Zach was nice enough to find this wonderful image for me again. It's impressive.

Living the Middle Class Dream

Shona and I went out and spent way too much on a bed. It's going to look so out of place in our bedroom. A behemoth of dark hardwood beauty in the middle of a collection of ten dollar college furniture. As I said to Shaver, somewhat akin to building a victorian mansion in a trailer park. We'll probably have to buy newer furniture for the rest of the bedroom over time, just to keep the dressers from panhandling every time we get out of bed.

The Fritz Chip

Great Short Story. A must-read for all you hax0rs out there.

Bringing Pretty Fonts To A Theatre Near You

I rest my case. Or, I try to. Those are the sticking points. I don't think I'm over extending myself there at all.

This is just gorgeous and I suspect it's more than just screenshot-ware. The gtk2 code is coming together, slowly but surely.

Deepest Apologies

I can't believe how long it's been since I updated this thing. I'm afraid of vanishing off of Federico's page so I had better write something.

I was on vacation all of last week, not really reading email, but kind of reading it anyway. Definitely not doing work-related things, that's for sure. Shona and I visited Syracuse and met up with old friends for a couple of days then spent a night at her Mom's summer home. It's on a lake that's up north of Syracuse in the middle of nowhere. From there it was off to Toronto for a couple of days where we didn't get to see nearly enough of Mike or Tyla. We got to see Graydon and Frances, which is always a pleasure. (Hey, Frances likes Jerk City, just like me. I can almost hear Ryan saying "STILL NOT FUNNY.")

Work Work Work

Now that I'm back, it's back to work. Hacked on a lot of Red Hat packaging issues. The package that's in rawhide is starting to shape up nicely. I still need to whip up some basic theme changes for at least the browser component. I get to explore the wonderful world of Mozilla themes now. (Yay!) There don't seem to be a lot of docs out there, other than the themes themselves. (I'm not surprised. This is the Mozilla project, after all.) I would love it if some nice person would point me in the right direction, though.

Hopefully I'll get a little time this week to hack on some more gtk2 related items. The Sun guys have put together a working plugin patch which is one of the last really big components that needs to be done. I'm going to try to review it this week so we can stuff it into the tree.

Then of course, there's always the Xft work. It's looking more and more like getting this done isn't going to be so much of a problem of writing code, but convincing the powers that be that it's OK to check it in, even though it has very little impact on the existing code base.

Heavy Breathing

Managed to get a little exercise yesterday. Jacob and I went out riding and had a great time. Well, almost. I got a cramp at the beginning of the ride and it haunted me for the rest of the time I was on the bike. I kept having to stop and hold my side like a fucking idiot.

Then we went and got good BBQ and went to see a cheesy movie. (I'm totally buying the soundtrack.)

Grandstanding

I like how this article uses the phrase 'acknowledged atheist' like it was 'acknowledged child molestor'. Do you ever see 'acknowledged christian' or 'acknowledged jew' in the news? Only one more step and they will be using the word 'admitted'. Oh, wait. Too late.

They should make them there atheists wear some kind of identifier so you can tell them apart. Like a badge on their sleeve or something. Something like a no smoking sign but with a big 'G' in the center.

[...]

Featureset

Mozilla, now with amazing Text Blocking Technology(tm). Mix this with our popup blocking and image blocking and you can enjoy the Internet in a completely content-free environment.

Exertion

The weather for the last couple of weeks has been terrible. It's been way to hot to go riding. Finally, today, I made some time and it was cool enough for me to go out. I had a decent ride but I think my back tire needs a little air. I kept feeling rocks against the rim.

Oppression

I really wish I could view all the content on the Internet. Sadly, I live in the United States and there are severe penalties for learning and exploring and expressing one's self. Lucky for the rest of the world, there's still hope.

Burn Out

I got a touch of Xft hacking in today. I've got a window that comes up now, although text isn't rendered. Some text measurement is in place so tables are sized properly. I'll try to get all the measurement bits in place tomorrow and re-merge with the tip since a whole mess of code landed right in the middle of what I'm working on. Yay. Next stop, conflict city.

I merged the native gtk theme code from the Mozilla tip back into the 1.0 branch in a patch and I've included it in the latest Red Hat rpm for our next beta. It seems really stable and Mozilla looks a little better integrated than before. At the the scrollbars are consistent. It's a credit to bryner's work. He's done a great job.

I also got some time to work with one of the nice Sun engineers on the 4.x plugin integration with the gtk2 builds. I promise that I'll write a diary entry that both describes gtk2's new focus mechanisms (surprise, it's not what you expect!) and what we have to do to get both the JVM and 4.x plugins like flash working in the build. It will make your head explode. Actually, I hope it makes the heads of the macromedia folks and the sun folks explode. (A man can dream, can't he?)

We've got a plan that as ugly as it is is probably going to work and he's going to go off and implement it. I can't wait to link to the code from here.

Food and Friends

Tonight Shona and I went over to Joe and Jacob's place. We made burgers. We sat around and told tall tales and traded stories of wasted youth. Then we watched Amelie, which I had never seen. It was amazing and removed the bad taste of my previous movie experience from my pallet. Now I understand why people were so enamored with it.

Intellectual Masturbation

Recently, I finished a book that I've been working on for a while. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. The writing style was jarring and amazing at the same time. I really wish that I spoke Spanish so that I could have understood more of it. It was also, by any measure, the most violent book I've ever read. So, if you enjoy good writing about troublesome subjects, it's a good read.

When Phil heard that I had not read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius he thrust the book into my hands as if it were the bible and he was some sort of christian missionary discovering a man who has never heard the word. Last night at two in the morning I read the introduction and the preface and it's pretty amazing so far. The writing style is wonderful.

I could have written this, even though I swear I didn't.

Today Ryan came over and brought gold with him. Pure gold. Shaulin Soccer, the movie. As I described it to Zach and Phil, it's like The Matrix meets really bad deoderant commercials meets bruce lee meets any random sports movie. You must find it and watch it. Ryan had five copies with him that he dredged Chinatown to find so I suspect that our friends are in for some pleasant surprises.

And now it's midnight and I've exposed myself to what is possibly one of the worst movies of all time. Dick. Put his movie on your list if you want to drive guests from your house or remove pests from your garden. OK. It's not all that bad. There are some choice moments provided by the magic of Bruce McCulloch and Will Farrell but that's about it. And of course, Dave Foley who can do no wrong. But other than that, it's pretty much crap. How can you take a large number of really great actors like this and create poop? It's pretty quite stunning. Did I mention the entirely predictable Dick jokes?

On to the good stuff. I spent a lot of the last couple days hacking on Xft. I've got things refactored so the core code is rendering again. Seems to work the same way that it did before, which is as I hoped. The Xft code is coming along now that the core code has been refactored.