joe shaw

Hi. I haven’t written in a while.

At the beginning of the month I moved to my new apartment in Inman Square.

85 tremont

The place is rad. It’s the second and third floor of a pretty typical Cambridge house. And fortunately the old landlord lived in my unit, so it’s in pretty good shape. Nice wide pine floors, a huge kitchen, free laundry in the basement. I’m very happy with the results. And the downstairs neighbors are pretty cool too.

The pictures don’t really do a good job of capturing the rooms, because I wasn’t using my widest lens. It was packed away in some box at the time.

Speaking of which, I’m very slowly unpacking. I still haven’t unpacked any of my books, and my office is a complete and total mess, but other than that things are coming together. I even have some artwork up on the walls now. I figure I’ll probably be all settled just before it’s time to move out.

On the hacking front, the last couple of days I’ve been working on moving Dashboard over to using Beagle.

rendering using beagle tiles

The move removes a crap ton of code, especially the complicated mess in the engine and basically makes it a pretty dumb shell around the beagle stuff. It’s not committed yet (and probably won’t be for a while) because it’s not even close to being functionally equivalent to the old Dashboard. For example, one of the biggest benefits of Dashboard — cluechaining — is missing because we don’t have the graphing or the associations in Beagle yet. Not to mention a lot of the Dashboard backends will need to be ported to be Beagle drivers (things like the FOAF backend, the RSS backend, etc.). Those are pretty easy projects so I hope people pick them up.

So while I wait for some of that stuff to stablize (or at least wait until Trow gets back to town so I can talk to him about implementing it), I’ve switched my focus to getting the focus tracking down in Dashboard. Based on some of Nat’s hacking on Timeline, I think we’re going to do all the focus tracking in Dashboard itself and just keep around some older cluepackets. This will make the Dashboard frontends a lot simpler since they’ll only need to be concerned with sending cluepackets. This new code uses libwnck though, so we don’t need to poll every couple of seconds.