Today I volunteered

glennji | Oct 15, 2004 min read

Today I volunteered myself as the new maintainer of a Gnome project, gnome-utils. Of course, by the time I shot the email off there had already been several other offers, but Glynn Fosterkindly suggested that having a couple of maintainers might be a good idea. Nice, considering he doesn’t know me at all and I haven’t given much to Gnome as yet. Reputation takes time, as always.

However, it reminded me of the gdict Gnome dictionary software, which is part of gnome-utils. At uni I used the dictionary all the time, looking up words like a crazy loon just to avoid studying. Now I’m trying to teach myself Mandarin Chinese, so something that I could use to look up hanzi would be very helpful.

Glynn has suggested that the dictionary shouldn’t actually be a separate app, but rather a backend for Dashboard/Beagle. This also works for me, because I’m trying to get some .NET exposure at work (Dashboard is Mono) just to learn something other than Java. And hey, that works in with the SyncML project that Warrick and I are working on. Well, thinking about. Well, talking about at the pub at least.

**ahem**