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Week 13 Blather

Thursday, 30 March 2006  |  scott wheeler

So, in typical blog-o-riffic fashion, since I seem to be back in the world of the blogging, here I go with a set of largely unrelated KDE/geek-ish notes:

  • Have a HDD about to die. 200 GB. Mostly media. Doing a bad cluster scan on it took about 18 hours. At then end what did I know? That the files that I already couldn't read are corrupted. Woohoo.
  • I've taken three days off just to relax, watch a few movies, do a bit of coding. First time I've used vacation days for such in a long time.
  • Another thing that I haven't done in a while -- just picked something annoying me and fixed it. I've hated it that every time I go to empty the trash on my desktop that the right mouse menu takes like half a second to come up, so I implemented menu caching and preloading. Seems to work well; we'll see if I can get it into the (frozen) 3.5 branch.
  • The kde-usability list seems to be on the mend. There's been a concerted effort in the last couple of weeks to try to give the list a bit of direction (and less of a comment box / peanut gallery) and it seems to be working a little. Let's hope for the best. I've written up some guidelines and run them by the usability folks, and those will probably go live in the next couple of days.
  • I've moved the whiteboard back into the livingroom. Yes, I own a 90 cm x 120 cm whiteboard. And it's now in my living room again. I've been coding on a few prototype sorts of things that will probably at some point find their way into KDE and sometimes you just need space for sketching and I'm definitely not a UML man.
  • During the time off I watched a few films. Crash was disappointing; it helped to once again invalidate the Oscars in my view. It's a collection of semi-contrived racial memes with a conflict, transposition, redemption, rinse, repeat cycle to it. Afterwards I watched Bulworth again for the first time in years; much better commentary on race and politics in the US and still one of my favorite films. Jackie Brown disappointing too, but mostly because I'd seen all of Tarantino's other films.

This concludes the test of the emergency blather system. Had this been an actual emergency, well, you hopefully wouldn't be reading my blog. ;-)