Monday, March 28, 2005

Update or not update, that is the question

Update or not update, that is the question
It's been a long time since I updated my blog, mainly by lack of time and envy. So, what happened during the past 4 months :
Sport : I'm continuing jogging each week (my doctor gave me some advices to improve my training). I'm still a little frustrated to not be able to go very fast to keep my hearbeat low and prevent any problem but it isn't that bad anyway. Taichi and Chikong lessons are still very interesting, even if I had to drop some sessions last quarter :(
Internet : I've recently discovered (thanks to my boss, FredL) http://del.icio.us/, a social bookmarking website. It allows you to tag your bookmarks, discover bookmarks with same tags by other people, subscribe to other people bookmarks and see what are the most recent or popular bookmarks in the system. Web interfaces is quite simple but many web API are available and nice apps are emerging (still no epiphany plugin yet...). Another discovery in the taxonomy world is Flickr. They were able to hook me (their web interface is really nice, with javascript so well integrated you don't notice it, for renaming photos, for instance). I started to upload some of my photos there and I'm not sure if I'll switch my photo hosting there. I planned to (using a paid account) but with Yahoo buying Flickr, I'm not sure it is such a good idea now, so I'll wait a little until I make my decision.
Work : we are currently finalising next Mdk release, with GNOME 2.8 (no need to complain, many people did and I explained why we chose it on cooker mailing list). With this release, we started our slow transition from Debian menu system to XDG menu system, at least in GNOME and KDE. Since GNOME implementation wasn't complete, I wrote support for Layout optional part (which was integrated in HEAD cvs by Mark, for GNOME 2.12) and Laurent finished KDE implementation. Although tricky, it was quite interesting, mainly because we both discovered errors in both implementations, due to difference in understanding the spec. Hopefully, working in near offices helped in that case (it was just a matter of "hey, I tested that but I don't get the same result in GNOME and KDE"). We still need to write testcases but it looks promising. Also as part of next Mdk release, I had to put Firefox as default browser and I was (well, it still is) a pain to get it working correctly in a Linux distribution environment (Debian dudes are doing a great job fixing it but more work is still needed).