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

I’ve added a quick hack to the gnome microtinderbox that links to the changelog of a module. It’s a gross nasty little hack that only works for GNOME CVS modules which use the standard Changelog naming and HEAD, and provides the link even when a module fails because of dependencies that failed, but that’s all I’m terribly concerned about for the moment. I’ll have to do more serious jhbuild hackery to make it actually work ‘correctly’ :)

I was prompted to do this because the first thing I do when I notice that a module is failing is check the Changelog; I’ve found that most of the time this is sufficient to find the problem. Doing such a thing for the broken gnome-games build this morning resulted in noticing that gnome-games now seem to support rendezvous through howl- which is pretty sweet. Hope I can get that built and start playing with Krissa at some point- unfortunately, yesterday’s experiments in building HEAD seem to have mostly failed with bizzare runtime library issues, so it might be a bit before I can try this out.

In perhaps the most bizarre (but best tasting) response to the Red Sox victory yet, my favorite dessert place just sent me an email that they’ve created a desert called ‘Sox Celebration’ featuring:

a tear drop shaped chocolate cake, representing the tears of joy experienced by all Red Sox fans. The cake is made of rich chocolate ganache and passion fruit mousse, capturing the passion and dedication of Red Sox Nation. The plate is decorated with a Green Monster tuille cookie, a chocolate cigarette symbolizing the Pesky Pole, a mini popcorn ball, and hazelnut ice cream adorned with two red chocolate Red Sox.

I can’t wait to eat one.

Speaking of great meals… Krissa and I had dinner with my boss (Kelli) last night at Chez Henri. Was great to meet some of her family, and we had a nice dinner, as we always do at Chez Henri.

This morning I’ll probably spend watching the victory parade on TV- I’m glad that they extended the parade route to go over the river, but it still will be just too insane, especially given the bad weather. And Schilling’s pro-Bush commentary in the past few days has made me a bit ill.

Will also spend time compiling Zucchi’s message-info-branch; I’m perhaps the abusive vfolder user. Of course, I can’t get gtk to compile (works fine on the tinderbox) so maybe I won’t get so far today… Oh, and apparently multisync CVS has preliminary Evo 2 sync, so hopefully I can play with that too.

Had a drink after work with Ben Hyde, wherein I discovered that the Stata Center has a pub. Lots of other interesting ideas were exchanged, but ‘you can drink in a pub just as weird as the rest of the stata center’ may be the most lasting impact of the conversation ;) Ben was sort of surprised to know that there is a group of people trying hard to do open source GUI ‘right’, and had correctly predicted that realistically it would require a near-fork and many people would leave the project when it happened. Interesting talk.

Last night was a blast. Such a blast I fell asleep for the 5th-7th innings… like I said earlier, I’ve been a total wreck, so the sleep was needed. Let me get out to Harvard Square afterwards, which was fun- harvard band was out there. They are no DUMB but they certainly added to the very, very jazzed atmosphere.

My personal feelings on the win got clarified a bit last night- a Duke friend who was born/bred Red Sox Nation said that this was better than the Duke championship in 2001. And lots of serious folks here are referring to this as on par with the births of their children. It’s just not that for me… I had a blast (particularly last week) and I will always be glad to say ‘I was there’, but I don’t have the tie-in lots of other people do, and so this wasn’t (for me) like Duke 2001, or even in the end like Duke 1998, when we beat Carolina but lost in the sweet 16. Still, pretty damn awesome, and it’s great for all the people I saw last night who’ve lived and breathed with this team since they were born.

My old LUG got re-certified by the Duke student government, and at the same meeting, a Duke branch of freeculture.org was apparently chartered. Good for Duke.

In the ‘cool things from cool people using gnome’ category, Nathan Yergler has written a nautilus properties page in pygtk that shows the Creative Commons license of properly tagged mp3 files.

Nathan is looking for more cool gnome+cc integration ideas- I’m sure some folks can come up with some. I’d personally love someday to see a gnome-cc package that you can install and give your desktop lots of CC loving, maybe including gnomoradio or gnomoradio integration. Anyway, really awesome stuff.

The sox are doing their best to make the world series anti-climactic, which is good- I am a total wreck at the moment and I don’t think I could deal with the stress of another 7 game series.

In the ‘spectacularly assy’ category, my cable provider allowed me to sign up to pay my bills online with firefox, but won’t actually allow me to access the payment form with firefox, because I don’t have a new enough version of netscape. Idiots.

Otherwise, a good weekend-old friend (Ian Peters, of greatest release announcement of all time fame) is in town, and we caught two Sox wins. Yay for that.

Very, very tempting to run out and buy an HDTV before the game today. So far, saving grace has been that the model I’d likely get weighs 200 pounds and they can’t deliver until November. I might finally break down before March.

As people at the office will tell you, I’ve been a big ball of unpleasant stress all week. So, John, don’t take it personally when I say I’m never speaking to you again. ;)

Novell is looking seriously at bugzilla, and has about 100 open bugs against it the internal implementation. I read them all why waiting for stuff to download from Germany, commented on something between 20 and 40. Shortly thereafter someone subscribed me to the internal bugzilla-devel list. Some things you can’t escape…

Just made plans to go down to DC to celebrate my grandfather’s 90th birthday by taking him flying for the first time in a small plane in some time. It was my mother’s idea, but a great one. I’m looking forward to it- apparently he’s been talking about flying again. He handed in his pilot’s license when he was 75 or so, and that was a big blow to him, so hopefully this will be a boost for his spirits.

Calum: I couldn’t agree more; it seems like there is a lot of hacking going on on notification areas right now without any serious consideration of the use cases for such a thing. It would be great if some of the usability experts sat down and presented such a case clearly and explicitly, though, or else it’s all going to get implemented with random-ass stuff in it without consideration for the consequences, and we’re going to be stuck with the crack.

[Added later, after re-reading] Worth noting that I don’t say this to crap on all the work people have been doing; it’s great to see so much energy going into something we’ve needed for a while. It is just frustrating that it could be both a better user experience and probably easier to code if there were more serious consideration of the right use cases.

For those of you not in Boston, this note from the MIT sysadmins summarizes yesterday here decently well. I did not call because, as Krissa put it, ‘you look like death’, and my synapses aren’t actually firing very often at this point. So despite saying I’d regret it forever if I didn’t call, and despite a reminder 20 minutes beforehand, I happily forgot about it until this morning.

Dom: you’re right that the trademark/copyright issue is a messy one, and one that I don’t think has ever really been sufficiently explored by actual legal experts. It’s a shame, someone needs to do it.

Nat: you best fix that Thompson link- I want to read it. If Kerry wins, I’ll lend you my copy of Fear and Loathing ’72 and you can revel in the good doctor’s eye for the campaign trail. And if Kerry doesn’t win, I’ll fedex it to you from Tahiti.

Jamin: bring it on ;)