Back from Hawaii

My excuse for being there for almost a week was the ECMA meeting for the CLI and C#. As Brad pointed out, there are now two public mailing lists for providing feedback and discussing the ongoing work of the ECMA CLI and C# standard efforts, you can subscribe to them by going here for C# and here for CLI

During the meeting there was a set of "interesting" proposals to the C# language, and I have come up with my own, watch this space for them.

After the ECMA meetings were over during the day, I would run to the beach and do some all-amateur snorkeling action: the hotel where we stayed at was packed with multi-colored fish and large turtles that would swim next to you, minding their own business.

Build Buddy released

At Ximian we developed a tool to build, package, sign, qa and distribute the Gnome desktop, which we refered to as "Build Buddy". This week it was released as GPL software.

Build buddy uses an XML-based configuration file similar to the RPM spec file to describe how to build a package and apply optional configuration options and patches depending on the target operating system. It can work on a cluster of computers and can also run various builds for different operating system on the same machine by using chroot-ed environments (we call those "jails").

We will be moving our XML build files to the public CVS this week.

Brilliant mockups

Nat pointed me to the Scoop proposal. We have been talking about implementing this kind of functionality to solve the issue with the IM client in Gnome poping up all the time, and handling other notifications that the system has for quite some time. The mockups in that site are a great starting place.

Movie of the Night

Went with Duncan and Robert to see Fog of War featuring Robert McNamara. A media rich movie, surely inspired by his book on the Vietnam mistake. Gorgeous music by Philip Glass. Obligatory watching required.

Message to Nat

Dude, if you read this, please return our salami and cheese. We checked your fridge while you were out, and you have to dispose those tomatoes you got six weeks ago, they are starting to smell.

I love the Internet

Sometimes I get advise from random people on writing code.