meta: I have moved my ChangeLog to blogs.gnome.org.

woo: Wii is for Wiictory!!!

elections (board): I am not running for reelection this year. After being on the board for the past five years, I wanted to step down before people start clamoring for term limits.

More seriously, I feel like I have finally accomplished most of what I wanted to get done as a board member (although it took four years longer than I had hoped). I was able to present a clear picture of the financial state of the Foundation at GUADEC this year, and many of the institutional issues we have faced have been resolved. The Foundation is in great shape and it should be fun to be on next year's board. Interest in GNOME is expanding, and there are lots of opportunities for the project everywhere.

Federico did an excellent writeup of what qualifications are important in a successful board member. I only have two minor quibbles with his post. The first is that we can definitely find the money to buy a phone card for board members. I would hate to have concerns about phone bills keep an otherwise excellent candidate off the board.

The second quibble is about his "rock star" comment. I think he is implying that being on the Board requires a definite time commitment. If you don't have the time, you won't be a good board member. People who already are doing a lot for the project (and thus, have earned the coveted "rock star" label) tend to not have spare time. If you do can't make the time for the board, don't run. It's just as simple as that. We need good people with time, energy, and especially passion to be on the board — don't let your label get in the way of running!

Besides, being on the board this upcoming year is the fastest way to "rock star" status. (-:

eleanor: Jesse has been posting baby pictures all week of his new baby. It's time to post a gratuitous baby picture of my own:

Eleanor hearing about Java moving to the GPL

shipping:A few months back, we asked a partner of ours (who will remain nameless) for some test equipment. We wanted to make sure that Fedora worked well on that set of hardware and machines. They didn't arrive for quite some time. Finally, last week, they arrived at the office.

It turns out that the machines had been shipped to the wrong location. Someone had very helpfully packed it up and forwarded them to us. Unfortunately, it seems that they didn't have any packing material at the office it was shipped from. So instead of shipping the machines with styrofoam, or even packing peanuts, they filled the box with leftover pens and harmonicas. Yes, harmonicas. About fifty of them. Keeping the computers safe. Fortunately, the machines were robust enough to survive the trip, but geez, I hope they don't go out to customers like that...

Releases: Fedora Core 6 (zod) was released this week. So I baked a cake:

Kneel before the Zod cake

It was a pretty awesome release. You can read the release announcement here.

I just thought I'd highlight three of my favorites features. First, compiz on aiglx works really well. Soeren made a valiant attempt at taming compiz by getting it to honor many of the metacity settings, as well as by providing a more traditional pager mode. He and Kristian also got X running with aiglx enabled by default, so starting a compositing manager doesn't require an X restart.

Secondly, X will now start without an Xorg.conf file. Adam has been working hard at making X autodetect hardware, and it can now do so on many setups correctly. There are times still when you will need that file, but it is bringing us closer to the day when you won't have to set up X at all.

Finally, if you want to play with Xen, Daniel did a really nice job on virt-manager. It looks slick.

RHEL4 in Fedora

sports: It's really tough to be married to a Mets and Broncos fan...

mail: Two pretty exciting emails caught my eye last week:

Alex Larsson discusses replacing gnome-vfs in glib.

Carl Worth proposes a new tessellator for cairo.

boxes: There is now a North American GNOME Event box! We spent the last couple of weeks putting it together. It was partially used at Siggraph, and now is ready to go out to other events.

First stop: Ohio LinuxFest2006.

milestones:Today I officially join the GNOME Old Farts Club. Now I get to be ornery all the time and complain about the young'uns.

photos:I finally put up my GUADEC photos. Most of them look similar to all the other GUADEC photos out there, but fire at night is always cool.

lazyweb:I'm a little hesitant to ask anything here, given that my last posting on limburger resulted in this gem: the key to limburger is that you need to eat it with mayonnaise and raw (or at least rare) halibut.

Nevertheless, I'm looking for a machine to purchase to put in the North American GNOME Event Box. It has to be small, light, and run Free software well. Something like the Shuttle X100 is close, but I'm not going to be able to get the Radeon card in it to work. Mac mini's are much better supported and a great size, but I would prefer something less 'branded'. Having Apple hardware in the booth would confuse our message.

Alternatively, if someone knows how to change the top plate on a Mac Mini to a custom logo, I could totally go that route. (-:

cheeses: It turns out that limburger tastes as bad as it smells.

cairo: What an excellent dockudrama! Or maybe it's just a dockumentary..

cairo (two): That post does point out akamaru, written by Kristian Høgsberg. It's a pretty nifty little physics model written with cairo. I don't know how practical it is, but it's pretty fun to play with.

passings: It was sad to see that György Ligetti died today. RIP.

presents:Sometimes the dog decides to bring me a present. Tonight, it was a very dead bird at two in the morning...

whoops: Things you don't want to hear your plumber say:

"Can you run downstairs really fast and make sure that there's no water coming out of the ceiling. I'm not kidding!"

SoC: We ended up getting some excellent Summer of Code applicants this year. I'm mentoring the forms in evince project. It looks like it will be a lot of fun to complete. Over all, there were three SOC projects accepted to work on poppler. Two were in the GNOME camp, and one was a KDE project, and all three require modifying the PDF file.

back to work: I have 1309 unread messages in my inbox. If one of them is yours, please be patient. I'll try to get to it soon.

Eleanor: Eleanor's stub fell off today! That means that she now has a belly button, and more importantly, can now graduate to the (better fitting) size one diapers. She is also gaining weight well, and is past her birthweight.

Also, she is wide awake right now. I hope she can sleep tonight.

SOC: There is less than a day left to get your summer of code proposal in. See the timeline here, and submit if you want to participate. We have a good list so far, but there's always room for more.

life: Eleanor is now over a week old, and is absolutely perfect! She has even started to sleep a little longer at night. Unfortunately for us, night for her seems to be from eight PM through four AM. Still, she is developing well and is gaining weight.

httpd: Every time I touch mod_rewrite, I end up regretting it.

printing: I saw that John did an initial port of gedit to the new printing work in GTK+. It didn't look too painful all things considering, and I hope that other projects will also take the time to try the port.

evince: I got a pretty enthusiastic proposal to do an evince SoC project. They wanted to tackle annotations and implement bookmarks, along the lines of the mockup Bryan and Diana did last summer. Hopefully it well be accepted.

/nick: jrb_afk is now known as jrb_tired

life: Eleanor Kathleen Blandford was born yesterday at 5:40 PM, EDT. She weighed seven pounds, twelve ounces. Both mother and daughter are doing well.

meta: Again, a long time between updates. This time, it's because I moved blogging software again. Instead of my own, crufty, home-grown software, I decided to use Federico's home-grown, crufty software. But Federico's uses emacs, which gives it pretty good style points.