work (sort of)
My father gave me Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive when I was home for Thanksgiving. The first section is a fairly persuasive rant on time tracking and time management, which I know I do poorly. I have installed gnotime and am going to try to have a go at tracking things at a fairly fine grain, and see how that goes. If anyone has any better software to suggest, please let me know- I’ll post a review of them :)
Am feeling very blah from a cold that bit me all weekend. Think I will likely take my first serious sick day in roughly forever tomorrow.
life
I hate Joe. Not only is he beating my ass in fantasy football today, the Bruins are pre-empting Duke basketball tonight. I blame Joe personally.
Saw my grandfather this weekend. His physical health is better than it was, which is great, but he is now in an Alzheimer’s ward. It is pretty pitiful- he’s the highest functioning person there, apparently, and he isn’t in great shape. If we don’t cure Alzheimer’s, or at least learn to arrest its progress, we’re going to soon have tens of millions of human husks on our hands. Tragic.
On a more upbeat note, I got my transcript from Duke today, and it turns out that I’ve been lying on my resume for years- apparently I did get a BS in comp sci and not a BA as I’ve been saying for years. Yay me. This is fairly bizarre, as I had to drop one of the requirements, but far be it from me to question what Duke’s registrar says.
gnome
Am psyched to see abi moving forward on collaboration and gnomemeeting moving forward on, like, everything. Really great to see.
In that vein, posted for public consumption here is an email I sent a while ago (lightly edited) on why I think 2006 will be a great year for GNOME.
- performance: huge amounts of performance work (including involvement from Sun, Novell, Nokia and IBM) going into the core platform, which should make every GNOME app faster and use less memory, and into gnome-session, which should make the overall launch experience faster.
- instant messaging: a revamped gnomemeeting, with simpler UI and support for SIP; and (slightly out of the gnome sphere, but close) GAIM 2.0, with great support for standards (including jabber) and a simplified UI.
- iinterop with the system: with gnome-screensaver and network-manager beginning to be widely deployed and sending out signals over d-bus, lots of apps should get smarter about the state of your computer- if you’re away, gnome-screensaver will say so, and apps like GAIM, gnomemeeting, and xchat-gnome will then indicate you’re away instead of having people communicate and wonder why you aren’t responding. If you’re offline, network-manager will say so, and apps will automatically log off instead of irritating you with ‘you’re offline. reconnect? [yes|no]’ dialogs. Better power management through gnome-power-manager too.
- management for admins: sabayon and pessulus should become polished and widely deployed, making it incredibly easy for even gnome-newbie admins anywhere to configure and lockdown GNOME.
- development platform: Project Ridley (simplifying APIs and moving them into GTK) and the new developer documentation the Foundation has commissioned should make the developer platform much easier and more pleasant to use.
- milestones for related projects: Mono should reach 2.0 (finally ;), marking it as a mature platform for those wishing to use C# to develop for GNOME; gstreamer should reach 0.10, with huge improvements in stability and performance, and hopefully in support for more difficult codecs. Both of these should help GNOME become more widespread.
- organization: the Board will be smaller and hopefully more active; GUADEC will have the most days (certainly) and be the best attended (hopefully) of any event we’ve ever had.
- quality: in the past 365 days we’ve fixed 9538 bugs (as of Nov. 7th 8:47am EST) Projects are underway to improve our crash reporting and seriously upgrade our bug tracking system, and for the first time in the Linux desktop space, we have not one but two automated testing platforms now- LDTP and Dogtail. I expect in the next year one will become widely deployed, and lots of tests will be written, making GNOME the first free software GUI tool with widespread pre-release automated testing. So I expect we’ll fix substantially more bugs next year.