Go forward in time to Aug 2000.
Richard is leaving tomorrow, so we took him for dinner and bought him a cake. We had fun decorating the cake with that toothpaste-like red frosting thing.
Went to the supermarket, finally. There's food at home again.
So my birthday was yesterday. I'm 24 now. Yay!
Yesterday I went book shopping in the afternoon. In the evening I went with Miguel, Emanuelle, Angélica, Andrea, Silke, and some other people to Sophia's. Good dancing action. Then we went to IHOP after they kicked everyone out of the place.
And the streets are full of people at that time. I still fail to understand why restaurants are closed.
Went to see The Five Senses tonight. Very pretty movie. It put me in a good mood.
Woke up pretty damn late. Sigh. Went to grab some food at the mall. Stopped by Filene's and got a kick-ass black silk shirt and a blazer coat thingy. I am a man in style.
Went with the monkeys to watch What Lies Beyond. Surprisingly good, and some of the photography is pretty damn good.
Went to the Lucky Cave after the movie, found that Mark Crichton had arrived there. We chilled there for a while. When we wanted to go for dinner at Audubon, theya gave us the boot treatment because they stop serving food at 11:00 PM. What a sucky silly stupid policy. So we went to Deli Haus, which was a, uh, Deli Haus-quality experience.
The food situation in the U.S. is pretty sad.
Interestingly enough, on our way back from Deli Haus a drunken girl stumbled by, pointed at me and babbled something about my shirt being nice. Cool.
Overslept, so I missed breakfast with Jacob and Miguel. What a shame.
Did a bit of EOG hacking before taking a shower; fixed a not-quite-off-by-one error in the "Zoom to Fit" calculations that were due to not using rounding when computing the sizes.
Decided that the GtkScrolledWindow API is completely useless. More exactly, the GTK+ scrolling interfaces are Wrong(tm). I think I know what the right model is; it is similar to Java's. I will have to experiment with this, since the current state of GtkScrolledWindow prevents me from implementing some niceties in EOG and it also leads to hysteresis when using the zoom-to-fit functionality.
Showered. Went to the office, there was a slow drizzle, even lighter than yesterday's rain. Stopped at the Kendall House of Pizza for a quick lunch, and found that Miguel, Jacob, and Peter were there. Had lunch and a nice talk.
Lots of mail reading action. There seems to be an inordinately big number of flamewars going on at the same time these days.
Another cool 5-minute hack to EOG: now the zoom center point is anchored to the mouse position. This makes wheel-zooming much nicer.
More furious hacking. I think I now support all the iCalendar component properties that are interesting for single-user calendars.
Mid-afternoon expedition to the comics shop and coffee. Everyone got their fix, and I was no exception.
It has been raining all day. A slow drizzle all day long, the kind which is not really uncomfortable but slowly and steadily makes you soaking wet.
Furious hacking in preparation for M3.
Got a pretty nice bookshelf for my bedroom. Now I can avoid having all my books making a mess on my desk. It looks pretty and organized. Yay! Some CD shopping action also took place.
Everyon is back from OLS. Seems everyone had a great time, and that makes me happy. I would be even happier if I had attended, of course.
So people have nothing better to do than waste everyone's time. Executive summary: someone who is trying to save humanity from the eeeeeeeeevil gnome-libs took the GnomeCanvas, did a half-assed sed job to replace "gnome" with "gtk", and is now distributing a gtk-canvas tarball with just the canvas, libart, and the canvas tests in it.
This is a waste of time for several reasons:
So I do not understand why people think the solution for not using gnome-libs is to take everything out of gnome-libs and put it somewhere else, and then use that stuff all over again. Like, duh! They are wasting everyone's time and pissing off the original authors of the code. That would be me and Raph.
On the other hand, it fills me with morbid pleasure to see people fighting so much over the GNOME Canvas; that means it is cool and people want it. So be it. Let them use gnome-libs and the world will be a better place.
