17 mars 2013
At Home
15:03 - Divers
Long time without any activity here, and more generally less time with computers those past months, even though I visited Lyon for the JDLL in November and I was of course present in Brussels for the FOSDEM and the developer experience hackfest that happened just before. (I didn't write about it but it was totally unexpected for me to find myself there with two other motivated devhelp developers, many thanks to Aleksander and Thomas.)
But I am now finally back in action, installed in my new place, and for the occasion here are some pictures, starting perhaps with the most raw moment, after a few weeks:
Walls and flooring removed, October 2012
I kept my other flat for a few months but had to let it go by December, and by chance my new upstairs neighbour offered me her spare bedroom, as well as her attic to store my boxes (thanks Fleur!). Still it kept for longer than expected and I became quite impatient of settling in my new place, and that finally happened ~10 days ago.
Temporary office space
The packing boxes left the attic but most of them are still unopened.
Packing boxes moved to the future living room
The kitchen is almost done, not shown in the picture: a fridge is still missing.
Black and white kitchen
And I have the most fabulous bathroom.
Tetris bathroom
Thanks to my good friend Macha for the architect work she did, it's that nice because she always had the eyes on the smallest details.
3 octobre 2012
bin/recent
11:21 - Code
For quite some time the access to recent files has been put forward in GNOME, it happened even more so in 3.6 with a "Recent Files" view in Files (née Nautilus), that makes use of a new recent files backend in gvfs.
This is all very nice but my daily activities still involve a lot of command line usage, and I didn't find any way to mark as recents the files I receive via mutt, the text files I create in vim, the pictures I resize with ImageMagick, etc. That always bothered me at the moment I wanted to access those files, but then I just copied a copy of the file to a scratch directory I had bookmarked, and went on with my work.
Until yesterday, as I finally decided to fix that, and quickly put together recent, a command line utility that just puts the file it gets as argument in the recent files list. It's very simple, uses GFile and GtkRecentManager, and the code is located there: recent.c. It's so simple I guess many others wrote something similar, but here you have, perhaps it will be useful.
28 septembre 2012
Releases!
20:23 - GNOME
On Wednesday GNOME 3.6 has been released; many thanks to all people involved, this release is definitely a great one. And then today it was my turn to be released, many thanks for the kind words (and phone calls, and visits).
12 août 2012
Esperanzah! 2012
21:28 - Divers
A Coruña, 25 juillet 2012.
À peine atterri du GUADEC, empaqueté un nouveau sac; à peine un détour par Bruxelles, pris un train; à peine arrivé à Floreffe, la vie non-stop, une fantastique équipée, merci toutes, tous.
Mémoires de Radio Esperanzah! 2012
Et puis déjà le retour, à Bruxelles et au travail, entre côtes d'agneau et bord de canal (en hauts), entre zoning industriel et entrepôt désaffecté (en bas), une semaine toute drôle.
Mais pour la terminer, un retour par GNOME, 201ème commit digest et 40 bugs corrigés dans le produit "website".
3 août 2012
GUADEC 2012
9:44 - GNOME
GUADEC is now over but I still have a few long days ahead as I packed a new bag as soon as soon as I got home, this time the direction is Floreffe in the belgian countryside to help in the ephemeral radio station we install every year during the Esperanzah! music festival.
Everything is now ready and we still have a few hours before the doors open so here I am, writing my own take on the time spent in A Coruña.
After an uneventful flight and the preregistration event, we at the release team had a meeting during lunch on Thursday where we discussed our usual stuff, and a little bit about the report we would give during the foundation AGM. It was planned to be the usual report, "we released 3.2 and 3.4, they were on time, we also did this and that…" but we changed it after the many discussions we all had, about Xan and Juan José "a bright future for GNOME" talk, about Benjamin "staring into the abyss" blog post. It seemed like the air was full of expectations regarding the release team, often beyond our actual attributions.
That's why, to go past the informal discussions, we changed our AGM presentation to bring the question upfront, to all foundation members: "what do you expect of the release team?". I am quite happy about the way it went, many opinions were heard during the AGM, even if we had to stop the discussion to leave room to other teams and members.
But we continued gathering feedback and it all fueled the "GNOME OS" BoF on Monday. While the morning was hept on technical grounds (application sandboxing, OSTree…), the afternoon turned into a very interesting conversation on priorities and targets. From form factors we should target (laptops but taking touch into consideration) to core applications, I believe we laid out the foundations for a solid planning. It will now have to be discussed further, and with community members that couldn't attend GUADEC and that BoF. More on that soon, on desktop devel list.
And GUADEC was then fast over, as a all it felt like we started with many doubts but shaked them out and ended with strenghtened confidence in the project, something that will be necessary to keep it going strong.
Others have written about the food, the parties, the games, and all other community bonding moments, I won't repeat team, I share their sentiments, it has been a great event, and I give all my thanks to the organizers and local team, and of course to the foundation who sponsored me, thank you all!
