It’s a really nice tunnel. Maybe a little too nice.

I mean, I’m all for making it a pleasurable ride with a long-term future, but was it really necessary to make it jewel encrusted? The emerald and ruby pattern along the top of the walls are nice, but the diamond walls and solid gold guard rails are a little over the top. Is this really the most effective use of our federal tax dollars?

Havoc: Keynote is pretty nice, although it lacks a lot of the customizability that people love from PowerPoint. The templates aren’t great, the clipart is virtually non-existent, and it’s trickier than it needs to be to change things like fonts and colors on various objects, but it has a ton of promise.

Of course, I think about rewriting Achtung off and on. With a nice high-level language like C# or Python and a much better platform and supporting libraries (like DiaCanvas, perhaps?) it seems like it’d be a lot simpler these days.

Anyway, is this not the sweetest desk setup you’ve ever seen? The photo kind of sucks because I only had my zoom lens and couldn’t get far enough away to get a holistic picture.

Alex Graveley: i really liked the cincinnati airport
Alex Graveley: made me want to hang out with ohioans
Joe Shaw: you mean like me and jacob?
Alex Graveley: no

Saturday my good friend and roommate from college Bryan came to Boston to do a show with his band Sweetheart. The show was actually in some guy’s kitchen in JP, so the venue sucked. It was a second floor apartment and with all the equipment there, I was convinced the floor would collapse. One of the guys in the band complained that he couldn’t really get into it, because every time he tried to rock out he’d knock a can of beans off a shelf. I had a good time anyway, and Bryan and I chatted the rest of the night talking about stuff. You know, junk.

The next day I had breakfast with Bryan and the band at some vegan place downtown. It’s in this really weird, tucked away place, and I can’t imagine they get a lot of business. It’s just in one of those parts of town that’s all office space and barren of life outside of the work week.

Sunday was also when they had calling hours for Ettore. I felt a lot better having gone.

At some point during the week my camera broke. Well, not the camera, the lens. Now whenever I try to use the lens it makes this horrible motor noise and says “Error 99” on the display. Other lenses work fine, though. It totally sucked… I took about 5 pictures, set the camera down, came back to it a few hours later and it was busted. I’ll need to ship it off to get repaired… I am going to try to get away with just sending the lens and not the whole camera.

this is the last picture i took. snorp’s face broke my camera

All week Robert Love was in town and it was great to see him again. I am so happy he’s working for us. I’ve wanted Ximian to hire a kernel guy since about the second week I worked here and there’s no better guy for desktop stuff than Robert. He’s already on Planet GNOME and done an OSNews interview so clearly other people in the community are psyched too.

Robert and I spent a lot of the week planning world domination with some Indian food interspersed. Unfortunately hardware integration is one area that we really need to catch up to Windows and Mac OS, but I think we’ve sketched out a pretty decent plan, and we’re building on top of a lot of great work out there already like Linux 2.6, udev, and HAL. And of course we’ll figure out some way to tie in the Novell services.

Thursday I went to the Bruins-Flames game with Sam, and it was awful. I mean, the game was awful; it was nice to see Sam. First I forgot that the FleetCenter would give me a hard time about my backpack and so when I got there, they did, and I ended up having to take a taxi home just to drop my bag off. I thought about leaving it at a bar, but I just couldn’t do it with my laptop in my bag. So I missed the first period, but that wasn’t so bad because the Flames scored two goals on four shots. It was among the worst games of hockey I’ve ever witnessed, and I am pissed off at the FleetCenter enough that I think I might not go to a game there again. Maybe playoff games. And the Beanpot. But nothing else. Fuckers.

Yesterday I had to pack up all my things at the office for our move to the new office in Cambridge. I have a ton of crap. Oh, I got a new computer for work. It wouldn’t turn on. I found that the power switch wasn’t connected. So then it turned on but wouldn’t boot. I found that the hard drive wasn’t plugged in. Go HP.

Yesterday was also Blizzard‘s birthday. He can no longer be trusted, but he sure had a lot of Blue Ribbon BBQ.

Now I’m on vacation and have the house to myself this weekend. Ah.

Ettore was an amazingly talented photographer, musician and programmer, and we’ll miss him dearly.