Dinner at Legal Sea Foods with Chris and Richard. The food was excellent as always, but service was surprisingly bad today. I guess you can't always win.
I am mesmerized by Federico Ibarra's sonata for solo violin. Sometimes I wish I could play the violin. Maybe some day. I wonder how your brain has to partition itself to accomodate playing two musical instruments proficiently.
I am the proud owner of a gnu.org mail address now.
So last night Tami and Tom from the FSF took Richard Hestilow and myself for a very nice kind of tour through the MIT LCS building. Pretty interesting stuff all over the place. We went home at dawn.
Woke up *way* too late. Waking up around dusk makes your day very short.
More progress on the Mudela stuff: correct stem directions, correct beaming, accent marks, and added a couple of bars. Source: .ly; output: .ps.
I'm still not completely satisfied with the output. Assume the anacrusis is bar 0. In bar 1, the fourth chord (i.e. upper voice) is too close to the third chord (i.e. lower voice); also, the sharp signs of the last chord are too close to the chord before it. In bar 6, the same thing happens between the dots of the first chord and the sharp signs of the second one; also, the natural and sharp signs of the last chord in the beamed group almost overlap with each other and look ugly: my Dover edition puts the natural sign to the left of both sharp signs. Finally, Lilypond seems to align the tenuto marks vertically over the beamed group, and so they end up too close to the slightly sloped beam. The Dover edition puts them at different levels.
I think I'm getting the hang of Mudela. It is kind of neat, and I really like that you have to think about the the music in terms of voices and other logical structures; it makes you make sense of it and understand it better. It is like reading source code. When reading music for the first time I tend to gloss over lots of little invisible details that actually are in the score. Looking at the printed music in detail makes you actually understand the structure of the composition, just like when you look at the big picture and then the details of the source for a program.
But the thing is, writing Mudela is still a pain in the ass even after you get the hang of it. You have to do the endless typeset/view/tweak cycle, and it gets tedious. Just like TeX.
Nice dinner at the Middle East restaurant with Richard, Ian, Chris, and Joe. If only service were better at that place.
Was woken up way too fucking early by the landlord and his minions banging on the apartment upstairs, which is getting renovated. I wonder how banging and pounding all day long can help to renovate an apartment.
Tried to ignore the banging and sleep some more, but then Urquijo rang the doorbell to remind me that we were going to have breakfast with Richard Stallman. So I showered and we went to the FSF.
Spent some time talking to the people that were at the FSF, and installed Helix GNOME on one of the machines there. Went for lunch with RMS, Tami, Tom, and Urquijo.
Went with Urquijo to do some book shopping. Got two books, book number one and book number two. My queue of books to read is not getting any shorter. My desk at home is getting completely invaded by books. I need a bookcase.
Back to Harvard Square for dinner with the aforementioned primates. Cafe Algiers after that.
Tried transcribing some Rachmaninov to Mudela format. It is a royal pain in the butt. Lovely big fat chords: .ly, .ps.
Joakim is a funny guy.
Francisco de Urquijo arrived tonight. Talked a bit to him before going to sleep; he's staying next door at the barracks.
Busy busy busy. Tired tired tired.
Got a cool little toy. Jacob got the same one. Jacob is a Sony fanboy, and I'm afraid he is turning me into one. This is becoming an arms race of my-latest-gadget-is-cooler-than-yours.
Nice lunch at a cafe in Charles street. It was a nice lunch for several reasons. First, it was a random singleton place, not a stupid evil chain. This makes it likely to have food that does not taste like it was put together in an assembly line. And so it was; the clam chowder was actually pretty good and chunky and it did not taste like it came from a tin, and the tuna salad and melted cheese sandwich had real tomatoes, real cheese, and tasted like something you would make at home. Goody goody. It put me in a good mood.
Nice walk down to the office. The park is really nice during the summer; it is a shame that winter sucks so much in Boston. I need to visit the Steinway piano store near the park some time. I should explore more of Beacon Hill, since there seem to be some interesting shops over there.
