Cross over to the next millenium into Jan 2000.
Now that I can play the piano again, I started playing Chopin's Polonaise in A, Op. 40 Num. 1. Today's progress: the first four bars. Playing the piano again made me very very happy.
Started cleaning up GdkPixbufAnimation in preparation for a gdk-pixbuf library release.
Went to visit my old friend Ricardo. Handed my old laptop over to him. Played lots of Nintendo and remembered the good old high school days.
Moved my web page and my mail to Helix Code. I am a happy employee now. Wheee!
Finally back from visiting my cousin in Laredo, TX. It's a long drive.
Lunch with Miguel and Urquijo at Le Petit Cluny. Slow service, very good food, monster-sized dessert.
Discussed canvas and Evolution hacking plans.
So Delta has this new policy where they will not let you take cardboard boxes as luggage during the holiday season. How incredibly convenient. Asked Owen to mail my boxes for me to my uncle's house in Laredo, whom I will be visiting for Christmas.
Full flights to Atlanta and to Mexico City. And a stupid kid was kicking my seat from behind all the way.
Went Christmas shopping yesterday. Braved the crowds. Buying books and CDs for others is dangerous, as you ending up buying a bunch of stuff for yourself, too.
Last night's movie: Honneamise no tsubasa. Saw it at Jonathan's house. Very nice, and with extremely detailed drawing.
Procrastinated packing for yesterday. Decided to pack today.
Dinner with Dave and Owen at the pizza place near home. Gave my car's title and key to Dave, because a friend of his will need it. Went home to start packing.
Oh, the packing adventure. Two Heavy-Ass(tm) boxes full of books and CDs (with clothes for soft padding), one Fat-Ass(tm) suitcase of clothes, one little but heavy suitcase with random crap, my backpack and another bag. The overweight charge is going to screw me over.
Last day of work for me at Red Hat, in theory. I may go to the office over the weekend to finish packing my stuff and such. I am going to miss the people here.
Lunch at the Greek place that all of RHAD loves. Dinner at an excellent place of Ethiopian food. Messy, good food.
Didn't get anything done today.
On Monday night we found an excellent Indian restaurant in Chapel Hill. Had dinner with Owen and Jonathan. Had a very spicy but extremely well-seasoned dish of potatoes and mushrooms. Mmmmm.
More hacking on the canvas. The code is coming out beautifully. I will just need Raph to finish fixing libart when I am done. I now realize we didn't fully understand the implications of the delayed update/redraw model when we initially wrote the thing. Today's work: finished the new hit testing methods for the rectangle and ellipse items. I am thinking we could pass the item-to-canvas affine transformations as we walk the item tree for increased efficiency.
At some point I had talked to Mike Slaughter, of Addison-Wesley, about writing a book on Bonobo. I now think it may be better to write a book on the GNOME imaging framework, encompassing the canvas, libart, the printing and font system, and other visual-related things. I need to talk to him again.
Slept too much last night.
So the funniest thing happened today. We went for dinner at Chili's, and when I came out there was a note in my car's windshield: “I need this car. Please call me at your convenience, will offer top dollar. XXX-XXXX. Ask for Morris. Thank you.” It is funny because a) my car is a piece of shit, b) it really is a piece of shit, c) he is offering “top dollar”, whatever that means.
Did a mega-merge of the gnome-libs-1-0 branch on CVS to the CANVAS_CLEANUP branch. I want to clean up as much of the canvas as possible this week before I leave RHAD Labs. Seems like a worthwile "last project" while here.
Today's work on the canvas: finalized the way item bounding boxes are represented, cleaned up the arguments that the GnomeCanvasRE item can take and simplified it a lot.
Yesterday's movies: Bicentennial Man and Toy Story 2. The former is surprisingly good, and that is a good thing because it would have pissed me off if Asimov's story got screwed up. The latter is extremely funny, and I want to see it again to pick up all the little details and references. And they showed an extended trailer for a “Dinosaur” movie for next year, and it looks extremely impressive.
Owen came up with a design for an IDE, called Eider, and we decided to pull a final all-night hacking run and write it. It is done using Python and the pygnome and pyglade bindings. So I'm learning Python, actually getting to like it, and very happy to be working with a scripting language. It is fun to pass chunks of elisp to Emacs and process the results back in Python. We definitely need to use scripting languages more in GNOME. Tomorrow I'll work on the icon list prettification code in the IDE; I have to figure out how to mangle imlib RGB arrays from within Python, or write a C implementation and bind it.