In the early days of Ximian, when working days at a time wasn’t uncommon, we had a bunch of snacks and quick meals in the office. You know, potato chips, ramen, single-serving microwaveable Chef Boyardee cups.

One day, Ettore was rummaging through the food and must have stumbled across the stash of Chef Boyardee for the first time. Lasagna, beef ravioli, beefaroni. “Beefaroni!” he exclaimed. “That’s not even a real Italian word!” He absolutely refused to eat any of it. He’d rather go hungry than eat one of those things. Maybe it had something to do with poorly reducing the whole of his national cuisine into a microwaveable plastic cup and slapping a lame labelon the side. Or maybe it was because they just tasted bad.

Either way, his indignance didn’t last long. He was wolfing those things down like a madman within a week. I think he ate more of those than anyone else in the entire office.

My favorite memory of Ettore though is when he, Nat and I would just be driving around town many a summer night and we’d hit the Longfellow bridge. We would go flying over it at a terribly unsafe speed, with all the windows down, the three of us screaming our lungs out along to OK Computer at the highest volume you can imagine.

I think of that all the time.

we got about 2 feet of snow

Some more photos.

Quite an adventure getting home. First we had a little car trouble getting to the airport in Cleveland. Some guard thingy on the front left wheel well was loose and rubbing against the tire. We pulled over and poked at it, but it finally came loose as we were getting off the turnpike. Good thing it didn’t go at 80.

Once at the airport our flight was delayed due to high winds in Newark. They had the flight getting in after both flights leaving for Boston, and the direct flights were full. Jacob and I decided to fly to Hartford and drive, rather than have to wake up in the morning. (“Yes, we work at night,” we lied.)

Renting the car was fun. The whole thing seemed pretty shady. He charged us $1 for full coverage on the car, and only charged me $10 instead of $25 for being under 25 years old. Then he pointed and said “just take whatever you want from the compact lot.” We chose the sexiest car in the lot: a white Pontiac Sunfire and hit the road seeking fun and adventure.

The drive was pretty boring.

130 miles and 40 chicken mcnuggets later, we’re back home.

In fact, today I pretty much just sat around the house. Yesterday my dad and I went down to my elementary school, St. Pats, to run some cat 5 for the middle school and such. Until now they had been running the network on a coax ring which was fine for the old Netware network (no offense to my employer!) but doesn’t really cut the mustard now. We thought it’d be a short job, but we ran into a bunch of problems drilling holes into the cinder block walls and pulling cable through blocked columns. What we had antcipated to be a five our job ended up taking 14, and we didn’t completely finish.

Yeah, so that sucked and I went drinking afterward with Kara.

kara with her nephew alex

Saw a bunch of other folks from high school and chatted with a few.

view of kent from st. pats’ roof

So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and I want to thank everyone who sent in links to other Apt repos and those who gave feedback on the software itself. I am still working on adding channels, particularly the SuSE ones, but I may not get them all finished until after I get back to Boston early next week.

The remainder of the summit trip was great. I was pretty wiped out on Sunday after a long night Saturday, but I got the chance to talk to a bunch of folks and it was a very positive trip.

Now I am back in Ohio for Thanksgiving with the fam. My dad and I had to run out to Doylestown to pick up some hardware but we stopped off in downtown Kent first:

dad in front of the pufferbelly

alex spilled water into his laptop immediately

Red Carpet Daemon 2.0 and Open Carpet

Also finally announced the release of rcd 2.0 and the open-carpet stuff. We did a lot of work over the past five months to get Red Carpet into a state where we can try to push it as the premier software management infrastructure and then try to get it integrated generically into GNOME. I am really excited about this release since it opens up a huge amount of open source software to our users who previously needed to turn to some other solution. Our daemon architecture makes it easy for others to write applications which tie into the packaging system, so I hope projects like NARC (Nautilus-Red Carpet integration) pick up again and see some adoption.

The Open Carpet software is a first step toward making Red Carpet services easy to set up. I’d like to work toward getting those big Apt repositories to also set up RC services, so we’ll see. On the other hand, I’d like to see smaller services set up as well. The recent Gossip release seems like a perfect candidate for Red Carpetification. I’ll have to email Mikael and Richard, since I don’t think they’re at the Summit.

I haven’t posted lately.

The other day there was a pretty sunset. Here are some photos.

