J5’s Blog

I just got back from talking to a bunch of cool people who put together a ski house every winter. They pretty much convinced me to buy a share so every other weekend this winter I am going to be MIA.

I might wake up and decide I don’t want to spend the money but the people all seemed like a fun group so I think that is unlikely. I’ve been saying I want to meet more people in the Boston area but with work being 40 minutes away and the hours I keep it has been harder.

The cool thing about a ski house is everyone there has at least one common interest and that is plowing down a mountain of snow at high velocity on planks of wood and fiberglass. WIth an average age of 29 at this perticular house and only 8 minutes from Killington it is right up my ally.

I took the skibus up last winter almost every weekend which was great but not as social as I would like. Also waking up at 4 in the morning and only having a day to ski pretty much killed the rest of the weekend. I would get to work on Mondays not feeling like I had the time to recharge my batteries. With the ski house I don’t have to rush and can decide I don’t want to ski on Sundays and take it easy. They are also going to have Internet so I can hack during downtimes.

Ok, so now I am just trying to convince myself it is worth it. I can’t think of anything that would stop me.

Bush wants to give the military a bigger role during domestic disasters. I am sure he will use some circular logic like if you are against his plan you are against helping victims of domestic disasters.

Of course many more people could have been helped if he had put the money where it was needed instead of giving tax breaks to the rich and going into an ill planned war. I think having a proper director of FEMA instead of someone who got the job through political favor would do more to help mitigate the fallout from domestic disasters than having the military on alert.

What is the definition of domestic disaster anyway? Does Cindy Sheehan protesting at the White House count?

This administration has the uncanny ability to take a disaster that caught them completely off guard (despite warnings from various people) and twist it to their advantage. Every time these disasters strike they seem to use it to encode more threats to our civil liberties into law.

We can not rest that much domestic power in a military organization of any kind. To do so would invite future abuse and perhaps even a day when the military decides that the government is not fit and declare a domestic disaster. Do I think that is likely? No, but opening up the door even a crack makes it that much more possible.

Before I go to lunch I thought I would just post a random feature I would like to see in mail clients when dealing with mailing lists. Most of my mail comes from mailing lists. Occasionally I want to reference a mailing list on another list, in private e-mail or in my blog. It would be really cool if I could drag and drop or somehow get the archive reference to that particular e-mail into another document.

Mailing lists already add the header List-Archive: which tells you where to look for the archives. It should be trivial (UPDATE: Apparently it is not) to add a header field which also gives you the full URL to the particular mail say List-Reference-URL:. I didn’t see a field in the headers to do this though there may be a standard already in place since I am sure I am not the only person to have thought of this.

The other part of the equation is having mail software like Evolution give an easy to use way to export this information.

It is a wonder with FOSS being such a dominate platform on the Internet why we don’t integrate these little niceties here and there. Mailing lists might not be the best example as its usefulness extends mostly to just techies but I am sure there are other cases to be made where FOSS software can take advantage of each other to make the user experience that much more productive even if it is just a small step at a time.

I’m getting pretty far with the notification widget and server that I think at least the library is ready to be committed upstream. I took Colin’s EggNotificationBubble and converted it into a widget that inherits from GtkWindow. Along the way I added a bevel to the borders and made the arrow flush with the corner. The change in arrow position does a couple of things. First it reduces the number of rectangles needed to construct the shaped window and second it makes dealing with screen edges a lot easier. Plus, I think it looks better.

I have been using NetworkManager as my test app but will soon move to Krb5 Auth Dialog to finish up the whole user actions workflow. On Monday I need to edit the specifications, submit that and the library to the libnotify guys, and check with Mark if he thinks it is a good idea to put the notification server into the notification area applet. After all of that it comes down to integrating/porting apps and submitting the whole notification shebang for consideration of inclusion in Gnome 2.14.

Brian Clark

We always knew he was a ricer but this just confirms it

Sweetwaters drip
to hold my tongue
Left bar of throngs
For bar of none
Hold to quotient
of good deeds, lacks
conversation
of which I seek
With open hearts
exclusively

I just received this in one of the Boston activity mailings I get. It is a benefit to raise money for Leukemia research. The event is being held at Clery’s, 113 Dartmouth Street, Boston, MA on Thursday the 15th of September at 7:00. Dewar’s is sponsoring so free Dewar’s cocktails from 7:30 to 9:30pm.

