Monthly Archives: September 2005

Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug

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This weekend has been generally not a good weekend, but up until now, it was just annoying, not problematic. I guess it’s not that problematic, but well…

I’m sleeping at work tonight.

I decided to do one simple thing tonight. I would walk out of my apartment and get Chinese food from the restaurant right next to my apartment. It’s like a 2 minute walk from my door, if that. No big problem, right?

First, I need to grab the wallet. This is important, as I must pay. Keys, hmm.. Nah, don’t need keys, I’m only going next door. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. Open the door, lock it, close it behind me. Wait, lock it? CRAP!

So I called the main office for the company that owns the apartment complex. Turns out they’re stationed in Texas, are are evacuated at the moment. Goody. Fortunately, they had backups. Lots and lots of unconnected backups. I reached one of them, no clue where it was, and they said I can expect a call soon from someone at my complex who could unlock my door. Great! I’ll just wait then.

45 minutes pass.

Called again, got someone else in a completely different state. She explained the whole problem, and the process for getting my door unlocked. First, a person at one of these offices sends an e-mail to someone at some other office. An e-mail. Great. Hurray for instant communication. Eventually, someone gets that e-mail, picks a person from the apartment complex in question, and calls.

Now, one of these two things didn’t work out so well, as it was almost three hours before I gave up. I decided to head to work and just get work done overnight, and sleep during Monday afternoon.

Next time I’ll know better than to think, “Keys? Nah, I don’t need keys!”

Chippy’s first Boston trip

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I’m finally heading to the Boston GNOME Summit! I’ve wanted to go for years, and people have asked me to attend, but due to school and such it was just never possible. However, this year VMware is sending a few of us to go. Alex Graveley, Philip Langdale, my girlfriend Jamie, and myself are all going, and will be there Friday night.

We might give a small talk on our experience in integrating our product with the GNOME desktop, and I’ve been asked by a few people to give a quick talk and demo of Galago with Tomboy, Beagle, Gaim and Evolution integration (and hopefully Gossip at that point too).

I look forward to going and meeting all these great people who I’ve only talked to through IRC and e-mail. It should be a fun weekend.

libview has a website!

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I’ve been hacking on libview’s new website. It’s not complete yet, but it has links to the downloads, news, some API documentation, SourceForge project page, etc. I just need to set up some form of script for the news page. I may just use WordPress or something, assuming I can get that working on SourceForge.

We’re going to release libview v0.5.1 fairly soon, once we move some more widgets into it and clean up a few things. Test programs and hopefully screenshots will be coming soon (though screenshots don’t do most of the widgets justice, as you really do have to play with them).

galago.info is no more, for a while

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I discovered last night that galago.info had expired just a couple of days ago. I was a bit shocked by this and looked through my inbox for expiration notices, but could find none. They may have been caught by the spam filter :(. So, it’s in this state where it’s unavailable for everybody (myself included) for 35 days. After 35 days, it’s available for purchase again. I could pay $90 to get it back now, it turns out, but that just seems too much for the domain.

So, I’ve moved to galago-project.org. Please update your bookmarks and check out the new svn repository. This covers all galago work and all notification work. Sorry for the inconvenience. It sucks.

The view looks good from up here

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Woot! We finally released libview, VMware’s Incredibly Exciting Widgets! This has been very long planned, but it’s finally out. libview consists of many of the useful generic widgets we use inside the VMware Workstation code base. We have 16 widgets and one utility class currently in there, and have a list of widgets we plan to move into libview.

Now, this is not just a code dump, like some other companies have done. We will not be developing these widgets any further inside our own tree at VMware. libview on SourceForge is where the widgets will be developed from now on. They are under the MIT license, so feel free to use them for whatever. We will be setting up a web page and a listserv and stuff in the near future, and will commit some more widgets, bug fixes, and test apps.

Most of the widgets are written in C++ using gtkmm, so most projects won’t be able to take advantage of them as-is. We expect a lot of people will be re-implementing the parts they need for some projects. However, if you’re a project that uses the excellent gtkmm, these should Just Work (TM).

For a description of what’s included, see Philip’s blog, as he went into a bit of detail.