Free Food (for Cowboys)

In celebration of cedar season here in Austin I bring you Cedar: The Plague of Trees. If I’m a little slow in responding to people or processing patches for the next few days it’s only because I can hardly move.

I’ve spent the last few weeks working very hard on getting F-Spot into a very usable state. In an attempt to get all the new code out to the masses and tested I’ll be making weekly F-Spot releases for the next few weeks. So it is my great pleasure to announce F-Spot 0.0.6, please check it out.

All the news of the new Novell hires has been very exciting. It is great to see talented people working full time on projects that will help the free desktop mature.

img_6624

Originally uploaded by lewing.

I’m testing the flickr blog posting utilty. I’ve been working a little on integrating the flickr export code I wrote a few months ago into f-spot. Things are coming along nicely but there is still a fairly large amount of work to do. I also started work on a gnome-vfs based export, but ran into several problems with the current gtk-sharp gnome-vfs bindings.

Last night while testing the flickr upload code I managed to reach my free upload limit for the month. That made testing difficult, so I went ahead and paid for a pro account. I’m interested to see how much I’ll end up using it.

I thought that was enough pain for one night but it turns out that was only the beginning. While writting a tests case for one of the gnome-vfs problems I managed to wipe out my public_html directory here on primates. I’m in the process of rebuilding things but please bear with me.

Today I discovered the fun of using Blam! to read CIA RSS feeds. It is a pleasant way to keep track of commits to projects I’m interested in, and I suspect I will be using it a lot in the future. Also today but far away in India Nat and Trow held a beagle hackfest and the results are impressive. The tomboy indexing alone would have made it notable but when you add all the other cool hacks it is positively inspiring. All told it was a very good day for Mono and Gnome so I won’t let the fact that I didn’t make any headway on the TextView problems bring me down.

Evolution 2.0 has finally been released and I’m still alive and passably sane. The actual release was sadly anticlimactic. Something that covered so much time, loss and pain seems like it should end with more than a slightly delayed announcement or two.

I tried out tomboy today, and was happily impressed. Then a little sweet talking from Alex ended up causing me several unproductive hours of bug hunting in Gtk#. Tomorrow I plan to share the pain with Mike.

It was my Mom’s birthday on Saturday so I spent the weekend in College Station visting family. While we where there the town was hit by its second infestation of love bugs this summer. Now even on good days I have a strong distaste for College Station, but if you add thick swarms of mating flies to mix it becomes nigh unbearable. Despite that we managed to have an excellent time celebrating.

Kristy at the pool

While I was there I managed to get a lot of f-spot hacking done at night after everyone had gone to sleep. I polished up the popup preview and added the start of a color correction dialog. Now that the feature list is starting to flesh out I’m getting a better feel for how to structure some of the internals and I’m excited to rework them a bit.

With that in mind try out f-spot 0.0.2

Spent last week in Boston hacking on f-spot and hanging out with the boston crew. Trow and Nat came up with some nice hacks. In a bit of interesting synchronicity Garrett pointed me to Adobe’s XMP a few minutes after Trow asked about embedding RDF into images. XMP looks interesting, the specification looks practical and Adobe is already shipping products that use it. I think I’ll try storing f-spot image versioning in XMP chunks this week to get a better feel for things.

Nat and Trow hacking