J5’s Blog

That was the quip my cousin and Reason assistant editor Kerry Howley said to me over drinks at our Grandparents house. She was only half seriously responding to the fact that my company Red Hat works on the One Laptop Per Child initiative. She had written an article pretty much bashing the effort.

We had a fun little debate and I’m not going to put words in her mouth here. You can read her side in the article. She has the one little weakness in that for some reason she respects me and my views. I guess it comes from her and I being the black sheep in the family who pursued careers outside the medical profession. I do wish however she had spoken to a few people within the project though I doubt they would have changed her views.

In any case I could only argue the fact that while there are many things third world countries could use more than inexpensive laptops, this is a way for people with a ceratin skill set to contribute to a solution. I for one don’t know how to solve world hunger but I can write programs that could teach kids motor skills or teach others how write programs for their needs. Anyway, that is beside the point since I am not directly involved in the project and even though there is only a thin partition separating me from the OLPC team at Red Hat, I really have no idea what they are up to.

All I really know is a lot of smart people are working on this project. Trying to predict its impact, success or failure at this point of the game is really not the point. It is a project with a plan and people who have the wherewithal to execute that plan and for me that is a huge first step.

One thing it has already accomplished is to get people to again debate ways to combat poverty and lack of education around the globe. Is it a silver bullet? No. But it is much better than sitting around twiddling our thumbs and ignoring the problem while saying the free market will cure all the world’s ills. I tend to think it is good when people attack a problem from different angles, even if some of those angles are top down solutions. That is because there is no hard fast rule about anything.

My cousin and I enjoy engaging in these little contests of wit. It spices up the usually boring, what have you been up to, conversations that go through typical family gatherings. For most people, politics at the dinner table is an instant drink in someones face type of faux pas. But for us it is just par for the course. Till the next gathering.

Thanks Thomas for the early Christmas present. I am impressed with Fluendo’s navigation of the market and had said to myself since the first time I heard about them, these guys are on to something. They are targeting specific problem areas within the Free and Open Source communities and solving them in legal ways. I mean they are effectively balancing the needs of our community along with popular culture all the while treading lightly through an area rife with patent mine fields. This in the end I believe will be a much more effective approach than just ignoring patents even if we do feel software patents are wrong.

I for one can’t wait to pay Fluendo for the rights to use WMV, MOV, RM, etc. Why is this? Because first of all I am a pragmatist. CNN, NYTimes, and most of the other sites that are moving to showing more video and doing so in a format that I currently can not legally view. Sitting here saying that sucks and is unjust isn’t going to get them to change to Ogg Vorbis and Theora. Paying a company who I know has the community’s best interests in mind and who I feel are talented enough to mount an effective campaign for change will help. Giving a little before you get is a fine trade-off for me.

Sure anyone can get the codecs for “free” right now. Download mplayer someone says. This only alienates us by putting us further and further into our own corner. It also breeds laziness. Why should we come up with a creative solution if we can just skirt around the problem? It is great that someone came out and said, “we are going to find a creative solution to this dilemma”.

Is the world perfect yet? Not at all. From what I have seen (DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer) Fedora still can not ship the mp3 codec because of redistribution issues but it does allow us to point users to a place where they can legally download it. Perhaps the Fedora community will come up with creative solutions for making it even easier to get. I’m excited at the possibilities. Kudos to you Fluendo and thanks for the legwork it took getting this gift to the community.

Activist-judge Noun. – A judge who does not hand down rulings consistent with a layperson’s deeply held personal beliefs

For those not in the know, Red Hat Magazine is a save the baby trees free Internet publication that comes out once a month. Articles are geared twords Red Hat, Fedora and Linux in general and are written by Red Hat employees, Fedora contributors and others in the comunity.

Some of the articles in this months issue are:

The making of the Fedora logo
by Alex Maier

Making One Laptop per Child a reality
by Lucy Ringland

Open source collaboration meets construction
by Rebecca Fernandez

Creative Commons runs annual fund-raising drive
by Greg DeKonigsberg

The virtues of Xen
by Alex Maier

Open Invention Network to protect against patent threat
by Mark Webbink

And much more…

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming. The ferraris are just gravy, honest!

- John Carmack of id Software (from the forward to Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book)

Join us on Monday Dec 19th in #dbus on freenode to help finish up the documentation. More info here. I hope to see you there.

I was up at the house again this weekend. I managed to get the Internet service working up there but beyond that I didn’t have any time to touch a computer. The snow was great and I even took some kickers and was able to tune my balance in the air. I even went off a small mogul and managed a 180. I still don’t have enough leg and core strength to throw in some grabs but I am working on it. Nothing hard core mind you, just some moves to make skiing a bit more challenging.

There were eleven of us up there this time which was awesome. Everyone is really cool and inevitably every time I go up there is someone I haven’t met yet. There hasn’t been anyone I have met yet who I dislike so this bodes well for the rest of the season.

