Go forward in time to Mar 2000.
Upon getting home last night, practiced some Rachmaninov. Got tired, went to sleep.
Woke up way too late, practiced some more. I am getting the hang of it.
Slept in the office and woke up feeling grimy.
Went with Ettore, Joe, and Jacob to watch American Beauty. What an excellent movie.
Mutopia is cool. I may transcribe some music for this nifty project.
Last night we went with Ettore to try to watch American Beauty, but it was sold out. So we went to a very nice Thai restaurant and had some kick-ass curried duck.
Then we went to the Lucky Cave to find Michael and Amanda watching The Shawshank Redemption. Afterwards we watched The Big Lebowski for the gazillionth time, and it was insanely funny as always.
Woke up late today. Had some leftover soup for breakfast. Played the piano until I got tired and went to the office. It is warm outside tonight.
Woke up early-ish. Made a kick-ass omelette for breakfast; tarragon certainly is a good thing on eggs. Went back to sleep.
Went to the MFA. Went to the symphony hall to pick up the program, and it seems I missed Bartók's piano concerto # 1 last January 28. This made me incredibly angry.
So I decided to waste my bile and my money in Tower Records. New CDs do wonders to one's mood.
Last night's movie: Pitch Black. It sucked.
Fixed gdk_imlib so that it does not barf when it cannot load its palette file in pseudocolor mode. Now it uses a hardcoded palette in that case. This is needed when you link it statically in a program, because that means the user will most likely not have imlib installed. Sigh.
It is 15 degrees centigrade today. Amazing.
Yesterday I spent a lot of time playing the piano and restocking the house with food. Now we have all the basics for survival such as Nutella, Darjeeling tea and artichoke hearts.
On Tuesday night we went for dinner at Fire and Ice in Harvard Square. Mmmmm. Ate like pigs and rolled back to the Lucky Cave for some movie action. Watched Aliens and The Matrix and had a great time.
Discovered the wonders of the Weather Applet in the GNOME Panel. This little thing kicks ass.
Released version 0.6.0 of Gdk-pixbuf. This makes me happy; the library is reaching maturity. The announcement has a task list at the end with things people could contribute with; please contact me if you are interested in hacking this.
Matt Loper went to the mall to have lunch, and brought me a Godzilla pop sucking candy. It has a battery and a motor. It opens and closes its toothed mouth when you press a button, and it spins the candy. I'll try to keep it from scaring the monkey dolls in the office.
Had some broiled haddock for lunch from the little restaurant a block away from the office. Not bad. I love fish.
Switched my machine to Spidermonkey. Behold the beauty.
Did a buttload of laundry.
Played the piano for a bit, then fled the house upon realizing I was starving. Went to the mall to eat and buy some eletric tape for the loose cables in my Korg's power adapter.
Slept.
Had some food.
Slept some more.
Michael Zucchi's birthday! Big party at the Lucky Cave, aka Nat's house.
Larry Ewing arrived today. Wheeeeee! He'll be here for a few days.
Missed the GIMP talk by Carey Bunks at MIT because I woke up too late. Yes, the meeting was in the afternoon. Yes, I woke up too late.
Carey wrote a beautiful book on the GIMP and Tigert got his copy today. It explains the fundamentals of image processing in terms of what the GIMP can do, and I really like it.
Some patch-flushing action. Integrated Rusty's patch to fix the demangling of canvas line endpoints when they are queried (and his patch to gnome-font-picker as well). Integrated Chris's patch to fix propagation of focus events to canvas items. And more importantly, got off my ass and wrote a nice routine to take the union of two microtile arrays while intersecting them with a clipping rectangle; this fixes the problem of having enormous microtile arrays in the canvas when two very distant items query redraws. Now the canvas only handles nice and small microtile arrays that are as big as the visible region. This was possible because of Michael's excellent analysis of the problem. I owe him a beer.
Miguel went back to Mexico yesterday and Raph went back to California today.
