Go forward in time to May 2000.
Committed the mega-patch to fix some robustness issues and do proper termination on the personal addressbook server.
Wrote a CipherSaber. Nice little toy.
Lunch at my grandmother's. She made a special meal because of my brother's birthday, and it was yummy.
Went to the movies with Oralia, a beautiful girl and an old friend of mine whom I had not seen for several years; we saw The Ninth Gate, not bad at all but the ending is really stupid. Had a really wonderful time.
Sent off an addressbook patch to Chris for review.
Met Chema at the Institute. Discussed gnome-print stuff; he has some extremely neat ideas for the architecture of the printer drivers. It's good to have someone working on that.
More wombat/addressbook cleanup. It's a bit trickier than the calendar part.
My brother was very happy with his new guitar scores.
Stayed up late re-reading Neuromancer. This is by far Gibson's best book.
The calendar server and libraries now terminate properly. Wheee! The addressbook's stuff is almost done as well.
Went with Areli to buy my brother's birthday present. We found some guitar transcriptions of Bach's suites for cello solo. Axel is going to love this.
Hacked some more on EOG. The full-screen viewer mode is almost done.
Got a new book.
Went to Luis Javier's house. I hacked on Evolution and he worked on his thesis.
Found some issues to be solved in Wombat. The calendar server needs better error reporting when creating/saving calendars; the addressbook server is rather lax in its error handling.
Woke up late. Had some leftover chicken for breakfast.
My dad saw me use Emacs's RMAIL and told me that it seemed much better/faster than the Lotus Notes mail thingy. I did not believe him, as RMAIL is about as crappy as you can get and still be useful. Evolution will kick ass.
Michael "da man" Meeks likes the new EOG scrolling code! My life is complete.
Wrote a list of milestones for the Evolution calendar.
Wrote uta_copy_area() and scroll_to() for EOG. This is neat! The first function is not perfect, but works pretty well. Asked Raph for comments; let's see what he says.
Discovered a color compositing bug in the gdk-pixbuf scaling functions with NEAREST interpolation mode. Sent a patch to Owen for review.
Ate a lot of chicken.
An ATM swallowed my card. Not good. Not fun.
Finished writing the list of things to be done for the Evolution calendar.
Released Eye of Gnome 0.3.
Spent all morning, i.e. a ridiculous amount of time, sorting out my paycheques. It is *hard* to cash a check from U.S.A. bank in Mexico. I climbed through about four levels of bureaucracy before the stupid bank's executive lady settled the stuff together.
Very nice lunch with my dad, her wife, and my little sister.
Wrote a big-ass master plan for the Evolution calendar/to-do/journal mechanism. Based it on a pretty good Outlook book that Miguel lent me. It is nice to have a thing to clone^H^H^H^H^Hfocus on.
Discovered that xmms is actually nicer than using plain mpg123 on my laptop.
Bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Especially since I met her when we were in Cambridge last October. This news made me very sad.
Lunch with Miguel, Pepe Chacón, and Víctor Guerra. Discussed using GNOME for the University and the Scholar Net project.
Finished cleaning up the addressbook installation stuff. Sent patch off to Chris for review.
Miguel was having trouble fixing GnomeCalculator to use visuals and colormaps properly, so I wrote a patch to fix it for good. Sent it off for review.
More Mussorgsky action. I'm up to the second Promenade.
Paco and I were comparing Pablo Casal's and Mstislav Rostropovich's versions of Bach's suites for cello. Both play them so differently and yet both versions are great.
Did some fixing of the installation of the addressbook stuff in Evolution.
Sigh. Went to the Sala Nezahualcóyotl with the intention of going to today's concert, which was supposed to be Verdi's Requiem. However, the University student strikers had been making trouble since yesterday, and today the whole campus was closed and surrounded by security personnel. The concert was cancelled without prior notice, and that pissed me off.
