Sunday mornings always tend to be reasonably productive hacking time, as I tend to wake up early, and Susan likes to sleep in. I’ve gotten quite a bit of my exif tagging program put together now, using perl gtk2, and glade-2. The program is basically just an image viewer, with some comment fields, that saves the comments to exif i n the image. Every other image viewer just creates some random new xml file, which means moving between systems is a pain, as all your comments are stuck in the old one. My goal for the end of the year is to have gone back and exif tagged my entire photo library, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting what/where the photos were taken, and I can automatically generate reasonable galleries online with them.

Glade is a really nice system, and I’m sort of depressed it has taken me this long to really understand how it works. Basically you use the glade-2 (for gtk 2.6), or glade-3 (for gtk-2.8) gui builder to generate an XML file. This file defines widget nesting, and relationships, as well as what signals are active, and what callbacks they call. Then you just create a program that reads the XML, calls glade builder, and write all the callbacks manually. Not having to have oodles of layout code totally confusing useful code is so nice.

While hacking on this over the last couple of days, I’ve also been catching up on missed TV over the last month. For the first time in a while, I’m picking up a few new shows this year. A quick review of stuff caught up on the Tivo runs as follows.

• Eureka – basically a scifi northern exposure. While not as good as northern exposure, it has a lot of charm, and is plenty of fun. I’m hoping scifi keeps it going. The sub characters are what makes this show really fun, which is exactly how northern exposure became such a favorite.
• Studio 60 – the new Aaron Sorkin show. Given that Aaron Sorkin made it, I’m sure I’m going to like it. The Pilot was really good, and setup a large number of really good characters. Unfortunately I think it might end up being more West Wing than Sports Night, so while it will be funny, it won’t quite fill the hole from Sports Night’s evisceration off of ABC. I did like that the guest star on the first ep was not from an NBC show, which shows a bit of integrity in making it, instead of just being a big cross promotion engine.
• Stargate SG-1 – man this show got so much better after the Farscape infusion. Sort of a shame they are going to shut it down when it is working again, and really interesting.
• Atlantis – still remains weak, though I’m about 4 weeks back still. I’d basically given up on the show, but Susan still sort of likes it.
• House – still remains awesome. Hugh Laurie is just incredible.
• How I Met Your Mother – a bit of a slow start, but with the cliff hanger like they left it, and only a 30 minute slot, there wasn’t much more they could do.

Beyond that, life is starting to be back to normal here. Work is basically caught up, Grad School is nearly caught up (exam on Tuesday, so today is going to require plenty of studying), and the house is in decent shape. My biggest free time task right now is updating the wedding picture album, which sees about daily updates. Got to get back to hacking now, and hopefully the honeymoon part 2 write up later.