J5’s Blog

Cousin

My cousin and aunt came up Friday night and we ate at a great Venezuelan place right down the block from my place. My cousin is back from Burma where she works for the Myanmar Times. She came back briefly to apply for grad school in international buisness and was up for an interview with Tufts University. Though it is not her first choice I really hope she goes there. I already promised her I would move to Arlington if she did. Both of us are the black sheep of the family being the only ones to not go into the medical field and we were both very cynical with the world during our teen years so we became close friends. So it would be really cool if she were to move up here but I also know that Tufts is not her first choice and I want her to get into the school that has the right program for her regaurdless of location.

Movies

Saw Shawn of the Dead after my cousin and aunt left. Five stars for this one. Everyone should see it. The story was great. A true loser to hero that is still a loser story. Going to see Shark Tales tomorrow curtesy of Dreamworks. From what I understand the movie was done mostly in Linux. Should be good because I have loved all of Dreamwork’s 3d animated movies.

Pizza Party

My Pizza Party at my apartment was loads of fun. Pizza, beer, hard liquor, oh my. A bunch of people showed up though some did cop out. Chris Lee, I’m looking at you . I spend the day ripping a good portion of my music collection using Rhythmbox and Soundjuicer. They are both awsome apps but could be a little more integrated with one another. Anyway, it was mostly for naught since there were perhaps three songs played before we turned on the Eye Toy and started playing Groove. I wish I could transfer some of the videos that were taken during the freestyle section. A hilarious good time was had by all. We went to the Good Time Emporium after we ate. I schooled everyone in Lazer Tag with a score of 1255. The next highest score was 890 with the rest under or around 600. The only reason I got this high was because I figured out that when you got hit you had a window of three seconds where you were invincible and could still fire your gun. So I just started walking around firing ant anyone I saw on the other team. For every kill they got out of me I took out five of their guys. At one point I squeezed inbetween two of the green team guys, said excuse me, shot them both and kept on walking. It would have been a bit more fair if you were not allowed to shoot durring the three second grace period after you had been shot. Good thing we won because Colin was talking some smack before the game. Too bad we didn’t take the loser buys a round of beers bet.

Just because I once sported blue hair and a goatee does not make it a contributing factor to me also being a Debian user at the time. Or did it? I’m so confused, must dye hair red!!!

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J5

Went to the movie theater this morning and it turned out I did leave it there. They had it in their lost and found. The woman who helped me was cute and I thought of asking her to put her number in it before she gave it back. I then thought better of it and just thanked her. I think the cheeziness of some of the movies I have seen there where trying to rub off on me. Anyway I now feel whole again. It is nice not having to buy a new phone yet. I’m waiting for one of the Linux phones and t-mobile’s Sidekick II to come out. I used the money I would have spent on the phone to buy a bunch of CD’s. Colin the Scissor Sister’s CD is a tribute to you, or well at least someone you know .

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J5

Can’t Find my Phone
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Sorry I haven’t called anyone as I can’t find my phone. I remember turning it on after the movie last night but it is not in my car or apartment. IM’ed a friend and had him call it but he only got the voice mail. Could be it slipped out of my pocket at the movie theater and I just think I looked at it being around 2:30 when we got out. Sky Captain is a good movie by the way. Anyway tonight looks like it is going to be a bust since I can’t get in contact with anyone. Thomas said something about doing something tomorrow and it would be nice to see him again before he goes back to Spain. So someone grab me on IRC or e-mail me or leave a comment in my blog. Funny that I feel so lonely and disconnected without my cell. Funnier still that I can reach out to people half way across the world but it is hard as hell to get in touch with people in the same state as me I think I might hit my friend up for IP phone service.<

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J5 <

So while others are able to branch off into Gnome 2.9 I am stuck closing bugs and getting FC3 into shape. Not that it is all bad but there are so many things I want to try and get in for 2.9. In no perticular order here is a list of things I want to work on, help out with or get others to work on:

• DBus Policy Manager – a root and session daemon that allows hal to run unprivileged and takes over callout duties while extending them to dbus services such as replacing the g-v-m daemon with a set of callout scripts. The idea is to be able to construct dynamic policy without having to create a new daemon for each policy domain.
• Gnome-VFS one-to-many (disks to volumes) patch – Most of this is already in Gnome-VFS already. There were a lot of interactions that needed to be addressed with too little time left for the final patch to go in. The final patch hooked up HAL to take advantage of one-to-many. What is needed here is a sane interface to the “Computers” v-folder to represent a drive with multipule volumes that is unmounted and a sane interface to represent when those three folders are mounted. It was kind of wierd to click on one icon and have it be replaced by three.
• Dphoto – a DBus daemon that marshles access to the gphoto library so multipule programs can access one device at the same time. Desrt, the creator of this project, has been doing some great hacking on this and there is already a gnome-vfs module to utilize it. I need to find a CVS home for it soon but I have been swamped with other things
• Scanner tools – We got photos, mass storage and for the most part printers. Scanners are next on my hitlist.
• Porting the printer detection and configuration tools and getting them upstream – due to time constraints I decided to go with doing callouts to printconf-tui, a Red Hat specific printer configuration tool used by Kudzu. I would like to either strip out the python code that does the detection and setting up of PPD files or port it to C so it is more upstreamable.

