Sun Vendor Patches
Glynn says:
I think I may have created the first vendor patch against the new file chooser. Fear me.
Hmm, I wonder what it does. Maybe it fades the dialog to black and back again using their secret patented algorithm when the user changes location.
Also Hubert has ZeroConf name lookup working. I think I'll poke him for information and use it at home, my ADSL router will give out IPs via DHCP but won't let me assign names to the mac addresses, and I don't really have a server, just a laptop and a desktop. Multi-cast DNS appears to be the solution to my naming problem and has been on my To Do list for a long time.
NP: From The Choirgirl Hotel, Tori Amos. This is my Tori Amos mega-minidisc. :)
Give Me Myself Again
The last few weeks have been totally mad: wedding planning is getting more intense with only 11 calendar weeks left. We've been spending every evening this week planning the gift list as we should send it off this weekend, and last week I even managed to have an opinion on flowers — a decisive one no less. Wedding list planning started out as a fun task (essentially, picking your own presents) and started turning into a task when we had to make sure there is a good range of gifts available for everyone and we've covered everything. Didn't add a DVD recorder for the TV, but we did add a cute Sony Hi-Fi for the bedroom.
Add in the stress from work and I'm 100% knackered. In a typical twist of reality, the espresso coffee I bought yesterday wasn't ground fine enough and makes an espresso which appear to be the mutant love-child between a weak espresso and a small cappuccino: it takes like a small strong coffee with a crema which is more like foam. I would say "what next", but that feels like tempting fate.
NP: Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos. Though anyone who has the album and was reading chronologically probably knew that already...
Give Me Pain
Work has been... interesting of late (as in "may you live in interesting times"). We have the usual vital deadline in 3 weeks time, a crack-ridden compiler suite from a new embedded processor (a 16/32-bit smart card processor by Infineon), software which used to work and is now for some reason broken, and the office tension is slowly creeping up.
Before this damn chip turned up I was assigned to personally interesting work: document our Java smartcard code, critique and write use cases for an Eclipse plugin we've written, and fix the documentation system. This last one is so interesting to me that I've been hacking on it every day this week so far on the commute, and it is starting to really kick arse.
Our tools parse the code and produce simple XML documents for each file with the (Javadoc-inspired) documentation comments in, which we used to process into HTML with XSLT. This was fine, but now I'm transforming the XML into a DocBook <refentry> and XIncluding it into a master DocBook <book>. A couple of Python scripts parse the includes, generate the intermediate <chapter> files and Make dependencies do their magic and glue it all together. Hopefully when I've battled with Make to my satisfaction, instead of having an API Reference in HTML, the programming guides in LaTeX, and all out of date, we'll have everything in DocBook. I'm using the gtk-doc DocBook customisation layer as it looks far nicer and also generates a DevHelp file for me, so I must file patches with my changes (so far tooltips on the navigation buttons).
Of course, in 45-minutes time I'll be sitting in front of brian, one of the Windows boxes, wondering why the Tasking post-locator says that the ELF file generated by the Tasking linker is corrupt...
Give Me Life
Congratulations Jeff and Pipka on your engagement!
It sounds like your proposal was a lot smoother than my own. We were in Rome over Easter, and our hotel (in the old part of the city) had a wonderful view over the city from the roof terrace. I was forming grand plans of proposing up on the terrace, with the city lights and fine wine... Then it turns a bit to cold to sit outside at 11pm and our hotel didn't sell wine, only small cans of beer. Not quite the vision I had, but a million things could have ruined the vision (someone else on the terrace for example). However, everything from that point went to plan and I still find myself grinning uncontrollably when I realise that in under 3 months we'll be Mr and Mrs!