Atlantic: New Jersey
Northeast: Ottawa
Southeast: Tampa Bay
Central: Detroit
Northwest: Colorado
Pacific: Dallas

East: New Jersey
West: Colorado
Stanley Cup: New Jersey
Hart: Peter Forsberg, Col.
Vezina: Martin Brodeur, NJ
Norris: Nicklas Lidstrom, Det.
Adams: Mike Sullivan, Bos.

Hope the Bruins do well this season, but the defense is sooooo sketchy.

This picture was on the front of cnn.com today, and I am pretty sure that guy is photoshopped in. Poorly.

Nothing really interesting to say… work is going pretty well. The multiserver support in rcd is working well enough now that I am not terrified to recommend that people try it.

My camera is sad. I hope the batteries are just low and that it’s not broken. Sigh.

Yeah, Cake is pretty good. I’d never seen them before. I didn’t even think they were still together. But the set was only an hour, which was a little disappointing.

Sam neglected to tell me who the opening band was, though. It was Cheap Trick.

Cheap fucking Trick.

At one point one of the guys in the band said to someone in the crowd, “You look familiar. Where have I seen you?” She answered, “I’ve been following you around for 27 years. When I was 9 I asked (someone in the band, the main guitarist, I don’t know their names) to marry me.”

Obviously I Want You To Want Me was the highlight of the night.

Another OSU win, in more familiar ow-my-heart-hurts fashion.

I got the printer working, albeit by editing a bunch of configuration files by hand, but it wasn’t too bad once I had a grasp on how everything worked and my rage subsided. But Linux still needs a lot of work in this area.

Jacob and I actually cooked dinner yesterday. This required purchasing a lot of kitchenly goods that we previously didn’t have. Like, say, a “health steamer”. Also cookie sheets.

We made the nutritious dinner of steamed asparagus and Ore-Ida® Texas Crispers!®. We decided not to push our luck by preparing meat. I also had animal crackers.

It’s amazing how clean the oven is, although it has been essentially unused in the two years we’ve lived here. Seriously, though. I’ve never seen an oven this clean. I should take a picture.

Also, we forgot to buy oven mits. The doctor tells me I can get the bandages taken off in four to six weeks.

Today is Boston Moving Day… I was planning on going out and taking pictures, but sharing printers in Linux is excessively difficult and making me angry.

Uh oh.

I walked in there with my laptop and out of there with an Apple Cinema HD Display. It’s an LCD display. It’s HUGE (23 inches). It’s bright. And it’s digital.

It’s a good thing, because it’s about time to put old Maggie, the 17 inch behemoth that I bought on eBay six or seven years ago, out to pasture. That monitor turned ten years old this month, and it’s starting to blink in and out and I’m not sure how much time it has left. It’s tough to part with, though, because it’s got this cool little LCD display beneath the tube which tells you (usually incorrectly) what resolution and refresh rate it’s running at, and also because it is at least 60 pounds and awkwardly large in every dimension.

Menacing Jimmy

this picture is so close to not sucking

this just makes me want to play simcity

Radiohead show on Wednesday. Fucking awesome. I think it might have been the best show I’ve ever been to. Check it out at ease.

A couple of corrections regarding my previous California recall debacle: 900,000 people must sign the initial recall ballot, out of about 21.5 million registered voters, which is closer to four percent than five. 1.6 million signatures were turned in, and last I heard, 1.3 million (six percent) were certified. Secondly, the 65 signatures to get on the ballot do need to be certified, and while over 250 people turned in the paperwork, only 137 will appear on the ballot.

But it’s still fucking ridiculous.

And with Bustamente and Arnold running neck-and-neck right now at about 40%, it’s looking increasingly likely that the winner will have less of a mandate than Gray Davis.

The power outages have been wreaking havoc on the routes across the country; the machine that hosts joeshaw.org — as well as other top internet sites like assbarn.com, nat.org, loolix.com, and the number three smut site in the world, off.net — is located in Toronto. The UPS worked dutifully for a couple hours but eventually failed and left that corner of the internet in the dark. Before long, it was basically impossible to get to a bunch of sites, because traffic was getting into routing loops between new york and london. Takes me back to 1995 and the days when the majority of traffic ran through sprintlink and those morons had no idea what they were doing. Anyway, nice to see my home state of Ohio (go buckeyes!) is to blame.

