New job – working at the OSAF

Posted by rae in Reid
at 3:21 pm on Monday, 28 November 2005

It’s been in the works for a little while, but now it’s official. I start work at the Open Source Applications Foundation next week. I will fly out to San Fransisco on Sunday to spend some time getting up to speed, and then return home to my coding dungeon to work on Chandler, whose current incarnation is an open source iCal replacement (plus much more!). Feel free to grab the latest version!

Chandler is a Python app that uses wxWidgets via a python wrapper called wxPython. The OSAF has a Wiki with much more information for you to browse. Take a look at a screenshot I just took of a development build I did. The UI has really improved recently.

I will be working with a very talented group of people, including Philippe Bossut, whom I have known for several years now, thanks to his work on Live Picture, which my then-employer, MGI Software, bought. Although we didn’t end up using the Live Picture code for the PhotoSuite project, I joined the LP-Group mailing list, where I got to know Philippe and other members of the Live Picture community. It’s great to be finally, actually working with Philippe.

It’s an incredible kick to be working on Free Software (Chandler is available under the GPL, version 2). Given the licensing, it’s too bad the OSAF isn’t called the Free Software Applications Foundation, but then I can see how that might easily get confused with the Free Software Foundation. :-)

I can talk all about what I’m doing… where the code is going… anything! It’s very liberating after working “under wraps” for so many years.

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Laptops

Posted by rae in Reid, hardware
at 1:40 pm on Thursday, 24 November 2005

image by oliver regelmann
I am getting a new laptop, which I will need for work. However, there are several factors that complicate the decision as to which one to get. First of all, Apple is getting close to revving their laptops to use Intel processors, so buying one just before that seems foolish. Ameleiorating that, however, is the fact that Intel-only apps are a long way off, and frankly the Intel machines will be running a lot of software under emulation for a long time to come.

A bonus on the Apple laptop side is that I have a developer hardware discount (on *one* purchase) that expires un April 2006. So if Intel PowerBooks come out in June, I would be a bit SOL.

Alternatively, I am looking at PC laptops. At first I was looking at all the normal things: screen size, disk space, CPU speed, grephics, etc. But then I realized I would probably wnt to run Linux on this thing. So I started looking around for lists of Linux-friendly laptops and found TuxMobil.

But *then*… I ran across a mention of Tablet PC’s. I realized that ya, since I was getting a laptop, why not a tablet? I’ve always wanted to run Alias SketchBook pro the way it was meant to be run. But still, I want Linux to be available (dual-boot).

So now I am down to looking for Linux Tablet PCs. A rare breed, indeed.

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Damn, I’m getting a cold

Posted by rae in Reid
at 4:17 am on Thursday, 24 November 2005

Today I started to get stuffed up in the head.

Bleaugh.

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Google Movies

Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net
at 11:55 am on Wednesday, 9 November 2005

google movies
click for larger version
I was trying out Google’s home page when I noticed they had something called “Movies”. I checked it out and found two interesting links: movie theatres near my house and movies showing near my house (it’s the same info, sorted by movie instead of theatre.

For our movie planning, we’ve been using Eye’s film listings, but maybe next time we’ll give Google a shot. They let you add reviews and stuff, too. No they don’t; they collect reviews from various film critics on the ‘Net and translate them all to X-out-of-five-star-ratings.

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Tire shredded on highway 401 at 100 km/h

Posted by rae in Reid, family, hardware
at 11:59 am on Monday, 7 November 2005

My back-left tire shredded itself while I was driving on the 401 two hours ago. The car’s in the shop and my day remains pretty much on schedule, strangely enough. It helps that I took today off to go to court, drive someone to the airport and go get new tires!

I made it to court 30 minutes after I had to pull over on the 401, so that worked out. As a bonus, my ticket was withdrawn, so I basically got off. Woo.

Now I wait to see if the garage we use can slap on a temporary tire so I can (a) drive someone to the airport around 1pm, and (b) drive out to Pickering to get our new tires put on the car!

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Sheeeee’s back!

Posted by rae in family, web site
at 1:35 am on Sunday, 6 November 2005

Luisa.org is back up and running, so feel free to go back to reading Luisa’s blog as often as you used to.

It turned out that because the domain had expired, we were unable to transfer the domain to a new provider, so we ended up paying “lowcostcomains” $22 instead of using Domainsatcost for $13! Grrrr. They’re not getting any more business from us.. unless I screw up again!

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What’s on My Bookshelf

Posted by rae in Reid
at 2:23 am on Friday, 4 November 2005

http://pics.tnir.org/rae/2005/2005-11-03-bookshelf-small.jpg

I was rearranging my bookshelf just now, and noticed a definite trend. In days gone by my “main” shelf (the one closest to eye level) would be full of books about Cocoa programming and OpenGL. These days it’s more full of web technology books.

I wouldn’t say it’s an alarming trend, or even a surprising one, just one I didn’t notice until today.

There are still a few straight programming texts at the bottom of the picture (which is the left end of the shelf), and there’s a Gimp book, which doesn’t quite fit in (it would go better with the QT book on the shelf above it).

You can see the teeny-tiny VBScript reference I’ve used recently on a project for which I was expecting to use PHP and Perl. Learning that has been.. an experience. :-) I highly recommend the Rails book. It’s one of two out there I think. And Ruby is the language de jour (right Parki?). Together, they are taking the internet by storm, waving the banner of “Web2.0″ hither and yon.

Okay, can you tell I’m typing to fill the space to the right of this image? If I don’t it will hang down into the next article. I *could* make it smaller, but then you wouldn’t be able to read the titles very well, would you?

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luisa.org is down for a bit

Posted by rae in family, web site
at 7:34 pm on Thursday, 3 November 2005

Turns out we let it expire! I am going to try to transfer it from LowCostDomains over to DomainsAtCost as recommended by Peter.

Boy, those sure are imaginitive names, eh?

technorati tags: , , ,

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Using Flock to post to my blog

Posted by rae in software, web site
at 2:45 pm on Thursday, 3 November 2005

Flock screenshot

I’m going to try using flock to post to my blog. Apparently it uses deli.cio.us tags, and lets you edit in a WYSIWYG way. i’m not sure about image though.

Ah, yes, you actually can wrap your text around images. Excellent.

Flickr Photo The screenshot to the right shows the advanced editing of links. There are also similar editing panels for images (which is how I got the text to wrap to the left of the image).

Flock has a built-in Flickr browser, allowing drag-and-drop placement of images from Flickr, which is how I got these screenshots into the posting. The screenshot above shows the standard “Flock” toolbar (which Flock calls “topbar”), and here you can see the “Flickr” toolbar.

Oh, in case you didn’t follow the link above, Flock is primarily a web browser, but with a definite emphasis on what is being called “social software”, which means sharing of links, blog postings, etc. It is only a “developer preview”, which means it isn’t really ready for most users just yet, but I have to say it looks very cool to me.

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