Older blog entries for murrayc (starting at number 15)

Back from GUADEC II, which seemed like a great success. It was a great way to learn about a lot of the new GNOME stuff in a short space of time.

I also became even more convinced that GNOME hackers are far more capable of getting things done than regular people. I know that they complain about long threads and flame wars, but it's nothing compared to the life-sucking mix of total-lack-of-understanding, personal agendas, failure to compromise, and apathy that one finds in commercial entities. I think GNOME is a pretty good example of how people who are confident and determined can find common ground through setting out their thoughts clearly and admitting when they don't understand things.

I heard RMS speak for the first time and thought that he put his ideas forward sanely. Then he proceeded to lose any respect that he had gained, by hijacking a GNOME 2 planning session and doing a stage invasion of the final keynote, just to winge about some irrelevant newbie stuff such as 'Should the minimise button be a down arrow?' and 'Should KDE and GNOME have the same background'. Totally abusing his position and our attention. Maybe RMS wouldn't be RMS if he was capable of recognising the facial expression that signifies 'total incredulity at your freakish behaviour'.

There's a bunch of new stuff that I want to wrap for C++, such as Bonobo, GConf, gdome, and gnome-vfs. I had a long irc discussion with cactus about Bonobo, and he seems to have some idea of how to wrap it all up nicely for C++.

The Doc says that I don't have to wear the cast on my ankle anymore, but I'm still limping along like a horror-show sidekick.

Released a new version of Bakery, including yet more tweaking of open/save functionality, for your re-use.

Also released a new GtkExtra--.

Finished another contract. Went snowboarding. Broke my ankle. I should get a lot of code done in the next few weeks.

Let it be known that Gauss Interprise's VIP Portal Manager is an awful product and that there technical support is comically hopeless.

The content management UI is unusable unless you have a huge monitor to keep all the windows from overlapping.

There is an admin tool used to create new websites but those websites will not work properly unless you go add some entries to a config file, in a way which is very badly described deep in a part of the manual which is nowhere near the part about creating new websites.

The examples contain several magic numbers with no explanation of what they mean or where they can be found. It turns out that they are an essential part of the system and that they can be seen by using the cursor to widen the leftmost column in a list box. The column is set to 0 pixels by default so there is no visual clue that the column is even there.

There technical support team just repeat the obscure error messages back at me, adding the odd 'in' or 'the' word. Then they say things like It's in one of the manuals somewhere but we don't know where.

Essential functionality such as adding new meta-infomation fields for documents is seen as a cutting-edge hack requiring editing of internal config files, with general warnings about bad things happening if you do this at the wrong time.

Whenever you change these text files you need to make identical changes to similar files in 3 other places. Immediately. Bad things will happen if you do not get this right.

There doesn't seem to be any way to move documents to other parts of the site - i.e. You can't reorganise your site structure.

Also, it's incredibly unstable both on the client and the server, exhibiting a variety of ways of simply not working. The client can't be used together with a JAVA_HOME environment variable, making it impossible to use the client at the same time as most Java development environments.

Furthermore, it's based around an ancient version of the JDK, which ought to demonstrate that it hasn't been actively developer for ages.

I do hope that advogato diaries get indexed by search engines, because there isn't much more information about this system on the web.

Finally got GNOME CVS access. Celebrated by fixing a bunch of showstoppers in gnome--. We should make a new release soon, but it's hard to say whether it's stable until we have code that tests it. libgnomeui has very few demos that we can translate, and there is very little documentation for some widgets. At least I feel good that gnome-- has more (and clearer) demos than the library that it wraps.

Did an interview for a new contract in Munich. In german. That was a silly idea.

Life would be a lot less tedious if Sun would just supply the GNU toolchain with Solaris. Life would also be less tedious if Sun would supply Solaris with the patches needed for their own JDK. Life might be less tedious without Solaris.

Released a new version of Bakery. Coding for things like 'This file is already open', 'You have unsaved changes.', etc is so fiddly for multi-doc apps, that I'm becoming more and more convinced of the usefulness of this library.

Started new contract this week for a vertical market internet startup in Munich. Very dull so far.

Built a nifty new i815e-based PC for home, but I'm waiting for RH7, so there'll be no coding this week.

My email inbox is full of 6000 identical spams from "Tele Sports Betting". I cleared my inbox but they're still coming through. Here's a bit of the header:

Received: from foxnt.foxnet.org [210.169.138.238] by mx29 via mtad (34FM.0700.3.03) with ESMTP id 943eiNRR80868M29; Thu, 14 Sep 2000 17:17:59 GMT Received: from mail.cc.biu.ac.il ([38.33.6.181]) by foxnt.foxnet.org with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.197.19); Thu, 14 Sep 2000 02:03:57 0900 To: <lgtyu@sunpoint.net> Return-Path: vmcepikmaj@esperanto.nu

Released my GNOME C++ Application Framework code: Bakery. It should start some discussion at least.