Today I’ve been moving a bunch of data off smaller drives (4 gig SCSI and 10 gig IDE) onto larger drives, partly to make it more manageable, and partly because I’m terrified of the drive failing and me losing that data. In fact, one of the 10 gig drives failed. A Western Digital. Do not buy Western Digital drives, no matter how poor you are in college. They still suck. IBM drives, on the other hand, do not suck.

Anyway, I ended up spending most of my day reading old email and chat logs and internet stalking my high school and college friends. I miss them terribly and must send them all email.

Some high school yearbook pictures:

One. Only five percent of the population has to sign a petition to cause a recall election.

Two. The state estimates that the cost of a recall election will be $35 million, which is not at all budgeted. The economic trouble in California is one of the stated reasons why a recall was effected in the first place.

Three. As a special election happening in October, a large number of precincts normally open for elections will be closed. This is partly because they use old punch card voting machines which have been decertified and not to be replaced before the 2004 presidential primary election, partly because some of the voting areas are unavailable in October, and partly because of the cost of holding a special election. Little surprise that the people most affected by this are poorer voters who may be unable to visit another precinct.

Four. To get on the ballot, it costs only $3500 and you must get 65 uncertified signatures.

Five. As a result of this, there are over 200 people on the ballot, including Gary Coleman, Larry Flint, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Six. The ballot is laid out thusly: the first question is whether to recall the governor. The second question is, if the governor is recalled, who should replace him. The first question is obviously decided by a majority. The second question, however, is determined by a plurality, and the governor is not permitted to be listed in the second question. This means that it is entirely possible for the governor to lose the first question getting 49% of the vote but then be replaced by someone who received a much less than a majority in the second question.

Seven. With the bar for recalling governors so low, why wouldn’t someone do it again, especially if the governor is recalled?

Before, I thought that I’d like to see referenda having a larger role in American politics, but this democracy-gone-awry is making me reconsider. Maybe it was just terrible foresight by the California legislators that dreamt it up, but maybe it’s just an unworkable concept in a country where a 50% voter turnout is considered acceptable.

sometimes jacob just comes into my room and starts talking

Nat and DP, and the CEO and the Vice Chairman of Novell all spoke to us… some people are pretty apprehensive about and some people are totally psyched, but nobody is indifferent about the whole thing.

This is my first acquistion, and so I’m probably being pretty naïv about the whole thing, but I am psyched. Right now we’re a separate business unit from Novell and I think they’ll keep us that way.

Plus, I made some money off the deal and that’s nice too.

I can’t think of anything clever or funny to say about that.

Last week, Ottawa.

The United States Embassy

During sushi there were some homeless guys drinking outside our window.

Skipping back, I had lunch with Nat and Jimmy and Nelson yesterday and we chatted a bit about Dashboard stuff. Nat wanted to go to Pamplona so we went and got me a bike.

my new bike

We biked from thed bike shop (on Beacon between St. Mary’s and Kenmore Sq.) to Harvard Sq. and had coffee. That ride had a nice, satisfying burn. A few hours later be biked to Nat’s house. That was murder, especially his street. I’m sure the 95° heat didn’t help, but I was still sweating well after I had gotten to Nat’s and taken a nice cool shower. I’m gonna be so buff or die from dehydration/heat stroke/heart explosion.

I haven’t gotten to the part with the talking turd yet, though.

The only thing that really bothers me about it is the family patriarch. He just doesn’t fit the mold of a 70-year old man from the midwest. His manner of speech is just wrong and it really irks me.

I am a little surprised that there doesn’t appear to be a file descriptor debugging library, since it seems to me that these types of bugs would be fairly common. Basically what I want are: (a) strictly increasing numbers for file descriptors and (b) some sort of protection if you try to write to a file descriptor that has been closed. A segfault or even a SIGUSR signal would be fine. If I don’t find something, I may have to write one.

Wednesday afternoon Nat invited a bunch of people over to our house for a BBQ. I think I was among the last to know this. It was a beautiful night and a lot of people showed up, despite the 4 hour notice or so. I guess people don’t exactly pencil in activities on a Wednesday night, with the West Wing being repeats and all.

