Matthew Walton’s Blog

Blog: updated template for monthly archives. Needs a new CSS class to make it work really properly, but it’ll do for now. Next task is the rest of the templates, and wrenching Gallery into some semblance of blending in. I may just write my own photo gallery so I can get it perfect. We shall see. Time, as always, is marching onwards.

Germany: I know I haven’t blogged about what I got up to in Germany, and I also haven’t posted any photos (except for those of you who’ve seen the picture of me in the hat, that is). I am about to post some pictures in the photo gallery, so check it out in about half an hour and hopefully there’ll be some there. I’m not going to write an account of the trip because it’s not really interesting enough to anybody except me, and I’ve got my memories. Or at least, I think I have… now where did I put them?

Other things: gtkmm 2.4.0 came out, and I’m in the release notes as a person who helped make it happen. This pleases me greatly. Maybe in some future release I’ll actually feel like I really deserve to be there.

Towel 0.4.0 will be out soon, but we need tarballs for libsigc++ 2.0.0 and libxml++ 2.6.0 first, which shouldn’t be long, fingers crossed. Tomorrow evening should see them both available. It’ll be a bit longer before they’re in Portage, of course, but that’s not up to me.

Recent activities: h2g2 London meet, Cambridge Pagan Moot, finally finding what looks to be a good Tai Chi class

Current projects: writing ‘Equisistance’ and my uk100k novel, adding man page output to Haddock, looking at filling in some of the gaps in the gtkmm documentation, working on Towel, trying to get the freedesktop.org X server to compile

Soundtrack: Loreena McKennitt. Again.

Well here I am. Pulling myself out of playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in preparation for another week at work. It’s a very engrossing game, and easily one of the best I’ve played for a long time. Also somewhere up there with the most beautiful. The rendition of the Wookie homeworld, Kashyyyk, is quite spectacular. Tatooine comes over as hot and dusty, and Dantooine is something of a lush paradise. I’ve not seen much more than that yet, but I’m sure the rest will live up to the start. Long live Bioware!

What else? Ah yes. Towel is almost ready for a 0.2.0 release. I’ve decided to follow Murray Cumming’s advice and ‘release early, release often’. He may not have come up with that, but he says it a lot, and he’s right. It does give one a sense of achievement to see one’s release announcements come up on Freshmeat.

My new story is also gradually starting to take shape. I even have a partial map!

So why haven’t I seen any positive reviews of this film yet? Went to see it this morning. Liked it a lot. One critic complained that it doesn’t go out with either a bang or a wimper, but to be honest, how it went out was quite good enough. A bang would’ve been bad, because there were quite enough of those as it was. A wimper wouldn’t have done it justice; instead they chose the middle path, as they did with so many other things, and, on the whole, I found it quite effective.

Of course, it helps that the theory I came up with after Reloaded came out proved to be correct… perhaps, as usual, people just didn’t get what they expected, and there are a lot of people around who don’t like that.

Powerbook’s still lovely — nobody’s managed to steal it yet, and you shouldn’t try either. I have a big stick hidden under my pillow.

Updated my writing NaNoWriMo page to match my latest thoughts on the plot, the new one hangs together a lot better and will be a lot more fun to write, although I’m trying not to turn it too light-hearted because it isn’t.