Sinzui

I resigned yesterday. I accepted a job to move a company to .NET. Shortly afterwords Monster Government Services called me and asked me to delay my decision until Nov 2. Oh well. I haven't signed anything yet so I may have an awkward moment on Tuesday. Monster uses Linux and wants to move some of their tools to better scaling solutions. It is Java work, but It is also not Windows work.

I took home my Nightmare before Christmas, Sandman, and Tick toys.

I expect to get back the time I've been missing since the start of the year. I've got two things I want to do: put search into Nautilus and Yelp, and move developers.gnome.org to wiki.

I'm at the point where I must make a decision about a job. If it weren't for the fact I must work on Windows, I would say yes immediately. I have had a few job offers in the past month and I have turned them down because they offered me the same RUP-dominated J2EE work that I have grown to dislike. This job offers me a chance to work with .Net, and build a team of agile developers. There is even some small hope of putting Mono into a commercial site.

I spent two hours removing a tag-team of IE spyware apps from my wife's computer last night. I truly do not like working on Windows. With the exception of 6 months, I've developed on Linux and Mac for the past decade. But this job is good offer, and an opportunity that will make it easier to make some Mono contributions.

I had 20 interviews in the past five weeks. One company was very interested in developing metadata collection and search tools, but I did not want to take a massive pay cut to make them. Another company offered me a ridiculously large sum of money; a clue that some was very wrong with the project. How sweet it could have been if I could have gotten the task of the first job and the pay of the second.

I cannot stop playing Interpol's new album Antics. I have donned headphones to separate myself from friends and family. There previous album Turn on the Bright Lights was merely an appetizer. I binged upon The Decline and Fall of British Sea Power, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Placebo's Sleeping with Ghosts, but Interpol's latest is better. I'm glad I put off purchasing Bork's latest–I'll dive into her album after I get the headphones off.

I fixed an annoying crash in Medusa. It is now safe to search without an index in msearch-gui. Nothing will happen, and that is better than a crash.

As a rule, I do not study the history of a nation as told by that nation. They tend to omit their atrocities. US history did not teach me about crimes committed against the native Americans. Australian history didn't tell me about similar crimes against the aboriginals. I understand that France tries to ignore Napoleon (who enacted some good laws). And the British never mention their food. So I choose to learn a nation's history from someone else.

Two weeks ago Indy¹
announced she is off the meat-list. Anne and I haggled with her on the issue. She will eat fish, and poultry on occasion, in exchange she will eat a wider variety of foods. I thought she would go a few days, but clearly I am wrong. Today she took herself off the jean-list. No more jeans. I just going to take her word for it, no arguments.

We started reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Indy is dressing up as a witch for Halloween. She says she cannot wait to see how much “loot” she's going to haul away with. I cannot have any. She says I'm too fat, and must do more exercise; cruel child.

[1] She does not have purple hair (yet). She does have a copy of GIMP.

Xan was quick to catch that I borked my modernization of Medusa's autotools. I have no idea what inserted the m4 dir into my Makefile.am, but it was very naughty. I do not have any macros to install, so i removed all references to m4. I note that GNOME's macros do not support AC_PROG_LIBTOOL to run libtoolize --force, so I reverted to AM_*.

Sri asked about a command line tool for search. msearch offers find/slocate like functionality. It supports content and mime-type matching in addition to the standard file matching rules.

Oh blast. I lost the mime-type criteria when I updated msearch-gui to GTK 2.4. I better update the glade file.

I finally found time to update Medusa's desktop tool to GTK 2.4. The code is smaller too since modern GTK widget have the right behavior be default. I never did locate the cause the error that Msearch used to report, but it is gone now. I suspect it was caused by the deprecated GnomeIconTheme under GNOME 2.5+. I am very happy to see my emblems again.

I also updated the open files behavior to use the default app instead of a nautilus view so that it plays well with Nautilus.

If you are looking for a gig that lets you apply your mad GTK skillz, then you should review a few opportunities I discovered recently.

C/C++/UNIX Sr Software Developer (GTK)

From the position description:

Senior Unix C/C++ Software Developer candidates with five+ years of application programming experience in C/C++ on Unix with hands on strong problem solving skills as well as experience in user interface design, user interaction design along with information layout, user flow, navigation and usability and knowledge of GTK.

Some serious math skills are implied and and advanced degree might be helpful.

Shinkuro

Shinkuro makes a secure IM/sharing app. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It uses Native widget sets (win32, Cocoa, GTK). It is written in C/C++.