15th July 2006
the weekend off
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So GNOME is in the process of migrating to Subversion and the CVS server is now read-only. So the question is, what are you going to do with your weekend off? Perhaps you should consider writing that article for GNOME Journal that you were going to write? If you can't think of a topic, think back to something exciting you saw at GUADEC. It doesn't matter if you're the author or not, get in touch with the author, ask them some questions and write an article (try to avoid doing an interview though, we don't want to go overboard on the interviews). If you're still stuck, here are some topics that might be interesting to write about (straight from my GUADEC programme):
Life (and Work)
Went into the city this avo to do a little bit of shopping. Bought some books, but not some shoes. Had a bit of a wander around the new Borders (bookstore). Messirs Bacon and Love will be happy to know they are well represented in the computing section. The selection of O'Reilly and No Starch books was quite impressive. Did not encounter the GNOME2 book unfortunately.
Having to teach the fundamentals of Linux, UNIX development, vim, Perl (which I don't actually know) and GTK+ to the new hire at work has gotten me thinking. Is there a market for training people who have generic computer science/programming skills as GTK+ programmers, and would you have to give training based on chosen language binding or could it be more high level (eg. I find that I can switch from language to language and still program in GTK+ fairly effectively).
I have also come up with several new reasons to hate Perl (since I'm being forced to write real code in it). My biggest hate in Perl (and ironically the thing my boss loves) is that it is incredibly flexible in what it accepts as valid source code, it not only allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, but hands you a loaded gun. For example, say you're trying to pass an array by reference into a subroutine and that you miss out the \. It quietly accepts this and creates a new empty array inside the subroutine. Or say you (mis-)assumed that cmp was a function, rather than an operator, and as such had given it no left operand. It quite happily accepts this, and returns 0 every time. Basically, it's an entire language full of gotchas, just waiting for you to make a typo and give you no warnings. The other thing I'm finding frustrating is that the Gtk2-Perl documentation doesn't seem to document the prototype of any of its callbacks. You know you need to pass a callback function, but you're not entirely sure what parameters you're passed, or what the order is.
- Kiwi, the Python GUI RAD framework
- something on Maemo
- Glom, the database tool
- Gimmie
- Adding printing support to applications using GTK+ 2.10
- Tiles, as appear in SLED
- Telepathy, the communications framework
- Dtrace
- Orca, the screenreader
- Tinymail, the mail client for small people (gnomes?)
Life (and Work)
Went into the city this avo to do a little bit of shopping. Bought some books, but not some shoes. Had a bit of a wander around the new Borders (bookstore). Messirs Bacon and Love will be happy to know they are well represented in the computing section. The selection of O'Reilly and No Starch books was quite impressive. Did not encounter the GNOME2 book unfortunately.
Having to teach the fundamentals of Linux, UNIX development, vim, Perl (which I don't actually know) and GTK+ to the new hire at work has gotten me thinking. Is there a market for training people who have generic computer science/programming skills as GTK+ programmers, and would you have to give training based on chosen language binding or could it be more high level (eg. I find that I can switch from language to language and still program in GTK+ fairly effectively).
I have also come up with several new reasons to hate Perl (since I'm being forced to write real code in it). My biggest hate in Perl (and ironically the thing my boss loves) is that it is incredibly flexible in what it accepts as valid source code, it not only allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, but hands you a loaded gun. For example, say you're trying to pass an array by reference into a subroutine and that you miss out the \. It quietly accepts this and creates a new empty array inside the subroutine. Or say you (mis-)assumed that cmp was a function, rather than an operator, and as such had given it no left operand. It quite happily accepts this, and returns 0 every time. Basically, it's an entire language full of gotchas, just waiting for you to make a typo and give you no warnings. The other thing I'm finding frustrating is that the Gtk2-Perl documentation doesn't seem to document the prototype of any of its callbacks. You know you need to pass a callback function, but you're not entirely sure what parameters you're passed, or what the order is.