The cost is $15 at the door or $20 for two tickets in advance. The organizer asks that you RSVP by Tuesday so she can tell Dewars how much to bring.

To buy tickets to the event or to donate please go to the organizer’s website.

I’m going to try to make it though it would be easier if I actually worked near Boston .

Fernanda G. Weiden has written a very insightful article on Women in Free Software. Check it out.

Dave Airlie, you rock!!! Thank you!

Once modular X hits Fedora I might even think about doing some X hacking. I always wanted to play around with X drivers.

Update:

Oh ya and Eric Anholt, you rock too!!!

I just got done with the last book in the Dune Prequels by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and coauthor Kevin J. Anderson. The two prequel series, Prelude to Dune and Legends of Dune were both good in their own rights in that they tied together a lot of the back story of the original Dune series. One learns about why humans hate thinking machines, why they abhor atomics, how the spice was found, how the great houses were formed along with the spacing guild and the Bene Gesserit who formed the trinity of power in the Dune universe. The prequels delve into the history between the Atreides and the Harkonnen and why they had become such bitter rivals.

Other than these revealing facts the prequels themselves do not achieve the same greatness that the original series had. I tried to put my finger on it but despite drawing off a treasure trove of notes found among Frank Herbert’s personal possessions after he died, these books lacked the same finesse. I know I couldn’t expect Brian to be a prolific as his father within his fathers own universe but there was something missing that I just could not pinpoint. That was until I read some excerpts at the end of the last book of Legends which were lost chapters Frank had penned but never made it into the books. Reading those I saw how Frank Herbert’s style just seemed to flow like a conversation. He spent little time on the action and even the description and more time on the thoughts and words of each of the major players. In this way one would have to construct the world of Dune through the jaded eyes of each of the participants.

With the newer series action and description were more the focus. It was more like reading a story about people instead of living through them and experiencing what they would have experienced.

Dune is a story about political intrigue, genetics, religious fervor, and securing the future. But mostly it is about survival of the Human race and how each of the above intertwined to do just that. There is much talk about what does it mean to be human and does the loss of compassion, love, and even hate make one less human. In this world right and wrong are relative. The battle was not fought between good and evil but for survival.

The old book were able to obtain this balance. Perhaps in the first book Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides was the savior of Humanity but even he understood the events he had set in motion would lead to the enslavement of the human race in order to ensure that the future was free. He always battled between what was good for the present and what was good for the future.

The newer series lacked that balance and portrayed good and evil in more of a clear cut view. While there was some dynamics to the characters, with a couple switching sides here and there, the line wasn’t as fluid as it should have been. A theme in the prequels are that humans are erratic and could not be understood easily. Except for a few moments the humans mostly acted logically and without that inner debate that was in the first books.

All in all they were great reads though the original series is the only literary masterpiece of the bunch. Hopefully when Brian goes to pen the conclusion to Chapterhouse Dune, which has been rumored to be the case after the last two series were finished, he will be able to do it justice. Chapterhouse left off on a huge cliffhanger. Apparently Frank had planned to write the conclusion himself and had a huge number of notes and short writings on it. He however never got around to it. Brian’s telling of the tale can either become a great masterpiece or ruin the Dune universe forever – the bar is set that high.

In one of my last posts on libnotify I displayed a notification bubble that followed the widget it was attached to. This is not a big deal with inprocess widgets but since libnotify is out of process it complicates things a bit. The hack I was using with the idle handler turned out to use too much CPU. I could use a timeout but I think it would still present some bigger issues.

You see, the biggest problem is that I don’t get config events (those ones that tell you your widget has moved or resized) because the widget doesn’t move relitive to its parent which in the case of notification icons is the notification area. I don’t think I can recive events from the notification area itself without hacking up the applet. I could be wrong however.

The other problem is some race conditions when the server closes the notification. If I do an update because the x and y changed before I recived the notification closed signal I could very well pop up the notification again when it was supposed to be closed. The fix would be to keep state in both the server and client but that would needlessly complicate things and gear the server twords the libnotify library when it should be library agnostic. This can all wait until after D-Bus 1.0 when state should be introduced on the bus itself. At least we are talking about adding it.

So the solution is to go the simple route and assume the location will not change for the life of the notification bubble. This cuts out having to solve some tough minor issues and getting to the more important ones, even if it does mean a loss of some polish.