Jonathan fixed some bugs in the GIF loader for gdk-pixbuf. Hopefully we'll be able to put out a release soon. The image loaders need plenty of loving, still. If you would like to contribute, please contact me.
My upper right molars started hurting last night when I went to bed. Pain pain pain. Then it stopped, just like that. I hope this does not mean I need to go to the dentist.
OK, I know I do need to go to the dentist, because I have some pending stuff to be done to my mouth. But I hoped for it to be just maintenance instead of contingency measures. I hope it doesn't turn into a must-go-now-or-die-in-pain situation.
I'm not at OLS. Suck.
Lunch at the mall with Michael, Richard, Arik, and Jeff. Mall food sucks. People like it because it is close by and cheap. I still think it sucks.
Stupidly hot and humid day today.
Tried to buy a couple of prints by Remedios Varo, one of my favorite artists, but the idiots will only ship to the billing address of the credit card. That, of course, happens not to be where I live right now. Sigh. I will have to call them tomorrow or something.
82 lines of code to read a TRIGGER property from a calendar alarm. I just *heart* iCalendar.
Finally got off my butt and integrated the gtk-doc framework into Evolution. This is neat. We now have a <book> for the Evolution Developer's Guide, with <parts> for each of the Evolution components and then a big <part> for all the <reference> sections of the API reference docs. Hopefully the rest of the Evolution hackers will populate it as appropriate. I really want to have as good developer's documentation as Outlook's.
Michael Meeks arrived today. Wheee!
But people here have no taste. Instead of going for a nice dinner we went to CBC's yet again. Had a semi-good steak. I wanted Legal's, though.
People watched Star Trek II at the office; I just fell asleep. Wrath of Khan is actually pretty good if you clip away everything that is not Ricardo Montalbán, but other than that, it is the same Star Trek cheesiness as always.
Went home, made use of my kick-ass new blue bed sheets. They are really blue. They make a nice combination with my really green sheets.
Woke up before my alarm clock went off. This made me happy; during the two seconds before getting up from bed I though it must be so early that I would be able to do so much stuff during the day.
Discovered that my alarm clock had not been set to trigger at all. So it was 2:00 PM yet again, and I would have to hurry up to see Ettore before he had to go to the airport. This did not make me happy.
Quickly practiced the Khachaturian toccata, kicked ass, then took a shower.
Missed Ettore by about half an hour. It's a shame that I didn't get a chance to say good-bye. Anyways, he'll be here again in a few weeks.
So the Tuning book is a wonderful read. It is well-written, it is funny, and it is incredibly interesting.
Went to Fire & Ice to celebrate Ettore's last day here before he goes back to Milan. The waiting line was an hour long, so we went CD shopping while we waited. Got 3 *good* CDs.
In the restaurant the waitress managed to piss me off. I had left my passport at the office and she said that neither my driver's nor my voter's license from Mexico were good IDs, so I could not have a beer with Ettore. Which is completely ridiculous, since the last times we have gone there those IDs have worked fine. And then she pissed me off again because they did not have lemonade and they brought me some lemon frozen frappe thingy instead.
Afterwards we joined Nat and Emanuelle at Cafe Algiers. Lots of talking. Jacob's headphones flew around as everyone listened to bits of Miguel's new CD.
Then Nat drove us back to the office. He has special music programmed for those high G-force moments. Nat is a man with a plan.
Ettore's laptop overheated or something and his PCMCIA network card stopped working. Brief moments of intense panic. It cooled down in a while and then it started working again. Panic levels back to normal, cursing levels up from normal.
Called home, had a nice and long conversation with my brother. He's going camping to Veracruz with some friends by the end of the month, which made me envious. Then I called Alexandra; talking to her made me very happy.
Went with Richard, Ettore, and Miguel to buy some books. Got two pretty cool books for myself.
