December 2003

In Nuremberg.

I am very excited to have Robert Love on board at Ximian, as we can finally tackle all of the hardware/system/desktop integration issues like plug-n-play and operating system events. Also, Robert’s an awesome guy with a best-selling book on Amazon.

Thursday I am going on vacation, for the first time in two years. Spending a few days in Buenos Aires (Miguel tells me I should write it “BsAs”), new year’s eve in Rio de Janeiro, and maybe hitting a few other places. My first trip to South America.

I loved Ettore so dearly, and he was one of few people whose respect I strove to deserve.

Please take care of yourselves and your friends. I can’t write another eulogy.

Christian Hammond’s Evolution/IM addressbook integration patches appear to be coming along nicely. And Sean Egan has been showing off rich text cut-n-paste between Gaim and Evolution.

Meilof Veeningen appears to have a nearly working patch to add NNTP support to Evolution.

I really wish someone would implement a whiteboard-like shared buffer mode for emacs. Too bad TANGO seems to have disappeared.

Interesting web sites in the Gnome world:

• Gnome support resources
• Gnome Bangalore chapter
• Gnome Chile
• Gnome Deutschland
• Gnome roadmap
• GUADEC 2004
• Planet GNOME

I hope to see the project’s web presence improve a lot in the next few months.

Also, I just want to point out: Edward Tufte’s web page sucks.

A fascinating observation from Linus on US Copyright law.

Miguel and I gave four talks at Linux Bangalore 2003. The most fun was the Rapid Application Development talk, in which we used Glade and Mono to build a little web service, live on stage. I wrote the client and Miguel wrote the server. The server provided a method which took screenshots of Miguel’s display, and the client displayed them and allowed you to scale them. We called it "MiggySpy."

Programming in front of an audience is fun. I always thought it would be cool if there were some kind of hack-o-lympics, with scoring and live coverage and everything. The commentators would be like:

“Alan Cox has been driving a hard game, and Dave Miller is fighting to keep up. Here comes the triple pointer dereference, let’s see if he remembers to cast… and he does! Perfect execution by Mr. Cox! Miller’s really in trouble now.”

Et cetera et cetera.

Miguel and I flew separate routes out of Bangalore (him through Dubai, me through Bombay), but we both ended up with an evening to spare in Frankfurt.

I’m in Nuremberg now, doing a little bit of Dashboard hacking, hoping to get a release out sooner or later.

Major milestone: Evolution 1.5.0 was released today. There has been a nice discussion on the evolution-hackers mailing list about using vertical panes for mail and contacts.

Sun’s recent announcements have been awe-inspiring. This is one of the interesting things about open source: a win for our shared platform is a win for all of us. It will take multiple vendors pushing hard on the Linux desktop to get the ISV snowball effect we need to enter the tornado.

Been thinking about UI and information presentation lately. This paper is good. Larry Lessig’s presentation style is something to be studied.

In India for the last three days.

In the office.

Two of them at Linux Bangalore, an absolutely amazing conference.

Hacker friends in Bangalore.

My bounty idea seems to be catching on. Sadly, this doesn’t mean I get to go into space.

The activity on the evolution-hackers mailing list has been awesome lately.