A fun day… for some hacking.

Over the course of the day, I:

• Tweaked the package complement on my workstation where last night I did an installation of the Fedora 15 pre-release tree
• Identified some weirdness in my local Eclipse environment and got things in better shape for later work
• Got a good start on some user documentation for PulseCaster
• Took my daughter to the skate rink, and managed to skate for at least a little while before realizing I was having a rough time because my kingpin bolts are just way too freakin’ tight
• Figured out how to adjust said kingpin bolts and made a note to take care of that before next week
• Took my son out for some errands and lunch — a nice trip and a good chance to exercise my patience muscles
• As a reward, bought some beer and a couple decent malbecs
• After returning home, cleared out some obsolete packages hanging around in Bodhi and begging for death
• Built and pushed a new update of PulseCaster to fix some bugs
• Built and pushed a refreshed upstream version of xmlstarlet
• Played with the dog
• Came back and turned up a French trance station I got into recently (for some reason, monotonous, non-vocal electronica seems to help me work more efficiently… probably since there are few lyrics to listen to and digest mentally)
• Went through some email to reduce backlog for Monday
• Triaged a crummy gnome-system-monitor bug affecting people with more than 4 CPU cores (like me)
• Had dinner with the family (Eleya made a fabulous corned beef, first timer but it was pretty much perfect!)
• Came back to the desk to find that the superhuman Matthias Clasen had fixed the gnome-system-monitor bug in question, and built and pushed an update out
• Installed said update with many thanks to Matthias, tested, and provided feedback

So of course, my definition of hacking is not nearly what some of my colleagues manage daily. But I feel like attacking some of this stuff on weekends and working on my own GNOME-ish projects are starting to give me a better fundamental understanding of some of the plumbing at work in the desktop. And of course, it gives me a wh0le new appreciation for it as well. I’m now rocking GNOME 3.0 pre-releases on both my main systems here at home, my laptop and my big workstation, and loving it.

I’ve contributed a few bug reports and to a small portion of the GNOME 3.0 user documentation for this release. It was lots of fun and made me feel connected with the release process for something I use every day that will be an intrinsic part of Fedora 15 when it arrives. It’s a great feeling to be just cranking on some little bits to help others, and just as much as ever, I know that if everyone does the same, free software has a future that is even brighter than the (already well-lit) present.