Not having to press shift with the scroll wheel to zoom in EOG actually feels better, so I left that as the default. Scroll wheels are for 1D data and images are 2D, so it doesn't make sense to scroll an image with the scroll wheel.
Found a double free() in gconfd. Told Havoc about it on IRC, and his proposed fix was the same as mine. EOG runs again. Wheeee!
More iCalendar hacking action. Wombat is almost completely iCalendarified. It's a shame that I cannot commit it right now because then the GUI part will break. It has to be committed all at once.
Made shift plus mouse whell control zooming in EOG. I'm thinking that this should be the default (i.e. without having to press shift) instead of scrolling. Mouse whell scrolling makes sense for 1D data, but images are 2D.
Got rid of the stupid evil uncomfortable obtrusive braindead keyboard drawer under my desk. Now my legs can move. There is peace in the world.
The wenus quantification starts. By 23:00, ewenus is at around 80.
Plenty of cursing as Evolution on CVS has to be shielded from gnome-print on CVS. After some configure.in hacking, it is safe again.
Dinner with Richard and Ettore at Mary Chung's. Had some good noodles with pickled pork. Afterwards, the coffee shop we wanted to go to was closed. Bummer. Why the hell do things close early in this city?
All porcupines like pickled walnuts. A respectable porcupine always carries around a collapsible umbrella.
On the way back to the sweatshop, we found a hurt dragonfly on the sidewalk. I picked it up and put it safely on a tree. I guess I am in a good mood.
So Evolution 0.2 came out yesterday. Wheeeeee!
Sort of celebration today at the Cambridge Brew Company. Nice dinner, good beer.
Miguel is back from London.
Quote of the day: <clahey>What did you say? The Charles river was uuencoded?
Slept like a rock last night. That was good.
Lots of release work. Make dist is a pain.
Dinner at the John Harvard thingy in Harvard Square. Had a good burger. Walked home afterwards; Cambridge and Boston are definitely nice in the summer when you can actually be in the street without fear of cryogenic death.
Arik's procrastination abilities for writing 30 lines of code are amazing.
Woke up way too late. Played the piano for quite a while, showered, went to the office.
Watched Dazed and Confused on the conference room projector. Pretty hilarious movie, and the soundtrack is awesome.
Wrote an appendix for the gdk-pixbuf documentation that describes how to port applications from Imlib to gdk-pixbuf. This should be called "Read this to save your soul". I could hand it out at subway stations and stuff.
Discovered that the canvas does not do any dithering when in antialiased mode. I will have to spank Raph with a curried trout.
Headphone fetish kicks in again. Bought a pair of folding headphones for the street, identical to the ones Chris got a few weeks ago. Sony must love me or something.
Late breakfast/early lunch with Richard at Sammy's Deli. Had a reasonable sandwich.
More calendar component property hacking. The iCalendar RFC is a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
Wrote code to make EOG pick the window sizes and zoom factors automatically based on the image size. This does not work perfectly yet, basically because geometry management in a GtkScrolledWindow is a major pain in the ass. Owen suggested using the window geometry hints, which looks like a reasonable idea. Will have to investigate more, as this would be much cleaner than the current hack borrowed from the GIMP's code.
Went with the rest of the hackers to see Scary Movie. Very funny if you are in a very silly mood.
Afterwards, went with Nat and Taylor to Sonsie's for a drink. Then we got hungry and went to Audubon for a good dinner. Then we went to the Lava Bar for some dancing action. Pretty cool place. We should go there again, and I should take Ettore this time.
After dancing we went to the Cave for a little while. Picked up the stuff that was on my old desk as Nat had taken it home. Was happy to recover my pretty walkman and some CDs I had left there.
Woke up late. Practiced the piano for about an hour before taking a shower and going to the office. This Polonaise thing gets addictive; I practiced the beginning of the F# minor, had a lot of fun with the fingering. This is a long and hard Polonaise, but since it is my favorite, it would be worthwile to spend some time on it.
