Go forward in time to Apr 2000.
Woke up way too late. Didn't get much done.
Saw Magnolia with Luis, Michelle, Paco, and Gina. Very crazy, really awesome movie.
So I was interviewed by Linux.com. It's not a Playboy interview, but it's a start, I guess.
Saw Kokaku Kidotai with Luis Javier. Very, very cool movie.
Lunch with Pepe Chacón; talked about his Helix Code plans for Latin America. Juanjo was also there, and we talked about the LOGO classes that he gave a looooong time ago.
More calendar hacking. Matt integrated the personal calendar server into Wombat; this was just a matter of making the PCS into a library and registering the factory with GOAD in the Wombat main file.
Did a bit of Eye of Gnome hacking; wrote some cool functions for manipulating microtile arrays. This baby is going to be *fast*. I will eat Compupic for breakfast.
Did an interview for Linux.com; it should appear there soon.
Wheeeee! My talk on the canvas for OLS 2000 was accepted. I am happy that there are so many cool speakers. It looks like OLS will be a blast again.
Nice fondue dinner with Luis, Paco, Javier Gutiérrez, and Javier Ortega.
More furious hacking on the calendar. Cleaned up some stuff in the utilities/PCS/client parts. More work on making the GUI use the new notification system, which is sort of a bitch to do.
Went with Luis, Michelle, Paco, and Javier to see The Talented Mr. Ripley. Very good movie, with gorgeous atmosphere and setting.
Read John Varley's The Persistence of Vision. What a beautiful little story. I had had the book with that story for a *long* time but I had never read it. I'm very glad I did read it now.
Made a pencil drawing of Miriam's left hand. The palm came out a bit too big, but the fingers were not bad at all. I need to re-read my anatomy books.
Lunch at my grandma's; she made a delicious chicken in mole verde.
Did some grokking effort on the Evolution shell code to integrate the calendar into it. I am still undecided whether to have a single monolithic notebook Bonobo control with all the calendar views in it or to also export those as separate controls.
Listened to Rachmaninov's preludes, Opus 32, trying to decide which one is not so obscenely hard that I will not be able to play it.
Nice breakfast with Miriam in Coyoacán, and then coffee.
Made a list of things that need to be done to finish the Evolution calendar. Awaiting for replies on the Evolution mailing list.
Hacked on making all of the Gnomecal views use the new notification interface. What were we smoking when we wrote the original code?
Woke up at around 8:30. Impressive. For the past few days I have been waking up way too early for my standards. I hope it lasts.
Got a phone call from Matt Loper; discussed calendar organization stuff.
Was unproductive for the better part of the day, but managed to arrange my two overcrowded desks into something usable for work. Was amazed at the amount of ancient crap I had on top of my bedroom's desk.
I am back in Mexico City, and I will be here for a while.
Went yesterday to the historic center of the city to get some music scores and some CDs. Wanted to go to the cathedral, but it was closed, apparently for restoration purposes.
Had an extremely pleasant time listening to Mussorgsky's original piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition while reading the music score, eating Mexican sweet bread and drinking milk. This is an amazing piece of music, so I'll have to start practicing it. And it is much different from Ravel's orchestral version.
Finished reading the last chapters of All Tomorrow's Parties while listening to Silvestre Revueltas's Night of the Mayas. They are both weird, loud, and thus match perfectly to each other.
And I am extremely happy to be back for a while in Mexico City, the most surreal of cities, where life is good and the food is even better.
Last day of GUADEC. Listened to the last part of Dave's talk on documentation, and went through Miguel's talk on Evolution.
Afterwards, Owen, Keith Packard, Havoc, and I went to Notre Dame to see the cathedral. It is incredible! It is fantastic that such beautiful structures were built over many centuries by countless people. Then we went for an early dinner to a little restaurant around there.
Went to the Helix Code party and then to La Locomotive, an awesome dance club. Large quantities of alcohol were ingested; lots of dancing ensued.
Second day of GUADEC. There was a long combined talk by Miguel (status of GNOME), Owen and Tim (GTK+ and Pango), and Michael Meeks (Bonobo).
Talked with Keith Packard about fonts in X and the new imaging model.
They had a big piano in the auditorium, so I played for some time after the talks were over. It was a bit out of tune, but it was nice to play on a real piano.
GUADEC-sponsored dinner with all the hackers. Discussed calendaring stuff with Eskil, who is an extremely funny guy. Talked about MC with Radek.
Afterwards, went to a bar where they were celebrating St. Patrick's day. Had a lot of fun with Ettore, Maciej, Joe, and many other hackers.
First day of GUADEC. Spent a lot of time talking to people and meeting all the GNOME hackers, which was a lot of fun.
Gave my talk on the canvas and libart. Raph arrived during the Q&A session, and he talked some more. Met Lauris Kaplinski, author of the Sodipodi illustration program.
Talked with Raph about his new ultra-cool printing algorithms for inkjet printers.
Dinner with some hackers at a nice and little restaurant; they bring you a little charcoal grill and you cook your meat there.
Arrived in Paris. This is a great city! The nice thing about old cities is that people have actually had the time to make them livable, comfortable, and interesting.
Left the stuff in the hotel and went to do some quick sight-seeing. We went to the Arc de Triomphe, walked along the Champs Elysees up to the Louvre, and then went to buy some clothes. Walking around Paris while listening to Bartók can be very surreal.
Pre-Paris preparations. Got a new CD player, got some towels for the house, an European power adapter, and some other random stuff.
