I’m in Boston again. Been here since Sunday. Things have been going fairly well I suppose. It seems I am starting to get my arms around red carpet now, as I was able to fix a few things today.

A lot of other remote guys are in town too, so that’s cool. I finally got to meet Tambet and Aidan.

I fixed a small bug in nautilus yesterday. I miss hacking on it. I guess there are big plans for 2.6, though, so maybe I can get in on that if I have time. It’s really great to see medusa getting some love. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I hear Curtis Hovey has been doing great things.

I’ve totally neglected dashboard this week. I have a little patch sitting on my machine at home that fixes up the epiphany frontend and turns it into a plugin. Hopefully it won’t be too out of date when I get back next week…..

I bought “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut and read it on the trip to Boston. I was only expecting to get maybe half-way done with it, but it turns out I was able to read the whole thing due to my flight(s) taking so long. In Indianapolis, we sat on the tarmac for like 45 minutes waiting for a new flight plan (apparently there was some bad weather in the original route), so I was like an hour late to JFK. At JFK, we had to wait for a flight plan again. Then, they found out they lost the captain’s luggage so we had to wait on that. When we finally got out of the terminal, we were like 46th in line for takeoff, so we slowly taxiied around for a while. During the taxi, the cabin filled with smoke due to some trivial air-conditioning snafu. Everyone freaked out and we went back to the tarmac. Two hours later, or so, we were finally in the air.

Anyway, “Cat’s Cradle” was really good. I think I’m going to get another Vonnegut to read on the way back. Anyone have a suggestion?

I had a pretty nice week in Boston, generally. All the Ximian guys/gals were cool (except Ian :) ). I even managed to get some actual work done. So, things were going well up until Friday. That’s when I missed my plane, because I thought it was leaving on Saturday. Ugh. I called the travel agency, and managed to get another flight out at 6:00 AM. I ended up getting to Indy around 11 or so. Then, I discover that my car’s battery is dead. Nice. Eventually, I get a jump from the parking lot dudes, and I’m on my way. Pretty tired by the time I get home, having not slept for about 30 hours. Slept the rest of the day. Have to deal with the car today, and find out what ran the battery down. I pulled a fuse to what I thought was the culprit yesterday (there is a penny in the cigarette lighter — seems a likely cause), so we’ll see how it goes.

I’m leaving tomorrow for my first trip to Boston. I’m pretty psyched about it.

Worked a bit on epiphany/dashboard today. Updated the frontend patch to work with the new API, and also built an RPM (http://www.snorp.net/files/packages/epiphany-0.7.3-2.i386.rpm). It requires mozilla from xd2 (sorry, it’s what I have).

It sounds like the dashboard demo at the o’reilly conference went pretty well. I suppose it will be getting even more attention now. Good stuff.

I’m back home now. Had a great weekend at the lake, as usual. Went sailing on the catamaran, watched fireworks, ate, etc.

Some friends of the people I was visiting are moving, and they had an old desk they were trying to get rid of. Amazingly, I found a way to transport it back down to Bloomington, so now I have a desk. Sweet.

Looks like Nat (and his trusty sidekicks) made a bunch of progress on Dashboard over the weekend. I wonder if that guy sleeps. It appears my ephy patch to make it send cluepackets is outdated now, and needs some more work. I should find time to fix it.

Tomorrow will end my first week as a Ximian employee. So far, I’m feeling pretty useless, having done exactly one productive thing the whole week. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of things eventually, but, you know, I’m impatient.

4th of July is on Friday. My family sort of has standing plans with some friends of ours who live on a lake. So, the girlfriend and I are heading up there tomorrow night. It’s always a great time, and I’m looking forward to it again this year.

Talked with a guy over email about the recent-files spec (he wondered why I was using XML), and then today with Federico on IRC (OO.o stuff). It has been a long time since I touched that code. I need to get it in shape so I don’t miss yet another opportunity to get it in the platform (2.6). Actually, by then maybe I’ll be able to redo it as a set of D-Bus messages instead of specifying the storage mechanism. Seems like it would be far better.

Everyone and their dog is hacking on dashboard. It sounds pretty freaking cool.

I moved into my new apartment yesterday. It was a fairly painless experience all in all. I don’t have any furniture yet (it’s coming this weekend), so that kind of sucks. Sleeping on the floor last night especially sucked.

Today was officially my first day working for Ximian. It went pretty well I think. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get up to speed quickly and start making useful contributions soon. I was able to get a mostly working development version of RCE on my machine today, which was about the only semi-productive thing I did. It’s clear I have a lot to learn, but I’m looking forward to it. Also, my first trip to Boston was arranged today. I’m really looking forward to that too. It’ll be totally cool meeting all the [ex-]gnomies and hopefully getting a good handle on my job.

I have snorp.net now. Hooray. Other than having snorp@snorp.net and this blog, I’m not sure why I really want my own domain. I guess I’ll use the webspace for posting screenshots and stuff, like I did with the IU webspace. Of course, I haven’t updated my blog on Advogato forever so I’ll probably end up ignoring this one too.

So, what’s been happening? I graduated in May. I’m pretty happy about that. I even found a job (!). I was able to land a 10 week contract job the week after I graduated. After I accepted it, though, another job fell in my lap. And not just any job, one at Ximian! I accepted it just when I was planning on leaving for California (the location of the contract job). Luckily, the guy who hired me for the contract was really cool about it (he had told me before that if I found a permanent job, he would have no problem with me bailing). I start at Ximian in a week or so, working on Red Carpet. Red Carpet is very cool, and I’m sure I’ll love working on it. WOO!!

In other news, I have been working on some code which lets users migrate windows to other screens or displays. So, for instance, if you have an app running on another machine you could simply pull it to your current display. A simpler usage might be to move a window between two screens on a non-xinerama multihead machine. I think it’s pretty cool. Nobody has said anything on xdg-list or wm-spec-list when I’ve posted about it, though, so maybe it’s not that cool? Anyway. I need to talk to Owen about it. Maybe he’ll let me put it in gtk+.

I finished the file monitoring system for the school project. It works ok for polling, but the dnotify backend is pretty buggy. If I can find some time to work on it, I think it may be ready in the GNOME 2.6 time frame.

Haven’t done much GNOME hacking generally, which pretty much sucks. I have been totally useless in the 2.4 cycle. I did fix a couple nautilus bugs (Yes Dave, 2 bugs!), so that’s good I guess. Still plenty of bug-fixing time to go, so maybe I’ll get my ass in gear one of these days.

To get hold of me you can find me on IRC, I use the nick awafaa or FunkyPenguin on the following networks: Freenode OFTC EFNet GNOME You can get hold of me on the social networks linked in the sidebar. Even better would be to find me in person at an event, we can chat over a beverage then ;-)

Andrew Wafaa A.K.A. FunkyPenguin Me I’m a Software Director in the Open Source Engineering group at Arm Ltd.. An appointed member of the openSUSE Board acting as Treasurer, and contributor to the project. This site This site is powered by Hugo, a Go based static site generator. The theme is an unmodified Blackburn by Yoshiharu Yamashita. Disclaimer The views and content on this site are expressly those of my own and DO NOT necessarily represent those of my employer.

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