Read some mail, did some catching up with the status of Evolution, read iCalendar-related RFCs. Mailed the ietf-calendar mailing list to ask about yet another badly-explained section of the spec.
Went with Ettore and Arik to the comic store in Harvard Square. Got some stuff. Then we went to the Tower Records next door. Got some more stuff. It's dangerous to go to those places.
Back to the office for a little while, did some more reading.
Very nice dinner with Ettore, Miguel, Chris, Richard, and Jeff at Fire & Ice. Ate like pigs, like, big time.
Titrax is cool. My own personal Big Brother. I'll see what I spend my life's time on. Maybe I pick my nose too much and that's why I never have time to do anything else.
Yay! Woke up a bit before 9:30. Go me.
Late-ish breakfast with Ettore and Miguel at a coffee shop/bookstore on Newbury street. Then, a little CD shopping action at Tower Records. Did not find the Khachaturian CD I was looking for.
Went with Arik to take his sister to the airport. It's a shame that she missed the fireworks.
Afterwards, many Helix Code hackers went to the river esplanade and then to the bridge to see the crowds and watch the fireworks show in the evening. It kicked ass! Very nice show indeed. Pyrotechnics are rather sophisticated these days, and they are always cool to watch.
For the first time Boston looks alive to me.
Then we went for ice cream, walked back to the cave, and then Ettore, Arik, and I went back to our house. The T was free that night, which was a nice touch.
Set my alarm clock for 9:00 AM. Woke up at 12:30. Sigh. Showered, went for lunch, went to the office.
More calendar component property hacking. Slow day at the office.
Grip refuses to work on my desktop box. Cdparanoia always hangs when ripping the last part of a track. It does work perfectly on my laptop, which is both good and a shame, since my laptop is much slower than the desktop box.
Did what in most standards-abiding countries amounts to a metric buttload of laundry. For the benefit of people in the U.S., who undoubtedly use something weird and illogical such as an imperial shitload, and without having to go into an accurate computation, I'll just say that this is a lot of laundry.
Put a bit of order in my room; the floor is no longer covered with clothes and suitcases. It is nice not to have to look where you step.
So the elections in Mexico are over. A religious, conservative, right-wing party won the presidency; that scares me a bit. Fortunately it is not the PRI which has been in power for 70 years. This should be a good change, if anything. Mexico City remains with the leftist PRD party, and that should be good, since they have done a reasonably decent job.
So it seems Acdsee and Compupic on Windows can both load the humongous test image of death. Apart from EOG, they are the only image viewers I know of that can view that image in a useful manner. EOG is still faster than any of them when zooming :-)
So it seems we have the best image viewing engine out there. As soon as Arik finishes the preferences stuff, we'll make a release. Kick ass.
Lunch at the mall. Bad food. Ate a little.
Several hackers at the office. More properties implemented. Hacked a little.
Le Corbusier is a passionate, rambling genius. Read a little.
Metapixel is Cool(tm).
Just for kicks, tried to see if I could play Chopin's Polonaise in F# minor, my favorite. It is pretty hard. It will have to wait. I should play an easier Polonaise first.
Woke up late-ish. Wished I had woken up later, since I still was fairly sleepy. On the way to a lunch place I ran into Quantum Books and did some book shopping action: computer graphics, computational geometry, and typography.
Met the rest of the hackers at the office; went with Jeff, Chris, Arik, and his sister for lunch in Harvard Square. Went to the Greenhouse place, which was not very good. Then we went to the Coop, and did more book shopping action: architecture, music, mathematics.
Harvard Square is actually pretty nice during the summer. Winter makes the whole of Boston/Cambridge very depressing.
More fields added to CalComponent.
Dinner at the Ginza in Chinatown.
“... the beauty of patina and to that curious quality of "rightness" of things that have merely "happened"...”
Go backward in time to Jun 2000.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:22:55 CDT