Pro-sized dinner action at Legal's with the people who were in the office, Peter, and Lizzie. I have a fish in my belly; a big one.
Lunch with Pepe Chacón at Ginza; had an enormous and delicious katsudon.
Afterwards, went with Pepe to buy some books. Big bookstores are dangerous. Then we went back to the Lucky Cave; Pepe discussed some stuff with Nat while I and later some other people watched 12 Monkeys. Terry Gilliam is a genius. Then we had dinner, courtesy of Ronnie and Taylor, and then we watched The Thin Red Line. For some reason I liked it much more this time than the first time I saw it in the theater. And the photography is just incredible. It is still too long, though.
Yesterday Jim Gettys came over to talk about Itsy-like machines and a desktop or a GNOME user interface for them. We went to Legal's once again.
Last night's movie: Mission to Mars. Kick-ass special effects, with a kick-ass space walk, but an extremely cheesy story.
Miguel and Pepe Chacón are here. Had lunch with Pepe at Legal Sea Food.
Miguel is supposed to get here today.
I've been playing with Lilypond, and I managed to set the notes for the first three bars of Chopin's Polonaise in A, Op. 40 Num. 1. Just the notes, no accents or dynamics or anything else. But it looks like this program is very neat indeed. This got me thinking, and writing a WYSIWYG music notation program is definitely not going to be trivial.
Synchronized with Seth Alves on what each one has to do for the Evolution calendar.
The Helix Code page is up, and of course it got slashdotted. We had some fun de-slashdottifying it.
Little de-slashdotification-HOWTO: first people get your main page. Be sure your images can be downloaded *fast*, preferably offsite from somewhere with a fat pipe. Then people will get your screenshots. Put them on a fast pipe as well. Then, hope for the best.
Webmastered for a while. In the evening we went to Charlie's Kitchen to celebrate.
Woke up late. Played the piano for a while. I am very happy that my technique is getting much better these days; I am doing very well on Chopin. Being able to practice at any time of the day, thanks to the headphones, certainly helps.
Last night Michael, Jacob, and I went back to the Lucky Cave and watched There's Something about Mary on TV and then Boogie Nights on DVD.
Woke up far too late. Went for lunch, went for coffee, and then went to the BSO.
The program was: Golijov's Last Round for string orchestra; Bruch's concerto for clarinet, viola, and orchestra; and Beethoven's 7th symphony.
Osvaldo Golijov is an Argentinian/Israeli in his early forties. Supposedly “Last Round” tries to simulate a tango's bandoneon with the string orchestra. It kicks ass. This was the world premiere of the piece, and Mr. Golijov was there. During the intermission I talked to him a bit; he seemed very happy when I told him how the first part of his composition reminded me a lot of Bartók's string quartets. I wished him good luck and said good-bye; he seems to be writing good stuff.
Bruch was far too melodic, too little rhythmic, and the first two movements were oversweet and dripping in honey and strings. The last movement started to get more interesting. The viola soloist should have played a bit louder, since the clarinet overshadowed him a bit too much.
Beethoven's 7th symphony is great, of course. The orchestra played the first movement in a bit sloppy fashion, but the subsequent ones were great, especially the second canon-like one. There were no encores.
Mr. Seiji Ozawa is a lot of fun to watch as a conductor. The symphony hall does not have as good acoustics and layout as the Sala Nezahualcóyotl at UNAM, but it is impressive to look at with all the decoration and the pipes of the organ in the back of the stage.
This was my first time at the BSO, and I had a great time. I'll certainly be going rather often.
Ettore left us today as he went back to Milan. We'll see him again in GUADEC.
Some hot code-cleaning action in Spidermonkey.
Just when everyone thought the guy was finally going to get fucked in the ass, and they send Pinochet back to Chile; just because the guy was old and ill? Give me a FUCKING break. This is ridiculous.
Had a long discussion with Matthias Ettrich, Torben Weis, Owen Taylor, Preston Brown, Nat Friedman, and Chuck (?), the guy from Inprise. We discussed a common control system, similar to Bonobo controls. Fortunately Bonobo needs only very minor changes to support it. This is a good thing, it means that the Bonobo design is very sane and useful.
First I went to the hotel where everyone was staying; Nat was busy and didn't go at that time. Then he joined us for dinner.
The design involves some cross-toolkit issues, some un-needed but nice syntactic sugar for IDL, and some special features for properties in interfaces. These are similar to CORBA interface attributes, but support documentation strings and custom GUI editors; this should be useful for graphical RAD tools and other GUI builders.
Bonobo should require a couple minor changes to support this. Nat was very happy to see that the Bonobo architecture made sense to other people.
Afterwards, we went to a bar with Ettore bar and said good-bye to each other.
Bertrand arrived here last night. He'll be hacking on Evolution here for some time.
Woke up early-ish. Went to the office. People were hungry, so we went to IHOP. Had a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity meal. The blueberry sauce on the pancakes was too sweet for my taste.
Larry went back to Austin today. Sigh.
Started reorganizing the evolution/calendar directory into more manageable chunks. Now we have separate directories for the IDL files, the calendar client library, the personal calendar server, and the GUI client.
Dinner at Legal Sea Food with the local Helix Code hackers, Owen Taylor, Matthias Ettrich, Torben Weis, and a guy from Inprise whose name I didn't quite catch. Had an interesting talk with Matthias about components and other technologies. We'll have a meeting tomorrow to discuss the stuff in detail.
Go backward in time to Feb 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Sun 2001/Jun/17 14:57:55 CDT