Dinner at a nice Japanese place with Owen, Jonathan, and Elliot. Had a big and good sukiyaki. Mmmmmm.
Ordered the automata theory book by Hopcroft and Ullman.
Read the C++-and-let's-rewrite-the-GTK+-object-system flamewar on the gtk-devel mailing list. People are on some serious crack.
Went to that dreadful soup/salad place again for lunch. A cold salad on a rainy day does not amuse me. Wonder why the other RHAD hackers like it.
More hacking on the icon list scrolling. Less hacking than I would have liked. Why am I so slow these days?
I left my wonderful Bartók piano CD in Mexico, so I was extremely happy to discover that I had left the MP3's in some obscure directory in my laptop. Paid attention and discovered what Raph meant by MP3 encoding artifacts.
Dinner with Matt, Jonathan, and Owen at Elmo's Diner. Had some good salmon and good tomato soup, which made up for the sucky lunch.
Wrote the million sanity checks required for the drawable to GdkPixbuf conversion functions. I think Michael has got the thing to a state where we can finally make a new release.
Got a new 10/100 MBPS ethernet and 56 KBPS modem PCMCIA card for my laptop, as I'll need a modem when I go back to Mexico. It worked beautifully in the first try, which made me very happy.
Fixed the blasted CVS mess that was in the gill source tree, which made me very unhappy. Fixing cvs add/remove fuckups is a very unpleasant task.
Wrote a section in the GNOME Programming Guidelines telling people not to move files in CVS in the intuitive-and-severely-broken way, but to ask a maintainer instead.
Spent way too much time answering mail.
Went to see Fight Club again with Matt and Jonathan.
Got off my ass and did laundry.
Yesterday's movie: End of Days. Sucked badly, but in an entertaining sort of way. The obvious conclusion you can extract from this film is that when The Man does not want you to get laid, there is nothing you can do about it.
Finally got off my ass and wrote an announcement for MC 4.5.42.
Thought of some new sections to put in the GNOME Programming Guidelines. Will write them up shortly.
My books arrived. I'll inhale all of Knuth's knowledge or die trying.
Last night's movie: Mononoke Hime. Kicked ass, and it is drawn very prettily.
Reviewed several patches for the Midnight Commander. Released version 4.5.42, finally.
My left hand started hurting rather badly today. I'll stop playing Bomberman for a while. My hands did not use to hurt when I played the piano.
Yesterday I went to the Mediterranean deli for an awfully late lunch (woke up at 3:00 PM). They had some sort of an Egyptian dance demonstration going on, and they said they would do belly dancing during the following days. Go figure.
Then went to the coffee shop to hack. Reviewed patches for MC, including a very interesting one by Sebastian Fischmeister. It needs some fixing before it can go into the source tree.
Jonathan and his father dropped in to have coffee and we went to see Being John Malkovich again. Then I decided I was not too late for the midnight show and I went to see The Wórld is Not Enough. It hurt when they cut up the car in half.
Wheee! Got my car back. It has a new radiator and I have $500 less.
Started hacking on a new GnomeIconCaption canvas item for the new icon list. This is the old GnomeIconTextItem hack but with a saner API for the icon list's model/view architecture.
Went to the Red Hat Christmas party in downtown Chapel Hill. Halfway through the party some of us decided we were still hungry from the finger food and went out for real food and coffee. Decided to give up seeing a movie in favor of sleep.
Jacob reorganized the GNOME FTP site. This is a good thing.
My car is still in the shop. They said they may have it ready tomorrow afternoon. Sigh.
Reorganized the gdk-pixbuf source tree, which was broken for historical reasons. Began rewriting the test program to be useful, so that I can make a new release.
Today's movie: Sleepy Hollow. Very nice Tim Burton look and feel, but rather lame script.
Last night's movie: The Messenger. Not bad, but definitely not one of Luc Besson's best.
My car is still in the shop. I fear the upcoming bill.
More hacking on the new icon list widget. I'm redoing the update code, since it was rather convoluted.
Tried to go to the 22:30 show of the James Bond movie, and the stupid theater that is a block away from home was closed. Closed. Only in North Carolina do these things happen.
Go backward in time to Nov 1999.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Fri 2001/Jun/15 18:06:55 CDT