We've now lived here for one week, and it's slowly starting to look like home. We've unpacked half of the boxes and assembled most of our furniture. We even have some curtains, although not quite enough. And we've painted one wall; the rest are still all white, we are going to paint three more walls at some point.
The new place is farther from city centre than the previous apartment, but I've discovered it's not quite as bad as I thought it would be. With luck and good timing, you can make downtown in less than half an hour. The commute time varies a lot: I've made it in something like 35 minutes, but it's also taken an hour once.
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Reading Planet GNOME recently, I'm reminded of something a co-worker said while we were in Prague: It didn't take more than the invention of the digital camera to turn this bunch of engineers into Japanese tourists.
I was one of the people who was snapping pictures all the time.
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Went to Prague last weekend on a company trip. Fabulous city, cheap and decent beer. Culinary side of things wasn't that impressive, although it was better than Lisbon where we were last year. Main point of excitement on the trip was four people of our group getting their luggage stolen two hours or so after our plane landed, when they left them in our minibus and the driver wasn't guarding it.
We went to see Faust in a black light theatre. It's apparently a local speciality. As a co-worker put it, it was slightly worse than a piece of shit. We were all in agreement. Never, never again.
Also went to see the Czech - Germany world cup hockey match, which wasn't anything to write home about (not that it prevents me from blogging about it.) The result was clear from the start, even though the Czech team played a lazy game. They did win 8-2 or something like that, going on pure routine. It was the second time in my life I've been to a hockey game, and the commercialism was something painful, with multiple ad breaks in the middle of the periods. The tackiest moment of all was someone proposing (and apparently getting yes for an answer) to his girlfriend in the middle of the game, with the whole arena watching it on the screen. I thought that happened only on Friends.
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Oh, and: If you are still experiencing character set troubles (like seeing * (straw:14064): WARNING *: Invalid UTF8 string passed to pangolayoutset_text()) with Straw 0.24, you should probably try to remove the feed a subscribe to it again. There might be old data in your DB the new version can't do much about.
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Some pretty cool shit here.
Subscribe categories to OPML feeds: make Jeff work for you! Create a category, make it subscribed to Planet GNOME's OPML feed, and you'll have an always up-to-date set of GNOME blogs in your aggregator. No support for FOAF blogrolls yet, though. Maybe in the next release.
Notification area thingy! If you have unread articles, there's a Straw icon in your notification area that tells you how many unread items you have. And click on it to bring Straw to front and to read those articles.
(Mostly) asynchronous subscription process! No longer will the subscribe dialog freeze Straw on you while it's working. Well, not very much at least. And there's less clicking involved, too.
No more feed information display in the main window screwing up the layout! Feed link is available in the article header, rest of the stuff in the feed properties dialog.
Prettier article view!
Overall less brokenness! Hopefully including a lot fewer locale/encoding problems.
Get it while it's hot from the download area.
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Running imgsizer on my local copy of the HIG made it so much nicer to read. Suddenly, the browser actually lands in the correct place when you click on a link in the table of contents.
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Four days off work does wonders. I hope. Been busy last couple of weeks. With mind numbed by J2EE/WebSphere pain, haven't had any energy to work on Straw or do much else with the computer, I've just spent most of my free time at the gym or cooking and doing home stuff. Or playing FFX2. I hope I'll squeeze off a few hours today and tomorrow for Straw. First thing on the agenda: sync up with Gnome CVS, last few times I tried I got a weird complaint about a conflict I couldn't locate. Second: make the configuration writer write into a temp file and copy that over the old configuration when it's done; I just lost my Straw config due to a crash. I wish I knew what piece of hardware is causing those.
At least my Gnome 2.6 setup is starting to work, slowly. I used to have a ~/.Xsession file that set up some locale variables and stuff, but apparently that isn't a good idea anymore. With it around, the normal Gnome session refused to work. Possibly I should have exec'd gnome-session or something there, I have no idea. Oh well, I nuked it, at least the thing starts now. I wonder what's the approved location for that kind of stuff… Another thing that still has to be figured out is why my ~/.Xmodmap no longer works, now I have to call xmodmap manually to get my keyboard configuration. Maybe one of these years I should really look into that new-fangled xkb thing.
But now, I think, is time to go out running, the weather is beautiful and relatively warm at +7 degrees celcius. Here's hoping it won't be as painful as the first time in the spring usually is. I at least should be in a slightly better condition than I usually am this time of year.
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I've had this problem with random crashes with my new-ish computer which I haven't managed (or bothered) to pinpoint. It's something hardware related, but that's all I know. Last saturday the thing crashed once again and after I rebooted it, it wouldn't start. There was, on the console, some complaint about missing modules for INPUT products and a last line with nothing on but "pci", then nothing happened. I pressed enter a couple of times, decided it was broken and shut it down frustrated. Reiserfs3 has gotten some files confused when the system has crashed a few times (hooray for journaling... I should really try ext3/XFS/JFS/Reiser4), so I thought that it had finally screwed up something vital.
At the beginning of the week I downloaded a CD image of Knoppix, burnt it to a CD and and booted my computer with it. Worked like a charm (first time I used KDE in a while. Still not to my taste.) I wasn't feeling much like doing forensics on the piece of junk so I didn't properly get to it before today; fscking my HDs found nothing strange so I just reinstalled the kernel and rebooted the machine. The same problem. Then I started reading the boot process output a bit better; among other things I noticed it had already loaded pretty much everything including sound card and network adapter drivers and the error messages were about hotplug. Oh boy. The first thought was to again reboot with Knoppix and tinker with the boot process; the second one was to press Ctrl C.
Next time I'll try that first, not a week afterwards.
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We're working on dropping the mxDateTime dependency from Straw for version 0.22. It's proving to be a bit more difficult than expected, and exposes two design blunders made early in the development. The other is easy to circumvent, the other one isn't.
First, you should store a version identifier in all files you create that you expect to read back. Including the data store. That's easy enough to deal with later on, luckily, just assume that in the case of absent version identifier, it's version 1.
The other is the result of too eager use of Python's pickle mechanism and a total brain-fart. For whatever reason, I've been storing mxDateTime instances in the database. Duh. Now to get rid of those, we can't drop the mxDateTime dependency completely. Luckily we can restrict it to the conversion function called, if necessary, on start up, but still, that's something I should have seen coming. It's not as if it's difficult to serialize a date object independently of the object format.
I'll just close this with a quote from Franklin P. Jones, whoever he is: Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.
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I bought myself yesterday Jak II. Not only because it was developed using Lisp. It rocks. It's also at times maddeningly difficult. So I just spent an hour with the blow up the ammo mission, one of the first ones. Oh well. Last time I played a platformer, the hero featured in the state of the art title was a green rabbit.
No, it's not making Straw's progress towards 0.22 any faster.
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