Sloe Gin and the art of Software Development 21 years ago
Posted in Updates on Sunday 14th December 2003 at 9:10pm
A bit of a lazy weekend really. Planned not to do much at all, but ended up out and about on Friday night and ill-advisedly sampled rather too much of a friends (admittedly very good) Sloe Gin.
Felt less then 100% on Saturday as a consequence. Set about downloading Gramps and trying to summarise all of the information on William Kent and his family I have discovered. A trip to the Family Records Centre is the next step, but this time of year isn't the optimum for getting to London - or indeed getting around amid the crowds of festive shoppers once there.
Released a new gnome-pkgview with a couple of tweaks and bug fixes. Seems people who build from source will be bitten by the recent intltool update and its attendant problems. Much help from Fuzzy on #lemmings with testing. This leads to people developing a hairbrained scheme for making it aware of more than just GNOME libs. Its actually a really good idea for other packages to use pkgconfig's .pc files. I remain to be persuaded there is an effective way to get the info for each distribution, but if anyone can find a way, the #lemmings can.
gnome-pkgview is a tool for inspecting the versions of GNOME libraries installed on your system. The information is often useful when submitting bug reports or diagnosing system problems.
Version 1.0.5 (Candlewick) fixes a nasty bug with ${target} substitutions in package descriptions, shows a busy cursor when refreshing the package list on slower systems, and supports detection of further distributions.
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5.tar.gz |
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5-1.i386.rpm |
 | gnome-pkgview-1.0.5-1.src.rpm |
A gentoo ebuild is available here courtesy of Matt Schick.
gnome-pkgview project page
Daylog Entry for 14/12/2002 22 years ago
Posted in Updates on Saturday 14th December 2002 at 12:00am
Spent the rest of this week being ill and reasonably maudlin. Chanced a trip to Bristol this morning in the hope of completing the one outstanding bit of gift shopping for my secular new year style gifts - failed miserably, but accomplished one or two chores for a friend. Took advantage of the relatively crowd-free early morning to browse book and record stores. Settled for a small volume of Pope, since I can't find a nicer used one with everything I want. Failed to find either Cat Power or Mountain Goats CDs which I'd hoped for, or indeed any kind of suitable gift. Slightly alarmed to see a long-lost acquaintance on the bus back to the station. Caught between wanting to say lots, and wanting to allow people the chance to ignore me. As ever, erred on the cowardly side. Submitted a patch for gnomine. Always failed to see the attraction of Minesweeper style games - even when they were quite the vogue with colleagues at work. Now I get it, I end up sending stupid patches! Lots of phone and online tech support tonight. Brief visit. Drunken IRC yakking. Sleepy now
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
