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Héctor Silva González, the son of Oralia's brother Hugo and his wife Juanita, was born on December 23rd. We went to see him today; it was his first bath outside of the hospital. Such a small baby feels so fragile when you hold him in your arms.
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Oralia made a Mr. Potato Head piñata for her school's end-of-year celebrations. I helped her with the gluing and the folding, and we had quite a bit of fun. It had been too long since I last made a piñata...
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Oh, and here is Oralia having fun with soap bubbles in Veracruz. This is a few weeks ago, on the day after the GULEV conference ended. The wind from the sea was blowing hard enough let you simply hold the soapy ring and have bubbles fly out by themselves.
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Garnacho has been kicking ass with GTK+ patches; first the filters-and-hidden-files bug, and now the drag-icon-for-text bug.
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Yesterday Oralia cooked a fantastic chicken in mustard sauce for lunch. Our cooking over the weekend was of varied success: pathetic fish and chips, but great pasta with sauteed asparagus. The moral of the story is: don't cook if you are starving. You'll rush things and screw them up.
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Here's a cute feature request for people who want to start hacking the GTK+ core: make drag-and-drop of text present a drag icon with the actual text you are dragging.
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Every now and then an ant will come into my office, climb my chair and my clothes and decide to use the bridge of my glasses as a walkway. When that happens, I see a little black blur crawling near the corner of my eye. When I take my glasses off to kill the intruder, I'll invariably leave a big smudge on the lenses.
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After seing Jimbob's work with GtkFileChooserButton, I wonder if the file chooser's own folders combo box in Save mode should be just like his — that would allow us to remove the "Browse for other folders" expander. If the user wants to select a folder that is not in his bookmarks, he can choose the "Other..." item in the drop-down.
We probably need to do some refactoring in the file chooser, so that GtkFileChooserButton can reuse the same code that GtkFileChooserDefault uses to maintain the combo box of folders.
Now that I gave my old laptop to Oralia, she's been using Novell Linux Desktop for her daily work. This includes hacks in Firefox and OpenOffice to use GtkFileChooser rather than their default file selectors. I've been watching her a bit while she tries to open and save files:
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As mentioned in bug #160398, the folders drop-down in Save mode has options that are useless: you don't want the "Filesystem" root there, or read-only volumes. When Oralia first encountered GtkFileChooser for saving a file, she couldn't find the folder she wanted in that drop-down, and had to be told that "Browse for other folders" is what she really needed.
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Adding bookmarks was not obvious at all. This is probably one of those usability things where once you know how to do it you'll never forget, but still, how do we make it easier for uses to discover the bookmarking functionality? A list of recently-used folders would be very useful.
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I've been writing a chapter for the GTK+ documentation on the GTK+ Drawing Model. It's not complete yet, but it's a start. A few months ago people were asking on IRC how to do some egregious hacks to have translucent widgets and such; hopefully this will help them understand why this will likely not work for the widget system itself.
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Ninja skills for folding t-shirts. Look at the video at the bottom of that page.
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Google now has autocompletion. Holy shit, that thing is amazing. Change the last two letters in that URI to select the language.
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It looks like I got elected again to serve on the GNOME Foundation's Board. Thanks to all the people who voted!
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There's a Henry Moore exhibition at the Museo de Arqueología de Xalapa, but they close at 5 PM. We found out, of course, as we arrived at 4:45. Argh, we'll have to return soon.
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Oralia and I had a great weekend; we cooked, rented movies, and relaxed. We rented Anything Else, which thankfully brings Woody Allen back to his old-style scripts; American Splendor, which is unexpectedly great; and Dogville, which is just fantastic. Starting a few months ago we had a stretch of inadvertently renting lousy movies, but these have restored our faith in our video club.