I brought up my Subaru this time around and what a difference all wheel drive makes. If I hadn’t mentioned it, I ended up buying a Subaru Legacy Sedan about a week ago. It really is an investment in safety even though I wanted to wait about a year until I bought a new car. When we were moving cars around in the driveway some of the front wheel drive vehicles need to get up some speed when backing out of the driveway or they would just spin their wheels at the top. With AWD it just felt like I was on dry pavement. I’m not going to kid myself into thinking AWD is some sort of magic pill though. You still need respect for the road condition but it does make me feel a lot safer to know I have it when I need it.

Now I just have to figure out how I am going to get both my cars down to NY for the holiday break. I selling my old car to my parents since they want a more fuel efficient car for short drives (my mom has a van) and my brother is also getting his license fairly soon. I have a plan. We shall see if it pans out.

Hear yee, hear yee. By royal decree Monday December 19th 2005 has been designated official Document D-Bus Day or DDDD for short. Please join us in #dbus on freenode.net. I will be in there from 10:00 AM EST to 8:00 PM EST to direct the efforts and hopefully others will be there when I am not.

The goal is to freshen up the API docs and get coverage in areas that need more love. So if you are always complaining that D-Bus docs suck now is your chance to be part of the fix.

How should I prepare?

Get the sources from CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/dbus login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/dbus co dbus

and look through the sources as well as the documents. Then figure out where you might like to contribute.

Join the D-Bus mailing list

What format are the docs written in?

They are written in the Doxygen format. You can look at the manual here and compare it to how we do things in the D-Bus source.

How do I submit my contributions?

Learn how to use cvs diff to make a patch:

cvs diff -u [filename] > descriptive_filename.patch

and then submit it to the dbus list along with a short description (files modified along with the functions documented)

How do I avoid duplicating work?

This is why we will be on IRC. Jump in and declare what you are going to work on or ask to be assigned an area. I will try to make sure no one will be stepping on each others toes. Depending on how many people participate this might be easy or hard. However if there are a few conflicts that shouldn’t be too bad since we are trying to get people involved and colliding while having lots of docs is always better than no collisions and no docs. I’m going to try and get patches in as soon as I see and review them so update from CVS frequently (like before you submit a patch.)

Hope to see you there. Remember, the better documented D-Bus is, the cooler the apps will be that use it. Only you can be a facilitator of cool!

Oh my god! A horrible plane crash! Hey everybody, get a load of this flaming wreckage! Come on, crowd around, crowd around!

Ladies and gentlemen, Krusty the Clown is dead!

I just released libnotify and notify-daemon. This is a simplification of the specification and a rework of the library API.

These bubbles are slated to be simplified. I asked Diana to do a mockup and wanted to see, using cairo, if I could duplicate it which I did. The problem with the stylized bubbles is that they don’t work well in all themes and only look their best with a drop shadow which requires a comp manager that can do shadows on ARGB windows (xcompmgr can do simple shadows but their good looking complex shadows only work with managed windows).

With the coming of named colors for themes in the next release of GTK+ and good drivers that can handle more intense graphics operations we should be able to revisit stylized bubbles in the near future. If anything it was a fun challenge – programming imitating art imitating programming.

BTW – the code works with both ARGB visuals and shaped windows.

You can get the releases here:

libnotify-0.3.0.tar.gz
notify-daemon-0.3.1.tar.gz

For right now they reside under the libnotify-ng and notify-daemon-ng modules in the galago-project.org SVN server

You will need to make sure that older releases of the notification-daemon are uninstalled before you can start to use notify-daemon.

GNOME 2.13.3 Development Release
================================

We are rolling, rolling, rolling another release of the never ending improvements to the GNOME desktop. Naysayers got ya down? Feeling misunderstood? Well now is the time to step into the real world and celebrate. The latest GNOME development release is out! Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, and translate it.

GNOME 2.13.3 has been released. This is our third development release on our road towards GNOME 2.14.0, which will be released in March 2006.

To compile it, you can use the jhbuild modulesets available at:
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/releng/2.13.3/

bindings 2.13.3 statistics:
tar.gz: 19M total
tar.bz2: 12M total

desktop 2.13.3 statistics:
tar.gz: 156M total
tar.bz2: 112M total

platform 2.13.3 statistics:
tar.gz: 49M total
tar.bz2: 34M total

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
————————–

This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status.

For more informations about 2.13, the full schedule, the official module lists and the proposed modules list, please see our new shiny 2.13 page on the wiki:
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointThirteen

UPDATE:

Detailed notes on this release can be found here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/platform/2.13/2.13.3/NEWS
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.13/2.13.3/NEWS
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/bindings/2.13/2.13.3/NEWS

–
John (J5) Palmieri