Crap, it's been way too long since I've updated this page. OK,
what's been going on?
Mozilla:
For the most part I've been working on the 1.0
release. We're tagged and we're about ready to bag. I've
been working on this thing for 4 years now and I think we're
finally ready to cross this threshold. Our browser does in fact
suck less. Less than what, I'm not sure, but I use it quite
happily every day.
I've also managed to get a little bit of gtk2 work done on the
side. The clipboard does seem to function now, which is good.
Next come drag and drop and anti aliased text, not necessarily in
that order. It's getting more and more usable. The bug
list is still pretty long but many of the things there aren't
too painful. i18n text input still scares the dickens out of me.
I might go down to North Carolina next week and work a bit with
Owen and Havoc and they might be able to explain some of the
XIM-fu to me.
My job role has changed at bit at Red Hat. For a while I was
doing high level OS customer support and doing Mozilla work for
only when I had spare time. Now I've been moved back into the
desktop group in order to be able to concentrate on finishing up
important Mozilla features. The first thing I am going to work on
is getting Mozilla working with Xft2. Keith is about ready to release independent versions
of both fontconfig and Xft2 which means that we can build Mozilla
against those versions independent of what X version a user might
have installed on their system.
Travelling:
I've had my new car for just over a year and it's already got over
20,000 miles on it. That's pretty scary for a person who doesn't
have to travel to work and doesn't do a lot of driving in town. I
guess I go on a lot of trips. I was trying to figure it out.
I've been to Montreal a few times, to Syracuse quite a few, I go
to Connecticut to see friends on a regular basis and I've taken
the car down the east coast on a number of occasions. Is highway
driving considered bad or good on a car with high milage? I can
never remember.
On that note, though, I spent a lot of last week away from home.
I decided to help a friend move out of Boston. We moved him out
of his apartment in Boston, drove down to Providence to get some
more stuff out of storage and then drove on to New York, where he
just got an apartment. After a short nap at a relative's place,
we proceeded to unload the truck at his new place. I still can't
believe that we managed to get that entire mattress into the
elevator. It was frigging huge.
After that was done I decided to go down to visit Phil who was moving out of
his place in South Jersey and moving to Boston. Instead of
carrying the combined weight of a large automobile in boxes, I
watched the people he had hired slowly empty his apartment of his
belongings. Once they had finally completed their assigned task,
Phil and I drove back to Boston. His cat, while being mighty
cute, doesn't understand that it's unwise to stand in someone's
lap when they are driving down the highway at 70 miles an hour.
Other Stuff:
I recently had to have a recent copy of Windows on a machine at
home so that I could use a Windows tool. So, I went out and
bought a copy of XP from the Evil Empire, via one of its vassals. It installed pretty
easily, which was nice. It works better on my laptop than
Windows98 did which is a good sign. It's pretty obvious that they
spent a lot of time working on startup and shutdown time. Plus,
the hibernate and multi-user features are nice as well. I wish we
were there.
I also secretly want to play with .NET and see if I can get Mono up and running. All of
that is a lot easier to do under XP than other operating systems
at the moment.
I've been told that the kernel has some support for hibernation
but since you essentially have to change every single driver to
save its state, it would be a lot of work. It would be nice to
have for Linux, though. But of course, my X server and my
wireless card have to figure out how to come back from a suspend
first. That's the most elementary of operations, right? Right.
Transportation:
I recently started looking at Motorcycles that I can't afford. I
didn't know that Honda was still making a CB750.
My dad had one of those when I was a good bit younger. I loved
that bike because it was a great balance between power and
usability. Of course, his was a model from 1976 and this is 2002.
Still, that particular bike hasn't changed much over the years.
It still has a rear drum brake and looks like it still has carbs
instead of fuel injection. It isn't a crotch rocket and it's not
a touring bike. It's somewhere in between. They also make a
smaller version of the Nighthark that's only a 250
CC version. Looks like it might be nice for putting around
town on. And they are both surprisingly cheap. Of course, I
can't afford either of them right now, so I shouldn't even be
looking. Maybe I should go to a dealership and see if I can take
one of them out for a test ride anyway.