I spent a lot of the weekend hanging out in Syracuse. I spent a little time visiting with friends but I spent most of my time hanging out in my mother-in-law's upstairs bedroom hacking on a laptop. I managed to kill a couple of the bugs on the the list. Grabs are working and the cursor is changing as it should be. However, I did find a nasty limitation in the implementation of grabs in Gtk+. Hopefully Owen will find a resolution.

It's the end of January. It's 64F out in Boston. Quick, someone reboot the Earth! It's broken!

Yesterday, Keith Packard and I sat down for about 10 hours or so and hacked out a demo of Mozilla using Xft and his new fontconfig code. We managed to get to the point where we could take a screenshot but I wouldn't actually use the patch for real. It's quite a hack.

Life has been pretty damn quiet as of late. I've been working on the next Mozilla release and random Red Hat things.

The other day I dropped by Wal Mart to try to find gloves since it is winter. Apparently they only carry gloves for people that love bright colors and have very small hands. But, they did have tons of camoflauge jackets. Good to know what's important.

I really liked this passage in a book that I'm reading right now:

Our nation has been blessed with the tradition of a vigorous bar committed to civil liberties for all, regardless of ideology, politics or the nature of the accusation. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow have come to personify this approach. Adams represented the British soldiers who participated in the Boston Massacre; Lincoln and Darrow represented the widest assortment of clients, ranging from corporations to common criminals to the oppressed. It would be a terrible tragedy if we were to surrender this noble tradition to those who are so certain about their ability to discover truth that they become impatient with the often imperfect processes of justice. It was the great judge Learned Hand who once observed that "the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not to sure that it is right."

The book is letters to a young lawyer by Alan Dershowitz.

Last night I went with some friends of mine to the House of Blues in Cambride, had a nice dinner and listened to some excellent live blues music.

I finished reading Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 which I thought was an excellent book. It was published in 1955 but carries echos from the period of 1919-1920 to our current day rhetoric and the so-called War on Terrorism. We should take the chance to learn from that period in our history and not make the same mistakes again. Sometimes, given the type of media coverage that I see I think that we are. John Ashcroft sometimes seems like a perfect stand-in for Mitchell Palmer.

There's an excellent article on salon by David Talbot talking about the use of US firepower over the years and how our current actions look in the light of history. Along with the article there are some excellent response letters as well.

I had forgotten how much I really like Tuesday Night Music Club.

I haven't been doing much other than fixing bugs and working on gtk2 port. over the last few days. Ho, hum. This is the boredom of winter, here at last.