J5’s Blog

Hmm, it’s almost time for me to move to Porter Square and start enjoying the benifits of living right across the street from a T station. The truck is rented, lease signed and ready for me to pick up, utilities cancled and moved to the new location on forest street. All that is needed is for Colin and I to occupy the place. Great thing about picking up a roomate is that the price we pay per month drops dramaticly. Biggest bummer about this place was the initial outlay which amounted to 4 month rent up front. Basicly we payed first, last and security deposit plus full brokers fee. It was worth it as this place was a find. It is super clean with no warping or scratching on the hardwood floors or walls and great natural lighting in every room. We move in Saturday and are trying to get others to move to Porter to start the Porter contingent to combat both the Arlington, Somerville and Central Square posses.

The weekend after the move I am planning on having a bar stocking party where people bring hard alcohol to mix their favorite drinks and whatever is left over at the end of the night stays for the next party. Hopefully I can get people I have met from around the area interacting with those I know from the Linux world. It will be interesting since I predominantly know people from work and the Gnome community but I am sure there will be enough alcohol flowing that it won’t devolve down into talking shop the whole evening. Having good friends come over to celebrate settling into a new home should be fun nonetheless.

My desktop:

Robots just rocked. I enjoyed it emensly. I once almost applied for a job at Blue Sky being that I passed their building many times when I lived in White Plains, NY, but my experience being in the games industry made me shy away from any more media companies.

I finaly found a plugin that can help limit the amount of comment spam I get. I had to clear out all the old comments just to get rid of the spam. We will see if this AuthImage plugin actually solves the problem for good and I can once again read comments without having to wade through tons of spam.

I did a release of D-BUS 0.31 today. This is the first release of the new API’s and recursive type system. At the same time I pushed this and apps depending on D-BUS into rawhide. There are a few more apps that need to go in but for the most part the migration is complete. I will be sending patches upstream for the various apps tomorrow. I will also be placing my porting guide on the wiki somewhere. It needs to be updated a bit. Get on D-BUS and start porting your apps today!!!

Here at Red Hat the core desktop team has been working on a way to fix some of the issues with gnome-session. In doing so we have created Gnome Desktop Services which comprise of a library for turning applications such as the panel or metacity into a minimal D-Bus service, and a daemon which can activate these services and their dependancies on demand. The library is already checked into cvs in the libgnomeservice module. Ray wants to fix up a couple of issues and then commit the daemon sometime soon. We have been working hard at getting the new D-Bus and HAL changes into Fedora Core 4 Test 1 so the release of the Desktop Services stuff has been delayed a bit.

The immediate benefit derived from the Desktop Services architecture is allowing us to define services that need to be running without having to hard code them within gnome-session. It is also a segway into the whole System Services idea I have been throwing around for awhile.

Using D-Bus for this stuff is a nobrainer. D-Bus activation allows us to easily startup services through dependencies or on demand when they are needed and the ability to track the lifecycle of a service allows us to do things like profile startup time and check the running status. It is also the hope that services will create richer D-Bus interface beyond what is provided by the library so that a users desktop experience can become a lot richer through interapplication communication which is one of the goals of D-Bus in the first place.

More information and code to come.

My first major car accident in my ten year driving carrer. I was headed back on route 3 from climbing in Nashua when I hit a patch of slush going about 45-50 mph. At first I tried to correct but then my steering wheel just locked. I spun around and headed backwards in the steep embankment between exit 33’s off and on ramp. I remeber thinking this would be fun if it were not so likely that I might get hurt. When the car got down the embankment it started to roll. That was the only point I thought I might not make it and as it tipped on its side I felt calm, like whatever happened I was ready to accept it. The car teatered but didn’t roll over and with a sudden slam as all the wheels once again touched earth, I was safe, unhurt and searching for my cell phone. A couple of good people stopped to see if I was alright. The left side of the car is now crushed and the front wheel was at the wrong angle with the tire off the rim. All and all not bad for what could have been a much more serious accident. Lon, the good friend that he is, came to pick me up so I am either staying at his house tonight or sleeping in the office depending if he can finish the work he is doing. Events like this always puts life in perspective and in the end I am actually smiling. No big revelation, no life flashing before my eyes, just the knowledge that I’ve still got another day to keep doing what I do.