Reign Drops Fall…

The splash screen contest has come and gone. Some (like me) like the splash, and others don’t. I agree with Nat’s comments about the splash being uninteresting to users, but I still like it. Perhaps a list of finalists with a short frame of time to express opinions about the chosen splashes would have been better (suggested by Andrew Johnson today), but we can learn from this and maybe we can do that next time.

I’d like to point out one entry that Jakub liked that I don’t think met the criteria. This entry doesn’t conform to the “No English text” rule. I know, it’s sign language; but the sign language used is American Sign Language. This is a specific language to the American deaf community and is NOT universal. There are many different sign languages around the world with their own alphabet. Some, like British Sign Language are very different from American Sign Language’s alphabet. I know it’s a nitpick, but if we’re going to say that the splash can’t have English text because we don’t want to translate the splash for users that speak another language, then we can’t have a language other than English (ASL) on our splash because we’d have to translate that as well.

I was talking to Thomas Wood and Andrew Johnson on IRC today and found out that Thomas has a spec he has come up with for a GNOME Theme Format. To me, it makes sense: make a standard format, give it an mime-type, add that to the shared-mime-info mime-type definitions and then allow gnome-theme-manager to open them from the command line so you can double click on them in Nautilus (or even come up with a Nautilus context menu entry for them). Check it out and post your ideas on the gnome-themes-list.

For some reason, the last two days have dragged on like no other. It seems like I’ve been at work for 9 hours and it’s only 11:55 AM. And now I get to babysit an FTP script for the rest of the week. What a thrill!!

Coaster
I emailed the libburn list yesterday about the problem with Coaster crashing. Now we wait…

Bounties
I’m glad to see the GNOME bounties are back. I may try my hand at some in order to get some extra money for flowers (for September) and gadgets (for me). If only more programs used gtkmm, this would be way easier…

Home
September and I bought a new TV and a new DVD/VCR combo last night. On the suggestion of the salesperson helping us, I bought component video cables. I really didn’t think there would be much difference between composite and component, but there really is… especially when watching cartoons and anime (I love to watch both). September and I watched Invader Zim and there were no horizontal lines that I’m used to seeing when watching animated DVDs. Moral of the story: use component video whenever possible. You won’t regret it.

Last night I played softball and got a cool oozing rasberry on my lower right leg. It was beautiful, but it hurt like no other. When I got home, my mom (yes, I live with my parents… it’s cheap!), God bless her, helped me get it all professionally wrapped and cleaned up (boy, it hurt getting all the little pieces of gravel out). This got me thinking: mom’s do a heck of a lot for us. Seeing as it’s mother’s day, I thought I’d write a little tribute to my supermom. Not only is she the resident nurse at my house, but she’s our counselor, our cook (except when dad grills out), and our chauffeur (my truck was broken yesterday, so she hauled my butt around). This is just a short list of all the things my mom does for us: basically, I’m saying THANKS MOM!

Music
Since some of the hackers on the planet post what movies they’re watching, I thought I’d start posting the music that I’m listening to this week. I picked up the new Demon Hunter CD. It is definately a great buy. It follows up their first release quite nicely. My brother also told me to listen to Meshuggah which was definately a good suggestion. I should listen to him more often…

Petreley
Ok, since it’s the hot topic, I thought I’d address it: Nicholas Petreley has written a wonderful piece of garbage that one of the editors of ArsTechnica has responded to. It’s a shame that Mr. Petreley needs to resort to ad hominem attacks on GNOME developers to make himself feel important and influential. I think most people that read this article will have my sentiments: they let anybody write anything on the internet.

Coaster
We had a meeting on Sunday night which was very productive. Todd from the Optimystic development team dropped by and we had a great discussion on how we should reuse as much code in Optimystic in Coaster (and vice versa) as possible. I’ve taken a look at his backend code and it looks great! Each project has different goals (in terms of UI), but the backends should generally be the same. From the discussions we (harshy, darkfusion, and I) had with Todd and Derek (ManMower), it looks like everyone is on the same page with the libburn backend. I’m pumped to start getting this stuff moving .

John Fleck
John, although I sometimes don’t agree with you on your global warming stuff (much like some people don’t agree with my views on things), I enjoy seeing what other people in the GNOME community are interested in and are doing. Please, don’t stop posting your blog entries because of one reader of the planet. As you can see from other posters, we don’t mind.

Today is the day. The GNOME Platform Bindings 2.6 release is today. Murray already has the c++ bindings tarballs released and ready to go, and I’m working on ebuilds for breakmygentoo.net.

I’ve been working on Coaster’s GUI pretty heavily lately, and harshy has the new website up. I hope to get a release out of the GUI soon, and hopefully we’ll have a working version sometime in the next few months.

In related news, I’m going to work on libpanelappletmm today and hopefully get a release for the 2.6 series. It should be fun, and I don’t think it should be too hard.

I’m really excited because the upcoming GNOME Platform Bindings release on April 5th April 12th. Murray has all the tarballs ready to go for the release candidate, he’s just waiting on the GNOME servers to get back up to normal after the little fiasco we had last week.

With these releases and the solidification of Bakery on the UIManager API, I will start porting and uploading my changes to Coaster’s arch for the user interface. Murray and I have worked hard over the last few weeks to get Bakery to use the UIManager sanely. I think it’s turned out quite well and I am quite pleased with it. Hopefully we can get a new release out soon after the Gtkmm releases.

Yes, that’s right, Coaster. The GNOME CD burning application that harshy, I, and company (everyone that’s in #coaster on irc.gimp.org) are working on. Development will now resume on it since Gtkmm 2.4 is under API freeze. This next week (while I’m away) I’m going to work on getting Coaster to use bakery 2.4 and bakery_gnomeui 2.0 (both use *mm 2.4/2.6). This is exciting because the guys at breakmygentoo.net are excited about Coaster and can’t wait to see the finished product. Hopefully I’ll have something to put into arch at the end of spring break.

Ok, so I gave in (the wait was killing me) and upgraded to Gnome 2.6 beta 1 using breakmygentoo.net ebuilds and a patch of my own devising (which I have submitted to Matt of bmg) for gtk+-2.3.6 which fixes some issues that will be fixed in 2.3.7 (mostly FileChooser stuff). And except for an < %popup(20040318-quicklounge-wrong.png|192|41|issue)%> with the Quick Lounge applet, it works! Just in case there was any doubt, I really really like it. It’s really polished and looks great. Ok, I need to get to bed. It’s 1:00 AM and I’m starting to doze off at the keyboard…