Et tu, Cthulhu

I’m finally back in Xalapa after more than three weeks on the road.

After the wildly successful GTK+ Berlin hackfest, I spent a day in the Hague with my good friends Andrea and Marcus, then headed for home. The flight was awful as usual, but mitigated by the fact that I was bringing back good memories and lots and lots of Belgian and Dutch candy.

Christian, Alex and Benjamin: Three happy hackers
(Ryan was AWOL for the picture)

The hackfest gang
(Picture courtesy of Tor Lillqvist)

Andrea, Marcus and their pet parrot, Perla

Bikes parked at the Hague central station

Late last month, I strapped on my backpack and went across the ocean to FOSDEM in Brussels. It was good to see some of the openSUSE and old Ximian guys again, but I was feeling kind of drained the whole time. Had Belgian waffles w/everything, which is a lot more “everything” than it is “waffle” (i.e. ice cream, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, chocolate shavings, strawberry jam, strawberries and banana).

Some old building in Brussels

After FOSDEM, I spent close to two weeks in Norway, visiting family and friends in between work. I even went skiing one weekend, an experience I’ve been idealizing in my mind since I moved to Mexico. Even so, it lived up to expectations.

Ski tracks

Me and my Mom skiing

My friends at Copyleft Software A/S were kind enough to lend me office space in Oslo. I must say they have an awesome work environment thing going.

Outside Copyleft’s offices

Lunch at Copyleft

Leo making his famous Donald Duck impression

After Norway, I left for Berlin where I’m currently taking up space at the GTK+ Hackfest.

The second Novell hack week is at an end, and I’ve set up a public Trac instance for Sterling. Development will go on there. I’ll devote some ITO (”innovation time off”) to it next time I get a chance.

Four days down. How time flies when you’re having fun. I must admit that Sterling is barely past the point where it creates a panel applet that does nothing - but on the other hand, I’ve absorbed a bit of how-to on C# and Mono tools. It’s rather pleasant so far.

Apart from the panel applet business, I’ve gotten the build framework for GConf schemas, gettext, icons and UI files out of the way, so I think it’s fair to say it’s getting ready to administer kicks to the proverbial hindside. I’ll have a public Git repo up sometime tomorrow.

Hey, it’s a start.

Federico and Tambet came and hacked in addition to Mike and me. Got some stuff done, but not as much as I’d have liked to. The arrachera I had for lunch sort of knocked me out.

I’d better get some sleep now. More tomorrow.

Day 2 is at an end, and I’ve spent it learning about C# and Mono tools, looking into how other projects do stuff. I now have a Git repository with a fledgling project structure, and a more solid foundation to work from knowledge-wise.

I feel a little bad for posting that Monodevelop screenshot yesterday. The intention wasn’t to make Monodevelop look bad, but rather to convey the occasional feeling of exasperation you can get when learning to use new tools, moving outside your comfort zone. I was using the older version that comes with openSUSE 10.3, assuming that would’ve been patched to fix most serious issues. I was wrong.

Fortunately, the eminent Mr. Hutchinson pointed me in the right direction - I got a newer version from one of his build service repos, and that works much better, although it still spews a little to the terminal. You can tell a lot of work went into it; this is the first time I’ve felt like I’m using a true IDE on Linux, i.e. the “integration” part actually works.

Mike arrived from Mexico City last night and will be spending the next couple of days here. His tiny new Lenovo X series Thinkpad looks totally sweet, but he spent a lot of time fighting poor wireless drivers. I guess most of us can empathize with that. Tomorrow, Tambet and Federico will hopefully join us, and we can all bask in teh hack week synergy.

Novell’s hack week has started. For those of you who don’t know what a hack week is, it’s a work week where we, the programmers at Novell, get to goof around with more or less whatever project we find interesting.

I’ve chosen to start a new project called “Sterling”, the goal of which is to keep better track of my moneys. I’ve used GnuCash to do this for some time, but it’s clunky and overkill for my uses. I want to streamline the process of entering transactions and otherwise keep the complexity down, especially for people like me who know (and care) little about accounting. Indeed, I want the UI to resemble Tomboy’s in many ways:

• Always running, with a panel applet interface.
• Desktop-global “new transaction” hotkey.
• Per-user database, no open/save dialogs.
• Implicit save on edit.
• Type-ahead completion of transaction description.
• Suggesting details of transaction based on similar past transactions.
• Tagging of transactions for easy cross-sectioning.
• Simple search-as-you-type view of transaction history.
• Multiple currencies recognized by their ISO 4217 codes.

Star Trek future features:

• Currency conversion (use Google?).
• Multiple registers (similar to books in Tomboy).
• Export to XML, merge from XML.
• Remote synchronization (by Zeroconf discovery or specific URI) allowing for shared databases.
• Desktop search integration.
• Drop-dead attractive graphs.

In order to make things as difficult for myself as possible, I’ve decided to learn something new and do it in C#/Mono. Of course, I’m already running into trouble…

Strange but true. I miss C, Emacs, Automake already.

In the year that went:

• My old blog went south. Which is just as well, I guess, since the hosting was pretty shitty. I now have a shiny new blog hosted with a more reliable provider. Maybe I’ll even be able to rescue the old content…
• Our cat, Tina, died.
• The trees in our garden were infested with an assortment of parasitic organisms, and had to be completely cut back. They’re already sprouting new growth, though.
• I turned 30 on a hot day in Havana.

The openSUSE GNOME team will be holding its first meeting tailored to asia-pacific time zones on Thursday 12:00 UTC, in #opensuse-gnome on irc.freenode.net. If you’ve been left out because of your time zone previously, this is your chance to participate.

I’m at the GNOME Summit. Right now watching the Hotwire talk.

Oh, and since my blog was broken when it mattered, I’m late to the party - but what the hell: openSUSE 10.3 is out! And it’s actually not too shabby, with GNOME 2.20 and all.