Boston GNOME Summit 2006
This past weekend was the Boston GNOME Summit, which I've made a habit of going to. I left work on Friday with the intention of getting there earlier than last year. Unfortunately, I ran into an hour-long line at the border, then managed to pass the same upstate New York spot twice traveling in the same direction, somehow, about 45 minutes later. Suffice it to say, I got there later than last time. Still, the drive was very nice, with a full moon lighting up the whole scenery around me.

At the conference itself, I went to a discussion whenever one was available. Whereas last year was all about optimization, this year there was a lot of focus on designing new technologies and the direction GNOME should take. I contributed to the talks as much as I could, but many of the subjects were about things I am not familiar with. A testament to all of the interesting directions the project is taking to stay fresh.

This year's hack was something that turned out fairly successful, judging by the reaction it got in the show-and-tell at the closing session. I made a quick little script that acts as a Nautilus thumbnailer for Windows EXE files. So, when a folder with Windows binaries is opened, their icon shows up using the same functionality as image files. The current implementation is a complete hack; it doesn't even choose the optimal icon resource. But I plan on extending icoutils to make a proper version more efficient.

I'd like to thank all of the locals for their great hospitality. I had a really good time hanging out with the RedHat and Novell folks. You learn so much by meeting people in real life compared to the internet. My back even made it into Jakub Steiner's flickr collection: