pleased precariously

I’ve been on the sidelines watching the usual mono debate on d-d-l. I’ve long since given up reading/mailing the gnome lists. Too much traffic, too much talking. But since planet.gnome.org is the new usenet, I figured I’d respond to Alvaro’s post here.

I suggest the following template be followed again for future Tomboy inclusion proposals:

1. Alex poposes tomboy for inclusion
2. A few people suggest it’s a great idea, and say they don’t care what language it’s written in, so long as it lets them do something they want to do. These same people cite f-spot, banshee, muine, beagle as other good examples of apps on the horizon.
3. A few people cite performance problems (citing no — or faulty — numbers), patent problems (citing hunches), memory problems (often incorrectly attributing it to the language/vm).
4. Someone says there’s no way gnome+mono will work on his 386SX with 4megs of RAM
5. Someone “me too”s with talk of embedded systems.
6. Discussion gets totally derailed with “who is our target audience?”
7. Someone wisely points out that gtk# should be split up between platform and desktop binding sets.
8. A few people say beagle shouldn’t be allowed in gnome (I love this one)

good times.

Do I think GNOME will accept a mono application in the desktop release set anytime soon? No (Sorry Alex. I’d love to be proven wrong.)

Do I think this attitude hurts the Mono project (or python, or java, or whatever)? obviously not.

Do I think this attitude will hurt GNOME in the long term? Yes.

Do I think this will reduce GNOME’s relevance on the desktop? Yes.

It’s all well and good to say the desktop shouldn’t include mono apps, Alvaro, but what happens when a good portion of your application developers tire of working in C? Isn’t it already happening? You can’t force them to work in C. The only thing you can do is exclude their work from GNOME, which hurts GNOME more than them.

Why devote so much time and effort to producing such good support for language bindings when we can’t use them? Why reward people who don’t have a vested interest in the desktop’s future and punish the people who are supposed to be improving it and innovating?

And Alvaro: Regardless of the fact that Novell might have a interest in promoting its technology, the application under consideration wasn’t written by Novell. It was written by a VMware employee on his own, who just wants his app used. Stop thinking about companies.

GNOME should stop trying to hold back the tide, and instead find a way to accomodate it.

went on an endurance ride again yesterday. Since bonking on my last ride of any distance, I was concentrating solely on three things. Eating, drinking, and keeping my heart rate below my LT. Anything else (namely, speed) was unimportant.

I felt reasonably confident that if I could do those three things, I could ride all day. And we did, pretty much. We left at 8am, got back at around 6:45pm. Moving time around 7 hours. I clocked in at 98 miles, give or take a mile. Rony did some laps around Kendall until his cyclometer read 100. The sun was out and pretty much brutal for the entire time we were on the bikes. It took me a few hours to think “huh, I need sunscreen”, which was all it took for this to show up:

We stopped often, we drank pretty much constantly (I refilled both of my large bottles at least 5 times, I lost count after a while), and ate only slightly less often (so. many. powerbars.)

Unfortunately I was stupid and didn’t charge my bike computer the night before, so I did 2/3 of the ride without it. The data I do have I uploaded to motionbased here.

Of course, without the bike computer I couldn’t monitor my heart rate with any accuracy. Because of this, and the fact that my ride partner only has speed/distance on his cyclometer (and therefore tries to optimize those), the whole LT thing went out the window. I was hurting by the end.

We got back, ordered an amazing amount of thai food, and I tried like hell to eat it. My mouth was raw and irritated, and I couldn’t eat more than a few bites before I had to stop. Not very comfortable. Between the small helpings I lounged around, watched the movie vv brought over, and tried to pass out. I’m pretty sure I was sleeping at some points with my eyes open. I was so exhausted my eyes were crossing, but it didn’t feel comfortable to let them close.

Slept fitfully when it finally came, and still feel pretty fatigued physically tonight.

fun

I’ve been playing around with my gps software again (”turtle”, for those who remember), adding CSV import, and display of heartrate and cadence information:

In an effort to figure out which features would be good to add, I’ve been playing around with Garmin’s Training Center, and MotionBased.com.

The latter definitely has the edge in terms of features and UI as well as fun things like Google earth export. pretty cool. Lots of information, lots of graphs, lots of things to geek out with.

I uploaded a couple of my tracks, like the 53 mile ride that Rony and I did on Saturday (where I bonked at 43 miles, ugh) and the easy ride vv and I did this morning before the rain came.

I don’t feel any larger, really, but none of my shirts are fitting me anymore. too tight across the chest/shoulders.

Time to replace my gazillion threadless shirts with larges.