We set up the retroscope and the TiVo kicked in and recorded portions of the party which it thought were episodes of the Simpsons, Seinfeld, etc. We have interesting tidbits on tape, with audio. Things like Alex opening a beer and leaving the bottle cap on the floor of the kitchen, and then someone coming in and stepping on it later. If only we had caught the person who hid all of Jacob‘s pants. (To whomever did that: ok, it’s seriously not funny anymore. You’re making him cry.)

Dave made a BJs stop before coming down and got things like 4 lbs of mustard and 5 lbs of BBQ sauce. We’ve made a dent in the mustard with our new everything-tastes-better-with-liberal-amounts-of-mustard policy, but the BBQ sauce is a lost cause. I think we’ve used maybe an ounce of the BBQ sauce. Maybe we can give it to a homeless shelter?

I went to the grocery store and saw that the big jugs of tropicana orange juice we usually buy had a $1.50 off if you used your stop and shop card dealie. I actually said “that’s a killer savings” aloud and people looked at me.

This past weekend we went up to Rockport and hung out at Dave’s place and hit the beach. At night we lay out in his backyard and watched shooting stars and satellites pass overhead. It was very nice until people started being loud and harshed my buzz. I was pretty surly the rest of the night.

I didn’t take any pictures while there despite having my camera, but I did get a horrible sunburn on the tops of my feet. I took a picture of that:

do not look at this photo if you do not like feet. or sunburn.

Took the train home Sunday afternoon with Pat. We didn’t make it over to my aunt and uncle’s restaurant (McT’s) in Gloucester this trip… maybe next time.

Talked to Melissa on the internet today for about an hour… haven’t talked to her in a while. We talked about grad school, cute Irish girls, Red Cross Vampires, whether M—- F———- is in jail (please pass on any information about this) and if we’ll ever have a high school reunion because of that, how anyone could have thought George Michael was straight, Lobster Sweepstakes, and Chicago (the city, not the movie). Good times. I need to talk to these people more.

We gotta finish this fucking mustard.

I set up an RSS feed for my web page, mostly because I can. Some other people scrape their HTML to generate it, but I found some neat hacks in PHP that let me do it pretty simply.

trinity college

Jon was there and we immediately got together and started hacking on multiserver support in libredcarpet. I think this is probably the largest hump we have to overcome in Red Carpet to really be an accepted community project. Talking with various subprojects people, like Thomas from GStreamer and some AbiWord guys, there was definitely a lot of excitement in making Red Carpet more general and apt- or yum-like.

On one hand, I feel like we have the ability to make Red Carpet the de facto standard packing system for GNOME, when you look at our architecture and the nice desktop integration efforts we can do, like the cool nautilus-rc thing Dave is doing.

On the other hand, I am not so naive to think that Red Carpet will really ever get there. I have a hard time seeing distributors like Red Hat and Debian ever adopting it, even if it is disassociated from Ximian. They have their own (often revenue generating) package management systems, and there are just so many political issues in the way. Not to mention the technical differences between the distros which make them so difficult to support… it’s not unlike the GNOME system tools in that respect. It’s a tough position to be in.

pitch, wicket, round, whatever. i am a fan of the women’s cricket.

enlightenment is available only during extended business hours

havoc and jimmac gathering for one of many food excursions

I haven’t yet decided if I like the windex blue.

Ah well, there had to be some karmic balance to the luck we had with the TiVo last week, and we got it in full force this week. I tried to ressurrect the Celeron 450, and it won’t even POST, so Jacob and I traded cases. His K6 is now in the Celeron’s old ATX case and my K6 is now in his old AT case and routing packets happily with 64 megs of RAM. It’d probably have 128 except that the memory in it before was bad and causing kernel panics. I wonder now if that is what caused all those problems with my SCSI card years and years ago.

Anyway, I was also debugging someone else’s code that was crashing on my OS X box and getting crashes as soon as I entered a function. GDB wasn’t helping me at all, and I finally found that it was because it was trying to allocate 640k on the stack. Jacob and Phil were quick to point out the problem, and it makes sense, but the idea never even occurred to me, since that’s just not a problem on Linux. Is it that programming is just more convenient on Linux, or that it just makes us lazier?

You may have heard that it snowed here recently.