The power adapter they gave me in the music store had the polarity wrong. So I cut up the stupid cables, separated them and flipped them around. I need some non-conducting tape to finish the fix and avoid having flying cables around, or a real power adapter that has a polarity switch.
Went to bed way too late playing the piano. I am very happy with my new keyboard. And Rachmaninov is *hard*. It takes some getting used to the change in harmony style after playing Chopin. Ditto with Bartók.
Got myself a Korg SP-100 keyboard! That was yesterday, and I was stupid enough to leave the power adapter at the store. So I went back this morning to pick it up, so tonight I'll make the first use of the keyboard. I am so happy to be able to play the piano here.
Dinner at Legal Sea Food with Marco (my cousin), Michael, Chris, Raph, Carey Bunks (GIMP book author), Tuomas, and Ettore. It is pretty pathetic that I had not seen my cousin, who lives here, since I got here last January. Anyways, we had a good dinner and discussed interesting stuff with the rest of the hackers.
Apparently today it was like 12 degrees Celsius in Boston. Really nice and tropical. It has been raining all day.
Friday's movie: Titus. I really liked it. Miguel and Angélica didn't like it because they said they did not understand much of the dialogue. Bleh.
The calendar server runs well, and I've been testing it with a little test program. Memprof found two or three memory leaks that I fixed. There are two remaining leaks which I just cannot find :-( I may just need sleep. The next step is to make the GUI client use the server as its main storage and event generation engine.
Fixed all the remaining resource management issues in the client and server sides of the calendar.
Found an important race condition in GOAD activation when it is used with factories that have the life cycle semantics of the calendar's. Basically, the problem would be solved if the activation process did an atomic, implicit reference count on the object you are requesting. Sigh.
Francisco de Urquijo came to visit today.
Went to a Thai food place for dinner in Kendall Square. Mmmmmm.
More furious hacking on the calendar.
Preston, Sergey, Raph, and Tigert visited Helix Code today. Many cool people are around!
Dinner with Raph, Michael, and Chris in the same Chinese place as the other day. Discussed canvas stuff with Raph. We disagree on the way to implement an illustration program; he wants all the DOM/SVG/W3C crapola, and I just want an illustration program that works, fast. Also discussed hacks that could be done with Raph's new pen plotter.
Apparently Miguel and the rest of the Helix Code hackers went for dinner at IHOP. Some people just have no taste.
Helix Code skiing trip! We went to Killington, Vermont, although Ettore, Miguel, and Jacob didn't want to go and stayed home. It was a lot of fun. Yesterday I was falling rather frequently, but today it got better. Today's last two rounds for me were completely fall-free. I am liking this crazy sport a lot. Also saw a blind skier going down on the last two rounds, and was completely amazed.
Friday's movie: Scream 3. Or, as Nat put it, I know what your breasts did last summer.
Our Italian coffee maker at home kicks ass.
Printed the iCalendar specification for the Nth time.
Dinner with Chris, Michael, and Ettore at a very good Chinese place in Harvard Square. It was snowing on our way there.
Woke up around noon.
Went to look for a grocery store or supermarket. Got lots of food for the apartment.
More calendar hacking. The model/view split is coming along fine, although a bit slower than I expected.
Dinner with Neil, Ettore, Matt, Michael, Phil, Chris, and Dan. We went to an Indian place around Central Square. Not bad at all, but not the best Indian food I have had.
It is obscenely cold tonight.
Woke up extremely late, at 4 PM. I suck.
Read the flamewar on gimp-developer about whether to use GNOME stuff in the GIMP or not. Some people like reinventing wheels, it seems.
Met with Phil Schwan around 2:00 AM in his hotel's lobby with the intention of getting food. Failed. Boston/Cambridge are looking like a wasteland. I just cannot believe there is nothing open. This would not happen in Mexico City, where there is real food available 24 hours a day.
Go backward in time to Jan 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Fri 2001/Jun/15 18:13:23 CDT