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

Went to see Marcel Marceau tonight with Krissa. It was pretty cool. He did his famous ‘Mask Maker’ piece, which is just incredible- the facial control is awesome to watch. Dave, he was even in a boxcage at one point. :) There was some pretty abstract stuff (‘The Hands’ and ‘Creation of the Earth’) mixed in with some pretty concrete stuff- a very amusing series of sketches of people in a ‘Public Garden.’ After the first series of solo pieces, there were some interesting troupe sets, which were mostly beautifully choreographed. All in all, a lot of fun; interesting to be able to say ‘I saw the best ever do his thing’, and to have appreciated why he is the best. That said, I probably wouldn’t go see any other mime, at least not for another decade or so ;)

It shows through Oct. 7th at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and I do recommend anyone in the Boston area go see him before he leaves.

I can’t believe I didn’t blog this proof earlier, but with Jeanne coming, it seems topical again.

Had a nice talk with Joe and Robert after work today; always nice to ramble with cool, smart folks about stuff that isn’t work related but still decently meaty. Watched ‘Galaxy Quest’ after dinner with Krissa; was amusing if overly cheesy. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on my dad’s big screen late saturday, I think.

I’m getting more psyched about summit in a few weeks- I know it’s short notice, so I know it’ll be smaller than we want, but it should still be fun. COME.

I’ve switched the pseudo-tinderbox over to gnome210 now that I got all the deps right for 2.8. (Thanks, Jody.) We’ll see how that goes. I need to make the top-level index more informative, but I might also want to learn python for that first ;) (I also want to export all this over VNC or nox at some point, but I really need to chroot that first, and that will probably start to get messy.

mharris: (if you, or someone near you, ahem ;) reads planet gnome, I’m curious about your experiments with triage, particularly about how the 4-D approach works for you. I admit my approach to triage is sort of brute force, and experimenting with a more structured approach would be interesting to me.

The problem with a clueless tool like me running a pseudo-tinderbox is that I often have no idea why the build fails, if it fails. pango and shared-mime-info build fine on my home box (suse 9.1, basically) and even built earlier in the day on the build box I’m using. Now neither build in another directory, and I have no idea why.

[Later] Ah-ha. Apparently jhbuild -ac runs make clean after autogen/configure, which (not too surprisingly) breaks some modules. Remove the -c (unecessary in a clean checkout anyway) and things appear to work like a charm. Watch this space!

If my trip home gets delayed by a hurricane again I have no idea what I’ll do, but it probably won’t be pretty.

In a sudden fit of micro-usefulness, I’ve written about 10 lines of shell and put up a micro-tinderbox here. I had it doing a complete build (sans mozilla and gnomemeeting) earlier in the day, but somehow seem to have botched that, not sure how yet, and frankly don’t care all that much ATM :) I’ll inspect logs and such in the morning. This is currently for 2.8, I wanted to get that working before I launched into the deep end of 2.9. Also, no useful binary output, unfortunately, and the page headers and footers have inherited some stuff from elsewhere on the box; hopefully I can fix that tomorrow. We’ll see. Anyway, hope this can soon be of micro-use to someone :) Note that this is implemented with ‘jhbuild tinderbox’ and not build-buddy, despite the headers on the pages; I strongly believe GNOME needs someone to dive in, learn build-buddy, and do regularly builds from there, but I’m not that man right now, so I’m making do with what tools I do know and understand.

[Also, my beleaguered brain knows there is prefix more appropriate than ‘micro’ or ‘sub’, maybe ‘pseudo’? Not sure. Cookies for whoever comes up with what I meant to use. ;)

For the record, by the way, I’m insanely jealous of Dom’s summer school experience, and glad to see from planet that hacking appears to be progressing on Abi, Planner, and maybe even Conglomerate.

Sadly, the reason I look exhausted in this picture is because that’s the way I’ve been feeling too often lately. Hopefully that will wind up soon- certainly doing even the tiniest bit of micro-hacking tonight was good for the soul, if not for the sleep I’d hoped to get tonight :)

Someone in IRC was complaining that they’d found a RH bug that had been open a year without being resolved. I told them this wasn’t a big deal, and pointed to 50595, which was resolved in the 2.8 release. Looking that up made me curious what the oldest bug to be resolved during the 2.8 cycle was; looks like 1923 wins the honor, having been opened on August 15th, 1999, and closed in gtk 2.4 on May 5th of this year. See, it pays to look at old bugs :)

While Jeff is busy going off the deep end ;), his SO is out making some PR waves with a vigorous defense of linux.au in the face of the MPAA. Good for her. I’d love for GNOME to make some headlines like that, on issues either political or technological.

Am spending the rest of the evening reading first cuts at docs. Yay. :/

Fall is coming. It is probably the best time of year here, what with crisp air, hot chocolate, and leaves, and cuddling, and flannels over t-shirts, but it does sort of point to winter next. Ah well.

After my last post, it was pointed out to me that I had this picture laying around that I’d not blogged previously. To clarify: this is Dave getting his Davey Bear on his Davey Birthday. It was very cute, and he loved it immensely.

Am reminded by these posts that tieguy.org is something that couldn’t happen without a pair of good friends. Thanks, guys.

Good weekend so far. Am reading Red Mars, which is pretty good, though perhaps paints people in slightly too Machiavellian a light. Still, engaging enough that I actually dreamed I was on mars last night.

Finally built 2.8 completely (except for g-v-m, still need a hal setup). Nice. Played some with tomboy- might become my main notetaking app very quickly. Still really need to get a machine set up with hal and the new X so I can play with vino+DAMAGE at home to make my music setup more responsive.

Caught an early-ish showing of Hero last night. Incredible use of color, and the movement of large masses of troops reminded me of Kurosawa’s Ran, which is not a bad thing. Felt somehow unpolished, though, compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon- the plot just didn’t feel as polished, and even the music felt slapped-on after the fact.

Off today to the harbor island’s with krissa’s department at school. Should be different, if nothing else. Sad that it is getting cold, though :/