You heard correctly.

I win.

All of you potential Xfrisk players out there: don’t click on the window manager close button for ANY window in the game. It quits. This includes the stats and cards windows. Just don’t do it.

Earlier today on cnn.com:

SNOWSTORM SLAMS NORTHEAST
Officials declared states of emergency in Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia as a heavy snow storm moved up the East Coast

Can someone tell me exact which of those is the Northeast? Right now it’s not even snowing north of Hartford.

Technology is really great when it works. The other day I managed to update my Mac OS without a hitch, transfer service from my old TiVo to my new Series2, and get it happily talking over the previously opened USB 1.1 ethernet adaptor I found in the very back of the shelf at Best Buy. Woo.

This means, of course, that I am cancelling the land line today.

Last night I went and saw Daredevil and at midnight The Big Lebowski. The former… not so good. I knew it was ominous when, in a 96 minute film they spend the first 30 excessively setting up the character. Dave put it well when he said it was like an old Nintendo game: first you have the easy villan, then the hard villan, and then the Boss. If not for the weak attempt at flashback, the plot would have been totally linear and boring.

… but I’m not complaining. I had fun at it, and Jennifer Garner is just so darn cute.

The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, is perhaps the most amazing piece of art ever applied to film. There is no word in the English language which describes its wonder. It is truly scrumtralescent. Jacob and I laughed at all the funny parts… the parts that are truly funny after watching it dozens of times. Everyone else laughed at the predictable parts. We are the true fans. Worship us.

WALTER Hell, you just tell him—well, you tell him, uh, we made the handoff, everything went, uh, you know according to—

DONNIE Oh yeah, how’d it go?

WALTER Went alright.  Dude’s car got a little dinged up— 

Anyway, here are a couple pictures. Neither of them came out all that well, but I like them just the same.

Shaver’s entry for today reminds me of some of the terrifying evil we have to do to get at some RPMlib functions which disappeared from the symbol table but at which we can get by doing some pointer arithmetic in an exported vtable. The rest of that file ain’t pretty either. And only 233 revisions to date.

Update: The name of the network is actually cockinferno, not cockmaster as I had previously misreported. Apologies.

Knifin’ around…

Yesterday I took 105 photos. Here are some of the less sucky ones:

They call me Quick Draw Shaw

Eliot St. and the Charles Hotel

I like the clouds here

And an oldie…

Simon likes to help us print rebate coupons

TiVo has this offer going where original Series 1 TiVo owners can get their lifetime service switched over to a new 80 gig Series 2 TiVo for free, which is very, very tempting. They’ve got free shipping, how can I pass? And I have a credit card now, so it’s like having free money!

I had sort of planned to go get some finish for my bookshelf but was lazy and watched the Bruins lose to Pittsburgh and ate a deli sandwich. Insulating my remaining windows failed miserably since the plastic sheets were far too small for my windows which are something like 4.5 ft. × 6 ft. But I did manage to repair my Airport base station and reaffirm my totally kick ass soldering skills. Jacob dutifully stood by with a fire extinguisher as I plugging it in, and just imagine my pride when i saw the cockmaster network show up in my airport list, along with pinchy’s den. Woo!

I didn’t take my camera out with me tonight, which naturally was a mistake, but at least Jacob caught this accident on “film”.

[ Music | 1969 – Boards of Canada ]

Jacob and I went to the first games of the Beanpot Tournament tonight. We saw BU beat Harvard and BC beat up on Northeastern. Next Monday is the final and I’m looking forward to it.

It is very lonely being a goalie.

S-A-T scores! clap clap clapclapclap

Before the game Jacob and I went furniture shopping. I got a badly needed bookshelf, although now I’ll need something else to put on the mantle.

I am loving these four day weeks. I had a bunch of vacation days backed up, so I’ve decided to spend them by taking Mondays off for a few weeks. I could definitely get used to this. I need to some how finagle a way to do this all year long. It’s probably best for my long-term sanity.

I haven’t really been updating this lately because it’s been cold and i haven’t really been doing anything. Jacob already regaled you with tales of crappy insulation products, frozen pipes, and huddling in a fetal position in front of the fire.

