A sucker for the fisheye, I.

I’ve moved over to using F-Spot fulltime. It is by far the best photo management tool I’ve used on Linux, and it’s only just begun. Once it has an image publication feature, there won’t be any going back.

A Charlottesville institution (great photo by Peach).

Can your employer do this?

Virginia wine cellar.

Off to India.

Papa pours the poire.

The algorithm they use is here. This would be a great feature for F-Spot.

There was also some discussion today of a web backend for F-Spot so you could use it to browse people’s online albums.

One thing that didn’t end up in the bounties but that I think would be neat is an RSS backend for the calendar, so that you can see blog entries on a timeline in your calendar.

Today we made an excursion to B&H for some new camera equipment to better capture the intensity and energy of this conference.

Discussing libtool in the taxi.

Toward the end, I think the stress was getting to us.

At dinner with the Evolution hackers.

Also, today the GNOME Foundation launched the Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt.

Currently there are 118 people registered for the Brooklyn GNOME Summit. If you plan on coming, you should add a note to the Wiki. If you’re not planning on coming, you should reconsider!

Our office has been overrun with adorable monkey antics lately.

There was a brief bout of dashboard-related activity today. Maybe it’ll pick up again.

Also, I am very excited to see the evolution-sharp module from Mike Kestner in CVS now. Having good C# bindings for the Evolution addressbook and calendar is going to make accessing that backend data much easier. It would have been a big help this summer on the dashboard work.

Overall I think there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming in Evolution 2.0. Here’s a very non-exhaustive list:

• Split of Evolution’s backends into the evolution-data-server module.
• Much simpler APIs for getting at the user’s personal data, for the addressbook (C, C#) and calendar.
• Full HIG compliance.
• Split of the various components (mailer, addressbook, calendar) such that they can eventually be run as separate apps, and not only in an Outlook-like shell.
• S/MIME support
• Support for viewing calendars stored on the web.

And, hopefully, substantially more integration with the rest of the desktop.

Stay tuned for more news on that later this week…

For those of you not in Ximian who don’t know, Chema started and ran our Mexico City office, led the Ximian Setup Tools team a few years ago, was in charge of the team that managed our contract with HP, led the Ximian Desktop for a while, was one of the creators of GNOME Love, and was recently our lead sales engineer for Europe.

Chema was one of the most loving, passionate people I have known. Being around Chema always made you want to do more and try harder. He was always questioning himself, trying to grow, taking on new challenges and never backing down.

When I went to visit our office in Mexico I stayed at Chema’s house and gripped the door handle on his car till my nuckles turned white when he drove us to work. Whenever he wasn’t on sales trips or skydiving he seemed to be in my office asking good hard questions and always pushing for us to do more.

Chema was easy to love, and he will be easy to miss.

In Utah again today. The first slopes opened yesterday, so I’m considering whether or not it makes any sense for me to go back to Boston this weekend.

I’ve been working on a fun little desktop hacking contest that we will launch this weekend. Stay tuned.

We now have a wiki for the Brooklyn GNOME Summit to take place later this week. If you’re planning on being there, add yourself to the attendee list!

Also, the Times of India wrote an article about us today.

Federico’s recent file-chooser work is exciting. I guess the screenshots will be more impressive when he puts the right icon next to the "bookmark" quicklinks in the left-hand sidebar.