They would not let any cars into campus, so I parked mine in a little side street and walked over to the concert hall to see what was going on. Nothing was going on, and it was closed, and several people were there because they had wanted to go to the concert, too. I found Paco on my way back to the car, and we decided to go to Luis's house to sulk and have a coffee. Paco was going to the concert as well. He was to have an exam in the morning, but it was postponed until after the Holy Week break this week because the campus was closed.
So we went to Coyoacán for a walk and a good coffee.
Fixed the Evolution build tree a bit so that it does not install unnecessary stuff for the calendar server and Wombat. I'll fix the addressbook part tomorrow.
Thought about how to finish writing uta_find_first_glom_rect(), which is one of those grunt work pieces of code. Also thought about uta_copy_area() for the scrolling code.
Went to bed at 07:00 AM last night. Uh, make that this morning. Woke up at 16:00.
Went with Luis Javier to do some CD shopping. Their stupid cashier would not accept my stupid US bank card, so I had to borrow cash. Sigh. It is weird, because one other time I had used the same card in the same store and it was fine.
Later we went to watch Galaxy Quest, a wonderful and extremely funny spoof of the cheeseball that Star Trek is.
Committed some hacking I did last night to the Eye of Gnome. It has the cool new scroll/update/redraw mechanism, which makes for a much more responsive feel. It is still not complete, and has some ugly hacks to make it work, but it will be done soon. There is a pesky memory overwrite somewhere that I haven't found.
Removed the old Tlacuache standalone PCS stuff from Evolution, and fixed the crufty Wombat bits that were related to it. We still need a way to terminate the Wombat server process at the appropriate time. I think I have a clean solution for this.
Went with Luis, Paco, and Michelle to have a good coffee and churros. Later we went to Luis's house; Paco studied for his Medicine exam, Luis finished some graphic design stuff, and I hacked on Evolution. Working among friends is cool; everyone keeps everyone else awake and focused.
Was amazed to see that Photoshop did not open some of the PNG test suite images properly. The GIMP did a slightly better job, but not quite successfully. Gdk-pixbuf does the Right Thing, of course, and as a result Eye of Gnome displays the images properly. Wheeeee.
Released version 0.7.0 of Gdk-pixbuf. It is incredible how much time I spent on this stupid release. Anyways, Tim's wonderful idea for hooking to the last refcount did go in, and it is pretty cool. I hope Darin will be happy with the way it works. The gdk-pixbuf API reference documentation is absolutely complete and pretty. We only lack programmer's documentation now.
I'll have to update the Eye of Gnome for the new gdk-pixbuf. It will be cool.
I tested old compiled applications with the new gdk-pixbuf, and it seems that they should work fine if you don't uninstall the old version of gdk-pixbuf. I hope it really does work, or people will be complaining all over the place. Fingers crossed.
Went to the drugstore to buy a fingernail cutter, as I lost the one I had. I imagined a big factory where they make millions of fingernail cutters every day; it would have conveyor belts where the finished fingernail cutters travel in perfect formation to their destination boxes. I imagined the research department of that factory, where scientists experiment all day long with space-age materials to achieve the ideal fingernail-cutting experience. I imagined the CEO of such an operation to be the archenemy of the CEO of a nail polish factory somewhere else. And then I came to the conclusion that the whole thing is just too weird.
I cut my fingernails as well, in case you were wondering.
Finished merging Havoc's mega-patch for GdkPixbuf. Fixed a bunch of other stuff and updated documentation in preparation for a release. I'm sorry that the API changed so much; people may have to change their sources quite a bit, but fortunately it is an easy job.
Did not put in Tim's idea for adding a hook for when a pixbuf loses its last reference count. This will be for the next version; I don't want to break the API *that* much in a single go. Besides, that will keep people busy. Mwahahaha.
Discovered that we really don't have good error reporting at all in the GdkPixbuf loader APIs. Found out about this when I came to this snippet of code in the progressive loaders that g_error()s out if it cannot allocate memory for the image buffer. Eeeeeeeeeeek! We need to add error reporting so that the application can know if it ran out of memory, or if it got a corrupt file or an incomplete one. This implies more API breakage. Sigh. Serves us right for not putting in error reporting since the beginning.
