Aaron Bockover

Community member extraordinaire Gabriel Burt (”gabaug”), of Banshee, F-Spot, and many other fames, has joined the desktop team at Novell to help work on Banshee and general multimedia support in openSUSE and SLED!

Gabriel has been an active and enthusiastic developer on Banshee for the last couple of years, contributing very notable components to the project, including Smart Playlists, Generic USB mass storage audio player support, and the Bookmarks plugin along with lots of general bug fixing, feature enhancement, and community support.

He also helps maintain F-Spot and has done a lot of work on the tag view and contributed the very innovative drag-and-drop tag searching.

Our first joint task on Banshee will be to construct a new road map for the project, so stay tuned, Banshee enthusiasts — many exciting new things are in the pipeline!

Welcome to the team Gabriel!

After 18 hours on the road on Saturday, I finally landed in Boston. My friend Connor and I left Raleigh at about 4:30 on Saturday morning, arrived in Wilmington, DE around 12:30 to eat lunch with my grandparents and take a short nap at their house (neither of us slept on Friday night), picked up the keys from my landlord at about midnight and stepped into my new apartment shortly thereafter. We spent all day Sunday doing touristy stuff around Boston since it was Connor’s first time here, and I drove him to the airport at about 5:30 this morning.

I haven’t had much sleep since Thursday night. Hopefully all my furniture and other belongings will arrive sometime this week so I can actually settle in. I have a sheet, a pillow, a blanket, and an air mattress until then. At least there are a bunch of unsecured access points around my building to hold me over until I can get the cable hooked up.

• Novell and EFF team on patent reform - Awesomeness

  “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been talking a lot about patents within Novell in the last twelve months. More than we have in the past,” he said. Novell concluded that the patent system is broken and that patents are hobbling innovation and open standards, by putting companies on the defensive.
  –Nat Friedman

• My good friend Jeff Tickle is working on an awesome Tomboy/Gtk# project called Virtual Paper, and has been making some wonderful progress. He could really use some expert Cairo advise regarding custom gradients on a stroke. I think Jeff should always blog from Virtual Paper itself and never again use the keyboard.

• Late last week Miguel started white-boarding the drawing engine for Moonlight, and has made some progress since getting his canvas to draw a rectangle.

• After a frantic brute-force apartment hunt in Boston last Thursday and Friday, I found a nice place in Kenmore/Back Bay, and will be moving out of my apartment in Raleigh at the end of next week. I’ll spend a week at my parents’ house visiting with family we have coming into town, and then will drive up to Boston on the 10th. I can’t wait!

• I have been working on some major performance improvements in Banshee and will write more about this later. 0.13.x is going to be completely awesome and noticeably faster. Unfortunately I’ve spent so much time this month preparing for the move to Boston that I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I want hacking. The good thing is that I am in one of those mad-hacking moods where I stay up all night and get real work done. These come and go in cycles, and usually last a long time.