Moving my weblog back here so I can have some more control and flexibility.

Took a much needed vacation from school and work last week in the lower Catskill Mountains. Tried to check my email once while I was away and got this error message in IE (notice the second line). Arrived home early yesterday and I am back to reality.

GNOME

Lots of new GNOME packages released since I've been away. The gstreamer and file-chooser work look especially exciting. Definitely on track for a nice 2.6.0 release.

In the process of cleaning up my home directory, I came across some of my first screenshots from the beginnings of GNOME 2.x. In just over a year and a half, it's really quite amazing the transition that went on from long flame wars, rewrites and general uncertainly to the direction and polish present in GNOME 2.3.x today.

Screenshots:
Early Winter 2002
Late Summer 2003

I finally added the new GNOME website header to art.gnome.org. I am still looking for a rocking header image to replace the boring purple one. If you have any ideas, please email them to me.

As for the future of art.gnome.org, I'd like to get rid of all of the purple background colors, but 500+ thumbnails have a drop shadow with a purple background added to them by hand. I'm looking for some help in removing all of the drop shadows or writing a gimp/python script to remove them.

gaim

I updated my GNOME browser gaim patch to work with gaim-0.67. The latest patch is here.

With Rob McQueen's help, I cooked up a patch to gaim that makes gaim open urls in the GNOME web browser. Gaim will now detect if you are running GNOME and automatically open URLs with your GNOME web browser. No extra configuration is required and the browser section of the preferences tab is actually hidden if you're running GNOME.

The patch against 0.66 is here. libgnome 2.3.3.1 or later is required since this uses the gnome-open binary.