Been having a wonderful headspace rest over the last week, attempting to avoid as much thought about work and GNOME as possible. It has been surprisingly invigorating to rest properly – shows that I don’t do a good job of this when it really matters. Yes, I admit it, part of this rest did involve playing computer games for the first time in years. Knights of the Old Republic is a really cool game. Very involving. Perhaps I should blog my crack theories on gaming some time…

But in the last few days I’ve been fidgeting a bit, so have continued with the web and release docs I’m writing, finally released El Prototypo, the massive GARNOME layout change (which seems to be holding up okay on garnome-list), writing about GUADEC and the Foundation, some interesting docs work, and been fixing bits and pieces here and there. Lots of time spent missing Pipka. Still have half a month apart. Pain.

Glynn is in town visiting relatives for Christmas, so met up the other night and wandered Sydney for beer and dinner. Talked shop. Lots of fascinating things happening in GNOMEland right now, ships moving on the map. It is fun watching (and sometimes commenting on) all of this without any commercial responsibility. Ah, freedom.

Found the freedesktop.org CafePress shop, must get one of those in time for linux.conf.au. An SMH writer uses the word “spiv” in a review. Haw haw. Dave Winer whines about a US presidential campaign group publishing Open Source software, saying “they went after the little guy”. Jim Moore, the campaign’s Internet Director, responds. It surprises me that Dave scorns (and perhaps fears) FOSS so much, and yet insists that we can’t write user interfaces good enough for real users. I’m almost tempted to try and convince him that he’s underestimated us, but it smells like a waste of good arse-kicking time. Interesting discussion about Darwinism and GNOME over on John’s blog.

Been watching Anders and Eric Anholt’s xserver hacking with interest, as they’re spending a lot of time on rage128 (which I have in my iBook) and radeon (in my desktop) acceleration. I will have to get xserver going on my iBook now! Watching puzzle pieces falling into place, with such a wide scope, is one of the coolest things about working on Free Software. cf. Linux 2.6, freedesktop (Cairo, D-BUS, the new xserver stuff…), rml’s work on kernel->userspace events, and so on. Shipshifting!