Went to get tickets for Wednesday's piano recital by Jorge Federico Osorio. But at 250 pesos a pop, it was kind of painful. We decided to skip it; it is ridiculously overpriced.
Helped Luis Javier install MIT-Scheme and the GIMP on his Windows box. It is cool to see the GIMP running there. It is jerky and sometimes downright buggy, but it is nice that it runs.
Lastly, being in a country where there's plenty of tropical fruit is a good thing.
Lots of piano playing. Thick harmonies, Mussorgsky style, do rock my world.
Slept.
Ate.
Slept some more.
Conference phone talk with Bart, Joakim, and Dave. Big plans for the GNOME developer's web site.
Merging action of Havoc's patches to gdk-pixbuf. I'll make a release over the weekend.
Saw Any Given Sunday with Luis Javier, Francoise, Paola, and Fernando. Oliver Stone rules as usual. And the movie's soundtrack is awesome.
Decided that I need a pianist girlfriend.
Did some gdk-pixbuf maintenance. Read lots of mail.
Dinner with Miriam at Cluny. Had an excellent crepe. Talked about life and whose-musical-composer-you-would-have-liked-to-be-a-pupil-of. Strange.
Met with Luis Javier at school, then we went to watch the re-release of The Matrix. It is good to see it in the theater again.
I am very happy to be going to the University to work on my normal Evolution stuff. It is a nice environment, I have many friends there, the network is fast, and it is generally a nice place to work and be around. It is much better than being alone at home, where I get distracted a lot. And now that classes have resumed their normal course at the university, after the ridiculously-long strike, the atmosphere is nice again.
Put some finishing touches on my Usenix paper and sent it off for review.
More calendar hacking. I am being slow these days :-(
I find myself visiting Advogato more and more frequently. Some articles are excellent, some are crap but well-intentioned, and some are so stupid as to be funny. The signal-to-noise ratio is not bad, though, which makes it worthwile.
Went to the University to talk to some friends and Pedro Miramontes, one of the teachers. We had a nice talk. Natorro is doing his thesis on neural networks for image recognition, so he may want to do some of that work for the Eye of Gnome's image classification system. We talked about that for a while.
Practiced some Mussorgsky for a while. I am getting the hang of it, and my fingers seem to be understanding the chords better.
Woke up late. Only noticed the change to daylight savings time when my watch did not match my laptop's clock. This is one of those times when it is good for machines to be smarter than oneself.
Saw Mickey Blue Eyes with Luis Javier, Alexandra, and Carlos. Funny, silly movie.
More Eye of Gnome hacking. Libart could use some of the functions I am writing to manipulate microtile arrays.
Spent a very frustrating hour trying to get any graphical PPP dialer to work on Pepe Chacon's laptop. Failed miserably; the PPP daemon died in all of them. Eventually, the non-graphical wvdial did work. A hand-written script also worked, of course. This made me very sad about the lack of usability in free systems.
Late lunch with Pepe at a small Argentinian restaurant; ate like pigs.
Went with Paco and Gina to the OFUNAM concert. The program was Tchaikovski's 1st piano concerto and his 5th symphony as well.
The piano concerto is impressive and beautiful. The pianist was a lady, dressed very elegantly in a gold and orange dress. Technically, she was incredible (although if you are not technically incredible, you just cannot play *that* concerto), but by the end she looked a bit tired and could have used some better interpretation. In any case, it is a fantastic concerto, and it is *hard*. The flute solo at the beginning of the second movement was completely screwed up, though.
Tchaikovski's 5th symphony was very good overall. The wind section was a bit disorganized, but the rest was not bad at all.
And the Sala Nezahualcóyotl kicks major acoustic ass. It is a really nice concert hall.
Afterwards, we went to Paco's house to have some fondue.
Go backward in time to Mar 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Sun 2001/Jun/17 15:00:04 CDT