Dogville made us think that, yes, there are people who just deserve a bullet in their heads (but how do you know that you aren't one of those people?). I was reminded of that thought this morning. I went to the bank, which is located in a small shopping mall. It was about 8:00 AM and the parking lot was mostly empty. However, I know that it gets completely full and busy at about 8:30 and so I parked near the exit, which is on the opposite end of the parking lot relative to the bank. So I had to walk across the parking lot. It was basically deserted, so anyone going through would really not have had a reason to drive hysterically, looking for a spot, or waiting for the long exit lines to let through. As I was crossing one of the empty parking rows, a mad taxicab practically screeched to my side, even though he had seen me crossing the row from a distance. I stood in front of his car and gave him a glare. He shouted at me, "JUST CROSS!", and he was starting to accelerate again before I had cleared his path.
All taxicab drivers in this town seem to be like that. I wanted to grab a stone from the ground and throw it at his car, and then remembered about the movie...
On other topics, yesterday I made a kick-ass spaghetti with an interesting sauce; it had tomatoes, habanero peppers, mustard, wine, and artichoke hearts, among other things. In the evening we took a pleasant stroll downtown and saw the yearly flower show. Mostly cacti and poinsettias, all overpriced.
Oh, yes, the last great movie we saw in a theater was The Dreamers. Even though the theater was pretty empty, people were constantly talking, answering cell phones, and being tremendously annoying. That's what happens when a movie with one gram of off-beatness shows around here: people don't understand why it doesn't conform to their narrow view of the world, and rather than just saying "bummer" and walking out of the theater, they prefer to stay and annoy people who really want to watch it.
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I'm putting together a list of my talks and tutorials. It's funny that now I'm in need of Magicpoint, which I happily deleted almost two years ago from my machine, to generate HTML versions of some old talks.
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Some time ago, during the Boston Summit, we discussed how to make Gnome easier to brand for distributions, especially regional distributions which may not have much manpower available. Rodrigo and Carlos pointed out this fantastic list of customizations that Ubuntu does to Debian. Ubuntu is developing tools to automate those changes, and they are going to describe the tools during the meeting in Mataró next week.
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Oralia is taking an ITESM online course about teaching strategies. People who take the course must submit their homework in MS Office formats, which is of course not a problem thanks to OpenOffice. However, they must also use Times New Roman, Arial — the well-known MS fonts; otherwise, they get graded lower. I can understand the intent behind this; the teachers evidently want students not to submit homework with weird/unreadable fonts from a "10,000 fonts for $5" CD-ROM. I wonder if they would understand that this is unfair to people using non-MS platforms. Maybe they would just say, "huh". Fortunately, many sites still carry the msfonts package. Installing the fonts on Oralia's machine was surprisingly easy; just drag them to the fonts:/// window in Nautilus, and things mostly Just Work.
That functionality was not completely obvious, though. For some reason, the fonts window did not refresh when I first dragged TrueType files into it, so I thought that nothing had happened. I had to hit C-r to refresh the window. In addition to the refreshing issue, maybe Fontilus should display some sort of sidebar with a few instructions: "To install fonts, drag TrueType files into this window".
I don't know if this is an artifact of the Novell patches to Gnome 2.6, but I couldn't find an obvious way to actually access fonts:/// without having to type that in Nautilus's location dialog. You can go to the control center, then select the Fonts, then select the tiny "Details..." button, and finally the "Go to font folder" button which is buried in that dialog — which is already three windows deep.
The GNOME User's Guide says that you must go into fonts:/// from Nautilus to install a font. That's pretty bad UI.
Hmmm, www.gnome.org/learn/ doesn't link to the user's guide for Gnome 2.8...
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With GTK+ 2.4.14 just about to come out, I thought I'd mention some of the cool features in it:
- GtkUIManager is *much* faster. The GIMP folks did some profiling, and managed to discover flaws in both GtkUIManager and the GObject signal system.
- The file chooser is much faster when loading folders. To get the full speedup, get a new libgnomeui as well.
- The "Browse for other folders" expander in the file chooser is now in the right place.
- You can now drag folders from the path bar to the bookmarks bar.
- Select-a-folder mode is easier to use.
- Keyboard navigation in the file list is better, as the stupid thing now highlights the correct row when you go to a child or parent folder.