Haven't blogged for a while now, as a result I've forgotten a whole lot of really cool stuff I wanted to write about, and instead am left with nothing but bitter rants. I'm sure if I think about it, I can think of some positive things to write.

O'Day
UWA held O'Day last Friday. The UCC stall was mildly successful, signing up about 40 new members, and raking in about $900. Mr Tearle took some photos, including one of me holding a hot, freshly laminated membership card.

As a result, UCC and UniSFA this week have been filled with freshers. There are heaps of them! To quote Dr Tom:

There are freshers in the room. Freshers are good because they provide the blood used to keep the club vampires older members alive. Freshers are bad because they take all the chairs. And the floor. Freshers should be made to sit on the roof. There were apparently many freshers last year. There are more freshers this year. As Grahame mentioned, the freshers this year come with built in livejournals and social lives. And also apparently talk about brane theory. In ten years time, there will be hundreds of freshers, who dominate the world with their scientific acheivements, evolve fast enough to be seen in real-time, and also have telepathy. And the room will have an Egyptian-style casino. No, that's a bit much.

I have to admit, the freshers are certainly vigorous. They seem like a fairly cohesive bunch. Perhaps this year will be the year to get a quality haul of freshers who stick around. The last decent sized haul was in 2002, although they are beginning to graduate now.

Qantas
So Qantas called me right before German on Monday, to inform me that my flight had been cancelled and that I needed to choose a new flight. The two flights I could change to both sucked, serious amounts. There was one flight I could take that didn't screw me around too much, but I have to go via Melbourne. What I find amusing is that they guy on the other end of the line made it seem like he was doing me a favour to get me on this plane. That might be the case, but at the same time they did cancel a flight that I had paid for, and arranged my time around, gah!

I now get a couple of hours in the immensely boring, Melbourne Airport.

So now I'm on QF648 leaving Perth on April 16 at 23.40 (WST). Then QF825 leaving Melbourne on April 17th at 08.25 (EST). Arriving in Canberra around 09.25. Hopefully there will be other people going to l.c.a from Melbourne on the same flight, who are going to be hanging around the airport beforehand.

Zope
I hate Zope... Zope ate my ZoDB. I knew it would eventually happen, but we weren't in "production" yet, so it wasn't backed up. As a result, we've lost about 2 months work on the new UCC web site. This is frustrating, as we were about to send it live. Bernard was quick to get an image of the disk, and has been finding data by searching blocks for cribs. The files I really need (the template overrides and stuff) are certainly there. Ideally, if we can work out how the contents headers are encoded, we can work out which ones are the latest revisions, and recover them back into Zope. It's less of a big deal if we don't get all the content, we managed to save a lot of that from the Google cache, so we can write a script to load that all back in.

What does this teach us? Always back up your files!

GNOME-Applets
Release GNOME Applets 2.9.7 (news). Seems to work, not a lot of hassles. A few problems with broken translations and the Gweather XML. I've fixed them, and will roll them for the release in 6 days.

Release Notes
The release notes have been coming along nicely, mostly due to the fantastic work of Murray. I did upload the screen shots though. Everything is looking shiny, perhaps we yet again have an excuse to party. We'll have to remember to invite the freshers.

PC307
I'm doing Professional Computing 307 this semester. I was worried that there would be no one I knew, but that appears to not be the case. I seem to know a heap of people, so my team consists of some incredible gifted and talented people. We have a web developer, a bespoke windows app developer, a GNOME hacker, as well as people who are interested in QA and documentation. A well rounded development team, without even trying.

The project has to be completed on a budget of 420 man hours, so in order to make this happen some serious planning needs to be done. I've been playing with Imendio's Planner. The HTML output (linked before) is actually pretty cool, except it seems to wrap things that touch the end of the gnatt chart onto the next line. The only other complain I have with Planner, is that I don't seem to be able to override the resource cost for a task. All the resources (people) have a cost of 1, giving our project a total budget of 420. However, when trying to mark the time I'll be at l.c.a and GUADEC, I can't set the cost for my time to 0. So it currently appears on our total. Perhaps one of the Imendio dudes will have a look at this for me (I haven't filed any bugs yet). Once we get our project, we'll be able to start planning, and actually be able to make proper use of the software.

PLUG talk
I have agreed to talk at PLUG. I'm not sure what on yet. There has been a suggestion of Python and GNOME. The topic has been flogged to death, plus others do it better, so I might have to think of a gimmick to add, like maybe GStreamer, and write an MP3 player on stage or something.

Now it's probably time to sleep, I'm already short a day on sleep this week. It would be nice to try and catch even a little of it up.

So, I've been working on the release notes when I think to myself... hey, this is docbook, wouldn't it be cool if we distributed the release notes in one of the packages and registered them in scrollkeeper so that they appeared in Yelp? So I opened Yelp, and dragged my XML file into it:

drag your XML into Yelp

Oh Baby, Oh Baby, Oh Baby!
It looks fine too, as you can see from this larger image.

There is one small problem, the first page displays "Credits" as an Abstract (the Credits page also shows Credits, but not as an Abstract) and doesn't show the actual content of the first page. I'm not sure if this is a mistake in Yelp or a mistake in our docbook (more likely). What else is cool is that this time around, the release notes will be translated using the incredibly cool xml2po