This is so true.. Today on the other hand I wrote a few patches for alacarte and deskbar. It seems that quite a few modules are missing the magic values in their .desktop files which Bug Buddy needs to send bugs to the right place. See #348827 for details. Perhaps this should be the next GNOME goal? (Doh. I alway forget to publish my blog entries with Wordpress. So this was supposed to appear yesterday.)

Somebody on desktop-devel-list asked for a “gconf-diff” which should tell them the settings they have in gconf that are different to the defaults. So I wrote it, you can get it in the list archives or by following this link: gconf-diff.py. As well as giving the keys that are different it also gives keys without a matching schema. I think this should also be helpful with troubleshooting upgrades and the like.

I have just submitted by first research paper to a leading networks conference. I wish I could have been in Boston but alas there was no time to spare with this deadline. Now i’m going to get some sleep.

Today I started reading High Fidelity and am having trouble putting it down. So far I have read three other of Hornby’s novels: About a Boy, How to Be Good and A Long Way Down (in that order). And to be honest after the insightful intrigue of the former I found the other two lacking in anything of any interest. A Long Way Down was massively predictable and a tad morbidly bland and How to Be Good failed to say anything interesting, at all. Ever. A couple of weekends ago I was visited by some close friends from Cambridge, Steve and Noirin, and we did the usual Berlin things. Sunday Fr hst ck, shopping, eating ice cream and a helluvalot of walking. We did however see Thankyou For Smoking at the Original Version cinema at the Sony Center. It was witty and clever and all the things a good film should be. Noirin commented afterwards that in the whole film that you don’t see anybody smoking in the whole thing. I’m looking forward to Starter for Ten. I doubt anyone outside the UK will really grok a film about a cult television series (if Countdown is cult, University Challenge must be up there with the Today Programme.) (Pardon the cheesy pun on the name of a chain of book shops long since subsumed into the now ubiquitous Borders.)

Yesterday myself and a work colleague went to the Olympic Stadium here in Berlin to see Hertha play Hannover in the Bundesleague. Since I’d never been to a football match before I wasn’t really sure what to expect. When we got onto the S-Bahn the train was full of optimistic fans drinking beer and rehearsing their football chants. Once we had found our seats in the overwhelmingly agoraphobic stadium we got to see quite a lot of action, in fact Hertha scored 4 goals to, uhm, Hannover’s, nil point. By the third goal my initial anticipation and scepticism had been replaced by an optimistic tension as I attently tracked the ball around the somewhat distant field. Ready to cheer along with the rest of the Hertha fans who surrounded us. Once the game was over we were submerged in the stream of blue and white as it left the stadium, their expectant optimism happily satiated. I think I now have some idea of what it feels like to be a football fan.

Just in case you missed it before…Fernando Herrera and Lorenzo Gil came up with a lovely bit of code that allows the parts of the GNOME experience written in Python to send traces via bug-buddy when something goes wrong. Pessulus will soon have this and i’m working on doing it for Deskbar. Update: Forgot the link to the code…bug-buddy-integration.py.

This weekend was quite a social razzmatazz. On Saturday night myself and two of the other interns I share an office with went to see the Laugh Olympics (they don’t appear to have a website) an English speaking improvisation show. In which the “Eastside” compete against their “Westside” counterparts in a series of improvisation sketches. The referee seeks various suggestions from the audience that are then incorporated into the act, all vaguely reminiscent of Radio 4 panel games. It was a fantastic experience (and very good value too, just 5), I intend to insist on taking everyone who comes to visit me to see it. It is on every Saturday, 9pm just off Rosenthaler Str. Full details can be found in the July edition of New Berlin Magazine. On Sunday we went to see Pirates of the Carribean at the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz. It was rubbish. Don’t bother. It was just a setup for the third movie, very Matrixesque. After the film I cheered myself up by eating a Teutonic D ner, much much nicer than the British variety. And much much cheaper too ( 1.30- 2.80).