One of the things I would like to see in the 2.10 or 2.12 timeframe is a standardised metadata system. Right now we have emblems but it would be nice to also have non-visible categorizartion on par with Epiphanies bookmark system or even name value pair metadata (i.e. location=”Boston, MA”). I am thinking mostly for photos right now and what I envision is the ability to categorize photos from Nautilus or an image viewer, drag them to gnome-blog and have gnome-blog pick up the metadata and pass it to WordPress. In WordPress you would be able to create a page and select the categories to be displayed. Bam, instant photo album of your trip to whereever. So you could post your photos to your blog but not have to have a perminant link to the blog entry for people to view it. Also would be nice to be able to post pictures from gnome-blog without having them show up in your blog but only in the gallery view.

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J5

…get things wrong when they don’t read the provided documentation. I’ve been browsing the Slashdot comments on Stateless Linux and it cracks me up to see comments like “Doesn’t LTSP do this?” and “We have had NFS mounted roots forever now”. For the most part the people who have read the PDF understood what Stateless is trying to achive. If perminent state is no longer kept on the client but mearly cached there it gives us the ability to do things like take a generic laptop off the shelf and sync it with a user’s image. This allows the moving around of physical hardware without loss of data such as a user getting an upgraded computer without having to reconstruct their desktop. Also, since a users state is cached they can work disconnected from a network and plug back in to resync the cache to the servers.

In my view of the Linux landscape this is not the only benifits that Stateless brings to us. Where the power really lies and where normal users will see the benifts without ever setting up a stateless network, is the development mentality that is needed to make the stateless architecture work. Since there is no root state any configuration done as root is lost every time the machine reboots. Because of this it forces the developers to look at problems such as configuration of hardware devices in a different light. Sateless forces us to be dynamic and flexable. If hardware is plugged in it has to Just Work^tm. This is why in previous blogs I had mentioned my work on a print dialog that no one should ever see. Things are not perfect yet so the dialog is still required (which saves state via user gconf keys removing the need for a root password) but at least Stateless pushes us into thinking about these issues and trying to find solutions to them.

So while stateless itself is geared mainly twords buisnesses with large desktop deployments, in the end the focus on solving the problems of a subset of our user base ends up solving the problems of the entire user base.

Just Works is not a real trademark but should be the mantra of the Linux Desktop effort. Why? Because if it Just Works, then we all can go on doing what we do

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J5

Davyd,

A good base for starting a freedesktop.org COM spec whould be DBUS. It is already designed with the idea of replacing KDE’s DCOP. Don’t know when or if that will happen but it has been designed in. Ryan Lortie (desrt on irc) wrote up a gphoto daemon in a couple of days, using dbus as the transport to connect the daemon to Gnome-VFS. Eventually the idea is to use this to so that more than one program can access a gphoto device at the same time. Since it uses DBUS, KDE can use it also. It is pretty snappy transferring megs of photos over unix sockets. What will most likely be needed for more intense programs is a shared memory transport.

As for Evangelizing GNOME to younger people I say the best way is to not. I tried to get my brother into it when he was 12 or 13 by dual booting his box. He never knew what to do with it. Now I just use it and have him ask questions when he feels like it. I feel that one day he will find a use for it and install it himself. In my opinion it is best for people to have a specific need that can be solved directly by Linux before you start installing it for them. Once they find Linux solves that need they often start evangelzing themselves and looking into all the nooks and cranies without any promting from anyone else. Isn’t that how we all got started? So I guess the best thing to expose a person to Linux by showing them the cool things you do with it. If they have questions, answere them and let them be the one to decide when they want to try it for themselves.

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J5

I was tracking down some memory leaks and a crasher bug in my printer driver dialog module in eggcups. Colin has been showing me how to use valgrind which rocks. Anyway, after taking out all of the functionality in my dialog derived from GtkDialog it was still crashing and leaking gobs of memory. After some playing around I tried not defining the finalize method, which was what was being called right before the crashes. That seemed to fix the crash which drove me mad because I had previously stripped all the functionality out of the finalize method to no avail. In the end I finaly relized that I wasn’t chaining the parent’s finalize method and adding that fixed both the crash and memory leaks. Arg!!! Boilerplate code, how I hate thee! Live and learn.

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J5

Seems like the server I was hosted at ran into a nasty UML bug where the master image panicked and mounted the file system as read only while the slave images still though they had write access. It crashed the disks hard and all my data was lost. Turns out the co-lo that was supposed to be backing up the server every week found out they only had backups from 2003.

I’ve lost a lot of data including past sites and art I had done and over a year and half of blogs. Mostly sentimental stuff but I would have never guessed how important they would seem to me.

On the brighter side it gave me a chance to move to a better blogging system (WordPress) and get a completely new design. Right now I am just using the stock template but I am having my 15 year old brother design something simple but cool. He is becoming a really good digital artist and I don’t have the time or energy to do web design these days. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

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J5