Recent blog entries for jsheets

Starting to get back into writing again, only this time I'm focusing more on the creative genres. The book did alright the first quarter, but apparently has not been selling as well as any of us had hoped. My editor lamented the fact that none of the GNOME books seem to be doing very well.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a sign to look for greener fields. I may eventually team up with a buddy from WorldForge to write a graphics book, but that's in the longer future. For now, I'd like to return to my original writing interests and pursue sci-fi/fantasy writing. In particular I'd like to finish my first screenplay and get started on my long-overdue first novel. I have a good starting base for both, but just need to devote the time to finish it.

Stay tuned for more info on my new related MetaDoc project, which I'll likely host on the OpenBooks web site....

InformIT just kicked off a two-week Featured Expert series on me, featuring the book. Part of the media blitz. They'll be running six small articles the first week, and I'll answer questions during the second week. It does require a free registration *cough*

Also, I finished the first pass at converting the book into DocBook for publishing on the Web. Just waiting final approval from Addison-Wesley before I can officially put it online.

And finally, we ship out tomorrow for our long-awaited cruise to Mexico and back. We'll stop briefly in election-fickle Florida. Just in time to miss the first major cold spell in frosty Minnesota!

Woo hoo! The book came out this weekend. We threw a nice little release party with some neighbors and CodeWeavers co-workers. The bindery finished ka-chunking them together at midnight Friday, and AWL saw to it that my complimentary copies made it in time for the party (thanks guys!).

Hmmm, still waiting for that Pearson's open license to finalize so I can put the book up on the OpenBooks Web site....

Registered the OpenBooks project on SourceForge, to maintain and distribute WGA and my other book-length writings, as well as any other professional-level books with open licenses. No website yet...

The chapter proofs are finally done now. I still have to do the appendix (the GNOME FAQ) and the front matter, plus the index, but that shouldn't take much work...relatively speaking.

It's official now. The copyediting phase for Writing GNOME Applications is finished. All that's left now is to review the proofs in a couple of weeks, and the index in a couple more.

This weekend I'd like to get started developing on MELon, the Modular Extensible Loader for WorldForge. I have some thoughts down on its design, and it should be pretty straightforward to implement -- especially with the existing UClient module implementation to use as a starting point.

Going to the Lowen & Navarro concert tomorrow at the Fine Line. We caught the last L&N concert there, and it was fantastic!

Whew! Just got done with the revisions for chapter 9. Three more chapters and all I have left to do is review proofs and review the index. Ahh, pining for the normal life again.

Actually, that's a fib. I'm already getting excited about going through the whole process again--except using DocBook instead of MS Word *shudder*. Call me masochistic if you must, but I think a lot of the peripheral hassle of writing this book will be moot with the more descriptive DocBook format. I'm curious to see how the copyediting stage will progress under DocBook.

Also today, I posted what I have so far in my effort to DocBook-ize the Wine developers docs.

Finished off the copy edits for Chapter One of Writing GNOME Applications. Looks like the process will go pretty smoothly, although it might take a little longer than I thought it would. It's all gotta be done by June 23rd, in order to get the book out by mid-September. Shouldn't be a problem, though.

The day of the Big Move. We're moving to a much nicer office space, with 16-foot ceilings and easier access (the old offices were literally across the street from the Metrodome, where the Minnesota Vikings romp). It seems to be going pretty smoothly so far. We'll see...

Finally got WINE to build all the way through and run with the automake setup. Woo hoo! Had a little trouble with SO versions for all the dlls. Forgot they were accessed with dlopen(), not the dynamic loader, meaning that you can't keep changing the file name. Consequently, I had to strip out the -version-info linker flag from roughly 60 makefiles. Oh well. My own fault.

But hey, it works! I must admit I'm quite surprised. I didn't think automake/libtool would be up to the task, without some custom makefile hacking.