Damn. The last diary entry was almost a year ago (I will keep a diary, I will).

When I'm not doing real work (porting code to various embedded chips, hacking on compilers) I am starting to play around with the brand new GNOME 2 environment. It is so much cooler than GNOME 1, and I am going to write a few programs to learn the libraries:

• An apt-get wrapping Druid to automate the tasks of updating my rather weird Debian APT setup.
• A blog editor — several of these exist already and I am sure I saw one written for GNOME. I may just try the Mozilla one I saw yesterday. However, a pluggable GTKHTML2 editor application would be cool.
• The long–term goal is to produce a decent XML editor. Conglomerate looked very cool but is now dead. Pollo is also a very nice Java tool — a merge of the two written in GTK+ 2 would be good. Of course for now there is always XEmacs+psgml+DTDs...

On a totally unrelated note I have been reading like mad recently. A few months ago I started reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series from start to end. I had read most of the books but reading them without a break gave me much more insight into the characters — there are far more cross-references than I even thought.

I have just started reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series. Last week I read 2001, which proved to be far better than I remembered (last time I read it was ~1995). Although Kubrick's film is excellent, it is missing some magical omph that the book has. Saturday just gone I started to read 2010 in the bath. Why oh why did ACC decide to base 2010 on the film of 2001 instead of the book? The resulting confusion is pretty hard to keep track off, I may have to watch the film again if I have the time.

What else is going on? For Christmas I bought myself a present: an IBM ThinkPad X22. What a toy! It's very handy now that I don't live very close to work, and have a 90 minute commute to do. If anyone else has one of these (or similar) and has got hiberation working, could you email me please?