According to Joe Jacob has some kind of crush on the girl at the burrito place.
Nick Walker came to the office today. He seems like a very good programmer. The concensus was `Lets get him, and we later figure out what for'. He does not want to do UI coding, but I think he will get used to it.
Jeff came with us to lunch, and we had a chance to discuss broken IMAP protocols. And lamented the state of the standards world.
He is working busily on the new file-sel, there are a few screenshots here and there. We got a feature list for file-sel-1.0 and file-sel-2.0 done.
He is also running into a few problems in ETable, but isn't everyone?
We are doomed! We are doomed! Another reporter with the vision of a profet has predicted that Linux on the desktop does not stand a chance. I wonder what he expects to achieve with those articles (maybe he just wants to be regarded as a `pundit' or a `visionaire').
Which reminds me of a story from Jamie Zawinski: "I always delete mail messages that begin with `I am what most people call a visionaire'". We know what follows that.
GNOME got its own breed of those people in the early days in the GNOME UI mailing lists. Discussion threads would frequently shift towards debates like this: `We have to ask ourselves: what is a file anyways, and more importantly, do 8-bit bytes make any sense? Lets rethink computing'.
Most of the GNOME hackers were actually visionaires and abandoned that mailing list for a full year. When we came back a year later, it seems like a completely different culture had evolved there, a whole different civilization. People are taking UI more seriously these days, specially after reading the stuff from `Joel on Software'.
So today I made my little contribution to make GNOME more usable by humans. The problem is that when normal humans download software on Linux, the software does not get the executable bit set, so there is no way you can launch those programs without changing permissions (which is way annoying for someone who has never dealt with Linux in the past).
So I wrote `gnome-exe-handler' and put it in gnome-utils. This program will handle ELF and a.out files and set the permissions bit on demand. That is CRAZY! I know. I know. No applause, just throw in the money.
My original idea was pretty hacky, but Yakk came up with the idea for the current implementation.
Chema and his hackers got a lot of momentum from the announcement last week of the XST. Now they are working furiously into getting more ports of the XST and bug fixing and pushing a new release out.
Contributions seem to be pouring in, and it seems like we will be working with some developers that want to build a KDE user interface.
Dietmar was right about configuration bits: I think it makes sense to have individual configuration elements of applications as global programs that set values on the global configuration space, and have every application listen to that.
That stuff needs to be a bit maintained. Those games are not even using the latest and greatest widgets. Man, so many things to do.
After the recent announcement of the GNOME Love project on the GNOME weekly news, a flood of people joined the mailing list, and we are trying to help contributors to become full fledged hackers.
Season Finale for that 70's show. SPOILER: Eric and Donna break up. Terrible. I know, I know. The good news is that Jackie and Kelso made it to the end of the season.
Fez is always funny. And Hyde a Zen guide. Oh, and of course Kitty.
I swear I must have pieces of that killer potato on the lungs, because I can not get into shape.
Alex today released for the first time Soup (a SOAP implementation) to the public in tarball format. This is good, as we can start using Soup in a few applications here and there.
The debate over how to correctly assemble OAFIID's is back alive. Owen was porting gmc to use OAF instead of GNORBA and we ran into a debate on irc on unique component ids.
The thread that will not die. At least we were not claiming we were technology pundits.
Told Jacob that I chit-chatted with the girl at the burrito place and told her about `my friend that has a crush on her'. He did not believe me. So I had to take further measures.
Jacob later went with Joe to get some food, and I tagged along. I pretended to call the restaurant and talk to the girl the Berk has a crush on and say `My Friend with the crush on you is on its way and is wearing a hat'.
Jacob got annoyed at me.
Been reading `The Manufacture Of Consent', I guess this is an article version of the interview on `Propaganda, the American Way'. It is a very sad reading. That and my Howard Zinn `On War' are just too sad to be true.
I have introduced a new keyword in my diary system that `hides' entries when I generate the text file, so I can keep a log of my inner thinking for the future. So my conclussions after reading Chomski and Zinn are kept hidden, you will have to get the books, read them and form your opinion ;-)
With Memorial Day coming (and me finally figuring out what it means), I am not sure I am going to watch the Pearl Harbor movie. I keep thinking of the trailers `A day that will live in infamy', and then I think of Zinn and Chomski's text on the two million people assasinated in Vietnam, the victims of Korea, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Irak and Cambodia.
Posted on 22 May 2001