Oops. Looks like I've neglected to blog again. So, quick update...
We settled the balance for our piece of land, cleared away the overgrowth and now we've nearly finished building a house to live in. It's gone well over budget, so money's very tight at the moment. We're already living in it, so when the rent runs out on our rented house at the end of the month, we can move all our old junk here and we'll still have a roof over our heads. The new house has got a phoneline, so my infrequent trips to the Internet cafe are no longer necessary.
Work's been a bit of a pain. I took on a job that 'should only take about ten days', back when I last posted, but it's dragged on horribly for various reasons. Half of it is because the design is based on a set of webpage mockups (supplied as PDFs!), with no verbal explanation of the requirements of the application, or what should happen and when. I've just been told to 'guess' and fill in the gaps, which has led to several designs for the underlying databases and classes etc being worked on and then scrapped - lots of time wasted. And to top it off, I didn't even get a deposit to start the work and I don't get a penny until it's finished, so I'm having to live on fresh air. If I hadn't already put a great deal of time into it, I'd probably just scrap it and find a new project to work on (one that pays at least a little bit up front, or at certain milestones). However, nothing else is forthcoming just at the moment and I'm determined to finish it off and call in the money it owes me. Sadly, when the money does come in it will all go toward paying off existing debts, so my dream of getting a new laptop for my birthday in a couple of days is just not going to happen. Mine died horribly shortly after my last post, so I'm borrowing P'Chai's (horribly slow Celeron) laptop to get my work done.
I finally branched gtranslator and started committing all the stuff I've been working on off-line over the last few months. Nice to get it off my laptop and into CVS where others can chew it over. However, it's still far from usable and in particular needs a certain amount of GUI love. I'll have to sit down and get into a GTK+ frame-of-mind at some point. When it's ready, it should be a massive improvement over previous releases and due to the fact that a lot of the buggy code has been completely cut out and replaced, it should also knock most of the existing bugzilla bugs out in one foul swoop (hopefully).
I've also spent a fair few hours recently doing GNOME sysadmin work. As well as dealing with the day-to-day enquiries, I've made a suggestion or two to the (closed) mailing list, and started looking into resurrecting Bonsai, which seems to be sorely missed by a lot of people. I'm also preparing to produce a monthly sysadmin summary for public consumption, so the rest of the community can see what new issues have come in, and what progress the team has made towards fixing stuff on our team todo list.
Enough for now...