Jesse Ross | jesseross.com

One of the core GNUstep developers, Richard Frith-Macdonald, posted a great recap of the entire FOSDEM from the GNUstep perspective. It’s a great, very accurate read, and, as my Etoile-buddy Nicolas says: “it makes you want to go to the fosdem :)”.

Well, this weekend we released the Etoile LiveCD, version 0.2 Developer Preview. There are an insane amount of bugs, and we were trying to keep it somewhat hush-hush until we had time to fix them all. However, the news got posted to OSNews.com, and the feedback was actually predominantly positive. My favorite comment was this one:

Just browsing the screenshots made me more excited than I’ve been for a while about unix desktops.

I do believe exciting times are ahead for the Etoile team ;)

Captions to come soon…

And check out Gürken’s photos for other images, including the GNUstepper Dinner.

Tomorrow I fly out to Belgium, but when I get there, I will have lost almost a complete day. Still, I’m hella excited!

We in the Etoile project have been having some good conversations bouncing around via email. Recently, Nicolas, one of the project maintainers, summed up the goals of the project in a very nice little list. For those interested in such things, here is his description:

The goals are a small, easy to use, ergonomic, innovative desktop, components based, focusing on communication/collaboration and on projects.

The really interesting part of this from my perspective is the emphasis communication/collaboration and the use of projects. Let me elaborate with some more words from Nicolas:

- communication/collaboration: we should have services/frameworks so that applications and users can communicate easily with other users — and thus collaborate. The idea here is to use something over Jabber for that. Whiteboard, shared file space, etc. Lots to do, but the jabber protocol is extensible, and I believe the recently committed jabber code will help us here.

- projects: the general idea of projects is persistence — eg, group your work environment into one project, close it, open it again days later to find it as you left it. How to achieve that ? Well, we have the Service component that is planned to evolve in order to manage that, by restarting applications when needed, etc. Technically, I think we’d store in a hidden folder some metadatas (list of apps, documents opened, positions of the windows..), and the filemanager would recognize those and then ask the Service daemon to restart a project. The applications would in turn need to answer to a few messages, like sending back their list of opened documents, knowing how to act on that information to reopen the documents, etc. Ideally most of the work would be done via a NSDocument subclass (so that applications would not need to do much themselves).

I think we’ve got some really fun stuff planned. FOSDEM promises to get a lot of stuff clarified, simply because we’ll all be in the same place at the same time, for once. I’m really excited to see where we’re at in the next month or so.

The full email with all the details is available here.

My brother is a big tattoo fiend. I’m not sure how many he has, but it’s more than I have. I can count at least 4 from memory, and I’m sure there are more. At any rate, he asked me about looking into prices on tattoo gun, as he wants to get into it. I had actually been looking at them too, as I think it could be a fun thing to know how to do (you know, for when this Internet fad dies down).

I know I want to get at least one more tattoo, and I’ve been pretty committed to the idea for about 3 years now, so I’m fairly certain that the tattoo that I want is something that I would be happy with for the rest of my life. The question is this: do I want to try to learn how to tattoo on myself? I’m not sure I could go through with that, but, honestly, I trust myself a hell of a lot more than I trust anyone else to mark up my body.

Also, I bet my brother would let me practice on him… ;)

A couple of swanky shots of Sevnthsin Internation Headquarters… man do I ever like coming to this space every day…

So, I discovered as of late that I’ve been added to a bunch of MN tech blog feeds. That means that people are probably subscribed to them (otherwise why would they have made them), and they’re looking for all the latest and greatest in tech news in the frozen midwest.

Well, sorry to disappoint, but you’re going to get me in the mix too.

Yes, I may write about some tech stuff. But I also rant about sappy shit like love. Which is the topic of tonight’s post.

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. I’m feeling pretty meh about the whole thing. The only redeeming feature about tomorrow is the fact that Ali gets to have a big party at school… and that I am guaranteed to get at least one Valentine card (from her, of course). I guess it’s expected for single bloggers to bitch about tomorrow (hence groups like this), but I’m not really that bitter. Sure, I would love to have someone to share dinner with tomorrow, but I haven’t decided if replacing all my free time with wooing attempts on the phone late into the night is really worth the trade.

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