weird- Gore (not typically a very optimistic speaker) was very focused on light humor about the worst parts of the last four years, and on constructive, positive talk about the possibilities of the next four years. Carter was also out of character- the great peacemaker talked mostly about his understanding (from his navy years) about the need for deterrence and strength (though obviously with a focus on the need for allies in order to have real security.) And Clinton, almost always the optimistic and positive type, was really the only speaker on the evening who was really openly negative, and he was quite negative, turning positive only in pieces. He remains a brilliant speaker who captures the rhythm of a religious orator better than anyone. Will be interesting in the morning to see how the speeches were interpreted by the press and public- I thought they mostly struck a very positive, well-coordinated tone that if continued could make Kerry quite electable. But Clinton, oddly, was off tone, and while good, didn’t really seem to match the rest of the evening. Weird.

Anyway, was great fun, despite the bus driver who got lost on the way back to the hotel, turning what would have been a 20 minute walk into a one hour drive. On the plus side, I did see parts of Boston I’d never seen before.

[Later] Forgot the best part of the evening. I saw some of the Daily Show guys. In person. Actually reporting from an actual news scene. Or at least preparing to. Or something. Go them. ;) (If I didn’t find Michael Moore an arrogant egocentric prick, the sighting of him would probably have trumped Daily Show, but… whatever :)

On the software side of things, read a ton of bugs Sunday night, which got me more in touch with the product than I’ve felt in a while. Not perfect, but I don’t feel like I’ve got this vast mountain out there to climb. Also, I got nautilus running at home to play with the new mime stuff- pretty nice.

In googling to solve my nautilus/VNC problems (all of jhbuilt gnome except nautilus runs fine under VNC, for some reason) I found this. Blast From The Past(tm).

A couple people have written me after my last post- thanks for the words of encouragement and support.

I’m currently playing with HEAD desktop (some nice new tweaks in panel and elsewhere), vino, and all the cool new ifolder/beagle/dashboard bits. I’ve actually (gasp) filed useful bugs, for the first time in ages. Been nice to just play and get back to some basics. Need to file more bugs, though… network status applet is reporting I’ve sent a billion Gb of data, in 12M packets. Big packets. :)

Clearly at this point the stress in my personal life and overcommitment in my professional life are leading me to say and do things that are hurtful to my friends and/or devalue what I’ve worked on over the past several years. And that’s the last thing I want to do, given that the success of GNOME is so important to so many things I believe in, and the friends I have here are some of the best I’ve ever made. So… I think I’m going to take a very brief break while I figure out better how to balance myself. Sucks, but sadly neither quitting my job nor dumping krissa :) are really viable options at the moment.

On a more upbeat note, this is one of the more interesting observations about the PC industry I’ve read in a long time. It’s not exactly new news, and I’m sure others have said it before, but it was the first time it registered with me.

After some polite nagging, I set about building HEAD tonight for the first time in a long time. jhbuild is still the build-challenged idiot’s best friend. And rug is still the default-install-challenged person’s best friend; you don’t know what your system is missing until you realize it doesn’t have m4. Or flex. Or… anyway. This whole experience has made me realize I’m short of RAM, too; nothing like compiling GNOME while running GNOME+muine on 128M RAM to make you run to crucial.com. Of course, doing this on suse for the first time has not been terribly pleasant- lots of weird issues I hadn’t seen before. Unset GNOME2_PATH to get around 147530 but am now seeing fdo 576. Worked around that one by just hacking the freedesktop.moduleset to use 0.14 directly instead of CVS. We’ll see what excitement lurks next :) And hopefully the next suse (and/or next jhbuild and/or next gnome as appropriate) will make it easier for all this to work out of the box.

BTW, clearly what the next summit needs is wine and cheese.

After reading fafblog today, I have come to the firm conclusion that GNOME should resolve further debates about module inclusion via the Socratic Method.Dave can play the part of Fafnir, and I can swim in ham jello.

Stefano is one of those people who appears to constantly be throwing off good ideas, in my limited association with him. Today’s good idea is the best explanation of RDF I’ve seen yet. Sorry, Edd. I still love ya.

sri: the number of people who read planet, as opposed to the number of people reached, say, every time linuxtoday or lwn publish an article from kde’s news sites, is probably fairly small. So don’t be afraid to rehash stuff that has been on planet- it’s important that this fairly closed universe be represented out to the broader world for people who don’t have time to read about Michael’s email every single day. :)

Saw this post by Dharmaveer Singh, about the apparently successful gnome bangalore meet this weekend. The question of ‘how do we grow things beyond the corporate seed it started with’ is a hard one for many corporate-centered open-source-ish activities- Real, OpenOffice, and Java have all struggled with this problem, and as far as I can see, none have completely succeeded. I’m very thankful I get to work in a pre-existing community- starting a new one would be Hard(tm), though perhaps an interesting challenge.

Had an awesome weekend in and around Conway, New Hampshire, with Krissa, my mom, and my stepdad. We went canoeing yesterday and hiking today. We stayed at a fun bed and breakfast close enough to Conway to make it easy to hit the stores when I needed antihistamines on Saturday morning, but far enough away it felt like we were pretty much in the wilderness. And with really, really great breakfasts. Really nice trip, really invigorating. Back to the grind tomorrow, I guess ;)

Little frustrating that I have no pictures of the weekend- there were some gorgeous pics to be had at the falls. Probably spend some time this week looking at a new camera, I guess. Or at least getting the old one fixed.

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person/jpick/”>jpick: let us know how redwood virtual works out; sounds like an interesting idea.

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person/dcoombs/”>dcoombs: that link to guadec pics is broken from advo; I guess you meant this?