Speaking of which, it turns out that the fireplace in my room can’t really handle a nice big fire. It probably just needs cleaning, but now everything in my room smells like wood smoke. I’ve washed all my clothes, so now I think it’s just in the carpet. And the furniture. And the walls.

It was a tough week at work. Two rather nasty and difficult to track down bugs manifested themselves, and Jon and I spent the majority of the week tracking them down and fixing them instead of working on the next version of the RC GUI. I hope next week is a little better.

Shaver took my overexaggerated “tons and tons and tons” comment literally and feared that Chimera may take three times as much memory as Safari. So Mike did what he does best and made me look like a fool. I did an entirely unscientific test which showed that, for one window, Safari and Chimera take about the same amount of memory, and in some cases Safari takes more. Chimera also feels quite a bit faster when rendering a page because it’s incremental rendering rules. Jacob was quick to point out, however, that Safari scrolls much faster than Chimera, and went back and forward much more quickly.

<whine>
Blah, so it’s really cold right now. I’ve cranked the heat up in the house to 72, but the heaters haven’t come on once since I did so and the temperature is hanging aroung 63 in here. Fortunately though, there actually seems to be no wind blowing, so at least the windows aren’t leaking horribly. And I have no firewood.
</whine>

So last week was my first back after vacation. I’d never taken two weeks off before, so it was nice to go home and see my family and friends for Christmas and come back here and lounge around for a week. Two week vacations are nice because while you can just be an amorphous blob that first week, eating whatever holiday goodies are in sight, that second week is boring as hell and you need to get out and do something. For me, it was the other way around.

Shaver‘s been in town for a few days… he came down and watched his Maple Leafs get handily beat by the Bruins. Woo. And the B’s traded John Grahame today, which makes me feel more at ease. It’s too bad things didn’t work out for him, but dear god, I could not handle his jumping while in net.

Whenever Mike’s around, there’s always two things: gluttony and video games. The former was fulfilled (and I mean “filled”) by Shona’s turkey last night and some mango fried rice today. And the latter by Halo. I still die an awful lot, but I am getting better at the finer aspects of the game, namely killing the other people. I even won a couple of games!

Tonight we saw Catch Me If You Can and it was a delightful romp. It had a very Spielbergian feel to it. I read the book about two years ago, and the movie seemed pretty true to it from what I remember. Of course, how much of that is true I’m not so sure.

It’s cold outside.

A lot of noise has been made lately about Apple’s new Safari web browser. Now that I am a member of the club I gave it a spin. It’s a fine browser, although a few things bother me about it (not the least of which is that god damned brushed metal UI… at least you can hack it out. It’s fast, but I really wish they’d turn the status bar on and move the MSN Explorer-like progress bar out of the address bar. I’m definitely in the tabbed-browser-or-something-like-it camp. The browser to me is so much about content delivery that I almost never need to cut-and-paste from one browser window into another and I rarely ever need to see more than one page at a time, although I do often have ten or more pages open, so I find tabs much easier to manage than separate windows. I think if I were ever to use Safari as a serious browser, it’d have to have something like that.

It has been interesting to see a huge backlash against Mozilla and Gecko after the release of Safari. What seems really amazing, though, is that a lot of these Mozilla guys aren’t really defending Gecko. Yes, it’s the most standards-compliant browser out there and can render some hideously laid out pages, but it takes forever to start up and users megs and megs and megs of memory.

Like Konqueror Safari is based on KHTML, and while everyone hailed its quickness before, its rendering was crap. These days, though, it probably renders more sites correctly than incorrectly, and they’re working hard on it. I think we may find that KHTML is the layout engine of choice as a middle ground between performance and proper layout and rendering for future open source (and perhaps some commercial) browsers. The GNOME folks may need to be dragged kicking and screaming, however.

We’ve been getting hit with a nor’easter the last couple of days… (Can’t say “northeaster”, there’s no time!) It rained pretty steadily all day until it turned into snow around 11 pm or so.

Tonight Nat had a dinner party:

If you work there will be cupcakes

We played mafia. I was mafia the first game with Taylor and Veanne and we kicked butt. We won without losing a single person. After that I was innocent and got killed a lot because I played every game differently and no one could get a good read on me. I guess I gave it away pretty badly the first game, but I still lived.

GO BUCKS

A hell of a game. That’s all I can say.

(fuck michigan)