I've had very little time for GNOME stuff during the past week – just an hour or so in the early mornings during the week. With that time I gradually managed to get the release notes done and now I'm trying to port Glom to the new libgda API (which looks like a minor, but not spectacular, improvement). libgdamm is ported to the new API, but hasn't settled down yet.

Nokia will kindly give me some days of freelancing work to get Maemo/Hildon C++ bindings done, and I'm looking forward to that, but I won't have time to start until the end of October.

I'm doing precisely zero work for the board at the moment, and also none for marketing, and I feel bad about that. I am very glad to see Dave Neary giving us forward momentum.

I'm also sorting out the hardware for the events box, which should just be ready in time for the first set of events, if I get the delivery addresses in time. I had to leave it a bit late, waiting on some hardware-donation decisions that fell through in the end.

For my paid work, I'm currently putting together a little custom server application, in order to farm some processing out to another computer. Although I've been involved in large telecoms projects for a few years now, this is actually the first time that I've sat down and actually tried to use the sockets API directly. It's also the first time I've had to think seriously about how best to use multiple threads. It's quite fun, and nice when it works, though it took me a couple of days to figure out the nuances of select(), such as that you can add the listening socket to the list of sockets that you test for readableness, in order to detect whether it's ready to accept() a new connection.

I know about epoll too, but I'm stuck on Linux kernel 2.4, and suspect that it wouldn't have an advantage in this particular situation.

Reading Robert Love's book (which I'm still reading gradually) also made me have a mini epiphany about multithreading. For instance, the explanation of how the kernel handles keyboard interrupts. The kernel needs to quickly store the new data in the buffer, but doesn't need to block at that moment waiting for some more involved processing. So it defers the work to a “bottom half” that runs in a different process. That and other examples in the book help me to think a bit more clearly about what part of work must be done immediately, what can be done a bit later, and what can be done concurrently.

Starting Monday, I'll be working for a client in Karlsruhe for a couple of months, optimizing some Linux C++ server software. I don't expect to be very available for GNOME stuff.

If anyone knows of any short-term apartments or rooms in Karlsruhe, I'd appreciate the help.

I’m back from North Berwick and a few days in Karlsruhe, trying to catch up on emails and To-Do lists.

I took the tourist boat to the Bass Rock for the first time. Next time I’ll try to take a zoom lense. The island appears greyish white from the mainland but that resolves, as you approach, to thousands (120,000 or so) gannets and their nests. It’s their realm.

I'll be in Edinburgh and North Berwick until the 11th of August, taking care of some family stuff, and taking a break. I'm not taking my laptop, but I am taking Robert Love's book.

I need advice from someone who really knows SQL.

This SQL command is simple and works, and hopefully the intention is clear. I get the actual contact name by joining on the contact id:

SELECT deliveries.departure_contact_id, contacts.name_last FROM deliveries
  LEFT OUTER JOIN contacts ON (deliveries.departure_contact_id = contacts.contacts_id)

However, what happens if I have two contact_id columns, and I want to get the full names for both? This is ambiguous, and incorrect:

SELECT deliveries.departure_contact_id, contacts.name_last, deliveries.arrival_contact_id, contacts.name_last FROM deliveries
  LEFT OUTER JOIN contacts ON (deliveries.departure_contact_id = contacts.contacts_id)
  LEFT OUTER JOIN contacts ON (deliveries.arrival_contact_id = contacts.contact_id)

Update: Thanks for all the comments. This seems to be common knowledge. You can use AS with LEFT OUTER JOIN to
give the join an alias, then use that alias name instead of the table name (even in the ON clause of the JOIN), like so:

SELECT deliveries.departure_contact_id, departure_contacts.name_last, deliveries.arrival_contact_id, arrival_contacts.name_last
FROM deliveres
  LEFT OUTER JOIN contacts AS departure_contacts ON (deliveries.departure_contact_id = departure_contacts.contacts_id)
  LEFT OUTER JOIN contacts AS arrival_contacts ON (deliveries.arrival_contact_id = arrival_contacts.contact_id)

That's a simple change in a generic function in Glom, and I can use the relationship names for the aliases.